Pure as the Driven Snow

Mingle² - Online Dating

To verify my self-proclaimed status of Art Blog By Bob as a family-friendly blog, I checked out a site that rates your blog from Disney-esque G to cover-your-eyes NC-17. (Site found via the always entertaining Ed Pettit’s Bibliothecary Blog, who received an undoubtedly justified R rating. ) Art Blog By Bob garnered the coveted (or kiss of death, depending on how you see it) rating of G.

Of course, this just proves that the rating system was based solely on text searches for certain naughty words. If the searches could “see” the content of some of my images, I think I would have hit R or maybe NC-17 for “nudity, strong sexual content, and Egon Schiele.”

[BTW, if you’re interested in a fascinating glimpse into the sexually puritanical yet firearms-friendly system of film ratings we have here in the United States, check out the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated.]

Reflections, Deflections, Introspections

Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman with a Hat (Dora), 1939; Oil on canvas. Fondation Beyeler, Basel; © 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“I would like to produce portraits that a hundred years from now will seem to people like apparitions,” Van Gogh once said. In The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, an exhibit at the Kimmell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, we see the many “ghosts” of modern portraiture: the spectral face in the mirror, the wisp of spirit glimmering in a subject’s eye, or the magically transformed identity behind a mask–always with Pablo Picasso at the heart of those dreams, and nightmares. Picasso’s Bust of a Woman with a Hat (Dora) (above) shows just one of the many alternatives to the classic portrait found in the exhibit.

The introduction to the catalogue marvels at “the survival and transformation of portraiture” in modern art through a breaking “of the traditional contract between artist and sitter,” resulting in an exploration of identities of not only the sitter and the artist himself, but also of the society around them. Paloma Alarco, Curator of Modern Painting at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain, and Malcolm Warner, Senior Curator at the Kimbell Art Museum, have gathered together a collection of the greatest portraits of modern art and present a panoramic view of the development of portraiture from Cezanne to today.

Francisco Calvo Serraller surveys the development of the portrait from the time of the Greeks in the catalogue’s opening essay, “The Spirit Behind the Mask.” Serraller sees the “secularization of the portrait” as a democratizing force that focused “its expressiveness as a vehicle for the fleeting and instantaneous” rather than celebrating the rich and the powerful. “[H]ow can we deny that our own age has been the golden age of the portrait?” he asks, arguing that “the genre of portraiture [is] the principle democratizing agent of art.” Alas, this democratizing power also becomes portraiture’s main weakness—a “triumph-failure” in Serraller’s view. “The portrait has died of its own success,” he laments, pointing to the abundance of imagery assaulting the modern consciousness—the blessing of expressive freedom, but also its curse.

Henri Matisse, Mlle Yvonne Landsberg, 1914; Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art; © 2007 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Portraits About Portraiture,” Malcolm Warner’s essay, examines the self-referential nature of the modern portrait. Modern painting is always painting about painting in some sense, so portraits, especially self-portraits, are often portraits about portraits. Portraiture, “the most subvertible of the genres,” in Warner’s eyes, allows the greatest freedom to explore the larger questions or representation and self. Warner points towards Picasso as “the modern artist who played most provocatively with identity.” Looking back towards the precedents of Rembrandt and Velazquez, Picasso assumes many personas, painting himself and others in various guises, questioning the nature of identity and self as actual or merely constructed. In addition to these transformative “masks,” Picasso and others, such as Lucian Freud, paint self-portraits clearly made with mirrors (Freud even places his mirrors on the floor), to raise the consciousness of the viewer as to the artificiality of the image, which is simply a reproduction of a reproduction rather than the thing itself, is such a thing truly exists. In works such as Henri Matisse’s Mlle Yvonne Landsberg (above), the mask and other unconventional techniques combine to subvert the presence of the sitter and elevate the style and vision of the artist. Matisse clearly sets out to say more about himself and his approach to the portrait than about the young lady portrayed. The days of the importance of the sitter give way to the primacy of painting and thinking about painting.



Paul Cézanne, Madame Cézanne in Blue, 1889-90; Oil on canvas; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Collection, gift of Sarah Campbell Blaffer

Picasso’s mask-like portrayal of Gertrude Stein in her famous portrait is only one of the alternative identities identified in John Klein’s essay, “The Mask as Image and Strategy.” In Stein’s portrait, the mask serves as “an intercessor,” “protecting [Picasso] from obligation to Stein’s features and forceful personality” and freeing him to complete his painting. Similarly, the mask-like face of Paul Cezanne’s wife in Madame Cezanne in Blue (above) renders her nonexistent as a person and allows Cezanne to approach the portrait the same way he would a still life or a mountain. (In fact, paintings by Cezanne hanging in Stein’s apartment may have inspired Picasso to use a mask for Stein. “Cezanne!” Picasso later said. “He was like a father to all of us.”) Other strategies that “find alternative languages of visual representation” include the use of the “otherness” of masks from exotic cultures, which can conceal but also reveal the elusive “inner” or “true” self. The use of masks by artists such as Amadeo Modigliani, who saw the mask as “more a starting point than a conclusion,” and Andy Warhol, who became an “astute observer of the surface” to turn real faces into masks in his “emphasis on the superficial,” are also explored.

Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer, 1968; Oil on canvas. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; © The Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London


Warhol also takes pride of place in William Feaver’s essay “’A Name, a Wretched Picture, & Worse Bust’: From Picasso’s Stalin to Warhol’s Mao.” Between the two artists’ portrayals of the two tyrannical leaders, Feaver inserts the history of the celebrity or glamour portrait in modern art. He sees Picasso’s portrait of Stalin as part of the artist’s strategy of “liberati[ng]… fact from appearance and… tweaking… recognizability.” Later tweaking includes Francis Bacon’s “invest[ing] portraiture with urgency… the moment someone flinches or whinnies and the mirror reveals the vulnerability of the bared neck,” such as in Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer (above). Bacon takes the failed snapshot and succeeds in create a non-portrait portrait head of all blurred surface, freed of detail. “[T]hroughout the twentieth century,” Feaver writes, “every generation had its own particularly brand of new realism. In portraiture especially, realism denotes more than fact.” For example, David Hockney’s portraits “range from the confessional to near-hero-worship,” including several featuring imaginary encounters with Picasso himself. But it is Warhol who culminates the movement begun by Picasso in his portraits of figures such as Mao Zedong. “Star treatment in Warhol usage was deadpan,” Feaver concludes. “The image had to be so processed that nothing much remained, beyond the Warhol look, but head and shoulders and stare.” In the final analysis, there is only the artist and the image he creates, regardless of who that image may claim to depict.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Olga), 1923; Oil on canvas. Private Collection (c/o Nicholas Maclean, New York); © 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


Paloma Alarco breaks down each of the thematic groupings of the exhibit in her chaptered exhibition notes. Starting with the revival of Romantic individualism and the artist as visionary hero, Alarco presents Picasso’s forerunners—Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin—as the first modern innovators of the portrait. Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka then emerge as the major practitioners of the portrait as gesture, especially in their enigmatic use of hands and facial expressions to convey emotion and character. “Modern Color” in the portrait begins with Van Gogh and spreads to the Fauvists Matisse and Maurice Vlaminck and later the German Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Alexej von Jawlensky. In “The Mirror Broken,” Alarco traces how “painting became a complex puzzle to be solved in the viewer’s gaze” in the Analytic Cubist works of Picasso and Juan Gris as well as the Italian Futurist works of Gino Severini. The calm of the years between the wars appears in “A Portrait of Society,” where even Picasso returns to a more realistic, apparently calmer style as in works such as Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Olga) (above), “albeit without renouncing the practices of modernism.” The German Neue Sachlichkeit movement epitomizes this realist turn, often tinged with brutal sarcasm, as in the works of Otto Dix and George Grosz.

The violence of World War II and the resultant appeal of Existentialism usher in an era of first Surrealism, as an escape from Fascism, and then an increased artistic dwelling on human suffering and alienation. Picasso’s Bust of a Woman with a Hat (Dora) (top of this review) embodies this disjointed time in war-torn Europe, while Jean Dubuffet’s monstrous anti-portraits depict the post-war world of “a society aware of its own decline.” In the concluding section, Alarco extends her analysis of the portrait to the nude, perhaps the most fascinating section of the exhibit. Describing the modernist strategy of “exotic exaggeration of the naked body to convey feeling,” Alarco presents Lucian Freud as “the artist of modern times who has best managed to convey the vulnerability of the human body.” With this final section, Alarco beautifully connects the innovations of Picasso at the start of the 20th century with those of Freud closer to the end.

The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso presents a stunning variety of portraits from modern art, culling together all the big names as well as the minor masters indicative of their time or certain concerns. The curators masterfully weave this huge amount of raw material into illuminating threads comprising the larger fabric of what the modern portrait has struggled to become. Picasso remains the focal point around which the exhibit turns, but the power of art to portray the human condition (and the strategies we use to deal with that condition) in his and others’ hands rises unmistakably.

[Many thanks to the Kimbell Art Museum for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso as well as the images above from the exhibit.]

It Was 40 Years Ago Today…

…That Peter Blake designed the iconic cover art for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (above). Actually, it wasn’t exactly 40 years ago today that he did this, but he was born 75 years ago today. Sir Peter continues to bask in the memories of the 1960s and the glory days of Swinging London. As Austin Powers would say, “Yeah, Baby!”

Blake began working in a Pop Art style in the 1950s, years before the American Pop Artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. He first received public attention through his award-winning painting Self-Portrait With Badges from 1961 (above). Blake covers himself with blue denim, the official uniform of rebellious American youth at that time, and holds a magazine emblazoned with the name “Elvis” and featuring a photo of Elvis Presley with Ann-Margret, perhaps from their movie Viva Las Vegas. The badges covering his denim jacket bring in all different pieces of early 1960s popular culture and, oddly, resemble the “flair” that some chain restaurants require their waitpersons to wear in place of actual individuality and personality.

Blake also painted a fascinating series of illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, including “Well, this is grand!” said Alice (above). The 1960s were one long Alice in Wonderland-esque adventure for many people and Blake’s work aptly captures that unique cultural moment. The sense of fun and inclusiveness seen in works such as the Sgt. Pepper cover remain as fresh and innovative today as they did 40 years ago. Who among us has not spent an afternoon listening to some format of Sgt. Pepper and trying to pick out the faces on that cover?

Anarchist in Art

Emma Goldman, early feminist and anarchist , once called painter Robert Henri “an anarchist in his conception of art and its relation to life.” Henri, teacher and humanist committed to the depiction of realism in all its gritty detail, such as his Snow in New York (1902) above, was born on June 24, 1865.

Henri served as a focal point for the Ashcan School (aka, “The Eight”), which shared and expanded Henri’s faith in art’s ability to depict the daily existence of the urban poor in America and awaken society’s conscience to their plight. Works such as Cumulus Clouds, East River (1901-1902) (above) make this impoverishment beautiful in its own stark way. Henri took his earlier love for the Impressionist style and Impressionist landscape and abandoned it to better depict the economic realities around him. Henri’s students, such as Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent, would take his artistic and political beliefs and mold them to their own artistic visions.

After 1909, Henri’s color palette took a brighter turn as he moved away from the social concerns of the Ashcan School towards a more modernist technique. During this period, Henri painted many wonderful portraits of children, such as Bernadita (1926) (above). I’ve always loved Henri’s depictions of children, which seem to me the logical extension of his humanism. As South African Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela once said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” The same warmth and compassion Henri brought to the dark, cold cityscape shines in the reflected eyes of the children of his later portraits. Robert Henri, a great teacher in his day, still has something to teach us today about what our society should be.

An American Vision

Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), Spring Night, Harlem River, 1913; Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 25 1/8 x 30 1/8 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1920

Holding up the works of American Impressionists to the best France had to offer, Duncan Phillips, founder of The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC once said, “Monet was only an eye, whereas Twachtman, Weir, and Lawson are also temperaments.” The singular vision of Duncan Phillips once focused tightly on American Impressionists, which made up 87 of the 237 paintings displayed when The Phillips’ doors opened in 1921. The exhibit American Impressionism: Paintings from The Phillips Collection tries to recapture that moment in art history when American Impressionism stood high in American art circles and Duncan Phillips was at the center of that ascendancy.

In the companion catalogue to the exhibit, American Impressionists: Painters of Light and the Modern Landscape, Susan Behrends Frank, Assistant Curator at The Phillips Collection, pays tribute to and chronicles the journey of Duncan Phillips as he struggled to become an art critic and then amassed his renowned collection. William H. Gedts, perhaps the foremost authority on American Impressionism, provides additional context to Frank’s essay with his own essay exploring the larger reception of Impressionism in America. At the heart of both essays lies the story of the struggles Phillips and the American Impressionists had first to overcome resistance to Impressionism and then to decide what “American” Impressionism truly meant. From the very beginning, Phillips boldly hung works such as Ernest Lawson’s Spring Night, Harlem River (above) next to works by Claude Monet, the quintessential Impressionist for most Americans at the time, intentionally inviting comparisons with a faith that the Americans could hold their own and that America deserved a place next to Europe in the world of art.

Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919), Afternoon by the Pond, Ca. 1908-1909; Oil on canvas, 25 1/8 x 30 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1921

After seeing the collections of the Corcoran Gallery and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, Phillips forged “an intensely self-conscious focus on the evolution of his collection in comparison… in the late teens,” Frank explains. Augustus Vincent Tack, a student of John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and William Merritt Chase, became an early mentor to Phillips as he developed his critical eye and fostered contacts within American Impressionist circles. Late, Weir himself befriended Phillips and challenged him to hang the works of Americans beside those of the great European Impressionists. Through Weir’s influence, Frank explains, Phillips sought “American artists who, he believed, expressed spiritual truth as well as visual truth” in the vein of early visionaries such as George Inness, in contrast to “the theatrical vision” of the Hudson River School. Weir himself fit this bill nicely, as can be seen in his Afternoon by the Pond (above), an intimate scene of nature full of the silent, contemplative spirituality Phillips came to favor.

John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), Summer, Late 1890s; Oil on canvas, 30 x 53 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1919

Another spiritual American Impressionist Phillips learned to love through Weir was Twachtman, whom Phillips always regretted never meeting himself. Works such as
Summer (above) inspired Phillips to say that in Twachtman “impressionism [had been] carried to the heights of spiritual expression.” “Few, if any, landscape painters were more sensitive or subtle,” Phillips wrote of Twachtman. Phillips passionately collected all the Twachtman paintings he could in the years before the opening of The Phillips Collection.

Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Washington Arch, Spring, Ca. 1893; Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 22 ½ in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1921

Sadly, Phillips relationship with Childe Hassam, the American Impressionist he ranked only behind Twachtman and Weir in greatness, was more stormy. Phillips continued to collect Hassam’s work, but never with the same enthusiasm as he brought to Twachtman and Weir’s art. In the late 1920s, Hassam and Phillips argued over the direction Phillips’ collection was taking, with Hassam denigrating Phillips' taste in art as “opinionated ignorance.” However, Phillips continued to value works such as Hassam’s Washington Arch, Spring (above), one of the highlights of The Phillips Collection and of all American Impressionism.

Allen Tucker (1866-1939), The Rise, Undated; Oil on canvas, 30 ½ x 36 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1927

With the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression in the United States, The Phillips Collection fell on hard times and the market for American Impressionism slumped. At the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, where the works of Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse first exploded on the American art scene, the conservative aspects of Impressionism made the movement seem a thing of the past. Phillips himself began to collect more modernist works. In retrospect, he realized that his collection of American Impressionists helped pave the way for these modern movements. Works such as The Rise (above) by Allen Tucker, once called “The American Van Gogh,” signaled a new period for Impressionism in America.

Today, American Impressionism has achieved a rebirth among art critics. After little interest during the 1940s and 1950s, several collections of solely American Impressionism rose in the 1960s. The long-overdue recognition of the achievement of Twachtman, Weir, and Hassam, as well as that of other American Impressionists such as Maurice Prendergast, Theodore Robinson, Edmund Tarbell, and many others, owes much to Duncan Phillips and his museum. The exhibit American Impressionism: Paintings from The Phillips Collection recaptures a landmark moment in American art and allows us to live it once again.

[Many thanks to The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue and the images from the exhibit.]

Faking It

When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

Wherefore he called to his wife, and fled to fashion his work anew –
The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review;
And he left his lore to the use of his sons -- and that was a glorious gain
When the Devil chuckled "Is it Art?" in the ear of the branded Cain.

From Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops

In his last completed movie, F for Fake, Orson Welles quotes from Kipling’s poem above with a twinkle in his eye. Ostensibly a documentary on the story of the great art forger Elmyr de Hory , who could forge a Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and many other modernist masters right before the cameras, Welles movie actually is a tone poem about the nature of art and artifice—how storytelling, whether it be in a book, painting, or movie, always involves a lie.

Peter Bogdanovich, in his introduction to the movie on the DVD, warns the viewer to not expect a linear storyline. Instead, Welles circles around the story, misdirecting you like any good conjurer while giving you enough substance to hold your attention until the final revelation. Serious issues of what truly constitutes art are embodied in the person of Elmyr, who becomes a sad anti-hero by movie’s end. When Elmyr’s works pass muster as true Picassos, etc., under the eye of the highest-ranked art critics, faith in the concept of expertise and “objective” judgments of quality are shattered. Although no names are named, Welles alludes the possibility that many paintings by Elmyr currently hang in prestigious collections around the world as “genuine” works by acknowledged masters. Does the fact that a painting is done by Elmyr rather than Modigliani make it any less beautiful? Welles leaves that question levitating in space for each of us to answer for ourselves.

When the biographer of Elmyr, Clifford Irving, himself becomes involved in a fake biography of Howard Hughes, Welles exalts in the intricate web of deception as the chronicler of a fraud becomes a fraud himself. Charlatanism spreads virally throughout the film, alluding back to Welles own fraud of the famous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938. All the way to the end, we hear Kipling’s Devil chuckle “Is it Art?”, knowing that each of us bear “the mark of Cain” that comes with any act of imagination.

Near the end of the film, Welles stands before Chartes Cathedral and in a magnificent monologue wonders at how such an achievement could have no signature, no famous name attached to it, and yet remain an inspiration. Chartes stands as a pure work of art, free of the taint of individual personality and the prejudices that signatures entail.

F for Fake deserves a place on the shelf and in the mind of anyone who loves thinking about art, about what constitutes art, and about what an artist truly achieves.

Eternal Vigilance

Rockwell Kent, American illustrator, author, and political activist, was born on this date in 1882. Kent’s illustrations for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in the 1920s helped in recovering that lost masterpiece for a new generation. Kent’s glorious image of the White Whale rising from the depths in Chapter CXXXIV, The Chase—Second Day, appears above.

Kent designed illustrations for such publications as Vanity Fair, Harper’s Weekly, and Life in the 1920s, earning a reputation as the Jazz-Age Hogarth. A believer in transcendentalist philosophy and a mystic, Kent traveled around the world and interacted with many different cultures. In 1937, the United States Postal Office hired Kent to paint a mural for their headquarters in Washington, DC. In that mural, Mail Service in the Tropics (above), Kent hid a political message encouraging Puerto Rican independence from the United States. (The message was written very small and in a dialect of Eskimo Inuit [which Kent had picked up during his travels in Alaska], so good luck finding it in the picture. I’d love to know how they found it. I’m picturing smirking Eskimos standing in front of the mural being asked “What’s so funny?”)

That political action and Kent’s membership in the Socialist, pro-Communist International Workers Order earned him the wrath of McCarthyism in the 1950s, which took a toll on his career and subsequent artistic reputation. I remember seeing a display of Kent’s work at the PMA years ago and wondering at the crisp lines and bold expressiveness of the figures, such as in his Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty above. I’ve always seen Kent’s figurative work as the most impressive expression of transcendentalist principles in visual art. I only wish he had illustrated more of the works of the 19th century American Renaissance.

Kent’s reputation has recovered some in the past few decades, as the madness of McCarthyism has been recognized for what it was. Ironically, in light of the Post Office mural fiasco, Kent received the honor of having his work appear a 34-cent postage stamp in 2001 (above) as part of a series honoring American Illustrators. As someone who has read every novel and most of the poetry Melville ever wrote, I’ll always appreciate the role Kent played in bringing that lost genius back to American culture.