Battle of the Pictures

“There are no documents of civilization that are not equally documents of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin once said. In The Abu Ghraib Effect, Steven F. Eisenman not only quotes Benjamin’s appraisal of how “civilized” Western civilization truly is, but also demonstrates how visual cultural artifacts beginning with the ancient Greeks reflect a tolerance for torture that stretches through history all the way up to the photographs of the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib. How could George W. Bush have won reelection after such revelations?, Eisenman asks. “Given this history, it is reasonable to assume that a majority of U.S. citizens are not much bothered by the fact of U.S. torture,” he concludes. Analyzing this embedded indifference, Eisenman discovers several figures in art history swimming against the prevailing currents. In his The Battle of the Pictures (above, from 1744-1745), William Hogarth pits older paintings of martyrs, saints, and other suffering souls against his contemporary eighteenth-century images of healthy middle-class life. Hogarth saw most religious, political, and even cultural imagery, especially "benign" renderings of cruelty to animals, as desensitizing individuals to larger acts of violence. (Lynndie England, infamous “star” of many of the Abu Ghraib photos, before joining the service, worked in a chicken-processing plant singled out by PETA for its excessive cruelty.) Eisenman pits the works of Hogarth and others against the larger corpus of torture-tolerant art to get at the real answer why Abu Ghraib happened and why it has not become an agent for change.

Eisenman makes it clear that he doesn’t consider the Abu Ghraib photos to be art. However, “the materials and tools of art history are essential,” he contents, “to understand them and counter their effect.” Eisenman sees the “Abu Ghraib effect” as a modern manifestation of the ancient “pathos formula” that depicts “the body as something willingly alienated by the victim (even to the point of death) for the sake of the pleasure and aggrandizement of the oppressor.” The Greeks believed women, children, slaves, and non-Greeks to be incapable of telling the truth without some physical coercion. At the same time, they felt that the tortured individual even welcomed the abuse, with all the obvious sadomasochistic sexual overtones. Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave (above, from 1513-1516) copied the classical idea of the oppressed figure accepting and perhaps even enjoying pain and death at the hands of a master. The Dying Slave, Eisenman writes, “manifests the pathos formula in the highest degree, eliding in a single marble body imperial conquest, physical constraint, ravishment and death.” From Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave to Bernini’s The Ecstacy of St. Theresa is a short cognitive leap, as the imperialism of the state merged with Christianity to create a whole new rationale for torture. “Now the victim is shown welcoming his torment because it is in emulation of Christ’s own suffering,” Eisenman shows. “Pain is a testament of the sufferer’s devotion to God. The torturer becomes a divine instrument in the miracle of salvation.” Truth in the service of the state gives way to truth in the pursuit of salvation, yet always in support of those in power at the expense of the weak.

By the eighteenth century, however, artists such as Hogarth begin to question the dynamic of a visual culture supporting such torture. In addition to The Battle of the Pictures, Hogarth’s series The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) demonstrates the continuous cycle of violence that begets more violence, often beginning in animal cruelty then leading to cruelty to human beings. Later, Goya’s Disasters of War, The Third of May, 1808, and images of the Spanish Inquisition revealed the madness of torture with clear-eyed, cold precision. During the French Revolution, Jaques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat serves as a “transformation of the Hellenistic pathos formula from a sign of subservience to autocratic power to a token of emancipation.” By the time Daumier, Courbet, and Manet rise to prominence, “the art and rhetoric of the classical past could not be seen without irony or even open mockery.” Manet’s The Mocking of Christ (1865) clearly shows how torture “degrade[s] both torturer and victim and hold[s] no promise of revelation.” But, just as the long history of visual buttressing of the establishment seems to be nearing the end as the twentieth century approached, the tables turned again.


The imperialism on the rise in the late nineteenth century bloomed into the sick rose of authoritarianism in the twentieth century, marked by what Eisenman sees as “the complete subordination of the body to doctrine, and the willing surrender of the autonomous, critical subject to the dictates of state authority and power.” Picasso’s Guernica stands as a lonely, futile blow against the wall of fascism built in Europe and the “patriotic” authoritarianism fostered in America. Modern mass culture soon exclusively serves its establishment masters, “project[ing] and monumentaliz[ing] the willing subordination of the weak to the strong, and sanction[ing] the enactment of torture for the expression of power and domination. The December 26, 2005 issue of The Nation examining America’s torture “problem” featured a cover copying Ben Shahn’s This Is Nazi Brutality (above, from 1943), directly linking America’s crime with that of the Third Reich. In a country in which the television show 24 is discussed more like fact than fiction and in which radio personality Rush Limbaugh can dismiss the Abu Ghraib atrocities as fraternity pranks or soft-core pornography, the realization that those acts were not about truth or security but rather about control and superiority forces us to consider, if not accept, such comparisons.


Eisenman ties together many ideas across centuries in a very small book, yet does so with troubling success. Looking at the Abu Ghraib photographs again disturbed me, as it will anyone reading the book. Seeing them in the context of fine art, however, disturbed me on a different level. History, of course, is written by the winners, so its art will be commissioned by the winners as well. As problematic as the concept of a monolithic “Western art” can be (and Eisenman acknowledges this problem in an afterword), the fact that we operate under the concept of a Western civilization is undeniable. Eisenman concentrates on the Abu Ghraib photographs, but they serve as just one piece of the larger mosaic of the Bush Administration’s actions over the last seven years. Comparisons between the current administration and Hitler’s regime always rankle, as they should, but that doesn’t make them any less apt. Leon Golub painted Interrogation II (above, from 1981) during the Reagan years, when torture in the name of anti-Communism earned you the label of “Freedom Fighter.” In Golub’s painting, Eisenman writes, we see “the emotional insensibility of the torturers, and the complete physical vulnerability of the victim.” It is this “emotional insensibility” that bothers me the most. If fascism and authoritarianism drenched the twentieth century in blood, will even more extreme versions flood the twenty-first? Only emotional sensibility—the Goya-esque courage or Hogarthian honesty of the past—can save our future. As another election looms over America, chock full of many of the same choices faced in 2004, The Abu Ghraib Effect provides a valuable perspective on selecting leaders with your eyes wide open, rather than based on who cries or who doesn't. Even in the most depressing sections of Eisenman’s recounting of the crimes of the past, he seeks out the rays of hope such as Picasso that existed in the past, making us believe that such individuals will exist once again. The blinders of Western civilization’s past will only continue to benefit the oppressors of the present if we continue to accept wearing them.

[Many thanks to the University of Chicago Press for providing me with a review copy of this book.]

In a Silent Way

Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

“Since the time of my youth, I have protested against the society in which I am living,” Franz Masereel once said. In Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, George A. Walker gathers together four of the greatest wordless woodcut novels of the twentieth century. “Only now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is Masereel being rediscovered as one of the most important graphic artists of the 20th century and the grandfather of the modern graphic novel,” Walker writes in his introduction. In addition to Masereel, Walker introduces a new generation to the art of Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri, and Laurence Hyde. In addition to their obvious artistry in the field of woodcuts, the thread that holds these four artists together is their thirst for social justice. “The politics and social issues they address are specific to their times,” Walker says, “but the broader issues are, sadly, still relevant to our contemporary eyes.” Regardless of place or time, these artists speak in a silent way through pure imagery against the oppression of the weak by the strong, and offer some hope for a brighter future.

Walker begins with Masereel’s The Passion of a Man (1918), which set the standard for later graphic novels. A friend of George Grosz, Masereel works in a highly Expressionist style, favoring dramatic angles and lighting effects to heighten the drama and emotional impact of his images, similar to the best woodcut art of Die Brucke artists such as Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Masereel follows his nameless hero from his birth in poverty to a young adulthood marked by hard labor and life in a fearsome city full of the temptations of alcohol and prostitution. Suddenly, he begins to read and a literal light from above illuminates his existence. After leading a strike against the cruel bosses, he is imprisoned and executed. The nameless hero radiates with an inner light before the firing squad much like Goya’s central figure of The Third of May, 1808. Such glorification of martyrdom in the name of resistance to authority earned Masereel the condemnation of the Nazis years later. By placing those condemning the hero to death beneath a cross, Masereel most likely didn’t endear himself to the churches, either.

Lynd Ward’s Wild Pilgrimage gives an American perspective on the deprivations of the early twentieth century. Ward studied in Germany and discovered Masereel’s work there. But, where Masereel’s technique demonstrates Expressionism, Ward creates images with finer detail that pulsates with the textures he generates. Ward introduced America to the wordless novel in 1929 with God’s Man, which sold 20,000 copies. Ward published Wild Pilgrimage in 1932, when the wounds of the 1929 Stock Crash were fresh and the Great Depression dominated the American consciousness. Wild Pilgrimage relates the odyssey of a young man who escapes the city and seeks a better life in the country. “In the American experience there is probably no more basic or recurrent impulse than to leave society,” Ward wrote of Wild Pilgrimage. “It is a madness—or a sanity—that can take hold of any citizen when the daily grind becomes suddenly more abrasive than anyone should be asked to endure.” Interspersing dream sequences with real events, Ward powerfully justifies Walker’s claim for a relationship between these early graphic novels and the early storyboard techniques for filmmaking. After witnessing a lynching in the countryside, Ward’s pilgrim encounters a farmer who educates him on standing up to the powers that be. The pilgrim returns to the city and joins a battle between union agitators and the police sent to disrupt them. In a final dream sequence, the pilgrim tears the head off of a whip-wielding boss. Looking into the disembodied head’s eyes, the pilgrim recognizes his own face, symbolizing the self-destructiveness of violent means even towards the proper ends. Such statements and his Socialist beliefs eventually gained Ward a place on the F.B.I.’s list of persons of interest.

From White Collar by Giacomo Patri, Copyright Estate of Tamara Rey Patri, courtesy of Georges Rey, excerpted from Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

Another Depression era graphic novel, Giacomo Patri’s 1938 White Collar expresses that Socialist trend even more strongly, emphasizing the senseless of the division between white and blue collar workers. “White Collar was to be my contribution to, what I believed then, an indispensible understanding of the necessity of unity among all American workers and voters,” Patri later said. Surrealist images such as the huge, starch-stiffened white collar imprisoning the individual (above) convey Patri’s message more powerfully and concisely than any words possibly could. Patri’s semi-autobiographical story follows the path of a respectable, office-working family man who loses everything in the aftermath of the Stock Crash. A portrait of Christ as the Man of Sorrows looks down upon the worker and his family as their sorrows mount, until suddenly it disappears—either sold with other possessions to pay the bills or removed in a rejection of religion. Such ambiguities and gaps that beg the reader to fill in the details comprise just one of the great pleasures of these graphic novels, which paradoxically carry a greater narrative power for not using words.

Patri’s white collar worker later happens upon a union rally and slowly begins to understand the unity of all workers, eventually becoming an agitator for fairness himself. Rockwell Kent’s introduction to the 1940 edition of White Collar praised its uplifting message: “Into the darkness of depression it throws light; the tragic dissonances it resolves; and to the dead hope it brings resurrection.” The McCarthy hearings and “Red Menace” days of the 1950s forced Patri’s pro-labor California school to close, demonstrating the powerful threat that his ideas of unity posed to the establishment.

Laurence Hyde’s 1951 Southern Cross completes the quartet. Through his strong draftsmanship full of moving lines and rhythmic textures, Hyde denounces in Southern Cross the testing by the United States Government of the hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll. Hyde juxtaposes the simple, harmonious life of the natives with the discordant “civilized” world of the sailors who come to take them off their homeland before the test begins. The two worlds collide violently in an exchange between a brutish seaman and a native defending his wife from sexual assault. Hyde’s sly humor comes across in the scenes in which the sailors explain the bomb to the natives. Festooning the bomb with an olive branch-bearing dove and angels and placing a rainbow over the post-detonation mushroom cloud, Hyde presents the same false, fantasy rationale that the American government gave to their own citizens to justify the arms race.

From Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

Himself a woodcut artist, Walker clearly and illuminatingly explains many of the intricacies of the art. Several illustrations in his introduction (such as the one above) present an image from a woodcut, enlarge a single detail, and then show the tool used to achieve certain effects. Walker’s insider knowledge of the craft as well as his clear affinity for the spirit of these works makes him the perfect presenter of their art. My only complaint with Graphic Witness is that I wish they had included all of the introductions and other essays that accompanied the original works. Walker alludes to and frequently quotes from these pieces, but those bits only create a hunger for more. Knowing that Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse wrote introductions to Masereel’s The Passion of a Man makes me want to track down those original responses to the images. Rockwell Kent’s words on both White Collar and Southern Cross would provide not only a perceptive viewpoint on those works but also reinforce the influence of Kent’s work on the genre. Drawn and Quarterly in 2007 printed a facsimile edition of Southern Cross that included both Kent’s words and Hyde’s own that truly enhanced the experience. (My review of that facsimile is here.) As powerful as these silent works are, even that silence can be taken too far.

From White Collar by Giacomo Patri, Copyright Estate of Tamara Rey Patri, courtesy of Georges Rey, excerpted from Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

“The artist is a witness of his time, but he can also be an accuser, a critic,” Masereel once wrote, “or he can celebrate in his works the uneasy greatness of his day.” Like the final scene of Patri’s White Collar (above), in which white collar and blue collar families march side by side in solidarity, these four wordless graphic novels stand together and transcend nationality and local politics to achieve a universality of the basic struggle of the haves versus the have nots. Each witnesses the ills of their time as well as the “greatness,” i.e., the indomitable spirit of the people. In an afterword, the modern graphic novelist Seth dismisses any true link between today’s graphic novels and these works. “Ultimately it’s a mistake to see these sublimely crafted wordless novels as mere precursors to today’s picture-novels,” Seth argues. “They stand on their own as fully realized artworks and don’t need to be drafted into someone else’s history.” Fortunately, the ideas these novels embody belong so inextricably to human history that no drafting is necessary.


[Many thanks to Firefly Books for providing me with a review copy of this book as well as the images above.]

Your Own Personal Jesus

Ewer with Jesus Healing the Blind Man and the Traditio Clavium, Rome, late 4th century; silver. The Trustees of the British Museum, London

My favorite scene in all of the Indiana Jones films comes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. As his father lays dying, Indy enters a room guarded by an ancient knight, who tells them that the true Holy Grail is one of the many vessels surrounding them. Elsa, the Nazi archaeologist, selects a beautiful golden chalice. “This certainly is the cup of the ‘King of Kings,’" the evil businessman says before taking a fatal drink. “He chose... poorly,” the knight says. “That's the cup of a carpenter,” Indy says, choosing a rough wooden cup. The Kimbell Art Museum’s current exhibition also chooses wisely in their presentation of Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art. In this exhibition and accompanying catalogue, we discover just how that humble carpenter evolved into the golden King of Kings. The silver ewer above encapsulates this dual nature, showing on one side Jesus healing the blind man (displaying the miracle worker and friend of the poor) and on the other one side Jesus handing the keys of power over to Peter (positioning Jesus as lawgiver and ruler passing on his authority to the Church and the governments it befriends). Picturing the Bible allows us to go back in time to the origin of Christian art and thought and see how Christianity became what we know today.

Engraved gem with Adam and Eve, Syria or Asia Minor, early 4th century; nicolo (banded agate). The Trustees of the British Museum, London

Jeffrey Spier, who conceived and organized the exhibition, provides an overview of the development of early Christian art in his opening essay, “The Earliest Christian Art: From Personal Salvation to Imperial Power.” Little Christian art exists that can be dated before the third century A.D. Slowly, however, as Christians attained wealth and property, they began to decorate their churches, tombs, and homes with art reflecting their faith, just as their non-Christian, pagan counterparts did. This new Christian art borrows from the existing pagan and Jewish models, reinterpreting the familiar motifs and scenes for the still-young faith. The fourth century A.D. gem shown above, engraved with a scene depicting Adam and Eve, would have been set as a seal into a ring, a later example of the early personal items that bore the first marks of Christian art. The story of Adam and Eve would have been familiar and comfortable from its use in Jewish art and yet would still mark the individual as a follower of Christ, the “new Adam” who died on the cross, the “new Tree of Knowledge.”

Sarcophagus with the Traditio Legis, Rome, last quarter of the 4th century; marble. Musée de l’Arles et de la Provence Antique, Arles, France

Christian art transcends the personal sphere and enters the public, political world with the acceptance of Christ and Christianity by Constantine the Great in 312. Legends tell of an epiphany in which God appeared before Constantine on the eve of a great battle for the control of the empire and assured him victory if he placed the sign of Christ on the shields of his men. That legend most likely arose much later to cement the connection between Constantine and Christ, but the marriage of religion and state power begins with Constantine’s ascension. As Johannes G. Deckers points out in his essay, “Constantine the Great and Early Christian Art,” “Beginning in the fourth century, the mild Son of God of the New Testament was eclipsed in art by the remote, all-powerful figure of the Pantocrator, guarantor of a hierarchical world order culminating in the person of the emperor.” Although the gentle Lamb of God motif appears under Christ’s feet at the center of the Arles Sarcophagus (above), the emphasis is clearly on the passage of the rules of law from the hand of Christ to St. Peter, who stands as a surrogate for the emperor. The small, antiestablishment band of Christians had made the big time and become assimilated by the ruling powers.

Ivory plaque with Pilate Washing His Hands, Christ Bearing the Cross, and Peter Denying Christ, Rome, c. 420-30, from the Maskell ivories. The Trustees of the British Museum, London

Several fascinating revelations arise from the discussions of the art. Truly startling is the idea that the cross was not a familiar motif in the earliest Christian art. If Constantine placed a symbol of Christ on his shields, it was most likely the Greek-lettered “chi-rho” Christogram—the savior’s monogram. The cross still carried connotations of shame and brutality that the early Christians didn’t want depicted in their art. An ivory plaque (above) shows one of the earliest uses of the cross in a compacted narrative scene of the passion and death of Christ, with Pilate washing his hands and Peter denying his Lord three times crammed in with a scene of Christ carrying his cross to Golgotha. Such concise composition creates opportunities for interesting parallels to be drawn within the image and with other images, promoting a level of exegesis—the elucidation of allegorical meaning on multiple levels—startling in its sophistication.

Book cover with scenes from the life of Jesus, northern Italy, second half of the 5th century; ivory with central figures of gilded-silver cell work inlaid with garnets. Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano e del Museo del Duomo, Milan

This sophistication appears most obviously in the elaborate Bible covers that were developed in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., as Christianity continued to grow in size and power. The example above shows the once-humble Lamb of God now depicted in gilded silver cells inlaid with garnets and other precious stones. Scenes of the life of Jesus appear in the ivory carvings surrounding the central motif. These expensive covers emphasized the importance of the gospels to Christianity as much as they displayed the importance of the individuals who paid for them to be made. The other half of this bible cover features a cross at the center, as bejeweled as the Lamb. Again, the two-sided nature of humble and powerful Christianity appears, but the balance is clearly moving towards the powerful.

Adam Naming the Animals, Rome (?), early 5th century, from an ivory diptych. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence

Many of these book covers actually carry out visually the doctrinal questions of the day. Theological doctors of the early church, such as St. Augustine and Paulinus, exerted great influence on the visual “language” of early Christian art. The ivory diptych half shown above featuring Adam naming the animals belongs with another half showing the miracles of St. Paul. By juxtaposing Adam and St. Paul, the artist visually recreates the doctrinal concept in which St. Paul (who once was bit by a poisonous viper and survived) and Adam (who had dominion over all the beasts) could neither be harmed by beasts and, therefore, overcame nature through their virtuous devotion to God. Such complex visual language no longer exists today, something Father Heinrich Pfeiffer, S.J., lamented in his analysis of the complex doctrinal concepts embedded in the Sistine Chapel in his work The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision (my review here). The fact that such intricate interplay between words and images exists within the tradition of Christian art from these earliest works to the heights of the Renaissance adds a whole new dimension to the genre and a coherence not obvious at first glance when placing these early ivory carvings and, for example, The Last Judgment side by side.

The Ascension, from the Rabbula Gospels, Syria, 586; vellum. Biblioteca Mdicea Laurenziana, Florence (Cod. Plut. I. 56, Fol. 13v)

In addition to the amazing covers of these early Bibles, the text itself became a work of art. In his essay, “The Word Made Flesh in Early Decorated Bibles," Herbert L. Kessler sees these illuminated scriptures as truly “living writing,” with initial capital letters transformed into a cross or a figure or the loops of letters embellished with symbols that emphasize or interact with the text itself. Another dimension that these illustrated works offer is in the inclusion of local artistic traditions or apocryphal religious accounts that would appeal to the intended audience using the work. The Ascension scene from the Rabbula Gospels (above) borrows from “extensive Gospel pictorial cycles originating in Syria—Palestine in the sixth century” that formed the basis for later Byzantine art. By including this local flavor, the gospels became that much more familiar and appealing to the worshiper. Such concern for catholic inclusiveness reminds me of Rowena Loverance’s study, Christian Art (reviewed here), which called for a renewed emphasis on the functionality and practicality she found in these early Christian works of art. If only the Catholic Church today could adopt a similar flexibility in approaching modern culture and assimilating it into their outreach to believers and nonbelievers.

Reliquary Cross of Justin II, the Crux Vaticana, Constantinople, 568-74; gilded silver over a bronze core, with inlaid gems. Treasury of Saint Peter’s (Capitolo di San Pietro in Vaticano), Vatican City.

Picturing the Bible saddens me in some ways. Although such works as the Reliquary Cross of Justin II (above) gleam with majesty and beauty, it’s hard to separate that shine from the tarnished history of religion used to justify abuses of political and military power going all the way back to Constantine. Steven F. Eisenman’s The Abu Ghraib Effect (to be reviewed here soon) would even argue that the rise of the cross as the primary symbol of Christianity over the Christogram or the Lamb of God reflects the violent, torture-laden history of the church and state union. However, the modern-day relevance of the early Christian art displayed in Picturing the Bible lies in the realization of the sophistication of the images. If we could only “read” the images surrounding us today with the same fluency that those generations up through the Renaissance could, perhaps that questioning eye could deconstruct the implications behind the imagery and challenge the institutions in power propagating the visual narrative we have come to accept unquestioningly. With such an eye we could “choose wisely” the proper sources from which to drink in our beliefs.

[Many thanks to the Kimbell Art Museum for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibition Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art and for the images above.]

A Fighting Education

"Art must no longer be the expression of individual satisfaction that it is today, but should aim to become a fighting educative art for all," David Alfaro Siqueiros once said, emphasizing the political activism behind so much of his work. Born December 29, 1896, Siqueiros lambasted the rich ruling classes in murals for the masses such as Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (above, from 1939-1940). With fellow muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Siqueiros revitalized the mural as a medium for public political protest. Siqueiros centered much of his imagery on the history of the Mexican Revolution, using that period’s violence and chaos to provide a language through which he could express his ideas of an ideal society, based heavily on his own Marxist ideals. Rivera and Orozco both loved their country passionately, but Siqueiros took that passion to another, perhaps dangerous level.


In The New Democracy (above, from 1944) a woman carrying the torch of freedom explodes from the center of the mural as she shatters the chains of oppression. The idealized classical bodies that Siqueiros depicts lend a timelessness to his message, which is basically the eternal struggle between the powerless many and the powerful few. Siqueiros preached his universal message beyond Mexico, traveling to South America, Europe, Russia, and even America to spread his vision and paint more ideologically charged murals. While in America in the late 1930s, Siqueiros ran a political art workshop attended by many young American artists, including Jackson Pollock, who saw the expressive potential of liquid paint in Siqueiros’ hands and later used that potential to create his own Abstract Expressionist works.


During that period in America, Siqueiros painted many smaller works, including Echo of a Scream (above, from 1937). It’s hard to imagine a more excessively disturbing scene than the bizarre infant of Echo of a Scream. As much as Siqueiros strove to bring light to the workers’ world, he fostered a dark side as well, particularly in his possible involvement in the assassination plot against Leon Trotsky that led to his 1940 exile from Mexico. Fighting against the excesses of capitalism and fascism, which he wed in the imagery of Portrait of the Bourgeoisie that he barely finished before his 1940 exile, Siqueiros fell into an excessiveness of his own. Like many artists of the early twentieth century, Siqueiros looked to Socialism as a solution to the ills of the exploitive capitalism sucking their country dry. Sadly, that promise soon disappeared as Communism became the next incarnation of authoritarianism and oppression. To the end, Siqueiros fiery passion for social justice could never be quenched, and his scream echoes on today.

Ho Ho Ho

I would like to wish everyone a very, very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from me, the lovely and talented Annie, and the excited and wide-eyed Alex (above). Art Blog By Bob will be very quiet after this post until most likely the New Year as we enjoy the holiday with family and friends.



I’ve always been a big fan of Santa Claus as a cultural phenomenon. A history of images of St. Nicholas, Santa Claus in his previous life, appears here. Thomas Nast’s Victorian Santa Claus (above, from 1881) ranks up there with the iconic images of the Jolly One. Christmas really is a Victorian invention in terms of traditions, thanks mainly to Nast and Charles Dickens. Our conception of Santa today still relies heavily on how the Victorians imagined him. My Mom has a collection of Santa figurines showing Santa through the years hailing all the way back to the 1880s and up to the 1940s, when that image, at least in America, became set in stone. Perhaps that was for the best. Imagining a 1980s Santa in a Members’ Only jacket and spandex with a mullet makes me shudder.


Perhaps no American artist loved the idea of Christmas and Santa as much as N.C. Wyeth. (His rendering of Santa from 1925 is above.) A behemoth of a man himself, N.C. would dress up as Santa for his children every year. Andrew Wyeth describes the literally bed-wetting terror he felt as “Santa” stood at the foot of his bed. Jamie Wyeth once described sweating profusely in anticipation of Christmas morning, which is at least better than wetting the bed.

No slice of Americana can be complete without including Norman Rockwell, who painted Santa many times over the years, including the image above from 1939. I find Rockwell’s image of Santa mapping his route around the world fascinating in light of just how divided the world was in 1939 as war raged in Europe and threatened to engulf the globe. Santa’s string tying together all the good boys and girls around the world provides the link of hope that the world needed at that moment. We could use that link today, too.

My new favorite image of Santa is, of course, this year’s photograph of Alex with Old Saint Nick (above). Christmas is about children above all else. Here’s hoping that everyone finds the love and peace that comes with embracing the children around us as well as the child remaining within us.

Abstract Spirituality

"The more frightening the world becomes” Wassily Kandinsky once said, “the more art becomes abstract." Born December 16, 1866, Kandinsky saw his world grow ever more frightening as fascism and war engulfed Europe in the twentieth century. Kandinsky responded to such madness with the first truly abstract paintings, such as Black Strokes I (above, from 1913). After studying and excelling at law and economics, Kandinsky didn’t begin studying art until after he turned 30 years of age. Perhaps coming to art later in life, after seeing and experiencing so much, allowed Kandinsky’s probing, analytical, yet highly spiritual intellect to see a whole new way of painting that a more classically trained artist could ever conceive.

Kandinsky actually began as a relatively conventional figurative painter. The Blue Rider (above) , which Kandinsky painted in 1903, shows his romantic side, with the lone, enigmatic horseback rider crossing the landscape. When Kandinsky and fellow artists August Macke and Franz Marc formed their group, Der Blaue Reiter, Kandinsky’s painting provided the name. Prior to World War I, Kandinsky’s style evolved into something more and more abstract, first resembling the strong, expressive color schemes of Marc and later losing the subject almost entirely in a complete loss of the recognizable subject. Kandinsky fled Germany just before the outbreak of war, returning to his native Russia, where their revoltion would soon turn everything upside down. Unable to fit in with the Constructivist and Suprematist movements en vogue in the new Russia, Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921, living there and teaching at the famed Bauhaus until 1933, when the Nazis closed it.

Upon his return to Germany, Kandinsky’s abstraction took a more scientific, analytical turn, as can be seen in works such as Yellow-Red-Blue (above, from 1925). The common attack on abstract works such as those by Kandinsky is that “anyone can do it,” but anyone looking closely at Kandinsky’s works can see the intricacy of composition and design. "Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult,” Kandinsky once responded to his detractors. “It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential." Kandinsky’s artistic “poetry” often took the form of art theory, most famously in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which likens life to a pyramid we each must climb with the assistance of the artist, if we permit them to help. We can’t register today the same shock that Kandinsky’s work delivered almost a century ago. Decades of abstract art have jaded us to the full impact of the artistic, political, and spiritual punch they once held. When the forces of darkness in the early twentieth century threatened to obliterate or, perhaps worse, appropriate art to their imperialist ends, Kandinsky’s turn to abstraction changed the rules of the game and denied them their prize. In looking to abstraction, Kandinsky held on to what was truly real in the human spirit.

The Angel of History

Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite painter, Paul Klee, created a body of evocative images that linger in the mind much like the great director’s most troubling film sequences. Born December 18, 1879, Klee painted Angelus Novus (above) in 1920, which the philosopher Walter Benjamin eventually owned. Benjamin saw Klee’s angel as "the angel of history.” “His face is turned towards the past,” Benjamin went on. “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage." Although he was half Swiss, Klee considered Germany his homeland, fighting for that country in World War I and later teaching at the famed Bauhaus until its closure by the Nazis and the condemnation of his works as “Degenerate Art.” The Nazis made special mention of Klee’s art as “the work of a sick mind.” Today, we honor Klee for the soundness of his mind, which continued to explore the outer reaches of art and spirituality as all reason collapsed around him.


Klee continually innovated in his approach to art. In The Future Man (above, from 1933), Klee applied watercolor using a spatula. Klee saw no method of drawing too outlandish if it could convey the message he wished. Klee paints The Future Man in the fateful year of 1933, when Hitler assumed power, the Bauhaus closed its doors, and the “Degenerate Art” exhibition opened its doors. Looking at this figure today, you have to wonder what future Klee envisioned for man in the midst of that nadir of hope. Klee suffers from the common misperception of his art due to the primitivism he employs, which belies the sophistication of his composition and draftsmanship. It’s not easy to make such a figure look so simple. A great sadness emerges from the simple face of The Future Man as it looks either ahead to an uncertain future or back to 1933 as the beginning of the end.

Despite living in such troubled times, Klee never lost his sense of humor and childish wonder. Fish Magic (above, from 1925) seems like a magical aquarium. The fish take on the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Many of Klee’s later abstract works have this quality of writing, as he strove for a universal “language” of drawing free of cultural and political associations. Like his close friend Wassily Kandinsky, Klee saw abstraction as the solution to the ills of twentieth-century European reality. "I belong not only to this life, “ Klee had placed on his tombstone. “ I live as well with the dead, as with those not born. Nearer to the heart of creation than others, but still too far." Paul Klee remains an angel of history, looking down at the sad chain of events as one long catastrophe, yet also recognizing the ties that bind all humanity across all eras.

A Warning from History

Potsdamer Platz, the heart of Berlin, seen from the renowned Café Josty. The famed traffic light is in the middle, and all around is the hustle and bustle of modern urban life—cars, streetcars, trucks, and pushcarts, and everywhere people walking, talking, and watching. SV-Bilderdienst/Scherl.

“Life was a complicated thing, threatened by the pulls of desire and death. Order and stability were ephemeral achievements,” Eric D. Weitz writes of Thomas Mann’s 1925 novel The Magic Mountain in his new study of the period, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. That description neatly encapsulates Weitz’s take on all the Weimar Republic, so full of hopeful promise after the deprivations of World War I and yet so divided by internal fissures that any permanent foundation could never be built. Weitz provides a panoramic view of Weimar, from the political intrigue in circles of power to the everyday life of men and women in the street (such as the Potsdamer Platz, above) to the lives and works of the artists hoping to bridge the gaps between those worlds and hold that common dream together.

A Berlin street scene 1926: the new woman out and about.

Using the writings of contemporary authors such as Mann, Joseph Roth, Christopher Isherwood, and Franz Hessel, Weitz leads us on a tour of Weimar Berlin, bringing all the sounds and sights of the streets back to life. “Just follow the unplanned adventure that happens to capture the eye,” Weitz quotes from Hessel. Electrical light brings a modern vibrancy to the city, even as the wounded veterans of The Great War haunt the shadows. Strikingly modern advertising, much of it either targeting the “new woman” or playing off her newfound allure, appears everywhere. “The streets did not thunder, they played music, a love song to the women of Berlin,” one contemporary author wrote. This “new woman” (examples of which appear above) emerges everywhere in German society, “an image of elegance and refinement, of activity and athleticism, and one that flowed from its bourgeois origins to working women, from the capital city to the provinces,” Weitz writes. The “new woman” also provides a very clear target for conservatives who see modern Berlin as “artificial” and even “parasitical,” literally draining the resources of the country in its pursuit of pleasure.

After setting the stage in terms of the social network and politics of the period (which shifted from a period of Left-Center control from 1918 through 1923 to Center-Right from 1924 to 1929 and, finally, authoritarian Right from 1930 to 1933, when the Nazis assumed full control), Weitz weaves into his narrative the impact of the arts on society. He sees George Grosz’s satiric art as indicative of how “the savagery of total war undermined deference toward authority,” leading to the disobedience and disrespect of the German people that undermined much of the Weimar reforms. In contrast, Weitz resurrects the Crystal Chain artists, a group whose letters to one another reflect German Expressionism’s forgotten “utopian tenor, a bold imagining of a harmonious and beautiful future.” “Where are you, prophets?—the heralds of the new life, telling of the new suns—moons—and stars! The millions await you!” one Crystal Chain artist breathlessly expounded. Although most exhibits today examine the angst-ridden side of German Expressionism, this strain of the movement that hoped to transform all of society through art equally captured contemporary artists’ imaginations. Later, the New Objectivity movement, led by Grosz, Otto Dix, Christian Schad, and others, picks up some of this hopeful thread during the stable middle period of Weimar, but replacing, at least in the works of Schad, the breathless fervor with “modulated tones and clean lines.”

Erich Mendelsohn, Einstein Tower, built 1920–24. Mendelsohn was one of Weimar Germany's most prominent and successful architects. The Tower was built as a laboratory and observatory in which Einstein's theories would be tested. Mendelsohn sought to capture in form the essence of relativity theory. He might not have succeeded in that venture, but the smooth exterior, recessed windows, absence of ornamentation, and overall beauty mark the building as a strikingly original example of modern architecture. On his first visit, Einstein reputedly said in admiration, “Organic!” Here the building is shown following an extensive, very successful renovation in the 1990s. Author’s photograph.

Architecture offers the most concrete means of transforming society. Architects such as Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Erich Mendelsohn design new buildings for the new German to live, shop, work, and study in that contrast starkly with their older surroundings. Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (above), his first building, housed an observatory and laboratory to test Albert Einstein’s theories by researching the sun’s light. “Organic!” Einstein himself gushed upon seeing it for the first time, struck by how seamlessly the building harmonized with its natural surroundings. As with the bright side of Expressionism, Weitz goes boldly beyond the familiar Bauhaus to present the intersection and interaction of art and society. Few periods in modern history offer such a rich opportunity to connect contemporary art and society.

Hans Surén, German Gymnastics. A wide variety of individuals and groups advocated nudity as the path to wholeness and, for those on the Right, the revival of the German spirit. Exercises in the nude, bathed in sunlight, would restore the individual and collective body and soul weakened by the corrupting influences of modern society. Surén’s book, Man and Sun, was wildly successful. G. Riebicke, Galerie Bodo Niemann, Berlin.

Even the human body became a work of art, as figures such as Hans Suren cultivated a cult of the body (above), hoping to transform society through the perfection of the individual physically. Sex takes center stage more openly than ever before in German culture. “Germans would leave behind the stuffy, rigid, and authoritarian society of imperial Germany… and a constrained and hypocritical sexual morality,” Weitz shows. “To be modern meant to be democratic, and it also meant a freer, more open attitude toward bodies and sex.” In this new openness, Hannah Hoch, through her striking photomontages, examines the place of the “new woman” in this freer sexual environment. Weitz wonderfully positions Hoch’s work within the conflicting themes of the era, which both celebrated and exploited women and their sexuality. “The panopoly of images” in Hoch’s work, Weitz concludes, “is a controlled chaos, that of modernity itself.”

From an art history perspective, Weitz offers many fascinating takes on the social-cultural interchange of the period. Just by highlighting the hopeful side of Expressionism and raising the profiles of Mendelsohn and Hoch, he adds depth and fullness to the familiar caricature of Weimar. However, I found myself often longing for more. I imagined a discussion of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Berlin Street Scene (recently exhibited at the Neue Galerie; my review here) adding nuance to Weitz’s virtual “stroll” through Berlin’s streets, especially in the context of the “new woman.” A brief extrapolation into the Nazis’ contrasting vision of architecture as capable of transforming society versus the plans of Mendelsohn et al would have been exciting. The picture of the nearly nude men exercising looks so much like a still from one of Leni Riefenstahl’s films that I can’t believe that Weitz resisted the urge to telescope his vision a little further (or even look back to the art of Hans Thoma for the roots of this body cult in German art and society).

The Tiller Girls, one of a number of very popular female dance revues, renowned for their precision movements and high kicks.

Ultimately, of course, Weitz is a historian, and he excels at tying together so much of the multiverse of Weimar that it seems unfair to complain of what he doesn’t do when he accomplishes so much. With the precision of the dancing Tiller Girls (above), Weitz never missteps in showing the roots and consequences of the Weimar years. Most importantly, like any good historian, Weitz writes with an eye not just on the past but on how the past speaks to the future. “Weimar Germany still speaks to us,” Weitz says at both the beginning and end of the book, “perhaps most often as a warning sign.” Weitz overturns the conventional narrative that Nazism inevitably followed Weimar. “Weimar did not just collapse,” he writes. “It was pushed over the precipice by a combination of the established Right, hostile to the republic from its very founding, and the newer extreme Right.” Arguing that the Nazis never won more than a third of the votes in any free election, Weitz confronts the idea that the German people wanted Nazi rule. Instead, Weitz reveals the nexus of common interests between groups in power that conspired through a chain of events to launch Adolf Hitler and his followers into leadership roles, always believing that their extremism could somehow be "contained."

But how does that speak to today? “Weimar… demonstrates the limits of elections as a criterion for democracy,” Weitz writes. “Democracy needs democratic convictions and a democratic culture that ripple through all the institutions of society, not just the formal political ones.” When the churches, army, and courts all hold views opposite to those held by the majority, they add up to a recipe for disaster, regardless of how votes are tallied. The Nazis stepped into the breach of German disequilibrium when no other group could muster the energy to fill that vacuum. Naomi Klein’s recent book The Shock Doctrine calls this phenomenon “disaster capitalism,” borrowing from the ideas of economist Milton Friedman of how broad changes in governmental policy can only be done in times of social chaos, such as the challenges to civil liberty after September 11th, the free market experimentation in Iraq after the American victory, and the remaking of New Orleans minus the displaced poor after Hurricane Katrina. Weitz never explicitly connects the events of Weimar with those of recent American history, but the implication is crystal clear. One of my favorite documentaries on the Nazi period is the 1998 BBC documentary The Nazis—A Warning from History. Eric D. Weitz’s Weimar Republic: Promise and Tragedy offers a similar warning from history as well as the hopeful argument that even the most seemingly powerful and inevitable political movements are not destined to happen but only require that good people do nothing to stop them.

[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of this book as well as the images from the book.]

Against the Wall

Few artists aroused such passions during his life as Diego Rivera. Born December 8, 1886, Rivera stirred political passions with his art during his life as well as the amorous passions of many women, including fellow artist Frida Kahlo. Perhaps the highlight (or lowlight, depending on how you look at it) of Rivera’s career was the infamous 1933 episode in which Rivera painted Vladimir Lenin into the mural Nelson Rockefeller commissioned for Rockefeller Center, titled Man at the Crossroads. Rockefeller ordered the fresco destroyed after Rivera, an avid Communist at the time, refused to remove the portrait. A year later, Rivera recreated the mural (above) at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Arte in Mexico City, renaming it Man, Controller of the Universe. As chaotic as his personal life became, Rivera was always the master of his artistic universe.

Rivera's role in the Mexican Mural Renaissance beside fellow muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros justly takes pride of place in memories of Diego. However, Rivera shouldn’t be labeled as just a muralist or just a Mexican artist. In his travels to Europe before 1920, Rivera saw and embraced Cubism, painting works such as Two Women (above, from 1914), showing that even then he had ladies on his mind. Cezanne’s bright colors and reduction of images to simple shapes inspired Rivera in his later murals. Travels through Italy and first-hand exposure to the great frescoes of the masters certainly provided material for Rivera to digest and transform into his native idiom.

Rivera’s pride in his native Mexico shines through much of his work. Kahlo absorbed much of that pride into her own work and even her personal dress, selecting native Mexican dress to please her Diego. Sadly, Rivera’s philandering brought much pain to Kahlo’s already painful life. Around the same time that Rivera painted Detroit Industry (above, detail of south wall, from 1932 to 1933), Kahlo suffered another miscarriage, which inspired her painting Henry Ford Hospital. After Kahlo’s death, Rivera told others that only then he realized that she had been the love of his life. Judging on appearances alone, Rivera makes for one of the unlikeliest of lotharios, but the passion and charisma of his life and art drew others to him magnetically and continues to inspire Latin American artists today.

Pressing the Flesh

Did anyone ever make marble look more convincingly like warm flesh than Gian Lorenzo Bernini? Born December 7, 1598, Bernini sculpted the magnificent Rape of Proserpina (above) from 1620 to 1621. As Proserpine resists Pluto, pushing his shaggy head away, Pluto’s fierce fingers press into the flesh of her leg and leave indentations. Touching sculptures in museums, especially something almost four centuries old, is verboten, but I always wondered what it would be like to touch this sculpture and feel the chill of the marble when my eyes clearly register the warmth of human flesh. With such works, Bernini announced his claim to Michelangelo’s title as the greatest sculptor of the human form.


Bernini took on Michelangelo directly in creating his version of David (above, from 1623-1624). Whereas Michelangelo’s David assumes a pose of complete classical composure as the confident future king, Bernini’s David sweats and strains in a gesture of pure torque and tension. Bernini’s David captures a sense of movement and effort that Michelangelo’s figure lacks in its effortless cool. Both Davids capture different aspects of the Biblical figure and represent their creators and their times equally well. Michelangelo’s David stood for a Florence and Italy that needed a symbol of pride to rally around. Bernini’s David stood for a nation and a church that knew it had some work to do.


With The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (above, from 1647-1652), Bernini made a cosmic leap in the world of religious sculpture. Religious and sexual ecstasy blur together in the expression of the saint as the rays of glory penetrate her soul. Simon Schama’s The Power of Art looked long and hard at St. Theresa’s moment of ecstasy, which marks a high point of the Counter-Reformation re-selling of Catholicism to the masses, now with the added element of sex to spice up the story. Schama does a good job of acting coy about the sexuality of this figure, but that eroticism is as obvious to us today as it was to the uneducated masses of the seventeenth century. Bernini worked hard to obtain the favor of the rich and powerful, which meant in most cases the Catholic Church hierarchy and those surrounding it. The fact that sex sells was as true then as it is today.

For the Cause

As the Russian Civil War brought down the Czarist regime and opened the door to Socialism and Communism, Alexander Rodchenko stood by to offer his art for the cause. Born December 5, 1891, Rodchenko excelled in multiple media, including painting, graphic design, and photography. Rodchenko’s photography of the Shukhov Tower (above, from 1926) shows the 160-meter-tall steel tower, the pride of Russian engineering, as an aesthetically modern creation as well. Rodchenko founded the school of Constructivism, which took up the challenge of creating a whole new visual vocabulary for the brave new world promised them. His photography used unique new perspectives—looking up through the latticework of Shukhov Tower or looking down upon the heads of crowds gathered in the streets—to challenge the viewer and other artists to turn the world upside down and look at it anew.

Rodchenko’s pre-revolutionary work was equally daring. Dance: An Objectless Composition (above, from 1915) demonstrates his awareness of European modernism, especially the Italian Futurists and their penchant for depicting motion. Rodchenko’s Dance swirls with movement like a Futurist work but simultaneously dissects and explodes the subject itself. Although no recognizable dancer appears, the spirit of the dance comes across. Perhaps the turmoil of this painting reflects the turmoil of Russian society moving closer and closer to total upheaval.

Rodchenko collaborated with other leading artists of the Soviet state as part of the Constructivist ethos of a communal culture of the people. His film poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film The Battleship Potemkin (above, from1926) captures the drama and propagandistic power of that landmark of early film. In 1929, Rodchenko joined an all-star team of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky to produce Mayakovsky's satirical play The Bedbug. The bold lettering style and eye-catching layout of Rodchenko’s designs still influence modern graphic design today. Looking back today, it’s sad to think of the creative energy and hope invested in this scheme to create an entirely new language of culture, completely divorced from all the sad baggage of the past. Like all utopian dreams, however, it was doomed to fail in one way or another. The art of that period, especially that by Rodchenko, still packs a punch that makes you believe, however briefly, that art can truly change the world.

Finish What You Started

How many Americans today could identify the classic portrait of George Washington on the one dollar bill as copied after the work of Gilbert Stuart? Fewer would even know that the original work (aka, The Athenaeum Portrait; above, from 1796) was never finished, just like the companion portrait of Martha Washington. Born December 3, 1755, Stuart earned a reputation as both the finest American portraitist of his time and the unreliable, debt-ridden, exasperating artist who failed to deliver time and again. Stuart lived large and well beyond his means, enjoying the company of the rich and powerful, including the men who would become the first six presidents of the United States, all of whom Stuart painted, or at least began painting.

Although born in the American colonies and beginning a career as an artist there, Stuart traveled to England to complete his training in 1775 as the hostilities that would become the American Revolution began. Whereas artists such as John Singleton Copley remained in America and adapted from portraits of the upper class to portraits of the new mercantile class, Stuart followed the money and continued to paint members of the upper class. His portrait of William Grant, better known as The Skater (above, from 1782) shows the influence of Benjamin West, who befriended and taught his fellow former colonist. Stuart soon commanded prices rivaling those demanded by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Unfortunately, success spoiled Stuart and his spendthrift ways forced him to flee to Ireland in 1787 to avoid debtor’s prison.

Stuart returned to America in 1793, after the Revolution. He soon began painting the new nobility of the young American nation, earning the distinction of being one of the few artists to have painted both King George III and George Washington. Stuart’s finished portrait of George Washington (aka, The Lansdowne Portrait; above, from 1796) shows the founding father in an almost royal pose, incongruous with the ideal of the early republic. When the nation’s capital moved to Washington, DC, Stuart opened a studio there in 1803 to be close to the seat of power. Stuart’s personal charisma made him the favorite portraitist of many of his subjects, charming even the curmudgeonly John Adams with his conversational skills. Sadly, like his contemporary Thomas Lawrence’s alcoholism, Stuart’s financial incompetence stood in the way of him achieving even greater things in art.

The Beginning of the End

Why write about art? Why is art important enough to write about? To get truly philosophical about art, you need look no further than Arthur C. Danto, philosopher-king of American art criticism. Now in paperback, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life, Danto’s fifth collection of his essays from The Nation, answers (or tries to answer) these questions and more over and over, with a diversity of subjects old and new, from Leonardo da Vinci to Damien Hirst. Ultimately, Danto’s answers boil down to a resounding “yes,” like Yoko Ono’s Yes Painting (above, from 1966), which requires the viewer to climb the ladder and look through the magnifying glass to see the tiny “yes” written on the ceiling. Fortunately, Danto makes the path to those answers easier. Seeing a shift in art criticism from interpretation to explanation, Danto believes “[w]e have to treat the art of today the way Hegel treated the art of the past, when artist and viewer constituted—or ideally constituted—an actual community.” Danto bridges the gap between art and everyday life, revealing the “elite” world of art to be just another corner of the larger global community.

Reading through the more than 40 essays in the collection, you find Danto telling many of the same stories over again and again. Rather than annoying repetition, these common threads hold the tapestry of Danto’s thought together. At the heart of Danto’s philosophy of art lies his concept of “The End of Art.” In the 1980s, “[a]ll at once movements no longer seemed to occur,” Danto writes. “The early twentieth century had seen hundreds of movements… each with its own manifesto. All this had vanished. The history of art no longer seemed driven by some inner necessity. One lost the sense of any narrative direction.” That lack of direction first dispirits Danto, then intoxicates him with possibility. Freed from that “burden” of art history’s narrative drive, artists could take their art in any direction, no longer fearing critical abuse for not carrying the storyline of art forward. Rather than finding meaning in this continued narrative, Danto finds meaning in the art itself—the “embodied meanings” of the work. “If nothing was ruled out as art,” Danto says of himself as critic, “I could rule out nothing as art.” Art thus encompassed all reality, merging the “real” world with the “art” world and recovering the sense of connection between art and life lost over time. Kalliphobia, or the fear of beauty, beginning with Dada and Surrealism, movements that made beauty “the sacrificial victim in a symbolic war against war” at the beginning of the war-torn twentieth century, created a rift between the common viewer and the artist that Danto now hopes to repair. “Art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek in art for meanings that neither of art’s peers—philosophy and religion—in what Hegel spoke of as the realm of Absolute Spirit, are able to provide,” Danto concludes, elevating art and art criticism to the level of a last, best hope for the modern human soul.

One of the beauties of Danto’s critical approach is his ability to take individual artists and spin out generalities that elucidate not only the artist at hand but the art world at large. The Blood Altar of Tilman Riemenschneider (detail shown above, from 1501-1505) provides the context for the discussion of anachronistic art criticism, i.e., criticizing artists of the past for not addressing the concerns of today. The controversy over Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper takes center stage in a meditation on iconoclasm from Plato to the Taliban to Rudy Giuliani. Taking the measure of the latest Whitney Biennial, Danto considers the state of arts instruction: “Since art schools no longer teach skills and MFA candidates have the option of making art any way they choose, the boundary between the self-taught and the highly taught artist has all but evaporated.” This skill-less artist, however intriguing, makes the mission of the art critic explaining that art to the public that much harder.

Danto continually amazes with his ability to make you see an artist in a new light. Showing examples of sfumato by Verrocchio to demonstrate that it “was already a matter of studio practice when Leonardo [da Vinci] was in his teens,” Danto proves that “even where Leonardo was most original, he was also in effect in conversation with his predecessors, and his successors in conversation with him.” Norman Rockwell, that realist anachronism in the modernist twentieth century (his The Connoisseur, from 1962, appears above), emerges in Danto’s examination as “an eroticist of human feeling, a rhetorician of visual perception.” With the assistance of Hume and Heidegger, Danto uncovers the “conceptual pleasures” of that “unabashed mentalist” Sol LeWitt. I can even forgive Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles after Danto writes, “What Ono offered [John] Lennon was a more fulfilling way of making art, and ultimately she was blamed for the dissolution of the band. What Lennon offered Ono was a way of using her art to change minds not just in terms of the nature of art and reality but also in terms of war and peace.” Danto even tries to made me love and cherish Jeff Koons, giving it a valiant if ultimately futile effort.

Since these essays stretch from 2000 to 2003, the topic of conversation obviously towering over all others is September 11th. Writing shortly after the attacks, Danto saw the most apt artistic approach to the senselessness of that event to be the simple, impromptu shrines that popped up all over New York City. “What the instantaneity of the impromptu shrines has taught us is that art, at some level, is an abiding integral component of the human spirit,” Danto writes. Danto writes simultaneously as a philosopher, art critic, and New Yorker when he writes of the attacks, bringing a whole new level of intensity and introspection to the subject. “The perceived target was life—our life, in both senses of the term: the fact that we live and the way we live,” he writes. “What terrorists saw as symbolic, New Yorkers saw as a war against a form of life.” Revisiting art and 9/11 one year later, Danto surveys the artistic responses up to that point and decides that “genuine 9/11 art… had to find ways of embodying the feeling rather than depicting the events, and is inevitably oblique.” Fortunately, Danto’s analysis of that tragedy is anything but oblique.

Unnatural Wonders will restore your faith in the world of art criticism. These short essays should be taken like pills for the anxiety that modern life and modern art can inflict upon the soul. As Danto concedes, “The End of Art” both dispirits and intoxicates with the double-edged sword of endless possibility. Danto’s writing will both lift your spirits and help sober you up when facing the sometimes too wide world of art.

[Many thanks to Columbia University Press for providing me with a review copy of this book.]