Art Blog By Bob

Close Shave

2009-09-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

Sidney Goodman. Night Vision, 1993-94. Charcoal and pastel on paper. 60 x 52 inches. Collection of Joseph and Patricia Connolly.

“While art is not always an emotional enterprise, it is absolutely consumed with life and death matters for [Sidney] Goodman,” writes Mark Rosenthal in the catalogue to Sidney Goodman: Man in the Mirror, “as if he, upon a time, dedicated himself to the dangerous mantra of Eros-Thanatos.” In the exhibition of the same name at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Goodman’s life and death obsession comes across in 60 drawings and watercolors in mostly black and white with the occasional touch of stunning color. Perhaps no other work encapsulates the Eros-Thanatos theme as neatly as Night Vision (above, from 1992-1994), which pairs figures of love and death on the page as closely as in life. As curator Julien Robson points out in his essay, Night Vision and other works display Goodman’s exploration of the theme of the classical sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons, in which serpents sent by the gods strangle a priest and his sons for sniffing out the ruse of the Trojan Horse. “Illuminated in the flash of the artist’s imagination,” Robson continues, “the combination of material drawn from observation and memory is synthesized into a form that has a dream-like discontinuity that co-mingles the real with the imaginary.” A teacher at the PAFA since 1979, Goodman teaches us art history with a twist by throwing the classical, baroque, symbolist, and figurative traditions, along with many others, into the blender of his vision. Looking at Night Vision, you recognize Fuseli, Blake, Goya, and others, but you never lose sight of Goodman.

Sidney Goodman. Child Near Source, 1987-88. Charcoal and pastel on paper. 35 x 44 inches. Collection of the artist.

Robson believes that Goodman’s move from the suburbs to Philadelphia is a key to his art. “In this transition the task of expressing the tensions of a listless existence gave way to a vital engagement with the passions and a reinvigorated investigation of the self,” Robson writes. Reversing white flight, Goodman hurled himself and his family into urban existence red in tooth and claw rather than wallow in the enervating safety of the ‘burbs. Child Near Source (above, from 1987-1988) originates from a photograph of one of Goodman’s children standing beside a tree in Rittenhouse Square in Center City Philadelphia. The expression on the child’s face as he looks back at his father or mother captures just how alien nature feels to him—a stand-in for the modern disconnect from life’s sources. The vulva-esque opening at the base of the tree stump adds a sexual dimension, as if the child wishes to return to the womb but wants to know how. Goodman makes use of candid photographs of his wife and children in many of the works in the exhibition not as sentimental fodder but as a springboard to deeper messages. “Goodman’s wit… unearths a residue of ambiguity that transforms these pictures from simply being meditations on domestic bliss into visually puzzling studies of familial relationships,” Robson remarks.

Sidney Goodman. The Birthday, 1988. Pastel and charcoal on paper. 90 x 61 inches. Collection of the artist.

In The Birthday (above, from 1988), Goodman poses his son as a devilish child, complete with horns thanks to a pair of birthday hats, cavorting in his “birthday suit.” Even in such childish themes Goodman manages to mix the everyday with both sex and danger. For Goodman, violence is childish and even cartoonish. In Mickey Watches, a leering Mickey Mouse witnesses the brutal beating of a man. A small drawing of The Three Stooges helps the viewer draw the conclusion that violence is both grotesque and comic in the baroque sensibility. It is in many of these depictions of violence that Goodman employs sparing yet stunning use of color. “So thoroughly is his work an art of black and white, especially in drawing,” Rosenthal writes of Goodman, “that it explodes when pastel suddenly appears.” Flashes of red representing bloodshed flame out from the image and burn into your memory with their selectiveness more than any painted bloodbath possibly could. I walked through the exhibit right after viewing Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light, another PAFA exhibition (my review here) running at the same time just downstairs from the Goodman show. Both teachers at the PAFA and both great artists in the figurative tradition, Goodman and Osborne demonstrate the entire gamut of emotions that color, either liberally flowing or selectively dripped out, can achieve. Each exhibition is moving by itself, but the combined effect will quite literally knock you off your feet.

Sidney Goodman. The Artist's Mother II, 1994. 47 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches. Charcoal and pastel on paper.

Goodman excels at manipulating imagery and motifs for different effects. In Night Vision, the Laocoön reference calls upon ideas of Eros and Thanatos. In The Artist’s Mother II (above, from 1994), the Laocoön tendrils reach out again as harbingers of death, but the passionate violence of eros gives way to the tenderness of agape as the tendrils extend to embrace rather than strangle the artist’s mother, who was dying at the time. The tree limbs serpentine around the elderly woman’s body as if accepting it back into nature, returning her to the mysterious source that mystified Goodman’s son in Child Near Source. Goodman draws his mother with the frizzy hair and chubby features of reality leaning against the wheelchair that became her final means of conveyance and conveys her as stunningly beautiful and alive at the very moment she is dying. As with the drawings and paintings of his children and wife, Goodman rejects the conventional definitions of beauty and redefines them as reality viewed intensely and imaginatively. His wife Pam shown sleeping or combing a child’s hair is not a fantasy woman but a real woman with all the flaws and perfections real women claim as their true charms.

Sidney Goodman. Man in the Mirror, 1987-88. Charcoal and pastel on paper. 22 x 30 inches. Collection of Malcolm Holzman.

Goodman also repeatedly turns his eye to himself. A series of works showing the artist shaving called Man in the Mirror (one above, from 1987-1988) jokingly presents the mundane reality Goodman faces each morning. The receding hairline and broadening features that come with age are an honest man honestly looking at who and what he is. I think of Thomas Eakins’ warts-and-all 1902 Self-Portrait as a precursor of Goodman’s self-portraits, and I’m sure Goodman is aware of Eakins, too. Funny enough, Eakins’ portrait shows the signs of a poorly performed shave, but Goodman’s works all demonstrate his gift with the blade. Goodman cuts close to the skin in his art and shows us what lurks beneath while spilling as little blood as necessary. In this black and white hall of mirrors, such dabs of blood always remind us of the human passions flowing beneath.

[Many thanks to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Sidney Goodman: Man in the Mirror and for the images from the exhibition.]

School’s in Session

2009-08-31T17:04:00.000-07:00

For the August Art Poll By Bob, in recognition of our annual trek to the New Jersey shore for fun, sun, and surf, I asked, “Which of these classic paintings of sunlight lights up your life the most?” The “Van Gogh effect” took control again as Vincent Van Gogh’s Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun (1889) edged out Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun (1952) and Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) 16 to 15. Henri Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904) and Edvard Munch’s The Sun From the Oslo University Aula Decoration (1911-1916) tied for fourth with 11 votes each. Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman before the Rising Sun (Woman before the Setting Sun) (1818-1820) snuck past J.M.W. Turner, The Angel, Standing in the Sun (1846) 10 to 9 for sixth place. Frida Kahlo’s Sun and Life (1947) with 6 votes, J.M.W. Turner’s Regulus (1828-1837) with 5 votes, and Michelangelo’s Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Planets from the Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1511) with 4 votes rounded out the field. You know it’s a tough battle when Michelangelo comes in dead last. Thanks to everyone who came out of the shade and voted.

For the September Art Poll By Bob, I’m going with a back to school theme that honors the artists who were also great teachers of art. As I learn to become a teacher myself, I find myself respecting the profession even more. For this month’s poll I’m asking, “Which of the following great artist-teachers do you wish you could have studied with?”:

Jacques-Louis David (Self-Portrait, 1784)

Thomas Eakins (Self-Portrait, 1902)

Robert Henri (Self-Portrait, 1903)

Wassily Kandinsky (Gabriele Münter’s Portrait of Wassily Kandinsky, 1906)

Paul Klee (Self-Portrait, 1911)

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, 1785)

Michelangelo (chalk portrait by Daniele da Volterra)

Charles Willson Peale (Self-Portrait, 1822)

Raphael (Self-Portrait in The School of Athens, 1511)

Rembrandt (Self-Portrait, 1661)

I would be happy to have sat at the feet of any of these great teachers of art and life. Please feel free to suggest other great artist-teachers that I may have missed in the comments. Remember that teacher who changed your life and vote for one of these great teachers of art!

The Knife Thrower

2009-08-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

Surrounded by the rising fascist movement in Italy in the late 1920s and 1930s, the painter Pietro Annigoni played the role of the rebel artist to the hilt, sometimes literally. With his fellow bohemian artists, Annigoni (above, in a 1946 Self-Portrait) would get drunk on wine in bars, fire pistols, challenge others to fencing duels, and sometimes even throw knives. Legend has it that Annigoni once even tossed a blade towards an uncooperative model. As penance, Annigoni would cut his own left forearm with a knife as a reminder to be good. In Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist, you find yourself cut by the intensity of Annigoni’s vision for art, which combines the Renaissance figurative tradition with a full comprehension of the horrors of the twentieth century. Called one of “The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen” by film critic Richard Crouse, Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist is finally available on DVD for all art lovers to see perhaps the greatest art documentary they’ve never seen but also to discover the greatest artist of the twentieth century they’ve never heard of.

The film relies heavily on Annigoni’s own words from his diaries, which reanimate the soul of the artist as much as his paintings. Annigoni recalls his family’s moving to Florence and that city’s “imaginary reality” as the turning point of his life. The art of the city literally intoxicates him. Choosing the artist’s life, Annigoni enrolls in the Accademia di Belle Arti (Firenze) hoping to follow in the Renaissance tradition but soon recognizes that the academy, too, has turned its back on its history in pursuit of modernism. For Annigoni, modern art represented a “chaotic disintegration” that separated art from the symbolism found in nature. Such separation seemed a “tragic loss of love for life” that Annigoni could not bear. Instead, Annigoni painted his world as he felt the Renaissance masters would, but not in slavish devotion. “Only people who know nothing about art believe that a style is repeatable in a different age,” Annigoni countered. After watching Hitler, Mussolini, and the destruction of Europe during World War II, Annigoni could not possibly paint Raphael-esque angels. Instead, the unreal “reality” of Annigoni’s Sayest Thou That This Is the Man? (above, from 1953) spoke to the facts of modernity in the language of the past as only an atheist who confessed a “nostalgia for god” could. Looking at paintings by Annigoni of the post-war period reminded me of the great films of the post-war Italian cinema. Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 The Bicycle Thief, Federico Fellini’s 1954 La Strada, Michelangelo Antonioni ‘s 1960 L'avventura , Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1961 Accattone, and many other films feature the same haggard faces of the Italian people descended from their Renaissance ancestors yet arrived upon a seemingly different planet.

Annigoni found the look for many of his painted characters in the faces of the refugees of World War II still roaming the streets of Italy, just as Michelangelo saw saints and Madonnas in the visages of beggars and whores. Despite painting the powerless so often, Annigoni soon found his talents sought after by the powerful. After his 1956 Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (above), Annigoni became the most pursued portraitist of his time. Yet, as Annigoni’s student Michael John Angel recounts, people came to Annigoni “to be made into an Annigoni”—with all the beauty of his technique yet also all the sadness of his worldview. The youthful knife thrower switches to a silent slipper of stilettos in these portraits. Even the regal Queen Elizabeth II looks wistfully into the distance, as if Annigoni had infected her with his memories of Italy’s agony during their sittings. It is in these paradoxical portraits that the paradox of Annigoni rises closest to the surface of his art. A lover of life who bemoaned modern art’s rejection of life itself, Annigoni could be cynical and pessimistic just as intensely. In many ways, modern art simply portrayed the larger descent into darkness that all of humanity was in the midst of. A trip to the United States in the 1960s to paint some portraits exposed Annigoni to the full force of American commercialism and vanity, confirming his bleak view of the future perhaps once and for all.

Annigoni cast the conflict between his style and modern art often in biblical terms. Modern art was a “poisoned fruit” that could never tempt him, regardless of profitability. In Sermon on the Mount (above, from 1953), Annigoni paints himself on the peak with his back turned to the viewer as he preaches to the faithful. As one commentator in the film says, the wealthy chose Annigoni, but Annigoni chose the beggars. To the very end, even in soaring church frescoes, Annigoni retained the common touch, the human link, that made his art meaningful to him and continues to make it meaningful to us. For those who knew or studied with Annigoni, the man still lives today as vibrantly as the colors of his paintings. To hear students or students of students speak his name, you’d imagine Annigoni was more myth than man. Yet, Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist never fails to show the man who could hurl a knife at your ear one day and then paint an image that could pierce your heart the next as anything less than magnificently human.

[Many thanks to Stephen Smith for providing me with a review copy of Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist. A short clip from the film is available on YouTube here.]

Eye Openers

2009-08-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

[Thomas Eakins’ birthday, July 25th, passed while I was on hiatus. This is me catching up.]

Whenever I start up my trusty laptop, I’m greeted with the image of Thomas Eakins’ The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (above, from 1871). Annie once asked me what famous painting I’d like to own and I told her that I wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Schmitt gracing our home. The next time I fired up my computer, I discovered that Annie had set up Eakins’ painting as my background. It’s a great eye opener early in the mornings to remind me of the beauty in the world, the greatness of art, my hometown of Philadelphia, and, most importantly, the beautiful woman with whom I’ve linked my life. I’ve read pretty much everything of significance written about the greatest artist Philadelphia’s ever produced. In fact, the evolution of my view of Eakins can serve as a microcosm of my overall relationship with art history. The Lloyd Goodrich myth of Eakins as the great American artist who put principles over profitability has now given way to a more realistic and more human view of the artist as a principled artist and man who still had to support his family and play by some of the rules of the game. The ruthless realism Goodrich proposed in works such as The Champion Single Sculls now gives way to the idea in Alan C. Braddock’s Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (reviewed here) that Eakins had an agenda in his art to present his home grounds in the best possible light.

As much as I hate Henry Adams’ Eakins Revealed for the Freudian hate frenzy that it is, Adams does begin, however loosely, from many of the character flaws of Eakins before amplifying them into pathologies. Goodrich sainted Eakins to fulfill his own mission of elevating American artists the same way that he saw French art historians writing fawning hagiographies of their own national artists. To present the weaknesses of Eakins as a person or even as an artist could reflect back badly on American art and defeat the whole purpose of Goodrich’s quest to create an American art history to challenge the art histories of centuries-older European countries. When I look at the photo of Eakins at about 40 years of age (above), I see a man who realizes fully who he is and just how far his temperament and talents will take him. Finding myself reaching that same place chronologically in life, I’m heartened by the intensity and conviction in Eakins’ eye. It’s not easy to look into a mirror and accept what you see. There was a lot that Eakins could have recognized and rejected, but to do so would be to cast away many of the same impulses that made him the artist and teacher he was. The look in Eakins’ eye is an eye opener for anyone standing astride that magic number of 40.

I still find it hard to believe how close Philadelphia was to having Eakins’ masterpiece, The Gross Clinic (above, from 1875), sold away. That near sale, however, may turn out to be a blessing in disguise if it opened the eyes of the community to what may be the single greatest painting in American art history sitting right under its collective nose. Every year, the University of Pennsylvania selects a book for its reading project as a way to “unite” the university in musing on one work. This year, Penn has chosen The Gross Clinic as its topic, the first time they’ve ever chosen a painting. The project website (note some access limited to students only) guides students not only in understanding the history and meaning of the work but also such nitty gritty details as the work’s strange conservation history. I envy those young students for the communal art history experience they’re about to have. Penn should be commended for looking in its own backyard for a topic that ties together so many great things about Philadelphia. Penn and the City of Philadelphia have had a contentious relationship for many years and The Gross Clinic might finally provide the connections to heal the disconnect that has festered for so long. Cynics might argue that today’s students won’t bring Eakins into their hearts, but I’ll bet on the artist that opened my eyes any day.

Neverland

2009-08-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

[Andrew Wyeth’s birthday, July 12th, passed while I was on hiatus. This is me catching up. I couldn’t let Andy’s birthday pass on by unnoted.]

When Michael Jackson passed away this past summer, I found myself thinking of the story I had heard of the King of Pop meeting painter Andrew Wyeth, who passed away last January. Maybe it was the closeness of their deaths. Maybe it was my imagination trying to picture what the two men would have in common to talk about. I’m not sure if they ever met, but I think the conversation would have eventually swung around to childhood and memory. MJ named his mansion complex Neverland, after Peter Pan’s place where little boys never grow up. Even into his nineties, Andy Wyeth had that little boy lost quality. The photograph above, showing Andy musing upon the landscape of his beloved Chadds Ford as he presses his hand against the farm window screen, shows how the old man could always get lost in the memories of his childhood. Michael Jackson used his money and surgery to turn back the hands of time. Andrew Wyeth used the power of his vision and the grace of his painting techniques to recapture time over and over again. In many ways, Wyeth’s present was a perpetual replaying of the past.

Photos and home movies exist of young Andy Wyeth playing the lead role of Robin Hood, with the neighborhood children, including many African-Americans, cast in the role of the Merry Men. Many of those children grew up with Andy and appeared in portrait after portrait as time passed but part of them always stayed the same. Not only did the woods of Chadds Ford provide the perfect Sherwood Forrest, but costumes were also freely available, thanks to the prop collection of Andy’s father, N.C. Wyeth, who illustrated tales of Robin Hood (above). Andrew Wyeth himself never painted the characters of his childhood, perhaps out of fear that it would be too close to his father’s work. Andy’s style of painting was 180 degrees different from that of N.C.’s for multiple reasons. But whenever you look at any painting set in Chadds Ford, it’s hard not to imagine little Andy dressed up as the devil may care thief hiding behind the next tree.

It’s been seven months since Wyeth’s death. After the initial mourning and memorials, the recognition of Wyeth’s achievement has slowed and, perhaps, stilled. The privacy he yearned for in his later years has become inertia on the part of the estate that should be opening up doors into his work rather than closing them. For me, the most enduring legacy of Andy Wyeth will be his sense of fun, even when his works strike the deepest and darkest notes. Wyeth’s Snow Hill (above, from 1987), painted when he turned 70, shows a collection of characters of his paintings frolicking like children in the snow around a May pole. The danse macabre becomes a joyful celebration of life, even when nature itself sleeps under the winter’s cold. If you follow the streamers down to each character, you’ll find that one streamer leads to nothing, suggesting that the artist himself invisibly joined the party. It’s time for Andy to come out of the shadows and reappear as the life of the party he truly was.

Paging Mr. Pynchon

2009-08-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

I have to say that I was taken aback when I first saw the cover art (above) for Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice. The novel, which I just finished, is excellent and, at 370 pages, rather “light” for Pynchon in terms of sheer words but as weighty as ever with deep thoughts and cosmic wit. Pynchon riffs on the noir conventions of the private investigator but with a neon-colored, drug-altered twist in placing the PI in California around 1970, during the peak of the Charles Manson-inspired paranoia and the beginning of the end of the 1960s hippie culture. The dime store quality of the artwork could easily trick someone not recognizing Pynchon as one of the highest of highbrow novelists into thinking they’ve picked up a run of the mill “beach read.” I think Pynchon himself would enjoy playing that little joke on an unsuspecting reader, so maybe that’s the reasoning behind the cover art. I, however, have another suggestion for a cover, perhaps for the second edition.

Pynchon creates a landscape of pure paranoia—the straights fear every hippie is a Manson-in-the-making ready to murder them in their beds, while the hippies fear the straights are trying to kill them off by more “officially sanctioned” means. Peter Saul’s The Government of California (above, from 1969) visually captures the public madness of that place and time, setting the ominous mug of Ronald Reagan, then governor of California but already setting his sights on the highest office, in a place of prominence. If Manson is the monster under the bed for the straights in Inherent Vice, Reagan is the monster ready to spring out of the closet for the hippies. The acid colors and twisted forms of Saul’s art mesh perfectly with similar effects Pynchon achieves in his psychedelic prose.

If anyone out there knows how to get in touch with the elusive Mr. Pynchon, please pass on my idea for a second edition cover. If Mr. Pynchon himself is reading, please feel free to drop a line in the comments. To confirm that you’re the real deal, please attach a recent picture, too.

Body Consciousness

2009-08-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Osborne. Renae, 1992. Oil on canvas; 60 x 72 in. Sylvia and Norman Salvat.

“In what ways can a contemporary artist show the myriad ways in which the figure relates to, reflects, is shaped by, and engages with the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of its environment?” Robert Cozzolino, curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, asks in Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light, the catalogue to the PAFA’s exhibition of Elizabeth Osborne’s stunningly colorful yet still figurative-focused work. First a student at the PAFA and now an instructor there since 1963, Osborne embodies the figurative tradition of the PAFA that stretches back to Thomas Eakins yet reaches forward throughout the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries in nodding towards abstraction’s explosion of color without losing sight of the human form. Osborne’s body consciousness of, as Cozzolino puts it, “refus[ing] to perpetuate the false dichotomy of abstraction versus figuration” allows her to link the human form with abstraction in works such as Renae (above, from 1992). In Renae, the woman’s red hair flames against a dark background symbolizing her dark mood, while the mauve wall on the left stands as pure abstract color and texture. Osborne strives for the best of both worlds and finds it over and over again.

Elizabeth Osborne. Color Field, 2000. Oil on canvas; 52 x 72 in. Dr. Janice T. Gordon.

When Osborne graduated from the PAFA in 1958, Jackson Pollock’s ghostly influence still dripped across the American art scene. Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme. Later, offshoots of Ab Ex such as Color Field painting kept a tight grip on the “new academy” of what was acceptable contemporary art. Osborne looked to artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns for a way to remain contemporary yet still true to her training. “From both of these artists,” Cozzolino writes, “she learned ways to incorporate suggestive traces of the body without relying on realist imagery.” In Color Field (above, from 2000), a ghostly female silhouette appears in the pale blue block of color among an almost abstract arrangement of colored shapes that, when visually reassembled, compose the artist’s studio. Alluding to the Color Field painters with her title while simultaneously clinging to the human body, however spectral, Osborne playfully pokes the abstract artists while changing the rules of their game to suit her purposes. “Clearly composed and impeccably designed, Osborne’s compositions filter the intensely observed world through her judicious adaptations of late-modernist strategies, including minimalism and color field painting,” Cozzolino says in praise of works such as Color Field. Seen in person, Color Field strikes the viewer as what Mondrian might have done if he’d just cut loose.

Elizabeth Osborne. The Bridge and I, 1992. Oil on board; 60 x 72 in. Mr. and Mrs. Harry C. Jones, III.

The daughter of an architect and wife of another, Osborne keenly understands the power of modern architecture. Color Field is just one example of abstraction as architecture. In The Bridge and I (above, from 1992), Osborne sets her self-portrait in her Philadelphia studio with the Benjamin Franklin Bridge behind her. Osborne’s birth father designed that bridge, so it stands in for the absent father in a way that both signifies and obscures him. The bridge “bridges” Osborne to her father, yet can never replace him. “Osborne’s eye for the order and open, liberating qualities of modernist architecture bears an uncommon sensitivity,” Cozzolino concludes. In works such as The Bridge and I, Osborne manages to achieve the subtle shades of emotion modern art often accesses through color, yet also taps into the symbolism of bodies (including her own) both present and absent. That connecting “and” of the title suggests union, but Osborne stands alone, with a chilling swath of cobalt separating her from her father’s design. The scarf slung about her self-portrait’s neck alludes to the cold loneliness of the arrangement.

Elizabeth Osborne. Lux I, 2008-09. Oil on wood panel; 44 x 30 in. The artist, courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.

Osborne, however, is more than just a figurative painter taken to a new, modernist level. “Landscape and the observation of natural phenomena,” Cozzolino writes, “have inspired Osborne to distill her subjects closest to abstraction.” Lux I (above, from 2008-2009), one of a series of similar works showing the light of a sunrise or a sunset approaches abstraction yet still remains linked to the American Luminist style of Frederic Church and others. Although Cozzolino never raises the name of Rothko, I couldn’t help but think of the tortured Abstract Expressionist, who also looked at Luminism and brought it into modern times. Standing before the three Lux paintings, I felt revitalized, energized, happy, whereas Rothko’s works depress and/or befuddle me with cosmos-sized riddles. Unlike Rothko, you can still imagine the real world in Osborne’s Lux paintings—the sunrise or sunset experienced with a loved one—whereas Rothko ultimately leaves us crushingly alone—dwarfed by the universe. In a way, the body appears even in near-abstractions such as Lux, except that the body in question is your own.

“Perpetually aware of the deep history she has at her back, looking over her shoulder in the studio, she continues to push the limits of her craft and explore the unknown realms of representation,” Cozzolino says in praise of Osborne, whom he has known in an “extended conversation” since 2004. This close affinity allows Cozzolino to make such statements with informed affection rather than baseless corniness. Osborne really is in a fight with the figures of the past, many of whom worked within her living memory. The brawny, brawling boys of the days of Pollock still muscle out much of American art since the middle of the twentieth century, to the sad exclusion of many deserving artists, particularly women. Like Grace Hartigan, Elizabeth Osborne stands toe to toe with giants and earns her time in the arena.

[Many thanks to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for providing me with a review copy of Robert Cozzolino’s Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light and for the images above from the exhibition.]

Something Old, Something New

2009-08-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about the internet is that it can bring the whole world right to your lap, or laptop. Nothing can replace the experience of standing before the work of art itself, but the online experience is the next best thing when time, place, and economics are all mitigating factors. I recently came across two great internet resources for art lovers from the Courtauld Institute in London and The Louvre in Paris. The Courtauld Institute has amassed a fine collection of films of their small but powerful collection on YouTube. You’ll be amazed at the masterpieces, such as Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (above, from 1882), in their collection. I’ve only been to London once and didn’t get a chance to visit the Courtauld, but I’ll be sure to place it on my itinerary if I ever get back.

Philadelphia loves to show off the fact that more works by Paul Cezanne live there than anywhere else on earth, including France. But the Courtauld boasts the finest collection in all of England, including Cezanne’s The Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (above, from 1882), which the PMA had to borrow for its Cezanne and Beyond exhibition earlier this year (my review here). In addition to Cezanne, the Courtauld owns impressive works by Rubens, Degas, and many others. What the Courtauld loses in size, it more than makes up for in impact. All of these videos convey the intimacy of the museum. I especially love how the videos put the curators front and center, talking up the art without talking down to the viewer the way that so many other art-related videos do, at least here in America. The Courtauld’s YouTube channel is a year old, so it’s hardly new, but the variety of videos they offer is not a “time waster” as so much of YouTube can be, but time well spent.

The Louvre’s collection, the greatest in the world, is certainly something old, but now we English-speaking, non-French speaking art lovers can enjoy it in a new way with the institution of a full English version of the Louvre’s database, Atlas. As someone who does not parley vous Francais, I found it frustrating to navigate the Louvre’s online system in French. Now, I can easily find such gems as Lorenzo Bartolini’s bust of Napoleon I (above, from 1805), which was sculpted and later cast to stand at the entrance of the Louvre during Napoleon’s reign. The cast itself sits in the Louvre’s immense storage, but you can see it online, now in English. All 30,000 works of the Louvre are now only a few clicks away for the English-speaking audience, along with the curator’s explanatory texts in English. I’ve been to the Louvre, but going once is never enough. I don’t know if you can ever go enough. The English version of Atlas is now the passport for all those linguistically challenged Americans, myself included, who can’t make it to the City of Light regularly.

There are simply so many rooms and so many objects at the Louvre that you can’t possibly enjoy them all. I don’t recall seeing the French chess piece from the 1100s (above) showing Adam and Eve, but the new English-version Atlas allows me to virtually stroll from room to room and see all these little gems at my leisure. Art teachers in America should bookmark Atlas and direct their students there for education and inspiration. It’s the field trip of a lifetime for free.

Your Moment of Zen

2009-08-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

Tom Killion, Mt. Tamalpais From Mill Valley Marshes, 1980 (9 x 12)

Part of the fascination of Japanese prints is that you envy the Japanese way of living with nature and wish you could somehow import that Zen into your own life and national culture. Artist Tom Killion and poet Gary Snyder’s Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints from Heyday Books offers a Japanese import that we can unashamedly use to transport our souls out of the drudgery of American capitalism run amok. Marrying Killion’s Japanese-inspired woodblock cuts (above and below) with Snyder’s Zen-infused verse, Tamalpais Walking guides us to the foot of Mount Tamalpais overlooking the teeming Bay City area and makes us feel that we’re actually there, ascending the peak with them. “We who bestow names, who imagine the world from within our human selves,” Killion writes, “what meaning shall we give this beautiful place?” The simplicity of Killion’s images and Snyder’s words opens doors through which we can venture and give our own personal meaning to this place, which resides as much on the Pacific Coast as in the imagination of anyone who reads this book.

Tom Killion, Bolinas Ridge to Duxbury Point, 2004 (14 x 18.5)

In 1965, Snyder, along with fellow poets Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen, founded a circumambulation route around Mount Tamalpais that could be completed in a single day. Snyder had roamed about the mountain since 1948 and wove many of his experiences there into his poetry. In his poem “Hills of Home,” Snyder writes:

to see your own tracks climbing
up the trail that you go down.
the ocean’s edge is high
it seems to rise and hang there
halfway up the sky.

Snyder’s essay in Tamalpais Walking, titled “Underfoot Earth Turns,” tenderly caresses the land with verbal imagery. Walking among the “strict and thoughtful old trees,” Snyder has come to see Tamalpais as “no longer just a playground or a gateway, but a temple and a teacher, a helper and a friend.” In the end, Snyder asks, “Did we make up that great space, or did it make us up?” Snyder’s soulful appreciation of Mount Tamalpais mirrors that of many great visual artists who find infinity in a single spot, such as Cezanne and Mount Sainte-Victorie or Andrew Wyeth and Chadds Ford. I couldn’t help but think of Thoreau at Walden Pond when reading of Snyder’s obsession with the mountain, especially in the way that both Thoreau and Snyder strive to wake the sleepers around them to the beauty without and within. “If you look, you’ll find a way,” Snyder writes of Tamalpais and, by extension, life.” “A path, a trail, an old road… it’s about discovering mobility, independence, choice, and places to hang out in the underbrush. It’s about getting there on your own two legs.” Snyder declares independence from the American rat race and encourages us to slow down, look around, and live, too.

Tom Killion, Mt. Tamalpais From Above Green Gulch (Coyote Ridge), 2002 (13 x 19)

Just as Snyder presents Tamalpais as a poetic microcosm of what America can be, Killion presents Tamalpais as a microcosm of American history, both good and bad. Tamalpais, the “sleeping lady” of the Bay Area, took it’s name from the local Miwok tribes. When Europeans settled the area and drove the Native Americans out, they kept the name of Tamalpais. The German immigrants who arrived in the 1880s and became the largest immigrant group in the area at the time transplanted their European hiking culture to Tamalpais and searched every inch of their new prize. Some of the earliest conservationists sought to save Tamalpais’ pristine beauty. “An American Wordsworth will one day come to sing these noble trees,” conservationist William Kent predicted in 1908. Killion traces the long line of poets leading up from the mid-19th century to Kenneth Rexroth in the 1930s to Snyder and the Beats of the 1950s and 1960s. Painters and photographers, most notably Ansel Adams, also brought their art to Tamalpais. Sadly, in the 1940s, Tamalpais witnessed the persecution of the local German population and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. Killion aptly positions Tamalpais as a wise witness to all these glories and tragedies in American history.

Tom Killion, Mt. Tamalpais, Marin County, 1996 (11.5 x 17)

Killion takes his rightful place among the great artists who have paid homage to Mount Tamalpais with his insightful and inspired images. Only eight years old when he first hiked Mount Tamalpais in 1961, Killion has studied its sides ever since. The art of Hiroshige and Hokusia, the twin towers of classic Japanese printmaking, inspired the young Killion to follow a similar approach to his personal peak. Killion’s 1975 book 28 Views of Mt. Tamalpais directly referenced Hiroshige’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji without slavish devotion but, instead, true homage. The Zen spirit of Hiroshige and Hokusai comes through clearly in works such as Killion’s Mt. Tamalpais, Marin County (above, from 1996). The single light shining through the window of the mountainside home hints at the human presence surrounding Tamalpais while simultaneously conveying how the dark, brooding shape dwarfs mere humanity. Killion’s works always stand in awe of nature. “Just a mountain,” Killion writes ironically of Tamalpais, “but fixed in the imagination of a city.” Killion’s art fixes Tamalpais panoramically into the imagination of anyone who can be open to the love and spirit behind them.

Tom Killion, The City From Mt. Tamalpais, 1979 (5 x 7)

Killion and Snyder’s art forms pair together like the perfect wine and food, composing a nourishing meal for the shrinking soul. “May we all find the Bay Mountain that gives us a crystal moment of being and a breath of the sky, and only asks us to hold the whole world dear,” Snyder prays as a closing benediction to readers of Tamalpais Walking. As much as Killion and Snyder and so many others hold Mount Tamalpais dear, the real message of Tamalpais Walking is for us to “hold the whole world dear” and find our own mountain to stand upon and see the world and ourselves fully, perhaps for the first time.

[Many thanks to Heyday Books for providing me with a review copy of Tom Killion and Gary Snyder’s Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints and for the images from the book.]

Here Comes the Sun

2009-07-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

For the July 2009 Art Poll By Bob, I got scientific and asked, “Which of these science-related works of art make you wish you had paid more attention in high school lab?” In a runaway, Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) nearly lapped the field with 17 votes. Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I (1514) and Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic (1875) tied for second with 9 votes each. Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (1487) came in fourth with 8 votes. William Blake's Newton (1795) won 5 votes to edge out Jacques-Louis David's Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife (1788) and Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower (1920-1924) with 4 votes each. Charles Willson Peale's The Artist in His Museum (1822) with 2 votes and Thomas Eakins' Portrait of Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897) and Charles Willson Peale's Exhuming the First American Mastodon (1806) with 1 vote each rounded out the field. Thanks to everyone who participated in my art experiment.

For the August Art Poll By Bob, to celebrate our annual trek to the New Jersey shore for fun, sun, and surf, I’m asking the following, “Which of these classic paintings of sunlight lights up your life the most?”:

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman before the Rising Sun (aka, Woman before the Setting Sun) (1818-1820)

Edward Hopper, Morning Sun (1952)

Frida Kahlo, Sun and Life (1947)

Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904)

Michelangelo, Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Planets from the Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1511)

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (1872)

Edvard Munch, The Sun From the Oslo University Aula Decoration (1911-1916)

J.M.W. Turner, The Angel, Standing in the Sun (1846)

J.M.W. Turner, Regulus (1828-1837)

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun (1889)

So, put on your shades, slather on some sunscreen, and vote!

Body Shop

2009-07-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

Rachel Spencer’s Financial Times review of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfection of Form at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy caught my eye last week. The Galleria dell’Accademia, home to Michelangelo’s David and other great sculptures by the master, draws a very clear, very distinct line between Michelangelo and Mapplethorpe’s approaches to the depiction of the human body. The idea itself seems fantastic. Unfortunately, according to Spencer, the execution fails to match the promise of that idea. Only a few works by Mapplethorpe appear near any of the Michelangelos, with the rest of Mapplethorpe’s work screened off in another part of the museum, as if they didn’t want the mainstream, David-loving tourists to accidentally see anything by Mapplethorpe. “Such an impoverished comparison merely teases at the possibility of a shared aesthetic,” Spencer laments, and I have to agree. Mapplethorpe’s Derrick Cross (above, from 1985) presents the human form at the peak of muscularity with all the unreality and symbolism of anything by Michelangelo, with the added twist that Mapplethorpe’s subjects actually existed in the physical world, whereas Michelangelo’s flexed and twisted only in his mind.

Spencer suggests Piero della Francesca as a better classical analogue for Mapplethorpe. She argues that Mapplethorpe’s dispassionate, almost mathematical approach to subjects such as Thomas (above, from 1987) follows the example of Piero more than that of the passionate, “agony and the ecstacy” Michelangelo. I’m not a big fan of the either/or dichotomy of passion version precision. There is certainly a great deal of precision and balance in all of Michelangelo’s figures at their most passionate. The David sculpture at the Galleria dell’Accademia sneers with defiance, but he stands balanced and almost symmetrically on two sturdy legs. Conversely, Mapplethorpe’s figures stretch themselves to the point of almost breaking to achieve his desired poses, but the rippling muscles and taut ligaments also speak of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s that rippled through and stretched the gay community to its limits. I see great passion in Derrick Cross, Thomas, and other photographs of Mapplethorpe from this period when such “perfect” bodies symbolized the breaking down of gay men’s bodies by disease and the failure of the American body politic to set aside prejudice and come to their aid.

Is the unspoken issue of this Mapplethorpe—Michelangelo pairing the artists’ shared sexual orientation? Michelangelo’s sexuality remains a topic of debate for scholars, but works such as Prigione Barbuto (above, 1530), one of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures of slaves, make more sense when seen in a homoerotic way. Sadly, Mapplethorpe remains the untouchable third rail of American art history for many museums, even twenty years after his death by AIDS. Perhaps only in Europe could Mapplethorpe be allowed to stand beside masters of the Western heritage, whereas American art continues to segregate Mapplethorpe and other homosexual artists into a defined zone separate from the mainstream. “Here, the absence of sex shots haunts the show like Banquo’s Ghost,” Spencer writes of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfection of Form’s lacking of Mapplethorpe’s more notoriously explicit photographs. Perhaps the best way to exorcise that erotic ghost once and for all is to allow it to walk freely and be seen, not only for better understanding Mapplethorpe but also for better understanding Michelangelo.

Top Ten List

2009-07-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

I'll be back from hiatus shortly in some form. Thanks for continuing to visit and comment while I'm getting back in the swing of things.

I was shocked (in a good way) by the number of people who continued to visit here despite the lack of new content. I'm not sure how much it played a role in that traffic, but I would like to take this chance to thank the nice people at The Art History Blog for nominating Art Blog By Bob for one of the Top Ten Art History and Museum Blogs at Blogs.com. I'm horrible at keeping up on the people who link here or mention me elsewhere, so I both thank and apologize to anyone else I might have missed. (If you've seen Art Blog By Bob mentioned somewhere else or if that's how you came to this site, please let me know in the comments.)

Semi-regular programming will recommence shortly. Thanks, again.

Brief Hiatus

2009-07-15T17:25:00.000-07:00

Because of family responsibilities and schoolwork, Art Blog By Bob has been and will continue to be on temporary hiatus until most likely the beginning of August. Until then, please feel free to wander through the archives and to picture me living the life of a scholar and praying to the patron saint of scholars, Saint Jerome, shown above in Albrecht Durer’s Saint Jerome in his Study (from 1514). Enjoy your summer!

The Missing Ingredient

2009-07-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

I wonder how much Woody Allen knows about Frida Kahlo, especially after seeing Allen’s 2008 romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Javier Bardem as the Spanish painter and Penélope Cruz as his passionate, often violent, ex-wife who also paints and actually greatly influences her ex-husband’s artistic vision, which he grudgingly admits, could be modern-day stand-ins for Frida and her ex, Diego Rivera. Born July 6, 1907, Kahlo said that she experienced two great accidents in her life: the 1929 bus accident that almost killed her and left her in agony for the rest of her life and the day she met Diego, who would break her heart countless times with philandering and other cruelties. Kahlo painted Frida and Diego (above) in 1931, when she still was “Mrs. Rivera” and devoted herself to Rivera’s career at the expense of her own. The scale of the two figures shows just how Kahlo saw herself as a tiny satellite orbiting the giant world of Diego Rivera. Kahlo’s feet seem to rise from the earth, as if Diego’s personal gravity could pull her into his orbit. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Bardem and Cruz’s characters strike a different pose, with the two standing as equals and, perhaps, with Cruz/Frida as the main figure at times. It’s as if Allen wants to rewrite the Frida/Diego story as it should have been told.

My favorite painting by Kahlo is her The Two Fridas (above, from 1939). I believe it’s the most accurate depiction of how we psychically fracture ourselves at moments of emotional stress. When Diego’s infidelities split them apart first emotionally and then legally in divorce, Frida’s life was torn in two. The strange cardiovascular system Frida creates to link the two Fridas in the painting shows how she wants to keep herself together but can’t ignore the reality of how her heart has been violated. I remember seeing this painting at the PMA during the Frida show last year and being stunned by the pain radiating from it. That tour was the first time The Two Fridas had ever been shown outside of Mexico, which made it even more memorable for me. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen tries to reconnect Bardem and Cruz’s characters through the Cristina character, as if all Diego and Frida needed was a ready and willing Scarlett Johansson to provide the missing ingredient to spice up their life. Frida certainly turned to relationships with women in her life to find something missing in her relationship with Diego, but I doubt that a threesome would have answered the deeper, lingering questions between them.

Frida showed just how much Diego lingered in and weighed upon her mind in Diego on my Mind (above, from 1943). Kahlo, who made such great use of her body in numerous other self-portraits, hides her physicality completely in this painting. All you see is an oval of her face, with a tiny portrait of Diego set in the center of her forehead, like a third eye. For Frida, Diego was the third eye through which she viewed the world. In 1949’s Diego and I, Frida paints a tearful self-portrait with another Diego on her brow, but this time the “third eye” has a third eye of its own. Frida gave Diego a third eye to symbolize his “wisdom,” as she saw it, but couldn’t paint herself with the same wisdom, instead making Diego her “third eye” and the source of all her wisdom. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Bardem’s Diego-esque painter eventually acknowledges Cruz/Kahlo as the source of his vision or wisdom, turning the Diego/Frida soap opera on its head. Of course, Diego acknowledged Frida’s influence stridently after her death, but in life he always maintained the upper hand, at least in the mind of the public. I’d love to ask Woody if he had Frida and Diego in mind when he wrote Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but even given the chance, I’m not sure if Woody would admit to rewriting art history in that way.

Madman Across the Water

2009-07-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

In May 1809, William Blake set up an exhibition of his works in a room above his brother’s hosiery shop in the house in which he was born and raised. Few people came to see the sixteen oddly beautiful works hung there, fewer picked up the Descriptive Catalogue Blake has written and printed to help explain his works, and even fewer bought anything. The sole review of the show published in The Examiner called the paintings “the wild effusions of a distempered brain.” Visitors straggled through as late as June 1810 to see the works. The length of the exhibition, however, marked not public interest but Blake’s own disappointment and wish to forget the hanging entirely. Two centuries later, the Tate Britain has recreated Blake’s failed show in an exhibition and Martin Myrone resurrects Blake’s weird and wonderful catalogue in William Blake’s Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures. Through Myrone’s scholarly introduction and editing of Blake’s own effusions, we can travel back in time to see works such as Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (above, from 1805-1809) as Blake’s contemporaries may have seen them. Myrone paints Blake’s 1809 fiasco as a turning point in the poet-artists’ career in which the Blake we have come to know and love today is seen as just one of the many possible “Blakes” that could have come down to us.

Blake always thought on a cosmic level, and this exhibition aimed no lower. In his introduction, Myrone calls Blake’s 1809 exhibition “not merely a celebration of an artist’s work, a straightforward retrospective of a career, but an agenda-setting, forcefully polemical intervention into the art world, and an enterprise aimed at reforming not only the tastes of the public, but their morality as well, through the revival of the ‘grand style’ in art.” In Blake’s black and white world of art and morality, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Durer emerge as the heroes of the grand style, whereas Titian, Rubens, Correggio, and Rembrandt represent the weaker elements that have cheapened art and drained the energy from public morality. Blake specifically challenged the art and morality of his time by “calling out” artists, including one-time friend Thomas Stothard, by interpreting subjects in his own “grand style” way. Blake’s The Canterbury Pilgrims (above, from 1808) challenges the more conventional rendering of Stothard by going bigger and bolder and attempting to convey the human drama embedded in Chaucer’s famous work. “He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see,” Blake writes in his catalogue, “does not imagine at all.” Anyone who loves Blake’s almost superhuman confidence in his poetry will eat up similar brashness in the catalogue. When Blake decries other artists “laboring to destroy Imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chairo Oscuro,” it’s easy to forget that Caravaggio, the king of chiaroscuro, languished in near obscurity in the 1800s, remembered mostly through his imitators. I also wonder what Blake’s friend, Henry Fuseli, himself a fan of chiaroscuro’s effects, may have thought of Blake’s “infernal” judgment. Blake never pulled his punches. Seen in My Visions allows you to step in the ring with the poetic pugilist for as many rounds as you can stand.

Of the sixteen works shown in 1809, eleven survive, including Blake’s The Soldiers Casting Lots for Christ's Garments (above, from 1800). The survivors show Blake’s work in tempera on canvas and watercolor on paper. Blake disdained oil painting as a symptom of art’s decline. Fresco, the medium for Michelangelo and Raphael, was forever, and Blake desired nothing less than eternity. In 1809, Blake still imagined a place in the mainstream art world for himself. None of the works shown in 1809 relate to the poetry Blake was writing and would later illustrate himself, gaining the fame he now enjoys posthumously. Chaucer, Thomas Gray, and the Bible provided the subject matter for Blake’s art. I found it difficult imagining a “Blake” different than the “Blake” I know so well, but Myrone convincingly argues for the possibility of at least one “Blake” that could have been. One of the lost works, titled Ancient Britons and standing at 3 meters high by 4 meters long, broke all the rules of what a “Blake” is known as. “A privately commissioned painting on a serious historic subject, painted in a severely classical style, full of patriot feeling, and completed on a very large scale,” Myrone describes Ancient Britons from the surviving clues. “If the picture had survived, our image of Blake might be quite radically different: he would be placed even more readily in the company of [James] Barry and Fuseli than he is now.” Would such a “Blake” be better or worse? If Ancient Britons were to reemerge from obscurity tomorrow, would the familiar “Blake” of soaring visions and stubborn independence be lost for good?

In the end, however, despite dreams of a parallel universe in which Blake and James Barry sit cozily beside each other in a prosaic list of painters of the period, we are left with the only Blake we know. After the failure of the 1809 show, Blake turned his back on the conventional art world. He participated in only one more exhibition in 1812. When Sir Joshua Reynolds, official tastemaker of Blake’s time and gatekeeper for artistic success, published his lectures, Blake annotated them with the bitter marginalia of a outsider with no hope of finding his way in. Seen in My Visions shows Blake at his visionary best, especially in works such as Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels (above, from 1805), but also at his pragmatic best, wishing for a way to become an insider without compromising his principles so as to better art and society from within the machinery itself. Even Blake knew that access to the inner workings of the system was the only way to change it. Denied the chance even to touch the levers of power, Blake forged a different path, lighting a long fuse for an artistic and philosophical bomb that would take decades to detonate and contribute to change. Even two centuries later, Blake explodes in our imaginations like few other artists. The exhibition and catalogue Seen in My Visions shows that Blake didn’t begin as a bomb thrower into the future.

[Many thanks to Tate Publishing for providing me with a review copy of William Blake’s Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, edited by Martin Myrone.]

Graphic Content

2009-07-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

One of the many joys of reading Vincent Van Gogh’s letters is his frequent references to other artists he admired. There are, of course, references to Millais, Corot, and others we still know well today, but it is the lesser-known names, the forgotten gems, that make you scour the internet for more. The English illustrator and painter Frank Holl appears in no less than eleven of Van Gogh’s letters. Born July 4, 1845, Holl drew Van Gogh’s attention with his graphic work in the socially conscious newspaper The Graphic founded by artist and social reformer William Luson Thomas. In the days before photographic reproduction in periodicals, magazines and newspapers relied on the talents of illustrators to capture the public’s eye and, in the case of The Graphic, the public’s heart and mind. While working for The Graphic, Holl painted such socially conscious works as Her Firstborn (above, from 1876), which shows dramatically and, yes, graphically the funeral procession of a family burying a young child. The poses and expressions of the figures are operatic in their emotion. You could almost hear a Puccini aria playing in the distance. In the Victorian age, infant and childhood mortality remained an agonizing reality. Holl’s poor British subjects and Van Gogh’s Dutch peasants both knew that reality well and both artists tapped into that emotion for their art.

In 1878, Thomas assigned Holl to visit Newgate Prison and create illustrations to accompany a story. In response, Holl painted Newgate: Committed for Trial (above, from 1878), which captures the pathos of a woman and child visiting the husband and father, respectively, held prisoner there. Holl actually painted this work inside Newgate prison to get all the physical and emotional details just right. The debtor’s prison remained another harsh reality for Victorians in England as the gap between the haves and the have nots widened to a chasm. For the upper classes in England, such sights were usually reserved for the lower classes. Holl brashly brings the dark side of British society in the 1870s to those in power by first painting such works and then exhibiting them at the Royal Academy alongside more genteel works. In many ways, Holl’s personal philosophy as enacted in his art mirrors that of the Ashcan School in America when they expanded their socially conscious graphic art to paint every corner, even the darkest, of urban American reality.

In 1877, Holl returned to the subject of childhood death with Hush! (above, from 1877). A mother asks an older child to be quiet as she anxiously watches over a sick baby. Both mother and elder sibling clearly know what might happen but don’t dare disturb the hushed silence by broaching the subject of death. In Hushed, the companion piece to Hush!, we witness the aftermath of the baby’s death. The mother covers her face while the surviving older child stands in stunned silence. The subtlety of the changed silence as conveyed in the two works illustrates Holl’s sensitivity and great psychological touch in portraying these people who too often remained invisible in British society. Unfortunately for Holl, such works did not sell well enough for him to support his own family. Holl painted portraits of the rich and powerful to provide for his family and to give himself the freedom to paint the socially conscious works closer to his heart. Working seven days a week, Holl eventually died from exhaustion at 43. "It is not too much to say that my father threw his life away by his utter inability to rest from work," Holl’s daughter later wrote. Thanks to Van Gogh, art lovers today can rediscover Holl’s paintings as well as his reforming passion.

Patriot Games

2009-07-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

When Stephen Colbert took his show The Colbert Report to Iraq as part of the USO, he followed in the great tradition of entertainers bringing joy to the troops. Colbert, however, did more than just entertain the troops. He enlightened our country. When Colbert allowed General Raymond Odierno, commander of the Multinational Corps in Iraq, to give him the full military buzzcut on the show, a comedian demonstrated greater solidarity with the troops and patriotism than any politician of the last 6 years and counting. On this Fourth of July, I’m not thinking of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or even Betsy Ross. Instead, I’m thinking of the picture of a true patriot, whose tonsorial sacrifice showed just how pitiful our sacrifices at home are in comparison to those fighting abroad. Like Jasper Johns’ Three Flags (below, from 1958), America the idea and ideal is a concept with many layers and dimensions to argue over, but one that we must always remember to live in our hearts.

Four Questions for… Elizabeth Kennedy

2009-07-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

In The Eight and American Modernisms (my review here), Elizabeth Kennedy, Curator of Collection at the Terra Foundation for American Art, tries to reposition The Eight within the history of American modern art. Along with her fellow essayists, Dr. Kennedy tries to toss the terms “The Ashcan School” onto the dustbin of art history for good. Dr. Kennedy also graciously agreed to answer a few questions regarding The Eight for a new feature at Art Blog By Bob, Four Questions for…

ABBB: In The Eight and American Modernisms, you go out of your way to minimize the use of the term “Ashcan School.” I’m as guilty as anyone of using the two labels synonymously. Do you think that the “Ashcan School” label deserves a full retirement?

Dr. Kennedy: Since the catchy phrase “Ashcan School” was coined in 1934, it has caused much mischief in coming to terms with the painterly qualities of The Eight’s body of work as well as veiling the importance of them as early American modernists. The journalistic and commercial endeavors of the Philadelphia Four (Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan), however, are somewhat connected to the concept of “realistic” portraying street life. The true connection to the term is Sloan’s 1905 etchings series of New York, which depict scenes that are alternatives to American academic artists’ genteel subjects.

For me, it is the careless mixing art and politics that is implied in the term “Ashcan,” invented during the Great Depression, which does a disservice to these artists’ ambitions to be “modern painters of one kind or another.” As early as 1907 Henri touted their differences (therefore, no school), and Sloan, until his death in the 1950s, disputed any political agenda for myself, who was at one time a socialist and a cartoonist for The Masses, or the other artists. In summary, there was no “social or political” agenda attached to these artists’ works of art.

ABBB: You chose Robert Henri’s Betalo Nude (1916) for the cover of The Eight and American Modernisms, which earned me several offended (and several lingering) stares while reading it on my commute. Do you feel that The Eight’s approach to the nude positions them closer to European modernism? If so, does that make them less “American”?

Dr. Kennedy: The human form is at the center of the western art tradition. The plethora of nude females pictured in US art after the 1860s continues until today. Art historian Kenneth Clark’s celebrated The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1972) makes the distinction between the “nude” and the “naked” model, which is an important difference to make for American art in the first decades of the 20th century. If the female nude form was idealized, then it could be accepted as a work of art; a realistic portrayal was problematic. While at the turn of the century, paintings of female nudes were found in American art exhibitions, but they were not as frequent as the French salons.

20th century avant-guard European art distorted the body—in color by Fauvist artists or in shape by cubists. Henri achieved his own ideas through the use of theories and inspiration—with no need to impose a national identity. The Betalo Nude is gorgeous because of the color harmonies used to create a shape that happens to be a body. Of course, a natural fission arises from viewing nudity but there are other paintings of nude women that do not have the same impact. Henri’s created an exceptional painting because if its color and composition.

ABBB: As The Eight and American Modernisms shows, the styles and personalities of the artists falling under that banner differ greatly. Is there one artist who stands out from the rest for you personally?

Dr. Kennedy: My favorite member of The Eight is Maurice Prendergast because of his willingness to explore unconventional ideas and, yet, when he found his original style that expressed his creativity he remained focused on his mission. His story is inspiring because eventually others, the important modern art collectors and artists, realized his brilliance. Nevertheless, he is an underappreciated modernist because he did not “fit the Ashcan” label nor did he preach a “mantra of modernism” in the style of Alfred Stieglitz or Thomas Hart Benton. Prendergast arose each morning and went to his studio to work and left behind some of the most beautiful paintings ever made.

ABBB: When The Eight whittled their number down to eight, they left Jerome Myers and George Bellows most notably outside the fold. Like the legendary “Fifth Beatle,” who would you nominate for the “Ninth” Eight? Are there any women candidates for the position?

Dr. Kennedy: If there had been a 9th artist, it should have been Herni’s protégée George Bellows. Bellows was an exceptionally inventive painter, whose brightly colored palette of men at work upset the “Ashcan” label—nothing gloomy about these New York streets. Bellows’ later portraits and nudes are equally exceptional for their technique and inventiveness. His work before his untimely death was verging on the surreal.

[Many thanks to Dr. Kennedy for her gracious and thoughtful answers.]

Scientific Method

2009-07-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

For the June 2009 Art Poll By Bob, I indulged my inner comic geek and asked a summer blockbuster of a question: “Which of these great comic artist’s work would you want to see on the big screen?” You picked Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange (1960s) with 7 votes, just edging out Jack Cole’s Plastic Man (1941) with 6. Dave Cockrum’s X-Men (1975) came in third with 5 votes, ahead of fourth place Jack Kirby’s Captain America (1976) with 4. Neal Adams’ Batman versus Ra’s al Ghul (1971), Frank Frazetta’s Conan the Barbarian (1970s), and Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man (1990) all tied with 3 votes each. Joe Kubert’s Hawkman squeeked out a single vote, but John Romita, Sr.’s Spider-Man (1967) and Joe Shuster’s Superman (1938) found no love. Thanks to everyone who shared in my comic book fantasies.

Inspired by Iris Schaefer, Katja Lewerentz, and Caroline von Saint-George’s Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists (my review here), I decided to tap into my inner Beaker (above) and use the scientific method to find the best science-related art. For the July 2009 Art Poll By Bob, I ask, “Which of these science-related works of art make you wish you had paid more attention in high school lab?”:

William Blake. Newton (1795).

Leonardo da Vinci. Vitruvian Man (1487).

Jacques-Louis David. Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife (1788).

Albrecht Durer. Melencolia I (1514).

Thomas Eakins. The Gross Clinic (1875).

Thomas Eakins. Portrait of Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897).

Erich Mendelsohn. Einstein Tower (1920-1924).

Charles Willson Peale. The Artist in His Museum (1822).

Charles Willson Peale. Exhuming the First American Mastodon (1806).

Joseph Wright of Derby. An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).

Eakins and Peale get two mentions each because they did so many science-related paintings. Durer’s Melancolia I makes the cut because I can’t think of a single image in art history that contains more references to mathematics. Please feel free to include any favorites that I may have missed in the comments. But now put on your lab coat, strap on those safety goggles, fire up the Bunsen burners, and vote!

Cleaning the Slate

2009-06-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

William Glackens, A Headache in Every Glass, 1903–1904, Charcoal and watercolor heightened with white gouache on cream wove paper, 13 1/4 x 19 1/2 in. (33.7 x 49.5 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.170

“We’ve come together because we’re so unlike,” wrote Robert Henri in a May 1907 press release for the Macbeth Galleries show in February 1908 that would forever link him and the other seven artists in that show as The Eight. Later, thanks to the socially conscious work of some of those artists, The Eight became known under the less-glamorous label of The Ashcan School. Certainly works such as William Glackens’ A Headache in Every Glass (above, 1903-1904) left a strong impression, creating new headaches for a group too diverse for any label beyond a simple number. For almost a century now, the label of Ashcan has been hard to rip away. In The Eight and American Modernisms, Elizabeth Kennedy of the Terra Foundation for American Art tries to pull The Eight from the ashes of art history and clean up not only their reputation but blow the dust off of the lasting effect those artists had on American Modern art in the years after the 1913 Armory Show that allegedly tolled the death knell for The Eight as an influential force for American art. If conventional art history etched a tombstone for The Eight, the years would read “1908-1913.” “This exaggeration of the rapid ascendancy and demise of The Eight’s contribution to a nascent American avant-garde obscures a far more complex tale,” Kennedy writes in her introductory essay, “for each artist experienced a successful professional journey that defies group labeling, with its implication of a single unifying ideology or a static artistic outlook.” The Eight and American Modernisms raises The Eight from the grave and confirms that reports of their early demise were greatly exaggerated.

Robert Henri, Figure in Motion, 1913, Oil on canvas, 77 1/4 x 37 1/4 in. (196.2 x 94.6 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.69

From the moment you look at the cover of The Eight and American Modernisms and behold Henri’s 1916 Betalo Nude, you know that this isn’t your father’s (or grandfather’s) idea of The Eight. The grime of gritty realism gives way to the symphony of tones and color in that nude, just one of the many nudes that The Eight painted during their heyday and long afterwards. As both artists and teachers, Henri and John Sloan were especially “dedicated to the representation of the human figure as the vehicle for portraying their expressive ideas,” writes Kennedy. Henri’s 1913 Figure in Motion (above), painted the same year that Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 wowed crowds at The Armory Show, responds to European Modernism without slavishly following it. “Experimental painting of the nude model in the studio was one of the theoretical strategies that some of The Eight continued late into their careers,” Kennedy explains, but never at the expense of losing their own personal vision. “It is necessary to pierce the core, to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensation exterior,” Henri said of his reaction to new art movements. It is this “dedication to individualism in art, writing, and teaching” on Henri’s part that “fostered American modernism” argues Sarah Vure in her essay on Henri.

George Luks, Knitting for the Soldiers: High Bridge Park, c. 1918, Oil on canvas 30 3/16 x 36 1/8 in. (76.7 x 91.8 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.87

Kennedy and her cohorts do their best to individualize each of The Eight and allow them to stand alone rather than force them to stand together. Perhaps none of these individuals was so “individual” as George Luks. “Sometimes you wonder over his versatility,” a New York art critic wrote of Luks in 1920, “a character actor, a low comedian, even song-and-dance man, a poet, a profound sympathizer with human misery, and a human orchestra.” In her essay on Luks, Judith Hansen O’Toole links Luks with Henri, calling both “passionate humanitarians seeking to forge a new artistic expression that was truly American and of their own time.” Luks’ Knitting for the Soldiers: High Bridge Park (above, c. 1918) brings the World War I home front home while portraying “realism” with color and vibrant style. Such paintings by Luks, who resisted the “social realist” label for himself, laid the groundwork for the social commentators of the 1920s and 1930s. Luks painted portraits of coal miners not only because they struck him as interesting subjects, but because they reminded him of the miners he’d known during his childhood in Pennsylvania coal country. “Making art was their life,” Kennedy writes of The Eight in her introduction, “not merely the practice of their profession.” Luks lived and painted with passion and was found dead at 67 in the doorway of a speakeasy in 1933 after losing in a brawl. Each of the essayists in The Eight and American Modernisms beautifully breathes life into their subject and integrates living and painting to the point that they become one again.

Ernest Lawson, Brooklyn Bridge, 1917–20, Oil on canvas, 20 3/8 x 24 in. (51.8 x 61.0 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.43

After reading these essays, you come away with a sense of The Eight as a truly pivotal group in the trajectory of American art history—the link that connects the past with the future. Trained by American Impressionists John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir, Ernest Lawson brought Impressionism to the big city. Essayist Jochan Wierich sees Lawson as the heir to the American Romantic tradition of the Hudson River School as much as an heir of European Impressionists. “Lawson demonstrated to his contemporaries how the art of landscape could survive and refashion itself as an expression of modern life,” Wierich writes, in works such as Brooklyn Bridge (above, from 1917-1920), which “combine pastoral tradition with urban reality.” The grit and grime of the Ashcan School label disappears in such transcendent and transformative works. Lawson builds a bridge between Thomas Cole and Edward Hopper that continues a tradition without chaining any one artist to a single style. Both conservator and innovator of the American tradition in art, Lawson and the rest of The Eight retained the elusively definable “Americanism” of art without closing eyes to possibilities from abroad.

Maurice Prendergast, St. Malo, after 1907, Watercolor and graphite on paper, 15 1/8 x 22 in. (38.4 x 55.9 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.121

In her essay specifically on Maurice Prendergast, Kennedy uses the greatest exception to ideas of The Eight to “prove the rule” of their uncategorizable diversity. Prendergast stood as the “only member of The Eight whose reputation grew more favorable in [The Armory Show’s] immediate aftermath,” Kennedy explains. Suddenly, oddball works such as St. Malo (above, from after 1907) seemed not so odd in the context of Post-Impressionism. Sadly, it took the affirmation of artists from overseas to free viewers to accept Prendergast’s unusual style. The Eight and American Modernisms looks to free viewers to accept these artists as individuals and then, again, as a group of artists united in the same goal of furthering American art and contributing to American society in their own diverging ways. “The Eight’s simultaneous recognition of non-representational art as a valid expression of contemporary art styles while refusing to embrace the authority of abstract art as the only ‘true’ vehicle for modernity encouraged other American artists to insist on the integrity of their own creative ideas,” Kennedy concludes. In other words, The Eight accepted other artists on their own terms and asked for nothing less for themselves. The failure of that courtesy costs us a clear picture of how vital these artists and their philosophy was to the beginnings of modern art in America. The Eight and American Modernisms rescues The Eight from the ignoble dustbin of art history and washes away the smear of Ashcan School for good.

[Many thanks to The University of Chicago Press for providing me with a review copy of The Eight and American Modernisms and to the Terra Foundation for American Art for the images from the catalogue above.]

Fat Bottomed Girls

2009-06-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

Oh, you gonna take me home tonight?
Oh, down beside that red firelight?
Are you gonna let it all hang out?
Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go round.

—From “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen

Beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder, especially ideals of female beauty, which vary by culture and era. These ideals of the past appear in the works of artists throughout time. The seventeenth-century in Europe must have been the era of the fat-bottomed girl judging by the works of Peter Paul Rubens, whose voluptuous vixens live on in the modern-day adjective “Rubenesque.” Born June 28, 1577, Rubens always had an eye for a girl with some meat on her bones. In Venus at a Mirror (above, from 1615), a decidedly non-waifish goddess admires her plump face in a mirror while presenting her broad back and ample rear to the viewer. A black woman attends to Venus on the right, a familiar trope of portraits examining beauty personified that Edouard Manet riffs on in the black handmaiden of Olympia. Sadly, the contrast between the black woman and the white goddess reflects the racism of the period, which could only find beauty in European tones. In modern day Hollywood, where slender Kate Winslet is seen as “Rubenesque,” Rubens’ Venus would be judged enormous, maybe even obese.

In the 1620s, Marie de' Medici, the queen-mother of France, commissioned Rubens to paint two allegorical cycles now known as the Marie de' Medici cycle to commemorate her life with the late Henry IV of France. One of those paintings, Rubens’ The Arrival of Marie de' Medici at Marseilles (above, from 1626), shows the young queen disembarking from the ship that had brought her from her native Florence, where she married Henry IV by proxy. A helmeted, blue-caped embodiment of France greets Marie on the gangplank. Beneath them, three buxom Nereids stand with Poseidon and other mythological sea figures that protected the new Queen on her voyage. Marie de’ Medici may be the intended center of attention, but the Nereids upstage her with their beauty, nudity, and fluidity. The rolls of their flesh roll like the waves themselves, making the sea goddesses seem to move even when standing still. By contrast, Marie seems statuesque in a bad way—cold, lifeless, and literally bloodless. There’s little promise of passion in the proxy marriage between Marie and Henry judging from this picture.

Rubens first wife died in 1626. Four years later, he married a voluptuous 16-year-old beauty named Hélène Fourment. Hélène became the muse of Rubens last years. She modeled at least one, and perhaps all three of the full-figured women in Rubens’ The Three Graces (above, from 1636). Granted, Rubens painted male figures who could use a gym membership, too, in works such as Bacchus (1640), but clearly Rubens’ ideal womanly figure was a full one. I guess it stands to reason that an artist with such a vigorous, omnivorous approach to life and art would admire women who also grabbed all the gusto they could. Rubens art does nothing by half measures, including portraying the female figure. Many primitive cultures worshiped a full-figured female type as the embodiment of fecundity. Despite being surrounded by the trappings of European civilization, Rubens “Rubenesque” ladies embody the fecundity of the primitive drives of his prodigious imagination.

Oh, Behave

2009-06-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

Mike Myers’ Austin Powers character spoofs the days of “Swinging London,” when outrageous behavior was the norm, but his outrageousness isn’t far from the real deal. In the middle of that swinging time was one of the most intriguing and fun artists of the twentieth century—Peter Blake. Born June 25, 1935, Blake was born just in time to soak up the teen-targeted popular culture of post-World War II Britain. Combining such “low brow” pop with “high brow” fine art technique and history, Blake created such works as Got a Girl (above, from 1960-1961). The faces of teen idols such as Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson appear in a band across the top above a series of red, white, and blue chevrons that recall the work of Blake’s American contemporary Kenneth Noland. Just as America imported to England young hunks through movies and music, it imported the latest trends in abstract art, such as Noland’s pieces. Blake binds the two imports together and creates a pastiche of cultures clashing. By putting Elvis et al. at the top and Noland on the bottom, Blake flips the idea of “high” versus “low” on its head. Blake would take this pastiche style to its greatest extreme in his design for for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which mixes history, literature, art, and music together in a dazzling, ground-breaking display.

In addition to celebrating stars who “got the girl” in Got the Girl, Blake “got” his own girl in Tuesday (above, from 1961). Two photos of the actress and early 1960s teen sex symbol Tuesday Weld appear above the simple banner of “TUESDAY.” Blake plays off of the instant, one-name name recognition of pop culture and modern media in broadcasting the actress’ first name. Tuesday in many ways is the companion piece to the male stars of Got a Girl. To Blake’s male perspective, the young male stars blend together in their similar hairstyles and chiseled features. In contrast, Tuesday Weld strikes the male viewer as unique and special. If Blake had been a woman, the two compositions might have been reversed. Blake again places a Noland-esque abstract arrangement of color beneath the pop culture reference, but I wonder if Blake also alludes here to the celebrity-celebrating boxes of Joseph Cornell. Cornell, also a omnivorous consumer of all strata of culture, created semi-shrines to Lauren Bacall and other starlets of the 1940s. The boxlike arrangement of Blake’s Tuesday leads me to believe that he’s having a little fun in “borrowing” Cornell’s style while modifying it to his own taste and time.

Blake has become a revered figure in British art, but that doesn’t mean that the old lion’s been tamed. In The Meeting, or Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hockney (above, from 1981-1983), Blake plays off of Gustave Courbet’s 1854 The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Blake recasts artist David Hockney as Courbet and himself and Howard Hodgkin as the fawning patrons. Blake and Hodgkin seem out of place in their heavy clothes, but Hockney, the transplanted British artist in his new California habitat, wears informal, seasonal clothing. Behind the artists, Blake places all the stereotypical accessories of California living—palm trees, garish advertising, and beautiful blondes on roller skates. Blake is one of my favorite artists of the twentieth century for his incorrigible yen for mixing up the history of art with the pop culture of the time with equal respect for both worlds yet a sense of overall irreverence. You have to respect a man who grew up never growing up.

Private Dancer

2009-06-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

"Different men are moved or left cold by lines according to the difference in their natures,” wrote Robert Henri. “What moves you is beautiful to you." Born June 24, 1865, Henri found women dancers moving in their beautiful, graceful movements and bodily freedom. Henri and the several other of The Eight artists found the modern dance style of Isadora Duncan especially intriguing. (John Sloan painted a portrait of Duncan in action in 1911.) Throughout his career, Henri painted many dancers, but one dancer—Betalo Rubino—captured his imagination the most as a model. From 1909 up until at least 1916, the dark eyes and hair of Betalo provided the perfect focal point for Henri’s explorations into color. Henri’s 1909 Salome remains for many the pinnacle of his career, or at least of his dancer and dancing works, but he continued to move past the colorful drama of that work and seek out new combinations. Unlike Degas, perhaps the most obsessive painter of dancers ever, Henri always paints the dancer as an individual rather than as a type. Degas’ dancers are beautiful in design, but you never feel that they are alive. In contrast, Henri’s Betalo the Dancer (above, from 1910) almost vibrates with life. The vigorous brushwork gives the sensation of movement, as if Betalo herself were suddenly caught unaware by our entrance and just turned to face the viewer.

Betalo proved to be an ideal model for exotic dress. Her athletic dancer’s physique and pretty face enhanced the exoticism of the costumes in works such as Dancer of Dehli and Dramatic Dancer, both done in 1916. In that same year of 1916, Henri painted Betalo several times in the nude. In the version above, Henri surrounds the pale-skinned, dark colored beauty with blues, grays, and whites. Like Whistler in works such as Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl (1898), Henri approaches abstraction in the composition of pure color compliments and contrasts but remains in the figurative tradition through the centering theme of the nude. Betalo must have seemed like a godsend of a model to Henri in her amazing versatility. A living, breathing example of chiaroscuro, Betalo exuded the drama around which Henri could experiment in color with full freedom. Betalo’s natural grace in motion comes across in Henri’s ability to paint her lounging but simultaneously raising herself slightly from the couch, as if anticipation of something or someone.

In the painting of Betalo nude above, also from 1916, Henri surrounds his private dancer with pinks and greens. As with the blue-gray nude above, the colors around her become echoed in her pale skin. Just as the dancing costumes clothed her in other paintings, the colors around Betalo “clothe” her in these nude paintings. There’s also that same sense of movement in Betalo’s reclining pose, as if she’s right at the moment of lifting herself into a new position. I doubt Betalo could hold such a suspended pose for long, but Henri tried to work quickly to get a sense of the essence of the moment. “Do it all in one sitting if you can,” Henri said of capturing the spirit of a model. “In one minute if you can. There is no virtue in delaying." For Henri, speed and movement were more virtuous than meticulous detail. Henri’s nude paintings of Betalo Rubino and other women around 1915 and 1916 present them as vital, alive, confident women rather than passive objects receiving the artist’s gaze. For many feminist critics, female nudes represent the repressive patriarchy of art history. I agree for the most part. However, Robert Henri’s nudes express rather than repress the fullness of womanhood and present the private dancer to the public eye in all her glory.

The Man Without a Country

2009-06-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

Although Henry Ossawa Tanner rose to prominence as the first great African-American artist, in the minds of many of his contemporaries, he always remained exactly that—an “African-American” artist and not just an artist. Born June 21, 1859, Tanner painted to escape from the prejudices of his time, but still found prejudice in the American art world. “I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain,” Tanner wrote in his autobiography. “Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.” Tanner’s very presence and talent challenged the mindset of his time. In The Banjo Lesson (above, from 1893), Tanner paints an older black man teaching music to a child in a warm and exceedingly human fashion. It lacks the burlesque of Thomas Eakins’ The Dancing Lesson, another scene of African-American culture being transmitted. As Alan C. Braddock points out in Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (reviewed here), Eakins puts into paint the ideology that held African-American culture as less sophisticated than white culture. A photo of Abraham Lincoln reading with his son Tad in the upper left-hand corner of The Dancing Lesson illustrating the perceived culture gap. Even Eakins, Tanner’s teacher, fell prey to this prejudice. Perhaps thinking of the Lincolns in Eakins’ picture, Tanner paints the two generations of African-Americans in a way that recalls that picture of white father and son reading, a possibly defiant gesture for the quiet Tanner. Tanner painted The Banjo Lesson in 1893 while briefly revisiting America. Unhappy with racial conditions in the United States, Tanner moved to France in 1891 and lived there for the rest of his life.

Although Tanner’s lauded as the first great African-American painter, few of his paintings deal with race. The Banjo Lesson and a few others are actually the exceptions in his career. Tanner’s The Annunciation (above, from 1898) is actually more representative of his body of work. Using his wife as a model for the Virgin Mary receiving the angel telling her that she’s going to give birth to the messiah, Tanner creates a scene of simplicity and realism that strikes at the heart of the humanity of the scene rather than plasters piety over it. I’ve looked at this painting many times in person at the PMA and always come away touched by the depth of feeling and faith it conveys. Depicting the angel as simply a brilliant light, Tanner resists the urge to bring the heavenly down to earth through illustration. It was this great faith that allowed Tanner to go on despite racial prejudice. France must have seemed like a great oasis to him. When artists of the Harlem Renaissance such as William H. Johnson traveled to Paris in the 1920s in pursuit of a better racial climate and new art experiences, they sought out Tanner as a pioneer and a pattern for their own careers.

Tanner never returned to America. Sadly, it took many years for him to gain any recognition in his homeland. In 1996, President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton oversaw the purchase of Tanner’s Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (above, from 1885) for the White House’s Green Room, making it the first artwork by an African-American artist to become part of the White House’s permanent collection. It was a fitting way of bringing Tanner “home,” in that rather than force the label of African-American artist on him with one of his images of black culture, the Clintons chose instead a landscape that could have been painted by anyone with great talent, regardless of skin color. Tanner had finally found the racially blind acceptance that he had looked for all along.

The Wright Stuff

2009-06-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of staying earlier this year at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, which bears many of the marks of Frank Lloyd Wright’s style, although his involvement in the project is questioned. What can’t be questioned is the fact that Wright (shown above in 1954) left an indelible mark on American architecture during his long career. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Wright’s death and the opening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Rizzoli, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and the Guggenheim have joined forces to publish three impressive books that celebrate the work of the master from different angles. Individually, these works shed light on Wright sometimes in small details, but, like the man himself, when assembled together, these works stack up into giant ideas and, perhaps, unrealizable ambitions. Anyone who knows the man and his work will find themselves captivated once again. Those who do not know Wright will discover the stuff of dreams—specifically, the American dream.

In Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, 350 color photos taken by Alan Weintraub featuring over 100 discrete works by Wright provide a sometimes dizzying display of the architect’s diversity and longevity. For $30 US, this collection offers a remarkably comprehensive collection of images of all of Wright’s major projects at a reasonable price. Wright built over 500 buildings, so a work covering all of them would cost, and perhaps weight, as much as a small house. The photos dwarf Kathryn Smith’s introductory text to the sections, but Smith makes up in quality what Weintraub covers in quantity. “Like Picasso, Einstein, or Freud,” Smith writes, Wright “was a rare individual who permanently altered the fundamental way we perceive our world.” Smith deals in superlatives, but the terms seem apt when supported by the photos. Like most great artists, Wright remains an enigma surrounded by more questions than answers as we learn more about him. “In the end,” Smith concludes, “these very paradoxes and contradictions that make him so difficult to compartmentalize are what give him such lasting appeal.” Looking at Weintraub’s photos of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, I found myself transported back to the place itself and fondly recalled the feeling of working and sleeping within a piece of art itself. Through this economical volume, people who have never had the chance at that feeling can at least press their noses against the windows.

In Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years: 1920-1932, Bruce Brooks Pfieffer concentrates on the lean years that tested Wright’s mettle and, rather than ruined him, forged him into an even greater artist and visionary. “My husband seemed to thrive on hardships,” Olgivanna, Wright’s third wife, recalled of that time. In that tumultuous decade, in addition to the “Great Depression” that plagued all of American society, Wright personally dealt with the death of his adoring mother in 1923, the death of his mentor Louis Sullivan in 1924, the (second) destruction of his Taliesin studio-home by fire in 1925, continued troubles with his second wife Miriam Noel until her death in 1930, and his descent into debt while trying to rebuild Taliesin. After the loss of Taliesin in 1926, Wright works with permanent home or studio for the rest of these “heroic” years. Despite these setbacks, Wright persevered. “He indeed seemed destined to be an architect who was not accepted by the world around him,” Pfieffer writes of Wright. “Yet that never defeated him, and he continued with ever-present optimism to continue creating buildings that rank among the most important works realized in his long career.” The greatest accomplishment of this period must be Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. Completed in 1923, The Imperial Hotel that same year withstood the magnitude 7.9 Great Kantō earthquake that leveled the rest of Tokyo. Like the Imperial Hotel, Wright withstood each earth-shattering event and seemingly stood even taller in the aftermath. Pfieffer is clearly a fan, but you can’t help but join along when trial piles on trial. In 1930, after years of darkness and no hint of a bright future ahead, Wright said in a lecture, “Keep your ideal of honesty so high that you will never quite be able to reach it.” That unreachable aspect of Wright’s work comes across in the many incredible illustrations and plans that fill Pfieffer’s book, many of which are for unrealized projects. A selection of Weintraub’s photography showing realized projects of this period appears in The Heroic Years, but it is the buildings that were never built and remain pure thought and imagination that appeal even more in their sheer potential. Pfieffer picks 1932 as the end of Wright’s trial by fire because that is the year Wright opened the Taliesin Fellowship, a school for architects in which Wright hoped to spread his gospel of democratic architecture to the next generation. In 1932, the private Wright became the public Wright for the rest of his days, thus committing himself to changing the world one design at a time.

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward picks up where The Heroic Years leaves off. The catalogue to the Guggenheim exhibition of the same name, From Within Outward concentrates on the public Wright—the builder of houses of worship such as Beth Sholom Synagogue, museums such as the Guggenheim, community centers such as the Marin County Civic Center, and suburban planning projects such as the uber-democratic, near-utopian Broadacre City. “Wright’s goal was nothing less than the reinvention of the built environment in order to promote our development as individuals, enhance and enrich the social rituals and patterns of our lives, and encourage meaningful reengagement with the world around us,” Margo Stipe explains in her introductory essay, “all of which are particularly timely and worthy of our attention today.” From Within Outward presents not a retrospective of a dead figure but rather the still-living spirit of a visionary whose vision is still applicable today. Stipe points out that the then 90-year-old Wright told a television interviewer in 1957 that he’d change the country if he could only live another fifteen years. Wright had only two more years of life in him, but From Within Outward resurrects the man and his plans five decades later with more vibrantly alive illustrations of both plans completed and never begun. In his essay on Wright’s sacred spaces, Joseph M. Siry writes, “Wright created a space for the whole community to see and know itself.” Through grand designs for what America could be, Wright, that great romantic dreamer of architecture, holds up a mirror to modern America “to see and know itself” and, more importantly, wonder what it could be.

Of all the unrealized plans in these books on Wright, those for Greater Baghdad (above, from 1957-1958) captured my imagination the most. “Wright’s culminating work in Baghdad elaborated his ideal of the spirit (that sense of interior he traced to the philosophy of Lao-Tzu) in space (a continuous flow), liberating human imagination, action, and interaction,” writes Mina Marefat in her essay on the Baghdad plans in From Within Outward. Within the planned opera house, Wright placed a statue of Aladdin. “We will find all the magic of ancient times magnified,” Wright explained of this touch. “Aladdin’s lamp was a symbol merely for Imagination. Let us take this lamp inside, in the Architect’s world.” Reading these three books on Wright injects the magic of Wright into our hearts and imaginations, allowing us to reengage with the world around us and, ultimately, freeing us from the dreary offices and apartment buildings of our lives to find new spaces that spark our minds and feed our souls. Wright’s magical dream for Baghdad never became a reality, but the true message of Wright’s life is that sometimes dreams can be more real than the deadening reality around us.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with review copies of Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years: 1920-1932, and Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward.]