Thinking Long Term: To Sell, or Not to Sell, a Masterpiece

“In the long run, we’re all dead,” John Maynard Keynes once said in defense of his brand of economics featuring an array of short-term solutions. It seems like the state legislature of Iowa feels the same way. Faced with a budgetary shortfall, the Iowa House is considering forcing the University of Iowa to sell Jackson Pollock’s Mural (detail shown above), a painting in their collection estimated to be worth $140 million USD. “That would be like selling your grandmother,” claims Sean O’Harrow, director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Lawmakers suggest that such a sale now could help pay for scholarships in the future. But are they really thinking long term in suggesting this short-term solution? Or are they selling away future generations’ enjoyment of their cultural heritage in a moment of panic? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Thinking Long Term."

Gothic Tale: A Biography of Grant Wood

“I’m the plainest kind of fellow you can find,” painter Grant Wood told an interviewer in the 1930s, the height of his fame. “There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced, that’s been even the least bit exciting.” In Grant Wood: A Life, R. Tripp Evans demonstrates just how deceitful Wood’s protestations really were. Instead of the well-worn tale of normalcy beyond compare, Evans, an art history professor from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, weaves a more gothic tale of subversion and submersion that reveals a new view of Wood as a tortured homosexual artist miscast as a purveyor of Reagan-esque Americana in works such as the iconic American Gothic (shown above). Through new readings of the works themselves as well as of Wood’s posthumous existence in the popular consciousness, Evans gives us the Grant Wood that the artist himself never could. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Gothic Tale."

Root Canal: “Prendergast in Italy” at the MFA Houston

In 1882, American novelist Henry James concluded that there was “nothing more to be said” about Venice, Italy. Artists of all stripes had trod and sloshed through the streets and canals so long that opportunities for saying something new had, he felt, dried up entirely. Yet, in 1900, Maurice Prendergast exhibited a series of watercolors painted of Venice that made a giant splash in the American art world and cleared a path for a new wave of American modernism. Prendergast in Italy, an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, brings together these watery landmarks to recreate a seminal moment in American modern art and to rescue a great artist from drowning in the depths of obscurity. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Root Canal."

[Image: Maurice Prendergast, American, 1858-1924. The Grand Canal, Venice, c. 1898-99. Watercolor and pencil on paper. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.123.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Fine Art, Houston for providing me with the image above and other press materials for Prendergast in Italy. Many thanks also to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a copy of the catalogue.]

Four Questions for… Elizabeth Kennedy

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.]

Mythbusters

It’s a great romantic myth that great artists come out of nowhere and develop a truly “new” style that breaks all the rules and announces a brave, new world. When Clement Greenberg hailed Jackson Pollock as the next big thing that would cast off the oppressive chains of the past and lead the way to a whole new way of seeing, he bought into that myth entirely and invited the entire art world to join him. Born January 28, 1912, Pollock owed much of his art to a series of mentors and influences, like pretty much every other major artist in history. As America pulled itself out from under The Great Depression, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Without that financial assistance, Pollock would never have continued as an artist and never painted works such as Moby-Dick (above, from 1943). Moby-Dick not only shows Pollock’s interest in Herman Melville but also the influence of David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom Pollock worked with in the 1930s. Siqueiros’ unique use of the liquid properties of paint as well as his independent spirit helped shape Pollock into the individualist he later became.

Another great influence on the young Pollock was Thomas Hart Benton. It’s hard to see how Benton, the pseudo-realist regionalist, could have influenced works such as Pollock’s Blue Poles (Number 11, 1952) (above, from 1952), but if you dig deeply, you can see the connections. Like Siqueiros, Benton displayed a fierce streak of independence and passed that trait on to his students, including Pollock. But even more importantly, Benton taught Pollock how to compose a painting. Many people who look at Pollock’s paintings deny that there is any structure, but there is, if you look closely. Blue Poles may have the most obvious structure of all. In his study of Pollock’s art, Kirk Varnedoe showed how Blue Poles mimics the compositions of many of Benton’s works, with the blue poles standing in for the figures that would strike poses in Benton’s historical murals. The drip technique certainly doesn’t come from Benton, but the underlying structure does.

Perhaps the most fascinating suggested influence on Pollock for me is that of Claude Monet. Monet’s late Water Lilies paintings, thanks to his severe cataracts, approach abstraction in their color and lines. Before even that late period, Monet’s Cathedral series took the face of a cathedral and almost dissolved it in different light effects. One of Pollock’s earliest drip paintings, titled Cathedral (above, from 1947), may pay homage to Monet in some sense. In Cathedral, Pollock layers paint in a very controlled and deliberate fashion, constructing the “cathedral” of paint with absolute control in a way that denies the myth of “Jack the Dripper” aimlessly flinging paint about and eventually calling it art. Monet’s art is all about the eye taking in light and color. Pollock took that lesson and extended it further, almost obliterating the ostensible subject in the pursuit of pure color and gesture. The wild ride of Abstract Expressionism seems light years away from the serenity of Impressionism, but inquiring minds can find connections in the great web of art history. Freed from the myth of magical individuality, Pollock can finally be seen as a great student of art history who set off on his own only after following the tracks of others.

Past and Passed

When Thomas Hart Benton painted a mural cycle for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair to represent the state of Indiana, he wanted to show the entire history of the state—good and bad. Born April 15, 1889, Benton drew fire for one panel called Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press (above, from 1933) in which he shows the Ku Klux Klan, a powerful, racist presence in Indiana in the 1920s. Amazingly, the murals made it to the World’s Fair, but later languished in various homes until Indiana University took them. The infamous KKK mural, which made brought Benton his first fame, now occupies a college classroom. “History was not a scholarly study for me but a drama,” Benton later said, reflecting his belief in history as a study of people and their stories rather than dry facts and dates. While Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists were painting the history of Mexico, Benton painted America’s past in his dramatic, muscular style, perfectly suited to the brawny persona the nation was beginning to adopt as it assumed a more prominent role in the world between the wars. Sadly, that approach to the past eventually resulted in Benton himself being passed by.

Benton saw history as specifically social history—the tale of people rather than rulers and their armies. In another state mural, for his native state, A Social History of the State of Missouri, Benton painted Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in one panel (above, 1936). In showing Huck with Jim, the escaped slave, Benton took on the issue of race again, bringing it home, as it were, to the deep South, which still employed the Jim Crow laws resulted from the failure of Reconstruction. Along with Grant Wood, Benton most often gets labeled with the Regionalist tag, which I’ve always seen as a diminutive assessment. Benton and Wood are much larger than just the region they come from. Clearly, they paint what they know, but the slice of American life they portray applies in many ways to the entire American odyssey. Benton studied in Paris for years and credited El Greco as an influence, making claims for his innate “American-ness” or “Midwestern” qualities seem thin.

Benton’s moment in the sun was quite brief. By the 1950s, modern art had quite literally passed him by. Despite his deep hatred for modern art, Benton actually contributed to the phenomenon that made him seem a dinosaur in teaching Jackson Pollock, whose Abstract Expressionism replaced Benton’s masculine Americanism with a new brand for the Cold War years. Benton’s later works seem painfully awkward, such as The Twist (above, from 1964), which tries to show the dance craze years after the height of its popularity. Benton’s marrying of his hate for modern art and modern art museums with his homophobia, calling the typical museum "a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait," led to his marginalization in the 1940s and makes him seem even more like a caveman today. At his best, Benton helped paint the history of the American people. At his worst, Benton embodied some of the same narrowing prejudices that he brought to light in his art.

Midwestern Values

As any average American for a short list of great American paintings and you’ll more often than not find on that list American Gothic (above, from 1930) by Grant Wood. Born February 13, 1892, Wood’s double portrait of his sister and dentist dressed as a spinster daughter and her farmer father remains one of those indelible images in American art that has crossed over into popular culture so powerfully that even people who know nothing about art (or even the name of the painting) know this image. I wouldn’t put American Gothic on my personal top five of American art, but Wood’s unique brand of Regionalism certainly makes him an interesting figure. Beneath the surface comedy of the hangdog visages of the farmer and his daughter, you sense some of the uncertainty and desperation of the people of the 1930s struggling during the hard times of the Great Depression.



American Gothic and its photorealism present an inaccurate picture of Wood as an artist. Like his fellow Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton, Wood depicted the world of the American Midwest through the prism of his own artistic vision. In Young Corn (above, from 1931), the rows of young corn form a hatched pattern in the foreground—more abstraction than produce. The bulbous trees that line up into the distance seem more like green clouds fastened to the earth by their trunks. Even the hillside at the top of the painting seems unreal in its roundness, as if it were a living thing inhaling and exhaling. Where American Gothic forces you to look at the faces of Midwestern living, Young Corn excludes all traces of humanity completely, making the landscape itself, or rather Wood’s revision of that landscape, the star.

In Fall Ploughing (above, from 1931), Wood creates a landscape similar to Young Corn, but accentuates the missing human element through an abandoned plough set front and center. Again, as in Young Corn, Wood reduces the landscape to basic forms, showing you the furrows left by the plough but concerning himself more with the interplay of those lines with the horizontal and curving lines all around and the perspective receding into the distance. Both Young Corn and Fall Ploughing look down upon the landscape from an unlikely angle, neither that of a person on the ground nor that of someone looking down. This odd vantage point seems even more unsettling with absence of the people working the farm. Even in the 1930s, such works as Wood’s American Gothic and his landscapes could document the increasing disappearance of the agrarian lifestyle in America—a trend that has accelerated today to the point that the small-time farmer has, as in Wood’s Fall Ploughing, literally vanished.

Etched into History

Edward Hopper, 1882-1967. Night Shadows. 1921/1924. Etching. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. © The Huntington

Even after Edward Hopper achieved some status as a painter, he continued to keep a press for etchings in his studio. Each day he’d enter his studio and toss his fedora hat onto the rarely used machine. In countless photographs and interview footage of Hopper, that machine usually lurks in the background. Hopper never could bring himself to part with that press, like an old trusted friend. When he wanted to give a special gift to someone, he’d crank up the old press and run off a copy of Night Shadows (above), demonstrating the pride he felt in the etchings he once turned to as a way to make money when his paintings weren’t selling. The exhibition Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 at The Huntington and the accompanying catalogue by Jessica Todd Smith and Kevin M. Murphy help explain Hopper’s fondness for the print genre and how the prints of that era reflected the people and history of America for nearly half a century. “We have selected prints that seem to capture the spirit of a certain cultural frisson that took place in art and culture of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century,” Smith writes in the catalogue. The prints selected from the Huntington’s massive collection of American prints demonstrate the same incisive eye and mastery of economy that the artists themselves displayed.

Samuel Margolies, 1898-1974. Man’s Canyons. 1936. Etching and aquatint. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. © The Huntington

At the dawn of the new century, the city rose like a natural wonder, flooding the imagination of artists and inspiring them to create works such as Samuel Margolies’ Man’s Canyons (above). Towering skyscrapers carried to the heavens the hopes and dreams of all society, offering the promise of endless possibility where the sky was, literally, the limit. Advances in publishing technology created a shift in the illustration world, leaving behind the need for literal journalism and moving forward to a world asking for images “deeply imbued with political and social engagement,” as Smith writes. The 1913 Armory Show brought the innovations of European modern art to America, further challenging artists to develop a new vision of their changing American environment. Margolies’ skyscrapers, rising vertically as the rays of light slash diagonally across the picture, owe as much to modern architecture as they do to Cubism.

Martin Lewis, 1881-1962. Glow in the City. 1929. Drypoint. Purchased with funds from Hannah and Russel Kully. © The Huntington

But not all hopes rose with the skyscrapers. Martin Lewis, who taught his friend Hopper etching techniques, captures the dichotomy of the modern city in Glow in the City (above), a romantic rendering of a woman wistfully gazing across the rooftops and washing lines at the tall building far in the distance. Hopper and Lewis both delved into the mood of the city lingering beneath the bustling excitement and the inexplicable sense of loneliness in the midst of teeming crowds. The artists of the Ashcan school, especially the former newspaper illustrators drawn to New York City for money and inspiration—such as John Sloan and George Bellows–also cast their eye upon the darker side of the city.

Charles Turzak 1899-1986. Man with Drill. ca. 1935. Woodcut. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. Printed with the permission of Joan Turzak Van Hees, daughter of Charles Turzak, Charles Turzak Studio/Gallery, Orlando Florida. © The Huntington

Charles Turzak’s Man with Drill (above) explicitly illustrates the dehumanization through labor of the time, when man and machine seemed troublingly one. Such images recall the German Expressionists and their fear of the machine and, by extension, the woodcut graphic novels of Franz Masereel. Where Masereel strung together long series of woodcuts into silent graphic novels of social commentary, single images such as Turzak’s ring just as powerfully as statements of social unrest. The visible vibrations rippling from the figure with the drill send shockwaves that threaten to topple the buildings in the background. In the face of the Great Depression and two world wars, such images strove to topple the powerful and help regain a sense of balance for the masses.

Childe Hassam, 1859-1935. The White Kimono. 1915. Etching. Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. © The Huntington

In response to the ills of the dehumanizing city, many artists turned to small town America and more intimate scenes for an antidote. Regionalists such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton depicted farms and farming in a return to simpler, more natural living. Illustrators followed the Dust Bowl migration to California as those displaced victims searched for an American Eden. The American Impressionist Childe Hassam, in contrast, sought solace in personalized parlor scenes such as The White Kimono (above), a quietly beautiful testimony to the excellence of the American print at the same time it documented and probed the American psyche.

Smith and Murphy provide an excellent, if brief overview of the American print from the turn of the twentieth century up until the dawn of the day of television. They list all the major donations, including forthcoming gifts of works by John Sloan from Gary, Brenda, and Harrison Ruttenberg and the American print collection of Hannah S. Kully, that have made the Huntington’s collection so comprehensive today. The actor and comedian Steve Martin provided funds to make the exhibition possible. Martin collects American art and provided the narration to the video that accompanied the Hopper exhibition at the National Gallery of Art last year. (My review of that video here.) Martin’s involvement in this project exemplifies the mainstream appeal such an exhibit should have for the public at large. These prints hold up a mirror to America over the course of five decades in a way that even great photography can only approximate. Here is the American dream seen through the prism of the American artist’s imagination and rendered in clear black and white. When you look at images such as Pele deLappe’s Rumors of War, Washington, D.C., showing the anxious faces of people listening to a radio and anticipating war in 1939, you see the same anxiety on the faces of Americans today coming to terms with new rumors of war. Pressed in Time provides not just a lesson in history or art but a lesson in the history of the American soul.


[Many thanks to The Huntington for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 and for the images from the exhibition.]

Composing Chaos

With the possible exception of Frida, Salma Hayek’s film of Frida Kahlo’s life and art, Ed Harris’ Pollock, his interpretation of the life and art of Jackson Pollock, may be the finest biopic of a painter ever done. Born January 28, 1912, Pollock lived the myth of the tortured artist, always playing up to the expectations the public had of the crazy artist dubbed by the press as “Jack the Dripper” for his unique abstract expressionist paintings created by dripping and splashing paint. Behind the wild life story and the caricature of the madman blindly flinging paint onto canvas, there is a core of composure beneath the chaos. In works such as Blue Poles Number 11, 1952 (above, from 1952), Pollock grounded the patterns of dripped color with the rhythmic series of horizontal blue lines (the “poles” of the title) using, as Kirk Varnedoe showed in his book on Pollock, a compositional pattern Pollock learned from the regionalist Thomas Hart Benton. In many ways, Pollock’s life careened out of control, thanks mainly to substance abuse and his unstable emotional life, but his art never was a creation of pure chance.

Like the poles that stabilize Blue Poles, Pollock’s marriage to fellow abstract expressionist Lee Krasner helped stabilize his life and allow him to enjoy some success. Works such as Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (above, from 1950) show the beautiful effects that Pollock’s technique could achieve. Advances in liquid paint made that technique possible, and Pollock’s time assisting David Alfaro Siqueiros helped open his eyes to that potential. Pollock’s drip paintings made such a paradigmatic leap in modern art that nobody really could follow in the same style. Anything else would be condemned as pure imitation. For a style so deceptively easy to the untrained eye, no school of Pollock formed around him. Such isolation only makes his art and his life more fascinating.

The performance aspect of Pollock’s painting continues to intrigue students of his art. Fortunately, Hans Namuth filmed Pollock at work, including innovative shots such as the one above in which Pollock painted on a sheet of glass as Namuth filmed from below, giving a sense of being within the painting as Pollock worked upon it. Unfortunately, such close scrutiny made the already self-conscious artist even more jittery and upset the delicate balance of his life. During his life, Pollock continually felt torn asunder by demands upon his work. The critic Clement Greenberg championed Pollock as the greatest painter of the age, the heir to the long legacy of Western art. Greenberg’s rival critic Harold Rosenberg, meanwhile, proposed Willem de Kooning as the top artist, attempting to generate a rivalry in the press between the artists that didn’t exist in real life between the two friends. Pollock even became the plaything of the United States government during the Cold War as they held his work up as an example of the freedom of American democracy in contrast to the repression of Russian Communism. All of these strains proved too much for Pollock, who lived too fast and died too young while drunk driving. Like James Dean, another icon of the period, it would be difficult to imagine Jackson Pollock living into old age, but it would have been nice to have had the chance.