Master of the Sky

“You are the master of the sky!” Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot once said to Eugene Boudin, born on July 12, 1824. Master of both sky and sea, having once been a seaman, Boudin broke new ground and was among the first French landscapists to paint en plein air. Beach Scene at Trouville (above) demonstrates Boudin’s dominion as well as his early proto-Impressionist technique.

Boudin worked at a small art shop run by his father, who gave up the sea-going life early. Working in the shop, Boudin met artists such as Jean-Francoise Millet and the Dutchman Johan Jongkind, who encouraged Boudin to take his painting outdoors. In 1857, the 33-year-old Boudin met the 17-year-old Claude Monet, the beginning of a life-long friendship. Monet later exhibited in Boudin’s shop and acknowledged his debt to Boudin. In 1859, Boudin met Gustave Courbet, who thought enough of his work to introduce Boudin to Charles Baudelaire, whose reviews of Boudin’s work helped him find an audience. Despite his connection to Monet and even exhibiting with the Impressionists, Boudin resisted the Impressionist label. Even today, he’s seen more as a maritime painter thanks to works such as Trouville, Awaiting the Tide (above).

As Pissarro was to Cezanne and other artists, Boudin was to the young Monet—helpful mentor, generous friend, and gentle teacher. In the standard history of Impressionism, Monet and Cezanne seem to come out of nowhere. It doesn’t belittle their genius to say that even they stood on the shoulders of others who may not themselves have been giants, but who certainly deserve remembrance.

Conquest of the Philosopher

Founder of the Scuola Metafisica or metaphysical school of art, Giorgio de Chirico was born on this date, July 10th, in 1888. de Chirico read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in his youth and translated those philosophical musings into works such as The Conquest of the Philosopher (above). In the unpopulated, dreamlike cityscapes of de Chirico’s finest work we see the beginnings of Surrealism.



Later Surrealists such as Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and Rene Magritte all pointed to de Chirico as an influence. Like his Nostalgia for the Infinite (above), the Greek-Italian de Chirico towered over all the other proto-Surrealists and really shaped the metaphysical, philosophical, and absurdist flavor of that school. de Chirico’s flair for great titles also influenced his Surrealist descendants. I’ve always thought that half of the appeal of de Chirico’s art rested in the titles themselves.


The Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni modeled much of his film style after de Chirico’s paintings. Antonioni had many de Chirico-esque landscapes to choose from amidst the devestation of post-World War II Europe. In that respect, de Chirico seems almost prophetic, “seeing” the post-apocalyptic landscape of wreck and ruin decades before it became a reality. Antonioni almost captures the same sense of mystery and menace in films such as L’aventurra, in which a couple searches for a lost friend on a weirdly unpopulated island and eventually lose their way and forget their quest. de Chirico style translated so well to film that you could say that he and all the other Surrealists fathered the postwar art house film style in Italy and many other European countries. de Chirico’s work is the stuff of Fellini-esque dreams, decades before Fellini even dreamt them.

Making a Splash

David Hockney turned 70 years young yesterday, July 9th. Hockney’s unique brand of Pop Art has made him one of Britain’s most successful artists of the 20th century. The English Hockney found perhaps his finest subject in the bright sunshine of California in such works as A Bigger Splash (above). The areas of flat color as well as the amazing depiction of the effect of displaced water testify to how justified Hockney’s own “big splash” on the artworld has been.




I’ve always loved how Hockney paints the effect of light and rippling pool water on the shimmering surface of an in-ground pool, such as in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (above). The combination of realism and abstraction just mesmerizes me. This unconventional portrait typifies the unconventional nature of Hockney, whose appearance over the years has transformed into something approaching late Andy Warhol, minus the wig. Hockney, too, seems mesmerized by the rippling water, perhaps to symbolize the self-awareness that often engulfs his art.


Hockney’s self-awareness as an artist often translates into direct confrontations with art history. In The Student Homage to Picasso (above), Hockney not only comes face to face with Pablo Picasso but in doing so places him on a pedestal, acknowledging his debt to the master. The recent exhibit The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso discusses Hockney’s engagement with the example of Picasso in the field of portraiture. Conversely, Hockney tried to knock Caravaggio and many other Old Masters off their pedestals in his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. In Secret Knowledge, Hockney advances the idea that artists such as Caravaggio used devices such as the camera obscura to project images on a canvas to make their stunning photorealist effects possible. Although many have come to the defense of the Old Masters and refuted Hockney’s claims, I confess to be an agnostic about the matter. Even if Caravaggio used such devices, they couldn’t possibly be totally responsible for his masterpieces. They couldn’t have made it that easy, or else everyone would have been Caravaggio. I remember when the PMA’s exhibit on Thomas Eakins years ago touched on his use of photography and projection onto canvas. Some critics presented this use as a form of cheating, which bothered me initially, until I overcame the prejudice about cameras as painting tools and accepted them as just another means by which art is made. To me, Hockney’s theory is interesting from a technical standpoint but moot in terms of whether works using such aids are art or not.

To Only Connect

“People from the bourgeoisie were entirely without charm for me,” Kathe Kollwitz said in her 1941 memoirs. “On the other hand, the proletariat had great style… I simply found it beautiful. As Zola or someone said, ‘The beautiful is the ugly.’” Kathe Kollwitz found beauty and dignity in the common person suffering and struggling through life and portrayed it with a power and resonance like few others. In Outbreak (above), part of the Peasants’ War series, “Black Anna” leads a charge of peasants against their oppressors. Kollwitz shapes the bodies of the oppressed into an arrowhead striking against tyranny. By showing “Black Anna” from the back, Kollwitz stresses the facelessness of the downtrodden’s struggle, which transcends place and time.



Fellow artist Max Klinger taught Kollwitz early on the power of black and white to convey ideas, free of the noise of color. They shared a faith in the power of graphic art to convey ideas and emotions, such as in her Woman With Dead Child (above). Rejecting the more progressive art styles of the twentieth century, Kollwitz embraced a simple style of powerful draftsmanship, believing that modern art had lost its common touch. “To be sure, Genius can run ahead and seek out new paths,” she wrote in her diary in 1916, “good artists, however, who come after genius—and I count myself among these—have to create again the connection that has been lost.” Kollwitz’s humility downplayed her own special genius to stir emotions and transcend barriers of language and culture. Any parent seeing this image immediately connects with the feeling of losing a child. Peter, Kollwitz’s youngest son and the model for this drawing, died in the opening days of World War I in Flanders.



Peter’s death mobilized Kollwitz’s social consciousness. In images such as The Volunteers (above), which shows death beating the drums of war and leading young men off to die, Kollwitz spoke eloquently of the siren song of war as well as the need for peace. Sadly, Kollwitz’s grandson, also named Peter, volunteered for World War II and died in 1942, repeating the same grim cycle of her own son years before. She struggled under the oppression of the Third Reich and received the label of “degenerate art” despite her great stature in German culture. Kollwitz died in 1945 at the age of 77, a scant eight days before Adolf Hitler found his own “final solution” in his infamous bunker beneath Berlin.


“I am in fact not at all revolutionary, but rather evolutionary,” Kollwitz wrote in her diary in 1920, expressing her wariness of any ideology and her faith in the goodness of the common people. “I am horrified and shaken by all the hatred in the world, I long for the kind of socialism that lets people live, and find that the earth has seen enough of murder, lies, misery, distortion. In short, of all these devilish things. The communist state that builds on that cannot be God’s work.” Kollwitz indeed performed “God’s work” in her art, depicting the oppressed and never the oppressor, raising empathy and compassion to an ideal above all others. The revealing self portraits she left behind, such as the one above, show a face that knows grief and knows how to communicate that knowledge. I’ve always felt that Kollwitz’s work exemplifies the spirit of the Beatitudes like few others: merciful, pure of heart, hungering and thirsting for justice, peacemaker.

The Color of Love

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art,” Marc Chagall once wrote. “It is the color of love.” Chagall, born on July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Belarus, beautifully painted the colors of love in images such as The Birthday (above) throughout the 97 years of his event-filled life. Few painters capture the magic and color of love like Chagall.

Despite the turmoil of his life, essentially the turmoil of twentieth century Europe, Chagall never lost touch with his Russian and Jewish roots, even in Paris and later in America. Hoping for a better future, Chagall aided the Russian Revolution of 1917 and even became the Soviet Ministry of Culture’s Commissar of Art for his region. When that hope went unfulfilled, Chagall fled back to Paris until the Nazi occupation during World War II. Thanks to Varian Fry, Chagall and his wife made it safely to America. Chagall kept his village memories in his heart everywhere he traveled. Images of cows, chickens, horses, simple villagers, and their plain houses populate Chagall’s imagery, including I and the Village (above), and comprise the main elements of his personal mythology, symbolizing the fertility, joy, and hope of his childhood memories, which grew into his adult ideals. “We all know that a good person can be a bad artist,” Chagall once said. “But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good man.” Equating great painting with great humanity (Caravaggio notwithstanding), Chagall links inseparably his beliefs in the power of art and the goodness of people.


In The White Crucifixion (above), Chagall co-opts Christian imagery to convey the larger human issues of suffering and pain, perhaps at the hands of Soviet and Nazi fascism. Some critics see Chagall commenting on the Holocaust here, but I see Chagall more as a painter of generalities than specifics. I’ve always viewed Chagall’s painted ideas to be as broad and as universal as the appeal of his colors and symbols. What star-eyed lover hasn’t imagined craning his neck magically for a birthday kiss as in The Birthday? Chagall stretches the boundaries of reality to reach the fundamentals of life: faith, family, and love.

Long Live Life

Today marks the 100th birthday of Frida Kahlo, one of the most original painters of the 20th century and perhaps the greatest female self-portraitist ever. Eight days before her death in 1954, Kahlo finished the painting above by writing the words Viva La Vida (or “Long Live Life” in English) on the center watermelon. Even in the midst of her pain, Kahlo could find some reserve of joy in life and express it through her art in full, abundant color.

Anyone who has seen the magnificent Salma Hayek film of Kahlo’s life is familiar with the details of her life. The child of a German father of Hungarian Jewish descent and a devout Catholic mother of Mexican-Spanish-Native American ancestry, Frida contracted polio at the age of six, beginning a life-long affair with agony that peaked at the age of 18, when she was involved in an accident between the bus she was riding on and a trolley car. Frida suffered a broken spine, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis; a fractured and dislocated foot; a dislocated shoulder; and the piercing of her abdomen and uterus by one of the bus’ iron handrails. In The Broken Column (above), Frida depicts with brutal honesty the depths of her agony. The thirty-five surgeries she underwent during her life did little to relieve her pain.

Even the love of her life, Diego Rivera, became a source of pain for Frida. Their dual portrait above shows them in happier times, before Rivera’s philandering became too much for their relationship to endure. Frida suffered multiple miscarriages during their marriage, due mainly to her injuries years before. Kahlo, too, had affairs during their marriage, with both men and women, most famously with the Russian Communist Leon Trotsky.

In Self Portrait With Cropped Hair (above), Kahlo assumes the clothes and hairstyle of a man, perhaps acknowledging her bisexuality. Kahlo definitely played with the concept of gender roles and identity in many of her portraits, which I’ve always seen as the strongest aspect of her oeuvre. Life in all its many facets, its heights and depths, was a laboratory on which her imagination continually experimented. Three days before her death, Kahlo writes in her diary, “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.” Rumors persist that she may have ended her own life (understandable in light of her pain), but nothing can end her presence in the world of art. We can only hope her end was joyful, just as we can only hope that she never truly leaves.

[I was very excited to see that the PMA has scheduled an exhibit of Kahlo’s work for February 2008 to celebrate this centennial. The accompanying catalogue will feature work by Hayden Herrera, whose biography of Kahlo remains the cornerstone of any research into Frida. The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico plans to stage the greatest exhibit of Kahlo’s art ever assembled this year.]

Politics as Art

Art Historian Crispin Sartwell profiles the unusual and perhaps artful political campaigning of Democratic Presidential candidate Mike Gravel (above) in the July 5th issue of The Los Angeles Times. Unknown to most Americans, Gravel’s campaign hopes to create a splash, or at least a tiny ripple, with their unconventional video advertisements on YouTube.

Mike Gravel served as a Democratic Senator from Alaska from 1969 to 1981. Gravel staged a one-man filibuster in 1971 that eventually forced the Nixon Administration to end the military draft in the United States, effectively ending the Vietnam War. He further endeared himself to the Nixonistas by reading The Pentagon Papers, documents revealing many illegal activities deepening American involvement in the Vietnam War, into the congressional record and thus making them available to the public in 1971. No stranger to controversy, Gravel dives into today’s political fray with an equally interesting and artistic statement.

In one Gravel2008 YouTube advertisement, Gravel stands before a pond and stares into the lens of the camera for over one minute before turning, picking up a rock, flinging the rock into the pond, and finally walking away, never speaking a word. In another, Gravel silently gathers wood and starts a fire, which the camera lingers on for 7 more minutes. In such images, Sartwell says, Gravel has “taken the pabulum and kitsch that is our political art and transcended it—swept it up, summarized it and broken through it into a new range of possibilities. Mike Gravel is to political advertising what Ralph Waldo Emerson is to the essay, Walt Whitman to poetry, Jackson Pollock to painting, 50 Cent to bullet wounds. He is the avant garde of the new artpolitical era.” High praise, indeed.

But seriously, there should be a place for such advertising to impact on the political and aesthetic consciousness of the average American. Gravel’s videos are as much political statements as political and aesthetic correctives. Americans receive such a battering of visual information (and disinformation) daily that such silent, nuanced presentations, leaving so many blanks to be filled in, so much room for interpretation and (*gasp*) critical thinking, that the most common responses are bafflement, angry derision, or (as I believe in Sartwell’s case) gentle mockery of a Don Quixote tilting at modern windmills.

I see Gravel’s ads as a needed troubling of the waters, hopefully creating a ripple effect that will gain momentum as it widens, or as that vital spark necessary to inflame Americans to re-stoke the fires of liberty. Of course, that’s just my interpretation, but that’s the appeal of Gravel’s video art—it makes you think, like all true art should. Unlike so many political ads that tell you what to think, Gravel’s ads actually ask you to think for yourself. Gravel clearly has little chance of winning the nomination or even coming close, which makes his campaign even more interesting and these ads even more inspiring. Here are political ads that aren’t for the candidate. They’re for the people.