An Exhibition About an Art Critic?

Nobody goes to a baseball game to watch the umpires, so why would someone go to a museum to see an exhibition dedicated to an art critic—one of those arbiters of taste who hopes to mediate but sometimes only muddles the interaction between artists and the public? England’s Tate Britain bets that the British public will come to watch the umpire in their new exhibition Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation. Not just your average umpire, Sir Kenneth Clark (shown above) ruled over art criticism for decades, stretching from his becoming Director of the British National Gallery in 1933 at just 30 years of age all the way to his crowning achievement with the 13-part documentary Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark in 1969. Although the main focus of the show is on Clark’s work in the 1930s and 1940s, by having the show’s title hark back to his highly personal broadcast of what was civilization and art, it raises the larger question of how this public servant served the public for well-intentioned good and possibly ill, as any critic can. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "An Exhibition About an Art Critic?"

What Did Robert Hughes Really Teach Us?

Upon hearing of the passing last week of journalist and art critic Robert Hughes (shown above), I felt like had lost a beloved teacher. For people who read Hughes’ books or articles or, more likely, saw him on television, he was the fun, brash, borderline bawdy professor whose name and face you never forget. Hughes brought modern art into your living room and made it understandable and surprisingly fun, which makes him a significant cultural figure beyond his contributions to art itself. In the end, it’s important to ask, what did Robert Hughes really teach us? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "What Did Robert Hughes Really Teach Us?"

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.]

Classical Chill

Seeing himself as a “conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator,” Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, born on this date in 1780, painted in a Neoclassical style amidst the heat and fury of the French Revolution raging about him. While contemporaries such as Jacques-Louis David painted propaganda to enflame the masses, Ingres painted royalist portraits such as his 1806 Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (above) to cool things off. David, of course, hated this portrait of Napoleon, which undid all of the revolutionary rhetoric his paintings built up around the leader. Ingres’ portrait showed Napoleon in perhaps truer colors, as a man comfortable with the trappings of power—exactly the type of leader the revolution just deposed. Perhaps Ingres’ portrait was the more honest of the two.

I’ll never forget seeing Ingres’ portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin (above) at the Louvre in person. The almost photographic smoothness of the canvas and the way Ingres built up the planes of each person’s face are unforgettable. You can’t walk away from an Ingres without acknowledging his technical ability. At the same time, you also feel a slight chill when you look into the eyes of his subjects or follow the contours of their faces closely. Ingres’ people lack the warmth of other portraits that I admire. It’s more than a rejection of Romanticism. It’s a lack of empathy. I believe that his portrait of Mme. Moitessier from 1856 may be one of the most dazzling performances of 19th century portraiture in terms of reproducing textures and surfaces (and the work with the mirror image in the back is just showing off). But even good Mme. Moitessier doesn’t seem like she’d be good company at dinner.

Ingres’ chilliness extends even to his masterful nudes, adding a la belle dame sans merci quality to their eyes and gestures. In La Grande Odalisque (above), from 1814, Ingres makes himself a liar and indulges in some innovation, extending the magnificent back of his subject by a few vertebrae to create the beautiful lines of his composition. He does it so masterfully that at first glimpse you don’t even notice. Ingres allowed himself such liberties too infrequently. As Sir Kenneth Clark pointed out in his The Nude, Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque and its free approach to the nude remains one of the touchstone nude images of Western art, inspiring later artists from Edgar Degas to Pablo Picasso to take similar liberties in their own artistic explorations of the female form.

I find much of Ingres to be infuriating for this combination of genius with conservatism. As much as La Grande Odalisque is a step forward, works such as 1862’s The Turkish Bath (above) take two steps back. Again, the technique is beautiful, but the bath seems to have gone cold. Ingres drains away the exoticism and eroticism that Eugene Delacroix brought to similar scenes of Orientalism, such as his Death of Sardanapalus. Ingres paints like Pygmallion sculpting in reverse, turning warm flesh into cold marble. Sometimes I wonder if Ingres’ coldness increased as a reaction to the fires of revolution and Romanticism around him, his fear forcing him to paint even more beautiful yet more lifeless figures as the world around him seemed to spiral out of control.

Fallen Nature

Steeped in the images of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland developed a spiritual vision of nature around him, taking those natural forms and twisting and torqueing them with the pulsating life he saw within. Sutherland, born on August 24, 1903, soon distorted those natural scenes so much that he was tagged as the English Surrealist, and even exhibited with Surrealist groups. When the world itself turned surreal in the dark days of World War II, Sutherland’s friend, the art critic Sir Kenneth Clark, found work for him as a war artist for Britain. The City: A Fallen Lift Shaft (above) shows London during “the Blitz,” a nightmare wasteland of shattered walls and twisted metal. Sutherland’s imaginative world had merged with his real one, but with a sad, sad difference.

In 1946, Sutherland received a commission to paint a crucifixion scene for for St. Matthew's Church in Northampton, England. The result (above) created a new paradigm for religious art in England. Sutherland captured the pathos and disjointed psyche of the postwar world in his Crucifixion as aptly as Matthias Grunewald had expressed the agony of his age in his Isenheim Altarpiece. Sutherland’s Crucifixion was later moved to the Tate Museum, where it stood next to the work of Francis Bacon, whose own triptychs expressed the same angst as Sutherland’s work. Bacon clearly felt the influence of Sutherland, and Sutherland befriended and championed Bacon very early on in the younger artist’s career.

Sadly, not everyone was ready for Sutherland’s type of painting. To celebrate the 80th birthday of Winston Churchill, the British government commissioned Sutherland to paint his portrait (above). Churchill hated it. Churchill’s wife hated it even more and actually destroyed it. This portrait of Churchill clearly shows the cross-influence of Bacon’s portraits, injecting a sense of menace and anxiety into what the British government and the Churchills were hoping would be a laudatory portrayal. Instead, Sutherland seems to merge Churchill’s image with his Crucifixion, affixing the stain of the war onto the visage of the wartime leader, irreversibly bonding the two, just as the two had become irreversibly bonded in the popular imagination. Whereas the authorities wanted a glorified vision of the war years, Sutherland’s honesty and clear-eyed view of war’s destruction could only show those years for the horror that they were.

Burial of Romanticism

“In our so very civilized society it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage,” wrote Gustave Courbet, the father of French Realism born on June 10, 1819. “I must be free even of governments. The people have my sympathies, I must address myself to them directly.” Courbet was nothing if not direct in his address to his audience or in his choice of subject matter. Courbet’s dedication to realism, to portraying his time exactly as it was, free of all mythology and Romanticism, inspired the Impressionists to seek out the everyday in their subject matter and helped liberate all Realist painters ever since.

Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans (above) captures the scene of Courbet’s uncle’s funeral, with realistic portraits of the actual attendees of the funeral. With this simple scene of simple people, Courbet set off a firestorm in the art world. Courbet saw his Burial as “the burial of Romanticism,” which is, of course, an exaggeration, but speaks a truth about how this work tamed the excesses of Romanticism and replaced it with a new respect for the quotidian lives of regular people as an acceptable subject for painting. No longer would the gods and goddesses of mythology and the kings and queens of Europe dominate canvasses.

Art was serious business for Courbet. “I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice,” Courbet wrote. “I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art’s sake.” Behind Courbet’s Realism lies a Socialist political agenda in tune with the struggle of the everyman and everywoman for freedom and dignity.

The most striking aspect of Courbet’s realism is his painting of the female nude. Sir Kenneth Clark in his still-valuable study, The Nude, points to Courbet’s Le Source (above) as one of the landmark nudes in the development of the genre. No longer was it necessary to “cover over” the nude body with mythological tags of Venus or Aphrodite. Courbet easily lays claim to the most audacious nude ever, The Origin of the World, a nude so audacious that I can’t show it here and still claim to run a “famly-friendly blog.”

Anyone interested in seeing Courbet’s work should visit the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, which owns all of the works I’ve discussed here, including The Painter’s Studio (above). In The Painter’s Studio, Courbet takes stock of his work and takes pride in his devotion to his vision. Although he sits at the easel and paints a landscape, he is surrounded by the simple, honest people who populated his paintings, as well as by a partially covered nude woman, who looks over his shoulder and seems to nod approvingly. Courbet still has our sympathies, even today, and has much to teach us not only about looking at art, but also about looking at life.

Wither Sister Wendy

While some friends were asking about my blog at lunch last week, they came up with a great question. So, here I’ll create a virtual milk carton and slap a familiar face on it to ask the question: Whatever happened to Sister Wendy? (The face that launched a thousand PBS fund drives is above.)

Sister Wendy Beckett, according to Wikipedia, is still alive at 77, living a life of prayer and contemplation in a Carmelite nunnery in Quidenham, Norfolk, England. She recently came out of contemplation long enough to give her, uh, blessing to a musical about her life, Postcards From God: The Sister Wendy Musical, which ran in London early in 2007. The tag line to the musical, “Nun Critic Superstar,” says it all.

The good Sister, who can brag of a degree in English Literature from Oxford University, began as a serious art critic, publishing articles in academic art journals before launching her illustrious television career. The books and videos spun off from those series will guarantee her fame long after she’s, shall we say, kicked the habit.

As an Irish Catholic with still-fresh memories of the nuns from my grade school days, I always found it disconcerting to see Sister Wendy floating before old master nudes, her hands flitting about in the air to shape the curves of the flesh in front of her as she described the sensuous features in her lilting British accent. Nathan Lane’s spot-on impression of her on Saturday Night Live captured this otherworldly, yet oddly eroticized aspect of Sister Wendy, who had actually taken the step of becoming a consecrated virgin.

Sister Wendy’s ability to bring great art to a popular audience, however, something not achieved on an equal scale since Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series in 1969, guarantees her a place in the minds and hearts of art lovers everywhere forever.