Picturing the Fourth of July

Americans for the past decade seem more caught up than ever in the idea of what it is to be an American, especially in an election year and perhaps never so much as on the Fourth of July—the day on which we celebrate the Declaration of Independence that inaugurated this little experiment in democracy we’ve been performing for over two centuries. To see a picture of the Fourth of July 2012, all you need to do is look out your window at the parades, barbeques, and fireworks. But to look back two centuries and see the Fourth of July circa 1812, perhaps our best glimpse appears in John Lewis Krimmel’s Fourth of July, Center Square (detail shown above). Krimmel’s genre scene of Americans celebrating America back then allows us to see how our celebration today mirrors and, perhaps, distorts what our ancestors saw as most important for our country. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Picturing the Fourth of July."

[Image: John Lewis Krimmel. Fourth of July, Center Square (detail), 1811-1812.]

Double Vision: “Seeing Double” at the Yale Center for British Art

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then John Scarlett Davis must have been the sincerest flatterer in all of England in 1829. In the exhibition Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London, the Yale Center for British Art solves the “puzzle” of Davis’s painting The Interior of the British Institution Gallery (shown), which caused a stir in the London art scene of 1829 in ostensibly recreating an exhibition of Old Masters hosted in 1829 by the British Institution, a London-based art organization run by collectors and connoisseurs. “Ostensibly” becomes the key word in examining Davis’ painting, as the Yale Center’s research shows just what kind of liberties Davis took in his recreation and to what ends he took those liberties. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Double Vision."

[Image: John Scarlett Davis, The Interior of the British Institution Gallery, 1829. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.]

[Many thanks to the Yale Center for British Art for providing me with press materials for Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London, which runs through September 19, 2010.]

Blind Ambition

When Benjamin West burst onto the English art scene in 1763, the brash American with a head full of Raphael and Titian thanks to his recent travels in Italy made few friends when King George III commissioned West to paint the royal family. Sir Joshua Reynolds and others turned their backs on the young artist they saw as too ambitious in infringing upon “their” territory. By 1768, however, West’s personal charm and artistic talent won the English artists over and he joined them in founding the Royal Academy of Arts, eventually succeeding his friend Reynolds as the academy’s second president in 1792. Born October 10, 1738, West stands as one of the first great American artists, yet the majority of his great works have nothing to do with America. West’s breakout work The Death of General Wolfe (above, from 1770) turned heads with its dramatic rendition of the final moments of the life of British General James Wolfe during the Battle of Quebec. By posing Wolfe as a fallen Christ figure, literally ripping off the composition and figures of the Renaissance, West fit in with the art ethos of the time in history painting. However, by allowing the figures to wear contemporary dress and not shrouding them in the togas of classicism, West changed the rules of the game, ambitiously aiming at a type of realism not seen before in history painting that opened the doors for Jacques-Louis David and his Neoclassicism on the verge of Romanticism.

Growing up in Philadelphia, it was hard not to see the works of West. The PAFA features two works by West that bookend their main staircase. To see these huge works you almost have to stand on the opposite side of the stairs, since there’s not enough room to back away from them without tumbling over the railing. A smaller work at the PAFA, West’s The Treaty of Penn with the Indians (above, from 1771-1772), presents an idealized version of the transaction in which William Penn secured land from the Native Americans to extend Pennsylvania. West reportedly first learned how to mix colors from the Native Americans living in Springfield, Pennsylvania, his birthplace (not far from where I live today). Like Penn, West was a Quaker and applied that sect’s principles of brotherhood and pacifism to Native Americans even when most whites considered them less than human.

It’s easy to discount the works of West today. Although he was hailed as “the American Raphael” in his day, many of his figures in his epic-sized works seem cartoonishly stilted today. The great draftsmanship of smaller works such as his altarpiece titled The Conversion of St. Paul (above, from 1786) is largely forgotten today, although he exhibited it to great acclaim during his lifetime. If critics can’t be converted to West’s talent, they should at least be open to accepting his role as a pivotal figure in early American painting. While living in London, West opened his doors to any American artist looking for guidance or a place to stay on their way to study in Europe. Such artists as Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Washington Allston, John Trumbull, Thomas Sully, and Samuel F. B. Morse all spent time in West’s studio and home, learning with the master. Matthew Pratt actually painted a tribute to West’s open house titled The American School. Like later critics, many of these artists rejected West’s teachings after accepting his kindness, but West had greater ambitions for American art than the simple continuation of his personal style.

Tour Guide

In the eighteenth century, anybody who was anyone took the Grand Tour, traipsing about Europe to see all the “glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” The best way of capturing those memories pre-photography was to commission a portrait, and the best man for the job was Pompeo Batoni. A Knight in Rome: Charles Cecil Roberts (above, from 1778) shows one of Batoni’s satisfied customers in full regalia against a backdrop of classical props to ensure that everyone who saw it knew that the subject had made the trip and was now “cultured.” Born June 25, 1708, Batoni recently received a wonderful 300th birthday present from the National Gallery in London, whose exhibition may resurrect his once omnipresent reputation. While traveling in Rome in 1760, Benjamin West complained that Italian artists spoke of and imitated no one but Batoni. Starting out as a Rococo painter, Batoni soon embraced the lessons of classical art, helping usher in the age of Neoclassicism that fed the taste for the past whetted by the Grand Tour craze.

Batoni’s portraits won him his largest acclaim, but he began building his reputation with religious works such as The Ecstasy of St. Catherine of Siena (above, from 1743). By this time, Batoni already rejected the showiness of Rococo for a more controlled style aligned with the ancient Greek and Roman works recently rediscovered and studied by the first art historians, especially Johann Winckelmann, who became a friend of Batoni. Compare this ecstasy with the greatest ecstasy of the Baroque age—Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. Side by side, Batoni’s work appears, well, less ecstatic and more controlled. The drama, energy, and tension remain, but Batoni turns the heat down to a low simmer where Bernini burns red hot. Swept up in the rationalizing wave of the Enlightenment, Batoni went with the flow and prioritized head over heart.

The same composure that Nicolas Poussin espoused in the seventeenth century, Batoni preached in the eighteenth. In turn, Batoni passed on the Neoclassical torch to Jacques-Louis David, to whom Batoni reportedly left his palette and brushes when he died. In works such as The Death of Meleager (above, from 1740-1743), Batoni made cool amazingly compelling. Reaching back into the mythology of Greece, Batoni shows Atalanta mourning for the dead Meleager. Batoni bleeds all the passion away, leaving the pathos of the two figures, accompanied by the strikingly attentive dog at the bottom right that steals the scene. Yet, this bloodless bloodletting remains compelling thanks to how wonderfully Batoni renders the different fabrics and actually creates a kind of movement in all the levels of darks and lights, making the body of Atalanta almost glow in contrast to the dimming light of Meleager. The pendulum of all art swings from hot to cool, from Dionysian to Apollonian, but Batoni made that pendulum swing to the cool, classical extreme as compellingly as any artist ever has.

Life After Death

Is it ever possible to “know” an artist? Even artists of the present fall beneath a blanket of critical analysis that covers over their true uniqueness and individuality, if you still even believe in the concept of “truth.” Sam Smiles’ J.M.W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist looks at the case history of J.M.W. Turner, a nineteenth century artist who was himself aware of the vagaries of history and tried to cheat death through a bequest to his native land that he believed would shape his reputation for future generations. Instead, the directions of his will were thwarted and his reputation soon became stretched and reshaped to meet the requirements of future critics who, amazingly, enlisted him into the ranks of modern art, providing “evidence” by association of both his greatness and the greatness of the modern artists they looked to promote. Would Turner have wished for allegedly unfinished works such as Disaster at Sea (aka Fire at Sea; above, from 1835) to become the foundation of his reputation as a “modern” artist? Would it have mattered if he didn’t?

Smiles begins by analyzing Turner’s own approach to the concept of legacies and reputations. From early on in Turner’s career, he painted homages to writers such as Alexander Pope (Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, 1808) and fellow artists, such as his portrait of Raphael in Rome, from the Vatican, Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing His Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (above, from 1820). In the 1820s, Turner painted works related to earlier artists such as Raphael, Rembrandt, Canaletto, and Ruisdael, “renovating the tradition they represented,” Smiles writes, and giving “a significant part of his output an art historically aware and self-reflexive quality.” Turner paints with an eye to the past while simultaneously keeping an eye on his own future. These commemorations reflect Turner’s personal sense of calling as an artist, Smiles believes, in which “the benefit of art lies in its power to engage and stimulate the mind,” with any commercial benefits being “incidental” to the greater societal good. Turner witnessed the deaths of this contemporaries Benjamin West and Thomas Lawrence (going so far as to paint a watercolor of Lawrence’s funeral) and pondered his own mortality and the posthumous fate of his work.

Smiles masterfully argues the state of Turner’s mind by painting a full picture of the state of the arts at that time, which can be described as nothing short of chaotic. The wills of both West and Lawrence, designed to protect their legacies and benefit the nation, were thwarted after their deaths, impressing on Turner even more the need to protect his own legacy and, thus, the future of British art and society. While bequeathing his oeuvre to the nation, Turner left explicit instructions that Sun Rising Through Vapour: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish (above, from 1807) and Dido Building Carthage be hung in the National Gallery alongside paintings by Claude Lorraine both to show the line of influence and to show that British works could meet the standards of the Old Masters. Turner’s will also made arrangements for a charity specifically for the benefit of poor and “decayed” artists, knowing that his own material success eluded many others who had also dedicated their lives to the arts. Alas, after Turner’s death in 1851, challenges by Turner’s cousins thwarted his will as well, the first link in the chain of events that has shaped our idea of Turner ever since.

John Ruskin, who had assumed the role of Turner’s champion while alive, continued to dominate the conversation after Turner’s death. Ruskin’s “iconographical” interpretations, valuing fidelity to nature and natural effects, hinged on seeing “unfinished” works such as Disaster at Sea (top of post) as interesting as glimpses into Turner’s mind at work rather than as finished conceptions. Ruskin sees post-1845 Turner paintings as the work of an artist in “decline” both artistically and morally—inseparable concepts in Ruskin’s Victorian worldview. As Ruskin’s power waned, more formalist readings of Turner’s art arose, valuing the “unfinished” works, many of which were only being then publicly displayed as the huge bequest was catalogued and restored, as the “true” Turner, i.e., the visionary who “invents” the Impressionist style. Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (above, from 1844) “contains a first rate Monet,” writes one critic in 1902, “if not, indeed, more than one.” A 1906 exhibition of Turner’s late works obliterates the line between “finished” and “unfinished” works seemingly for good, opening up the critical field to adopt Turner as a Impressionist after the fact and, much later, to apply all types of modernist labels to the long-dead painter. Walter Sickert calls Turner “more modern than any living painter” in 1925, expressing the prevailing mood of Turner as more twentieth than nineteenth century artist, literally born before his time.

Smiles outlines the critical campaign for the soul of Turner with broad strokes but manages to give enough detail to keep the story both concrete and riveting. The tales of Turner’s fate at the Tate Britain made me wish I had looked at the exhibit with a more discerning eye while there. The British Council’s post-World War II exploitation of the “modern” Turner “to showcase the vitality and modernity of British culture” becomes a cautionary tale of government intervention in the arts for political ends. Lawrence Gowing’s 1966 exhibit at the MoMA, Turner: Imagination and Reality, completes the coronation of Turner as a modern artist through an installation usually reserved for modern artists and an emphasis on the most modern-looking (i.e., Abstract Expressionist-looking) paintings, completely free of any historical context that Turner himself would have experienced while working on the paintings. “Gowing’s Turner thus occupied an eternal present,” Smiles writes, “and for that reason could offer lessons to all contemporary artists wrestling with the same problems.” Turner’s desire to serve society through art lives on, but radically different from how he intended. John Gage’s 1969 book Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth arrives on the scene as a corrective to Gowing’s designs, presenting a Turner “more obviously historically placed and intellectually responsive to his age” and “better understood when his cultural milieu was restored to him” than Gowing’s historically abstracted, time-travelling Turner.

Will the “real” Turner ever stand up and be recognized? Is it the nineteenth century living and breathing man or the twentieth century modernist icon? Turner is simultaneously all and none of these things, larger than any one idea and yet too elusive, as all great artists, to be permanently pinned down to any single label. Smiles seems to come down on the side of those looking to recover the historical Turner as much as possible. “For all its difficulty, and even while aware of its ultimate frustration,” Smiles writes, “we must still make the attempt to encounter the past in all its specificity and otherness.” While speaking of Turner in particular, Smiles raises much larger general questions for both the art historian and the non-professional art lover. For art historians, Smiles shows the consequences of curatorial decisions, which always remain choices of inclusion and exclusion that impact not only the artist but the entire fabric of art history’s larger tapestry. For the non-professional art lover, Smiles awakens us to look critically at exhibitions and ask the classic crime-story question, “Quo bono?”—who benefits? In other words, whose agenda is being served by curatorial choices, and why? J.M.W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist turns commonplace shibboleths of art history (Turner the Impressionist, Turner the Modernist, etc.) and makes us question them and see Turner afresh. Turner himself could wish for no greater legacy than that.

[Many thanks to Manchester University Press and their American distributor Palgrave for providing me with a review copy of Sam Smiles’ J.M.W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist.]