Self-Operating Cartoonist

Rube Goldberg, father of the Rube Goldberg Machine cartoon, such as the Self-Operating Napkin (above), was born on the Fourth of July, 1883. Goldberg mastered nearly every style of cartooning there is and his inventions have entered the English language as a synonym for overly complicated solutions to simple problems.

Goldberg defined “prolific” during his cartooning career, writing several strips for several papers for decades. In 1938, Goldberg turned his hand to political cartooning. His Peace Today cartoon (above), placing a typical house on a nuclear bomb teetering on the brink of world destruction, won him the Pulitzer Prize for Political Cartooning in 1948. Looking back, it’s amazing that Goldberg could feel moved to make such a statement so shortly after World War II, when America was still basking in the glow of its atomic-powered victory over Japan. Such prescience is lost in the more popular image of Goldberg as the clownish creator of madcap machines.

Goldberg’s machines hint at the Surrealist and Pataphysical in many ways, hinting at a sophistication and awareness of modern art movements that his moniker “Rube” belies. Near the end of his life, well past the age of 80, Goldberg put down his pen and became a sculptor, realizing some of his famous machines in three dimensions. Rube Goldberg is one of the unjustly degraded artists of American history because of his chosen field of cartooning. If only he were still around, he’d be able to construct the machine that could right that wrong, too.

Student and Teacher

“Paint like Velazquez! Paint like Velazquez!” extolled Carolus-Duran, the great French portraitist and teacher of John Singer Sargent. Born on July 4, 1837 as Charles Auguste Emile Durand, Carolus-Duran had a lasting influence on Sargent, who attended his atelier from 1874 through 1878 and painted the Velazquez-esque portrait above of his teacher in 1879. Sargent was obviously listening.



Carolus-Duran earned a rakish reputation during his days in Paris, growing nearly as famous for his good looks as for his painting skills and talent as a teacher. He demonstrated an early willingness to accept foreign students in the tough world of the Paris art schools, to the benefit of Americans such as Sargent and Theodore Robinson, who studied briefly under Carolus-Duran before embracing Impressionism and meeting Claude Monet. Working directly on the canvas, with no preparatory drawings or underpainting, Carolus-Duran promoted a bold, fresh style of painting in tune with the philosophy of the Impressionists if not with their subject matter or style. In works such as his Danae (above), you can see the brilliant attention to detail and careful brushstrokes, as well as the sexual freedom in the air of late 19th century Paris.


But Carolus-Duran’s claim to fame during his lifetime was the society portrait. As seen in The Merrymakers (above), Carolus-Duran could paint textures and surfaces with such a fidelity that Sargent must have learned some of his tricks from the master. Carolus-Duran recognized Sargent’s talent early, inviting him and only two other students on a special painting trip in 1875 to Nice, France. The shadow under the knife at the edge of the table is one of those little details that go unnoticed but are as much a signature of mastery as the name written in the corner. Carolus-Duran’s paintings are little known today, but his contribution to the education of Sargent alone earns him a place in the halls of art history.

Pursuing Happiness

A Happy and Safe Independence Day on this Fourth of July to all my fellow Americans! I’ll be taking the time to spend barbequing with family and friends on the deck. Growing up in Philadelphia, living through the Bicentennial hoopla of 1976, working near the historic section and Independence Hall all my adult life, and just being an overall history nerd, I’ve always come to see these 4th of July celebrations as more than just fireworks and hotdogs. Like Jasper Johns’ Flag (above), the birth of America is a much more nuanced and textured reality than the smooth image of the history text books. Today’s political realities just add to the shadows, but today is a day to celebrate Jefferson et al.’s audacious experiment of American democracy and to live out the words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Fanfare for a Common Man

John Singleton Copley, one of the greatest artists of Colonial period America and the finest portraitist of pre-Revolutionary Boston, was born on this date in 1738. With portraits such as that of Paul Revere above, Copley brought the same grandeur and prestige to middle class merchants in the colonies as other portraitists had brought to the crowned heads of Europe.

Revere, famous subject of Longfellow’s “Midnight Ride,” holds one of his silver crafts in his hand in Copley’s portrait, part of the artist’s technique to replace the trappings of power in the portraits of royalty and create a new social dynamic in America through the portrait. Young America’s identity as a democratic society composed of individuals who rose on their merits rather than their lineage owes much to Copley’s portraits of men such as Revere, Samuel Adams, and many others.

Copley’s most dramatic painting, Watson and the Shark (above),[*] tells the story of Brook Watson, who survived a vicious shark attack in 1749 and rose to become Mayor of London. Watson, an orphan at a young age, lost his right leg below the knee to a shark while swimming in the waters off of Havana, Cuba—one of the first fully documented accounts of a shark attacking a human. Copley avoids a graphic depiction of Watson’s wounds by having the right leg trail off in the watery depths. Amazingly, considering the medicine of the time, Watson survived and thrived. Watson commissioned the painting from Copley so that it could be hung in a hospital as an example to youth that any disadvantage can be overcome with enough determination. Copley’s depictions of Watson and Revere both celebrate the power of the individual not only to overcome any obstacle but also to inspire others to rise themselves.

([*] It would be unkind to point out in the middle of Copley’s and Watson’s inspirational moment just how bad the depiction of the shark in Watson and the Shark is. Copley obviously never saw a live shark, but most likely only preserved jaws. His shark not only has forward-facing eyes, but also rather prominent lips. Nonetheless, the drama of the painting, including the poses of all those on the boat frantically trying to save Watson, more than makes up for the unfortunate shark. Cue the “Theme from Jaws” here, just in time for beach season.)

Really Old School

Johann Friedrich Overbeck, German Romantic painter and perhaps the finest of the Nazarene Movement, was born on this date in 1789. Overbeck and the Nazarenes hoped to resurrect a sense of spirituality and honesty in religious art, which they felt had become sensationalized as part of the Neoclassicist strain of Romantic art. His simple and spare Christ Resurrects the Daughter of Jairu appears above.

The Nazarenes saw the influence of Jacques-Louis David and the other Neoclassicist painters of the Romantic era as tainting religious art. To escape the worldliness of that type of art, Overbeck and other painters formed the Brotherhood of St. Luke in Vienna in 1809. In 1810, Overbeck and the three remaining members of the Brotherhood moved to Rome to live in an abandoned monastery, where they lived a near-monastic existence in hopes of recreating the conditions of the workshops of the Middle Ages, whose honest, spiritual religious art they tried to emulate. The name Nazarenes actually refers to their practice of wearing “biblical-style” clothing and hairstyles and was originally a derisive name.



Overbeck and the Nazarenes lived their artistic and spiritual philosophy to the utmost. In The Triumph of Religion in Art (above), Overbeck literally enthrones religion over art, believing that the only true purpose of art was to work to the greater glory of God. Even among the devout Nazarenes, Overbeck was noted for his piety. Although Overbeck’s style tends towards a dryness and somberness that makes it less than popular today, his philosophy of honesty and simplicity and a return to Medieval practices in art presages the goals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England in Victorian times and stands as one of the earliest truly avant garde art movements. Overbeck still stands today as perhaps the last of the true believers.

War and Remembrance

Sir Stanley Spencer, British painter of both World War I and II, was born on June 30, 1891. Spencer’s painting from the First World War, Travoys Arriving, with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, appears above. The combination of modernist and primitive techniques Spencer made his own led to such unusual perspectives as this bird’s eye view of wounded men on stretchers, a sight Spencer knew firsthand from his own service in the British Army in World War I.

The British government asked Spencer to be a War Artist during World War II, since he was too old to serve in the military. One of the eight panels of his Shipbuilding on the Clyde (above) shows welders working on the metal plates of a battleship. In addition to being a patriotic scene of the home front war effort, Spencer’s painting shows the influence of Piero della Francesca and the Italian “primitive” approach. Piero’s unique use of architecture and composition (taken in an absurdist direction by artists such as de Chirico) becomes in Spencer’s hands a re-visioning of the battleship as modern cathedral. Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the two most influential British critics of Spencer’s formative years, helped revive the reputation of Piero and the Italian “primitives” and clearly influenced Spencer’s work.

Another artist championed by Fry was Gauguin, whose spirituality refashioned in Tahitian garb freed Spencer to refashion his own devout Christianity. In The Resurrection, Cookham (above), Spencer speculates as to the events of the second coming in his own home town of Cookham, England. The simple people of his home town burst from their graves, similar to the scenes of Renaissance art, but surrounded by the homely accoutrements of 20th century small-town England rather than some fictional plain. Spencer received a knighthood for his paintings for his country, which not only documented the suffering of war but also pointed towards a brighter future, in the next world if not this one.

Rat Pack Art Criticism

I recently made the wonderful little discovery of this song from a 1955 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie titled Artists and Models:

You can trace the mystery
Of ancient history

Through art of artists and their models

You can comb through the Rome colosseum

And the rear of your nearest museum

There's the Mona Lisa,
The Tower of Pisa

A cowhand's daughter out in Texas

And there's modern art to see

That makes you wonder

What the heck it’s meant to be

On the streets of Murmark
There's a fancy kind of art
That is strictly for the tourists from the sticks

And those wise Greenwich guys
Really open up your eyes
Painting portraits of their pretty little chicks

So to each creator and imitator
Who daubs and dabbles with the brushes

To the guys that draw their bunnies
Or the Sunday morning funnies

And brighten up the world today

And to every girl that poses
To every Grandma Moses

We like to tip the old beret

Martin plays a struggling comic book artist and Lewis plays a children’s book writer obsessed with comic books. The movie also stars Shirley MacLaine as Bessie Sparrowbush, a model for a comic book heroine called Bat Lady. The director Frank Tashlin wrote comics himself in the 1940s and apparently includes plenty of comic-related gags as well as some social commentary about the censorship issues of the 1950s surrounding the The Seduction of the Innocent controversy and resulting Comics Code. Pop Art also gets the treatment. (Some great stills from the movie are here.)

I’m not usually a Martin-Lewis fan, but this looks like one to check out, at least once Netflix starts carrying it.