Can You Imagine a George Lucas Museum?

“I’m a storyteller at heart,” Star Wars mastermind George Lucas says at the beginning of his proposal for a new museum to be built on the grounds of San Francisco’s Presidio, “and I understand the power of a visual image to tell a story.” The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, the proposed name for the museum, “will be a center highlighting populist art from some of the great illustrators of the last 150 years through today’s digital art used to create animated and live-action movies, visual effects, props and sketches.” Many museums offer exhibitions or departments dedicated to this brand of “populist art,” but Lucas’ museum, relying heavily on its founder’s personal collection (and $300 million USD of his money), will explore that art and its influence on an unprecedented scale. A veritable “Death Star” of  public-friendly art, The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum boggles the imagination with possibility. Can you imagine a George Lucas museum? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can You Imagine a George Lucas Museum?"

[Image: Queen Amidala Gown. Costume Designer: Trisha Biggar. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. TM & © 1999 Lucasfilm Ltd. Image source here.]

Happy Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone out there. Make sure to get your sweetie in a firm embrace and engage in a full-throttle liplock ala Rodin’s The Kiss (above, from 1886), which I think should be subtitled “Get a room.” A very special Valentine’s Day to my one and only love, Annie, and to our beloved Alex, happy dispenser of wet kisses.



Valentine’s Day always mystifies me in regards to how a martyred saint turned into the original gangster of love. It’s only a little less befuddling than the combination of the Easter Bunny and the Resurrection around Easter. Maxfield Parrish’s painting of Saint Valentine (above, from 1904) shows the saint as dreamy romantic, perhaps wondering whether to send flowers, candy, or both.

The Student Becomes the Teacher

In works such as The Ironworker’s Noontime (above), Thomas Pollock Anshutz exemplifies the realist side of the Ashcan School that recognized the urban existence of the early twentieth century as the new grand subject for American art. Born October 5, 1851, Anshutz attended the PAFA as a student from 1875 through 1881 under the tutelage of Thomas Eakins. After graduating, Anshutz became Eakins’ designated assistant and chief photographer, remaining with the PAFA in some capacity for the most part until his death in 1912. Students such as Maxfield Parrish and Charles Demuth recall Anshutz as a gifted and giving teacher, supportive even when they took their art in directions other than his own brand of realism. Not until 1985 did scholars discover the dark side of Anshutz and his involvement in the conspiracy to oust Eakins, his friend and mentor, from teaching at the PAFA, the scandal that began Eakins’ sad marginalization from the American art world.

Anshutz learned well from Eakins. In works such as A Rose (above, from 1906), Anshutz shows not only the technique of Eakins but also some of the gift for bold color of John Singer Sargent. Rebecca Whelen, the woman in A Rose, was the daughter of one of the trustees of the PAFA while Anshutz taught there. Anshutz’s artistic output is relatively small, due in part to his commitment to teaching. In such works as A Rose, his photographic realism reflects his interest in photography, which Eakins encouraged and developed in making Anshutz his chief photographer in his many photographic experiements of nude bodies in motion. Maxfield Parrish’s use of photographs in his works resulted from Anshutz’s teachings.

As a devotee of Eakins, I cringe at the sight of Anshutz’s Self Portrait of 1909 (above), showing the painter as respectable teacher and painter, comfortable in his position in society, a position he helped deny to Eakins. Sidney Kirkpatrick in The Revenge of Thomas Eakins sees Anshutz as “the prime mover of this conspiracy” to remove Eakins from his teaching position at the PAFA after the episode involving a nude model. Anshutz himself took many of the nude photos that incriminated Eakins before the trustees of the PAFA and the court of public opinion, yet he led the secret movement within the PAFA to take Eakins' teaching position away. With Eakins gone, Anshutz easily slid into his open slot. Anshutz went on to teach many years and earn a minor place in American art history. Eakins taught sporadically after his expulsion before ending his teaching days completely after another sexually charged scandal involving his niece. Today, Eakins has his revenge in his towering reputation in relation to that of Anshutz, but that seems cold comfort today.

Mirror of Illusions

Considered by some the greatest living American artist of the first two decades of the 20th century, Arthur B. Davies fell into relative obscurity shortly after his death in 1928. Born September 26, 1862, Davies helped introduce European modern art into America through his involvement with the 1913 Armory Show, perhaps setting off the chain of events that led to his fallen reputation. In works such as Maya, Mirror of Illusions (above), from 1910, Davies created Symbolist netherworlds in his paintings, peopling them with nymph-like nudes in indistinct, yet evocative landscapes. Davies own personal life was spent in an illusory netherworld of his own making, too.

After moving to New York City in 1896, Davies began work as a magazine illustrator, developing the style that would lead to paintings such as The Hesitation of Orestes (above), from 1915-1918. Like his contemporary painter/illustrator Maxfield Parrish, Davies combined great draftsmanship with a flair for fantasy imagery that took fragments of past mythologies, such as the story of Orestes, and wove whole narratives around them. This narrative power and murky mysticism lead some to compare Davies’ work with that of Albert Pinkham Ryder, another contemporary working in the Symbolist vein. After some early successes, a benefactor paid for Davies to travel to Europe to study, where he encountered the latest trends in modern art.

Davies soaked up many of the influences he found in Europe. Dancers (above) shows the influence of Cubism as well as the bright palette of the Fauves {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauvism } . Davies soon aligned with like-minded Americans such as Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Henri and The Eight to bring modern art to America. The 1913 Armory Show that introduced Duchamp, Picasso, and other visionaries to America would not have happened without the efforts of Arthur B. Davies. After Davies’s death, the first president of the MoMA credited Davies with the idea of a modern art museum in America. While championing modern art in America, Davies led a kind of surreal personal life, first marrying a woman who had murdered her first husband and then living a double life between his wife and two children and his mistress and their child. The life and work of Arthur B. Davies, however, continue to defy the odds by remaining in obscurity.

Rhapsody in Blue

Born on this date in 1870, Maxfield Parrish epitomized the wave of great American illustration around the beginning of the 20th century. When Parrish asked Howard Pyle, teacher of N.C. Wyeth and many other great illustrators of that generation, to take him on as a student, Pyle told Parrish, after looking at his work, that he had nothing to teach him. After suffering tuberculosis and a nervous breakdown in 1900, Parrish’s medium of choice shifted from illustration to oil painting, but he never lost that touch for imaginative narrative in his works. Daybreak (above) stands as Parrish’s most reproduced image. Few houses in the 1920s didn’t have something done by Parrish somewhere, either a reproduction hanging on the wall or an illustration on a magazine cover. Few artists could create such imaginary worlds as Parrish.

While working in the Curtis Building in Philadelphia for many years, I had the daily pleasure of walking past Parrish’s beautiful glass mosaic, The Dream Garden, which he co-created with Louis Comfort Tiffany and his team. My wife Annie and I had our wedding photos taken in front of that mosaic, which added a magical touch to our already magical day. The sense of wonder and unreal beauty in Parrish’s works is breathtaking. Parrish’s paintings are some of the few that actually look good in reproduction, thanks mainly to his own knowledge of the printing process and his cooperation with the pressmen of Curtis Publishing to get the colors right. The transcendent blue of such works as Ecstasy (above) soon became known as “Parrish blue,” since it was so identifiable with the artist himself.

Although Parrish did attend classes at the PAFA, which helped sharpen his eye, nobody could have taught him to create landscapes such as that in Moonlight (above). Parrish’s fashioning of the mountains in all their textured cragginess captures the moonlight so romantically. Many critics consider Parrish’s work too light or overly romantic to be considered “serious” art, an aftereffect, perhaps, of his wide popularity during his heyday. Personally, I think there’s more than room enough in the canon of art to fit in Parrish and his poetic, magical skies of blue.

Whose Art Is it Anyway?

There was an interesting article in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer surveying the recent issue of sales of public art. The near sale of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic to the Walmart heiress roused the Philadelphia community's sense of cultural heritage, only to suffer the gut punch of the very quiet sale of Eakins' The Cello Player by the PAFA. What had become a rescue mission sadly turned into a hostage swap.

I was one of the many who made the pilgrimage to Jefferson University Hospital to see The Gross Clinic when the outcome was still in question. I'd seen it many times before, but it was like seeing an old friend on his deathbed (complete with the institutional hospital decor). I'm glad that the PAFA and the PMA will be ping-ponging The Gross Clinic back and forth for the time being, but the secret joy of being able to see it in its natural habitat (sometimes behind bars, like a zoo, when the guards wouldn't open the gallery up) can never be replaced.

I realize that art and cultural funding is a low priority in the United States right now, akin to worrying about the aluminum siding on a burning house, so federal funding is a longshot. I just wish that there was some remaining sense of noblisse oblige in today's moneyed elite that would allow them to save our cultural heritage rather than pillage it.


This entire episode reminds me of the soap opera that was Steve "I poked a hole in my Picasso" Wynn's attempt to buy Maxfield Parrish's The Dream Garden out of the Curtis Center in Center City Philadelphia (probably to install in a men's room of the Bellagio). Fortunately, the lords of Philadelphia city politics intervened and saved it from Vegas (and the less-advertised possibility of severe damage in transit). The Dream Garden holds a special place in my heart after having worked in the Curtis Center for many, many years. It was a welcome sight on dreary Monday mornings. My wife and I actually had our formal wedding photos taken in front of the mosaic, so it's an irreplaceable part of my family's history, something to show to the kids years from now (and, hopefully, for them to show to their kids someday).

I'm sure that The Dream Garden and other special pieces of Philadelphia art and history have inspired countless similar stories linking them to this place so powerfully than no amount of money could (or should) pull them away.