Cleaning the Slate

William Glackens, A Headache in Every Glass, 1903–1904, Charcoal and watercolor heightened with white gouache on cream wove paper, 13 1/4 x 19 1/2 in. (33.7 x 49.5 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.170

“We’ve come together because we’re so unlike,” wrote Robert Henri in a May 1907 press release for the Macbeth Galleries show in February 1908 that would forever link him and the other seven artists in that show as The Eight. Later, thanks to the socially conscious work of some of those artists, The Eight became known under the less-glamorous label of The Ashcan School. Certainly works such as William Glackens’ A Headache in Every Glass (above, 1903-1904) left a strong impression, creating new headaches for a group too diverse for any label beyond a simple number. For almost a century now, the label of Ashcan has been hard to rip away. In The Eight and American Modernisms, Elizabeth Kennedy of the Terra Foundation for American Art tries to pull The Eight from the ashes of art history and clean up not only their reputation but blow the dust off of the lasting effect those artists had on American Modern art in the years after the 1913 Armory Show that allegedly tolled the death knell for The Eight as an influential force for American art. If conventional art history etched a tombstone for The Eight, the years would read “1908-1913.” “This exaggeration of the rapid ascendancy and demise of The Eight’s contribution to a nascent American avant-garde obscures a far more complex tale,” Kennedy writes in her introductory essay, “for each artist experienced a successful professional journey that defies group labeling, with its implication of a single unifying ideology or a static artistic outlook.” The Eight and American Modernisms raises The Eight from the grave and confirms that reports of their early demise were greatly exaggerated.

Robert Henri, Figure in Motion, 1913, Oil on canvas, 77 1/4 x 37 1/4 in. (196.2 x 94.6 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.69

From the moment you look at the cover of The Eight and American Modernisms and behold Henri’s 1916 Betalo Nude, you know that this isn’t your father’s (or grandfather’s) idea of The Eight. The grime of gritty realism gives way to the symphony of tones and color in that nude, just one of the many nudes that The Eight painted during their heyday and long afterwards. As both artists and teachers, Henri and John Sloan were especially “dedicated to the representation of the human figure as the vehicle for portraying their expressive ideas,” writes Kennedy. Henri’s 1913 Figure in Motion (above), painted the same year that Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 wowed crowds at The Armory Show, responds to European Modernism without slavishly following it. “Experimental painting of the nude model in the studio was one of the theoretical strategies that some of The Eight continued late into their careers,” Kennedy explains, but never at the expense of losing their own personal vision. “It is necessary to pierce the core, to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensation exterior,” Henri said of his reaction to new art movements. It is this “dedication to individualism in art, writing, and teaching” on Henri’s part that “fostered American modernism” argues Sarah Vure in her essay on Henri.

George Luks, Knitting for the Soldiers: High Bridge Park, c. 1918, Oil on canvas 30 3/16 x 36 1/8 in. (76.7 x 91.8 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.87

Kennedy and her cohorts do their best to individualize each of The Eight and allow them to stand alone rather than force them to stand together. Perhaps none of these individuals was so “individual” as George Luks. “Sometimes you wonder over his versatility,” a New York art critic wrote of Luks in 1920, “a character actor, a low comedian, even song-and-dance man, a poet, a profound sympathizer with human misery, and a human orchestra.” In her essay on Luks, Judith Hansen O’Toole links Luks with Henri, calling both “passionate humanitarians seeking to forge a new artistic expression that was truly American and of their own time.” Luks’ Knitting for the Soldiers: High Bridge Park (above, c. 1918) brings the World War I home front home while portraying “realism” with color and vibrant style. Such paintings by Luks, who resisted the “social realist” label for himself, laid the groundwork for the social commentators of the 1920s and 1930s. Luks painted portraits of coal miners not only because they struck him as interesting subjects, but because they reminded him of the miners he’d known during his childhood in Pennsylvania coal country. “Making art was their life,” Kennedy writes of The Eight in her introduction, “not merely the practice of their profession.” Luks lived and painted with passion and was found dead at 67 in the doorway of a speakeasy in 1933 after losing in a brawl. Each of the essayists in The Eight and American Modernisms beautifully breathes life into their subject and integrates living and painting to the point that they become one again.

Ernest Lawson, Brooklyn Bridge, 1917–20, Oil on canvas, 20 3/8 x 24 in. (51.8 x 61.0 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.43


After reading these essays, you come away with a sense of The Eight as a truly pivotal group in the trajectory of American art history—the link that connects the past with the future. Trained by American Impressionists John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir, Ernest Lawson brought Impressionism to the big city. Essayist Jochan Wierich sees Lawson as the heir to the American Romantic tradition of the Hudson River School as much as an heir of European Impressionists. “Lawson demonstrated to his contemporaries how the art of landscape could survive and refashion itself as an expression of modern life,” Wierich writes, in works such as Brooklyn Bridge (above, from 1917-1920), which “combine pastoral tradition with urban reality.” The grit and grime of the Ashcan School label disappears in such transcendent and transformative works. Lawson builds a bridge between Thomas Cole and Edward Hopper that continues a tradition without chaining any one artist to a single style. Both conservator and innovator of the American tradition in art, Lawson and the rest of The Eight retained the elusively definable “Americanism” of art without closing eyes to possibilities from abroad.

Maurice Prendergast, St. Malo, after 1907, Watercolor and graphite on paper, 15 1/8 x 22 in. (38.4 x 55.9 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.121

In her essay specifically on Maurice Prendergast, Kennedy uses the greatest exception to ideas of The Eight to “prove the rule” of their uncategorizable diversity. Prendergast stood as the “only member of The Eight whose reputation grew more favorable in [The Armory Show’s] immediate aftermath,” Kennedy explains. Suddenly, oddball works such as St. Malo (above, from after 1907) seemed not so odd in the context of Post-Impressionism. Sadly, it took the affirmation of artists from overseas to free viewers to accept Prendergast’s unusual style. The Eight and American Modernisms looks to free viewers to accept these artists as individuals and then, again, as a group of artists united in the same goal of furthering American art and contributing to American society in their own diverging ways. “The Eight’s simultaneous recognition of non-representational art as a valid expression of contemporary art styles while refusing to embrace the authority of abstract art as the only ‘true’ vehicle for modernity encouraged other American artists to insist on the integrity of their own creative ideas,” Kennedy concludes. In other words, The Eight accepted other artists on their own terms and asked for nothing less for themselves. The failure of that courtesy costs us a clear picture of how vital these artists and their philosophy was to the beginnings of modern art in America. The Eight and American Modernisms rescues The Eight from the ignoble dustbin of art history and washes away the smear of Ashcan School for good.


[Many thanks to The University of Chicago Press for providing me with a review copy of The Eight and American Modernisms and to the Terra Foundation for American Art for the images from the catalogue above.]

Fat Bottomed Girls

Oh, you gonna take me home tonight?
Oh, down beside that red firelight?
Are you gonna let it all hang out?
Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go round.

—From “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen

Beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder, especially ideals of female beauty, which vary by culture and era. These ideals of the past appear in the works of artists throughout time. The seventeenth-century in Europe must have been the era of the fat-bottomed girl judging by the works of Peter Paul Rubens, whose voluptuous vixens live on in the modern-day adjective “Rubenesque.” Born June 28, 1577, Rubens always had an eye for a girl with some meat on her bones. In Venus at a Mirror (above, from 1615), a decidedly non-waifish goddess admires her plump face in a mirror while presenting her broad back and ample rear to the viewer. A black woman attends to Venus on the right, a familiar trope of portraits examining beauty personified that Edouard Manet riffs on in the black handmaiden of Olympia. Sadly, the contrast between the black woman and the white goddess reflects the racism of the period, which could only find beauty in European tones. In modern day Hollywood, where slender Kate Winslet is seen as “Rubenesque,” Rubens’ Venus would be judged enormous, maybe even obese.

In the 1620s, Marie de' Medici, the queen-mother of France, commissioned Rubens to paint two allegorical cycles now known as the Marie de' Medici cycle to commemorate her life with the late Henry IV of France. One of those paintings, Rubens’ The Arrival of Marie de' Medici at Marseilles (above, from 1626), shows the young queen disembarking from the ship that had brought her from her native Florence, where she married Henry IV by proxy. A helmeted, blue-caped embodiment of France greets Marie on the gangplank. Beneath them, three buxom Nereids stand with Poseidon and other mythological sea figures that protected the new Queen on her voyage. Marie de’ Medici may be the intended center of attention, but the Nereids upstage her with their beauty, nudity, and fluidity. The rolls of their flesh roll like the waves themselves, making the sea goddesses seem to move even when standing still. By contrast, Marie seems statuesque in a bad way—cold, lifeless, and literally bloodless. There’s little promise of passion in the proxy marriage between Marie and Henry judging from this picture.

Rubens first wife died in 1626. Four years later, he married a voluptuous 16-year-old beauty named Hélène Fourment. Hélène became the muse of Rubens last years. She modeled at least one, and perhaps all three of the full-figured women in Rubens’ The Three Graces (above, from 1636). Granted, Rubens painted male figures who could use a gym membership, too, in works such as Bacchus (1640), but clearly Rubens’ ideal womanly figure was a full one. I guess it stands to reason that an artist with such a vigorous, omnivorous approach to life and art would admire women who also grabbed all the gusto they could. Rubens art does nothing by half measures, including portraying the female figure. Many primitive cultures worshiped a full-figured female type as the embodiment of fecundity. Despite being surrounded by the trappings of European civilization, Rubens “Rubenesque” ladies embody the fecundity of the primitive drives of his prodigious imagination.

Oh, Behave

Mike Myers’ Austin Powers character spoofs the days of “Swinging London,” when outrageous behavior was the norm, but his outrageousness isn’t far from the real deal. In the middle of that swinging time was one of the most intriguing and fun artists of the twentieth century—Peter Blake. Born June 25, 1935, Blake was born just in time to soak up the teen-targeted popular culture of post-World War II Britain. Combining such “low brow” pop with “high brow” fine art technique and history, Blake created such works as Got a Girl (above, from 1960-1961). The faces of teen idols such as Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson appear in a band across the top above a series of red, white, and blue chevrons that recall the work of Blake’s American contemporary Kenneth Noland. Just as America imported to England young hunks through movies and music, it imported the latest trends in abstract art, such as Noland’s pieces. Blake binds the two imports together and creates a pastiche of cultures clashing. By putting Elvis et al. at the top and Noland on the bottom, Blake flips the idea of “high” versus “low” on its head. Blake would take this pastiche style to its greatest extreme in his design for for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which mixes history, literature, art, and music together in a dazzling, ground-breaking display.

In addition to celebrating stars who “got the girl” in Got the Girl, Blake “got” his own girl in Tuesday (above, from 1961). Two photos of the actress and early 1960s teen sex symbol Tuesday Weld appear above the simple banner of “TUESDAY.” Blake plays off of the instant, one-name name recognition of pop culture and modern media in broadcasting the actress’ first name. Tuesday in many ways is the companion piece to the male stars of Got a Girl. To Blake’s male perspective, the young male stars blend together in their similar hairstyles and chiseled features. In contrast, Tuesday Weld strikes the male viewer as unique and special. If Blake had been a woman, the two compositions might have been reversed. Blake again places a Noland-esque abstract arrangement of color beneath the pop culture reference, but I wonder if Blake also alludes here to the celebrity-celebrating boxes of Joseph Cornell. Cornell, also a omnivorous consumer of all strata of culture, created semi-shrines to Lauren Bacall and other starlets of the 1940s. The boxlike arrangement of Blake’s Tuesday leads me to believe that he’s having a little fun in “borrowing” Cornell’s style while modifying it to his own taste and time.

Blake has become a revered figure in British art, but that doesn’t mean that the old lion’s been tamed. In The Meeting, or Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hockney (above, from 1981-1983), Blake plays off of Gustave Courbet’s 1854 The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Blake recasts artist David Hockney as Courbet and himself and Howard Hodgkin as the fawning patrons. Blake and Hodgkin seem out of place in their heavy clothes, but Hockney, the transplanted British artist in his new California habitat, wears informal, seasonal clothing. Behind the artists, Blake places all the stereotypical accessories of California living—palm trees, garish advertising, and beautiful blondes on roller skates. Blake is one of my favorite artists of the twentieth century for his incorrigible yen for mixing up the history of art with the pop culture of the time with equal respect for both worlds yet a sense of overall irreverence. You have to respect a man who grew up never growing up.

Private Dancer

"Different men are moved or left cold by lines according to the difference in their natures,” wrote Robert Henri. “What moves you is beautiful to you." Born June 24, 1865, Henri found women dancers moving in their beautiful, graceful movements and bodily freedom. Henri and the several other of The Eight artists found the modern dance style of Isadora Duncan especially intriguing. (John Sloan painted a portrait of Duncan in action in 1911.) Throughout his career, Henri painted many dancers, but one dancer—Betalo Rubino—captured his imagination the most as a model. From 1909 up until at least 1916, the dark eyes and hair of Betalo provided the perfect focal point for Henri’s explorations into color. Henri’s 1909 Salome remains for many the pinnacle of his career, or at least of his dancer and dancing works, but he continued to move past the colorful drama of that work and seek out new combinations. Unlike Degas, perhaps the most obsessive painter of dancers ever, Henri always paints the dancer as an individual rather than as a type. Degas’ dancers are beautiful in design, but you never feel that they are alive. In contrast, Henri’s Betalo the Dancer (above, from 1910) almost vibrates with life. The vigorous brushwork gives the sensation of movement, as if Betalo herself were suddenly caught unaware by our entrance and just turned to face the viewer.

Betalo proved to be an ideal model for exotic dress. Her athletic dancer’s physique and pretty face enhanced the exoticism of the costumes in works such as Dancer of Dehli and Dramatic Dancer, both done in 1916. In that same year of 1916, Henri painted Betalo several times in the nude. In the version above, Henri surrounds the pale-skinned, dark colored beauty with blues, grays, and whites. Like Whistler in works such as Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl (1898), Henri approaches abstraction in the composition of pure color compliments and contrasts but remains in the figurative tradition through the centering theme of the nude. Betalo must have seemed like a godsend of a model to Henri in her amazing versatility. A living, breathing example of chiaroscuro, Betalo exuded the drama around which Henri could experiment in color with full freedom. Betalo’s natural grace in motion comes across in Henri’s ability to paint her lounging but simultaneously raising herself slightly from the couch, as if anticipation of something or someone.


In the painting of Betalo nude above, also from 1916, Henri surrounds his private dancer with pinks and greens. As with the blue-gray nude above, the colors around her become echoed in her pale skin. Just as the dancing costumes clothed her in other paintings, the colors around Betalo “clothe” her in these nude paintings. There’s also that same sense of movement in Betalo’s reclining pose, as if she’s right at the moment of lifting herself into a new position. I doubt Betalo could hold such a suspended pose for long, but Henri tried to work quickly to get a sense of the essence of the moment. “Do it all in one sitting if you can,” Henri said of capturing the spirit of a model. “In one minute if you can. There is no virtue in delaying." For Henri, speed and movement were more virtuous than meticulous detail. Henri’s nude paintings of Betalo Rubino and other women around 1915 and 1916 present them as vital, alive, confident women rather than passive objects receiving the artist’s gaze. For many feminist critics, female nudes represent the repressive patriarchy of art history. I agree for the most part. However, Robert Henri’s nudes express rather than repress the fullness of womanhood and present the private dancer to the public eye in all her glory.

The Man Without a Country

Although Henry Ossawa Tanner rose to prominence as the first great African-American artist, in the minds of many of his contemporaries, he always remained exactly that—an “African-American” artist and not just an artist. Born June 21, 1859, Tanner painted to escape from the prejudices of his time, but still found prejudice in the American art world. “I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain,” Tanner wrote in his autobiography. “Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.” Tanner’s very presence and talent challenged the mindset of his time. In The Banjo Lesson (above, from 1893), Tanner paints an older black man teaching music to a child in a warm and exceedingly human fashion. It lacks the burlesque of Thomas Eakins’ The Dancing Lesson, another scene of African-American culture being transmitted. As Alan C. Braddock points out in Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (reviewed here), Eakins puts into paint the ideology that held African-American culture as less sophisticated than white culture. A photo of Abraham Lincoln reading with his son Tad in the upper left-hand corner of The Dancing Lesson illustrating the perceived culture gap. Even Eakins, Tanner’s teacher, fell prey to this prejudice. Perhaps thinking of the Lincolns in Eakins’ picture, Tanner paints the two generations of African-Americans in a way that recalls that picture of white father and son reading, a possibly defiant gesture for the quiet Tanner. Tanner painted The Banjo Lesson in 1893 while briefly revisiting America. Unhappy with racial conditions in the United States, Tanner moved to France in 1891 and lived there for the rest of his life.

Although Tanner’s lauded as the first great African-American painter, few of his paintings deal with race. The Banjo Lesson and a few others are actually the exceptions in his career. Tanner’s The Annunciation (above, from 1898) is actually more representative of his body of work. Using his wife as a model for the Virgin Mary receiving the angel telling her that she’s going to give birth to the messiah, Tanner creates a scene of simplicity and realism that strikes at the heart of the humanity of the scene rather than plasters piety over it. I’ve looked at this painting many times in person at the PMA and always come away touched by the depth of feeling and faith it conveys. Depicting the angel as simply a brilliant light, Tanner resists the urge to bring the heavenly down to earth through illustration. It was this great faith that allowed Tanner to go on despite racial prejudice. France must have seemed like a great oasis to him. When artists of the Harlem Renaissance such as William H. Johnson traveled to Paris in the 1920s in pursuit of a better racial climate and new art experiences, they sought out Tanner as a pioneer and a pattern for their own careers.

Tanner never returned to America. Sadly, it took many years for him to gain any recognition in his homeland. In 1996, President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton oversaw the purchase of Tanner’s Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (above, from 1885) for the White House’s Green Room, making it the first artwork by an African-American artist to become part of the White House’s permanent collection. It was a fitting way of bringing Tanner “home,” in that rather than force the label of African-American artist on him with one of his images of black culture, the Clintons chose instead a landscape that could have been painted by anyone with great talent, regardless of skin color. Tanner had finally found the racially blind acceptance that he had looked for all along.

The Wright Stuff

I had the pleasure of staying earlier this year at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, which bears many of the marks of Frank Lloyd Wright’s style, although his involvement in the project is questioned. What can’t be questioned is the fact that Wright (shown above in 1954) left an indelible mark on American architecture during his long career. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Wright’s death and the opening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Rizzoli, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and the Guggenheim have joined forces to publish three impressive books that celebrate the work of the master from different angles. Individually, these works shed light on Wright sometimes in small details, but, like the man himself, when assembled together, these works stack up into giant ideas and, perhaps, unrealizable ambitions. Anyone who knows the man and his work will find themselves captivated once again. Those who do not know Wright will discover the stuff of dreams—specifically, the American dream.

In Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, 350 color photos taken by Alan Weintraub featuring over 100 discrete works by Wright provide a sometimes dizzying display of the architect’s diversity and longevity. For $30 US, this collection offers a remarkably comprehensive collection of images of all of Wright’s major projects at a reasonable price. Wright built over 500 buildings, so a work covering all of them would cost, and perhaps weight, as much as a small house. The photos dwarf Kathryn Smith’s introductory text to the sections, but Smith makes up in quality what Weintraub covers in quantity. “Like Picasso, Einstein, or Freud,” Smith writes, Wright “was a rare individual who permanently altered the fundamental way we perceive our world.” Smith deals in superlatives, but the terms seem apt when supported by the photos. Like most great artists, Wright remains an enigma surrounded by more questions than answers as we learn more about him. “In the end,” Smith concludes, “these very paradoxes and contradictions that make him so difficult to compartmentalize are what give him such lasting appeal.” Looking at Weintraub’s photos of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, I found myself transported back to the place itself and fondly recalled the feeling of working and sleeping within a piece of art itself. Through this economical volume, people who have never had the chance at that feeling can at least press their noses against the windows.

In Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years: 1920-1932, Bruce Brooks Pfieffer concentrates on the lean years that tested Wright’s mettle and, rather than ruined him, forged him into an even greater artist and visionary. “My husband seemed to thrive on hardships,” Olgivanna, Wright’s third wife, recalled of that time. In that tumultuous decade, in addition to the “Great Depression” that plagued all of American society, Wright personally dealt with the death of his adoring mother in 1923, the death of his mentor Louis Sullivan in 1924, the (second) destruction of his Taliesin studio-home by fire in 1925, continued troubles with his second wife Miriam Noel until her death in 1930, and his descent into debt while trying to rebuild Taliesin. After the loss of Taliesin in 1926, Wright works with permanent home or studio for the rest of these “heroic” years. Despite these setbacks, Wright persevered. “He indeed seemed destined to be an architect who was not accepted by the world around him,” Pfieffer writes of Wright. “Yet that never defeated him, and he continued with ever-present optimism to continue creating buildings that rank among the most important works realized in his long career.” The greatest accomplishment of this period must be Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. Completed in 1923, The Imperial Hotel that same year withstood the magnitude 7.9 Great Kantō earthquake that leveled the rest of Tokyo. Like the Imperial Hotel, Wright withstood each earth-shattering event and seemingly stood even taller in the aftermath. Pfieffer is clearly a fan, but you can’t help but join along when trial piles on trial. In 1930, after years of darkness and no hint of a bright future ahead, Wright said in a lecture, “Keep your ideal of honesty so high that you will never quite be able to reach it.” That unreachable aspect of Wright’s work comes across in the many incredible illustrations and plans that fill Pfieffer’s book, many of which are for unrealized projects. A selection of Weintraub’s photography showing realized projects of this period appears in The Heroic Years, but it is the buildings that were never built and remain pure thought and imagination that appeal even more in their sheer potential. Pfieffer picks 1932 as the end of Wright’s trial by fire because that is the year Wright opened the Taliesin Fellowship, a school for architects in which Wright hoped to spread his gospel of democratic architecture to the next generation. In 1932, the private Wright became the public Wright for the rest of his days, thus committing himself to changing the world one design at a time.

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward picks up where The Heroic Years leaves off. The catalogue to the Guggenheim exhibition of the same name, From Within Outward concentrates on the public Wright—the builder of houses of worship such as Beth Sholom Synagogue, museums such as the Guggenheim, community centers such as the Marin County Civic Center, and suburban planning projects such as the uber-democratic, near-utopian Broadacre City. “Wright’s goal was nothing less than the reinvention of the built environment in order to promote our development as individuals, enhance and enrich the social rituals and patterns of our lives, and encourage meaningful reengagement with the world around us,” Margo Stipe explains in her introductory essay, “all of which are particularly timely and worthy of our attention today.” From Within Outward presents not a retrospective of a dead figure but rather the still-living spirit of a visionary whose vision is still applicable today. Stipe points out that the then 90-year-old Wright told a television interviewer in 1957 that he’d change the country if he could only live another fifteen years. Wright had only two more years of life in him, but From Within Outward resurrects the man and his plans five decades later with more vibrantly alive illustrations of both plans completed and never begun. In his essay on Wright’s sacred spaces, Joseph M. Siry writes, “Wright created a space for the whole community to see and know itself.” Through grand designs for what America could be, Wright, that great romantic dreamer of architecture, holds up a mirror to modern America “to see and know itself” and, more importantly, wonder what it could be.

Of all the unrealized plans in these books on Wright, those for Greater Baghdad (above, from 1957-1958) captured my imagination the most. “Wright’s culminating work in Baghdad elaborated his ideal of the spirit (that sense of interior he traced to the philosophy of Lao-Tzu) in space (a continuous flow), liberating human imagination, action, and interaction,” writes Mina Marefat in her essay on the Baghdad plans in From Within Outward. Within the planned opera house, Wright placed a statue of Aladdin. “We will find all the magic of ancient times magnified,” Wright explained of this touch. “Aladdin’s lamp was a symbol merely for Imagination. Let us take this lamp inside, in the Architect’s world.” Reading these three books on Wright injects the magic of Wright into our hearts and imaginations, allowing us to reengage with the world around us and, ultimately, freeing us from the dreary offices and apartment buildings of our lives to find new spaces that spark our minds and feed our souls. Wright’s magical dream for Baghdad never became a reality, but the true message of Wright’s life is that sometimes dreams can be more real than the deadening reality around us.


[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with review copies of Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years: 1920-1932, and Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward.]

Absolutely

In his 1955 memoir titled It’s Me, O Lord, Rockwell Kent wrote, “There is a deeply satisfying finality about land’s end. Gone is that everlasting urge the island traveler feels to journey on and on; there are not further peaks to beckon you; you have attained the absolute.” Born June 21, 1882, Kent remains in many ways the American equivalent of England’s William Blake—a bold visionary who expressed ideas of the absolute in words and pictures. Kent’s And Women Must Weep or Shipwreck, Coast of Ireland (above, from 1927-1928) captures this sense of the absolute power of nature while simultaneously depicting the place of humanity within it. Kent studied under both Robert Henri and Abbott Thayer, two of the most spiritually oriented artists in America at the turn of the twentieth century. Henri believed deeply in vitalism and Kent clearly shared that same faith in an electric force in the universe far greater than any individual being. Kent is best known for his amazing illustrations in black and white for such classic works as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which was only rising to status as the Great American Novel when Kent illustrated a 1930 edition. As much as I love Kent’s graphic work, I think he gets even more cosmic in color.

Nudism and the cult of the body reigned in Europe in the first few decades of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure if Kent took that as his source for works such as Recumbent Nudes with Ringed Sun (above, from 1914). It’s entirely possible that Kent simply arrived at this image by extending the Romantic and Transcendentalist philosophy to the human body itself, unashamedly nude before the nourishing sun. Heliotherapy, also known as sun or light therapy, may be the source of the ringed sun baking the bodies beneath. Regardless of whether Kent subscribed to those particular cures, he did believe that freedom of the mind and soul could cure anything. For Kent, the good fight was always the fight against oppression, which won him the honor of being a target of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. An incurable traveler, Kent visited all kinds of peoples and studied their cultures closely, which allowed him to see clearly the bare truth that we’re all human beneath it all.

As fascinating as Kent’s sense of the beautiful side of the absolute is, his sense of the sublimely terrible side fascinates me even more. Kent’s House of Dread, Newfoundland (above, from 1915) shows a naked man leaning against a house built on a cliff’s edge as a crying woman leans out of a window above. The sense of dread created by the ambiguity of the situation reeks of the most dreadful works of Edvard Munch. A member of the golden age of American illustration, Kent knew the power of images to tell a story. Here, Kent tells the other side of the story of the absolute, the one fragile humanity doesn’t like hearing. Kent built a similar home on a rocky peak in Monhegan Island, Maine, that is now owned by Jamie Wyeth, grandson of another great American illustrator, N.C. Wyeth. Jamie’s style resembles that of his grandfather more than that of his father, Andrew Wyeth, so he understandably felt a kinship with Kent both artistically and spiritually. After several decades of obscurity thanks to the hostile political climate of the 1950s, Rockwell Kent has been reconnected with the body politic of art history and reminded it that it has a soul, too.