Play On

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

—From Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Music and art have always coexisted as close “sister” arts. The non-rational aspects of each medium naturally go hand in hand. Although he had little technical knowledge of music or musical instruments, Pablo Picasso painted musicians and their instruments throughout his career. Born October 25, 1881, Picasso made gaffes such as incorrectly assembled instruments or instruments placed in the wrong hand, but he always seemed to get at the spirit of music with little problem. The Old Guitarist (above, from 1903), painted during Picasso’s deep depression known as the Blue Period, shows a blind beggar playing a guitar on a street corner for money. The blind man’s limbs seem to flow about the canvas like the lines of music he plays. You can almost here the somber tune the man plays on his guitar. Growing up in Barcelona, Picasso undoubtedly saw similar figures in their ragged clothing hoping to exchange their artistry for another moment of survival. Nothing in this picture approaches realism, but the mood and emotions conveyed are amazingly realistic, making you feel as if you were passing this man on a corner, fingering the coin in your pocket before you tossed it into his cup.

After Picasso moved past the depression of his Blue Period and the romantic elation of his Rose Period, he plunged himself into the intellectualism of Cubism. Picasso’s Violin and Guitar (above, from 1913) stands as just one of the many works in which Picasso takes musical instruments and explodes them in the Cubist style. Cubism’s disassembling masked Picasso’s inability or unwillingness to accurately depict such instruments. In contrast to The Old Guitarist, Picasso’s Violin and Guitar lacks any human element, both visually and emotionally. Picasso reportedly knew next to nothing about classical music and had no desire to learn, choosing instead to stick to the Spanish folk and street music of his youth. These Cubist musical instruments might be Picasso’s violent reaction to classical music, which he may have saw as just another component of the stale, establishment art world that his new art movement challenged. Aside from that cultural clash, I never get the sense that Picasso chooses violins or guitars for any other reason than that they offer interesting shapes with interiors asking to be exteriorized by Cubism.

After World War I, however, Picasso returns to the human side of music in Synthetic Cubist works such as Three Musicians (above, from 1921, the PMA version). I’ve always loved Three Musicians for its color and humor, especially in contrast to the dour browns of earlier Analytical Cubism. Here, both the instruments and the anatomy of the musicians are all wrong, yet the sense of performance is completely right. Picasso’s art is so rich and so varied across so many styles that his accomplishment is simply too large to take in all at once. Slicing into that oeuvre and looking at one sliver allows you to see in microcosm the macrocosm of Picasso’s imagination continually evolving, sometimes forward and sometimes back. The sadness of the Blue Period and The Old Guitarist disappears in Three Musicians, yet the experimentation of Cubism remains. Such never ending reinvention and pilfering literally from himself sets Picasso apart from the rest of modern art—a movement unto himself only momentarily aligning with others, if at all. In the final analysis, “if music be the food of love,” and life, Picasso calls “play on.”

Tears of a Clown

Every family has at least one elderly aunt who collects tchotches of some kind. I have one who collects clowns in all forms—painted plates, porcelain figurines, snow globes, you name it. If only she had something by Walt Kuhn, I could forgive her. Born October 27, 1877, Kuhn painted clowns and other circus performers repeatedly over the last eight years of his life in the 1940s, when mental instability and chronic ulcers plagued him. Kuhn reportedly obsessively attended circuses such as Ringling Brothers Circus, perhaps seeing something of himself in the faces of the performers. Fright Wig (above, from 1940) shows one of the clowns in an almost menacing way, totally devoid of laughter. Today, Kuhn is remembered more for his efforts to introduce modern European art to America than his own paintings, but works such as Fright Wig seem frightfully close to the best that German Expressionism offered decades before.

Along with Walter Pach and Arthur B. Davies, Kuhn helped organize the (in)famous 1913 Armory Show that gathered together somewhere in the vicinity of 1,250 works of art by more than 300 of the best European and American artists painting in Impressionist, Fauvist, Cubist, and other modern styles. Thanks to the Armory Show, figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse finally found a toehold on American shores and invaded the American art scene for good. Much of Kuhn’s art appears to be an attempt to respond to those artists—a reply in hopes of sneaking out of their huge shadows. In 1918, Kuhn traveled to the western part of the United States to paint a series of works he called An Imaginary History of the West. In The Longhorn Saloon (above, from 1918), Kuhn evokes the smoky atmosphere of the stereotypical Wild West barroom. You can almost hear the piano player in the background. The rough handling of the figures shows Kuhn’s debt to European modernism, but the subject matter illustrates how Kuhn sought to take those European models and make them unquestionably American.

All of Kuhn’s paintings of circus performers carry a sense of sadness you sense even if you don’t know anything about Kuhn’s mental state at the time. A work such as Roberto (above, from 1946) shows a typical clown in an atypical pose of weariness with the world. Looking at the starkness of Kuhn’s portraits of circus people, usually set against a plain backdrop, I think of German art again, not the Expressionists but instead the New Objectivity of artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Christian Schad. Like those German artists, Kuhn wanted to paint reality as he saw it—not just the surfaces of society but also the soul suffering underneath. Kuhn’s ability to render the fixed stare of his subjects into something both pleading and accusatory lends his portraits a deep psychological intensity. First mired in World War II and then caught up in the sad recognition of a world in which the Holocaust and Hiroshima are possible, Kuhn dealt with life through his art as best as he could. Like his clowns, however, Kuhn thinly disguised his inner turmoil through his art.

The Battle of Algiers

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

—From “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

Like so many French artists of the middle of the nineteenth century, Eugene Fromentin wanted to be Eugène Delacroix, especially the Delacroix who brought the exotic world of the Middle East and Northern Africa to France. Born October 24, 1820, Fromentin created images such as Falconry in Algeria—The Spoils (above, from 1863) that celebrated the color and adventure of Algiers, the French colony in North Africa that fired his imagination and drew him back multiple times for more material and inspiration. In Falconry in Algieria, Fromentin shows servants pulling a rabbit from the talons of the trained falcon as two riders, members of the noble class, look on. Fromentin painted the falcons and falconers of Algeria many times, fascinated with the drama of the hunt. By the time that Fromentin painted this scene, however, falconry had become a thing of the past, reserved for only the highest members of the aristocracy. Fromentin’s depiction of Algiers tries to resurrect a romantic past that France’s colonizing has destroyed, much like the falcon rending apart the rabbit in his claws.

Five years later after Falconry in Algiers, Fromentin painted Muleteers Stopped, Algiers (above, from 1868). Showing a pack of drably dressed locals against a drab, sandy landscape besotted with ruins, Fromentin paints an Algiers totally devoid of color and excitement. Delacroix’s sumptuous color and detail disappear from this painting. While other French artists exploited the public’s taste for the spectacular in Orientalist painting, Fromentin seems as weary of that inaccuracy as the muleteers shown here resting with their animals. France took Algiers as a colony by force in 1827. Just thirty years later, Fromentin seems to be saying that the long occupation was one huge mistake—an imperialist crime against both the people of Algiers and the people of France. The War of Algeria waged between 1954 and 1962, depicted so stirringly in the film The Battle of Algiers, finally ended France’s reign over Algeria a little over a century later.

In many ways, Fromentin saw himself as the new standard bearer of French painting, much like his Algerian Standard Bearer (above, from 1860-1865). The banner once held so high by earlier artists such as Delacroix and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres seems held just a little lower by Fromentin in these Algerian paintings. In addition to being a great painter, Fromentin wrote exceptionally well. Fromentin counted the novelist George Sand among his friends and admirers of both his painting and his writing. In his art history and criticism, Fromentin expressed his admiration for the Dutch painting, especially that of Rembrandt. In his Algerian paintings, Fromentin perhaps longed to capture the same innate humanity of his subjects as Rembrandt and other Dutch artists had captured in their countrymen. Making the imaginative leap across cultures, Fromentin stepped into the shoes of his subjects and restored the dignity that colonization had stripped from them.

Late Bloomer

“I was twenty-one before I saw a good picture,” Sir Matthew Smith once said of his insular upbringing in the shadow of his pious, businessman father. Born October 22, 1879, Smith eventually resisted his father’s attempts to place him in the world of business and, despite ill health, willed himself into the world of art. In 1908, Smith traveled to France to study at the Slade, the art school run by Henri Matisse. Although he most likely didn’t study directly with Matisse, Matisse influenced the entire curriculum of the school. Smith’s Dulcie (above, from 1915) shows how he took the style of Matisse in his Fauvist days and adapted it to his own uses. The connection with Matisse opened up doors to Smith that allowed him to exhibit with the likes of Matisse, Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, and Georges Rouault all before World War I erupted and forced Smith to return to England. Because of this influence of Matisse, Smith seemed “more French than English” upon his return, according to one contemporary, in terms of his handling of color to elicit emotion. Smith neatly smuggled Matisse across the Channel and overnight opened the eyes of his countrymen to the next big thing in painting.

Within a few years of returning to England, Smith found himself drafted into the war. He suffered shrapnel wounds in combat that taxed his already frail health, but the experience of war exacted a greater toll on his mind, beginning a cycle of creativity alternating with depression that would plague the rest of his life. Smith eventually established a London studio near that of Walter Sickert, whose (in)famous “Camden Town” nudes set the standard for the nude form in English painting in the early twentieth century. In Model Turning (above, from 1924), Smith slowly turns away from Matisse’s influence and turns toward a style closer to that of Sickert’s. The red skirt and blue and purple cushions hark back to Fauvism, but the instability of the figure itself generated by the roughness of the brushwork is pure Sickert. Actually, Smith exceeds even Sickert’s penchant for molding the figure in color like a sculpture rather than through line.

Smith continued to progress in a more Sickert-esque direction. In one of his many portraits of his friend and fellow painter Augustus John (above, from 1944), Smith handles the subject roughly. John referred to his portrait as “another hemorrhage for Matthew” in acknowledgment of the bloody, gory way Smith painted flesh even in the portraits of friends. As the pace of his cyclical depression increased, Smith’s view of life and humanity seemed to darken considerably. The young Francis Bacon admired Smith’s troubled style and patterned his own work after it. In many ways, Smith is the link between Sickert and Bacon, the two most important painters of the nude in English painting in the twentieth century. Smith’s evolution from Fauvism, one kind of beastliness, to the later brand of beastliness in his final works demonstrates how the late bloomer more than made up for lost time.

Island Hopping

Fleeing the turmoil of the 1917 Russian Revolution, David Burliuk, the “Father of Russian Futurism,” gathered together his family (above) and set his sights on the safety of the United States. Unable to emigrate directly to America, however, Burliuk first moved to Siberia and then to Japan. While in Japan, Burliuk exhibited his work to a Japanese audience that had never seen firsthand modern European painting or a modern painter such as Burliuk. Michael Craig and Copernicus Films examine this strange interlude in the artist’s exodus in the film David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde. Craig examines both Burliuk’s influence on the Japanese avant-garde as well as the influence of Japanese art and culture on Burliuk himself. Burliuk arrived in Japan just as that closed culture began to open itself up to the ideas of the West. For Japanese artists coming to grips with a world shifting beneath their feet, Burliuk provided an example of how to steady yourself and find a new place in an uncertain, new world.

Unlike Craig’s other films in his series on the Russian avant-garde, such as Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Avant-garde (reviewed here) and Architecture and the Russian Avant-garde (reviewed here), David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde leaves Russia and the Russian Revolution’s aftershocks behind for the relative calm of Japan. Burliuk found great success in Japan, beginning with his exhibition titled “The First Exhibition of Russian Painting in Japan.” A member of Japan’s imperial family came to the show and even bought one of Burliuk’s paintings. As Japan got to know Burliuk and Futurism, Burliuk engaged himself fully with the subtleties of Japanese culture and art. Burliuk’s cultural immersion results in almost Impressionistic works such as his Kyoto Temple (above) that departed radically from the more radical style his new Japanese audience knew him best for. Like so many European artists fascinated with Japonisme who incorporated that style into their art, Burliuk internalized the Japanese art surrounding him but even more so by seeing it fully in context and not through prints and paintings alone. The footage of modern day Japan in all its colorful vibrancy makes it clear just how powerful an effect it could have on the artistic imagination of someone as open to new experiences as Burliuk.

Of all the nineteenth century artists who adapted Japonisme to their art, Paul Gauguin inspired Burliuk the most. When Burliuk took his family to a vacation on the island of Ogasawara, the Japanese equivalent of Hawaii, Burliuk recreated the pilgrimage of Gauguin to Tahiti that freed Gauguin’s artistic soul. Burliuk traveled all over Ogasawara in search of beautiful vistas to paint (above). In addition, Burliuk learned Japanese by speaking with the local fishermen and came to appreciate their simple way of life. For me, the section showing the beauty of Ogasawara was the highlight of the film. Craig and company capture all the magic of that tropical paradise visually while the narration fully connects the love triangle formed between Burliuk, Gauguin, and Ogasawara. After painting on the island for several months, Burliuk returned to mainland Japan and exhibited his landscapes, which surprised and, sometimes, disappointed audiences expecting more Futurism from the touted “Father of Russian Futurism.” However, Craig calls this period in Burliuk’s career “a summing up of where he’d been” and “a step back to step forward.” Reenergized and refocused by his island idyll, Burliuk rediscoved the social purpose of his art in Japan just before leaving for America. As the Japanese translator of Burliuk’s writings notes in the film, Burliuk’s early books written in Russia seem heavily weighted with the gloom of political events, whereas the books written during his stay in Japan shine with a sunny view of the future. Titling one of those Japanese books “What Is Futurism? An Answer,” Burliuk seemed confident that answers did indeed exist in a rational world.

Japanese artists such as Tomoyoshi Murayama (shown above with his wife) and Kinoshita Shuichiro took Burliuk’s answers and tried to translate them into a language that could address their cultural concerns. Craig succinctly yet compellingly outlines the social situation of Japan between the wars as a nation with an identity crisis, caught between an ancient insular tradition and the pressing need to join the rest of the globe. Young Japanese artists following Burliuk’s example soon came into conflict with the established Japanese art world. Like the Russian avant-garde, the Japanese avant-garde viewed art as a means of social revolution and used technology as the means of combining commerce and art. The Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 that devastated Tokyo provided these young artists with an opportunity to remake the rebuilt city in a modern way to reflect the next stage of Japanese culture and society. Using archival footage, Craig and company recreate that moment in Japanese history when old and new clashed and avant-garde art stood at the center of it all.

To Western eyes, Asian art often seems a monolithic parade of ancient styles endlessly recycled. David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde reveals how the same concerns that rocked European societies also unsettled the Asian world. Burliuk’s travels allowed him to cross-pollinate the Japanese avant-garde with the earlier example of Russia’s progressive art movement. After Burliuk sparked Japanese artists into action, they set a raging bonfire of activity, including the Sanaka Exhibition (above) as well as forays into theater and dance that modernized the ancient traditions of Kabuki and Noh. A visually amazing film as well as a whirlwind tour through early Japanese modern art and the life of David Burliuk, David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde will set you off on your own voyage of discovery to learn more about this amazing crossing of paths.

[Many thanks to Michael Craig and Copernicus Films for providing me with a review copy of David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde and for the images from the film.]

Friendly Boy Walking Along in the Sun

When 2008 began, the short list for greatest living American artist usually included Andrew Wyeth, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg. Sadly, Rauschenberg left that list on May 12th at the age of 82. Born October 22, 1925, Rauschenberg, who preferred to be called “Bob,” once said, “"I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun." Such sunny optimism stood out amongst the angst-ridden Abstract Expressionists such as the self-destructive Jackson Pollock who were Rauschenberg’s 1950s contemporaries. "You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist," Bob later said. There’s a degree of playfulness and fun in works such as Rauschenberg’s Monogram (above, from 1955-1959), the “combine” consisting of a painted goat and a tire, that approximates the sense of joy in art that Marcel Duchamp tried to convey in his works better than the work of any other modern American artist. In many ways Monogram actually is Rauschenberg’s signature, with every inch stamped with his creativity and casual approach.

"I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out of the real world," Rauschenberg said around the time he presented his Bed (above, from 1955), literally his bed cover painted and mounted on a wall. For a major American artist, Rauschenberg had stunningly little skill as a painter or sculptor. Rauschenberg’s talent rested in his ability to take the very stuff of life and elevate it to the status of art like an alchemist transforming base metal into pure gold. You can’t even call Rauschenberg an “idea man,” because he didn’t work in abstract ideas as much as in practical production. From what I’ve read of him and the documentaries I’ve seen, Rauschenberg never stopped working, as if the impulse to create art were as essential to him as breathing. Such relentless creativity, of course, means you’re not going to be 100% successful, but that never deterred him. "Screwing things up is a virtue,” Rauschenberg responded to our perfectionist world. “Being correct is never the point. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” I don’t think I’ve ever read a better rationale for fearlessness not only in art but in all aspects of life.

It’s hard to think of an artist who was as diverse as Rauschenberg. From influencing avant-garde composer John Cage’s "silent" classical work 4'33" to creating a Grammy Award-winning album art for the Talking Heads' 1983 album Speaking in Tongues (above), Rauschenberg dabbled in music, theater, and anything else he could finagle his way into. The bizarre tennis game played in an increasingly darkened hall at the center of Rauschenberg’s collaboration with Billy Klüver titled Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) may be the finest Dada moment in American art, but even that moment seems tinged with a sense of failure or incompleteness. Rauschenberg’s reach often exceeded his grasp. Although he fully accepted his limitations, he still chose to ignore them. Andy Warhol gets a lot of credit for effecting a new mindset in art in his time, perhaps too much, but I believe that Bob Rauschenberg deserves some credit for trying to instigate a revolution in American art that never truly took hold. How different would American art look today (and perhaps all of American culture, from politics on down), if Rauschenberg’s “friendly boy” walking in the sunny light of optimism served as the model for a fearless pursuit of greater things.

Literal Minded

When N.C. Wyeth took an assignment to illustrate a book, he read the book intently from cover to cover. Born October 22, 1882, Wyeth searched in his reading for those scenes that the author had only barely described, taking those moments as his opportunity to stamp his own vision on the work. Wyeth illustrated 112 books, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (cover image above, from 1911). Unlike most illustrators, Wyeth painted large oil paintings that publishing companies reproduced on a smaller scale for the books. It was if Wyeth couldn’t bring himself to miniaturize the works of his imagination, even knowing they’d eventually be mass distributed that way. Born and raised in New England, Wyeth reveled in the region’s literary tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others. Wyeth’s literature-formed visual imagination made him the foremost illustrator of great, imaginative (too often what we call “children’s”) books of his time.

Wyeth left the comforts of New England in 1902 to study under Howard Pyle, often deemed the father of American illustration for teaching a whole generation of great illustrators. Pyle loved the legends of King Arthur and inflamed Wyeth’s interest in that subject. In 1922, Wyeth illustrated The Boy’s King Arthur (an illustration from which, above). "I am Sir Launcelot du Lake, King Ban's son of Benwick, and knight of the Round Table," Launcelot says to the swordsman before him in the scene Wyeth chooses to show the warrior bloodied but not beaten. Wyeth filled his Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania studio with costumes and props to place on models while painting such scenes. Wyeth’s children often borrowed those costumes and props and played knights, cowboys, Indians, and other characters in the woods surrounding their home. Nobody played pretend in the Wyeth family like the sickly son, Andrew.

N.C. Wyeth’s greatest legacy in the history of art may be his children and grandchildren. Andrew has earned a place in the upper tier of American painters of the twentieth century. Jamie Wyeth, N.C.’s grandson, stands among the great painters of his time. Even Wyeth’s daughters find a place among the superior female painters of their era. Perhaps my favorite N.C. painting is his work In a Dream I Met General Washington (above, from 1930). N.C. paints himself painting a mural of George Washington leading his troops when the mural suddenly comes to life and addresses the artist. It’s a beautiful depiction of just how immediate and alive such scenes could be for N.C. Even more touching is how N.C. places his young, 13-year-old son Andrew in the corner of the painting, sketching the dream sequence playing out before him. In this painting we see the past playing out before N.C., the artist of the present, as Andrew, the artist of the future, picks up the torch passed on to him by his father. Sadly, N.C. always denied the greatness of his illustrations. "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other,” Wyeth lamented. In the few years before his accidental death in 1945, N.C. tried to find a new, non-illustration style of easel painting, but never could recapture the verve of his illustration work. Although N.C. Wyeth denied the fine art value of his illustrations, there’s no denying the beauty and imaginativeness of them today.