Animal Magnetism

In a world and age that seemed to conspire against her sex, Rosa Bonheur was lucky enough to have an enlightened father. Born March 16, 1822, Bonheur benefitted from her father’s belief in Saint-Simonianism, a form of Christian socialism that believed in the equal education for women. That sect held that every living creature possessed a soul, even animals, and, therefore, deserved to be treated as such. Not only did this belief inform the early feminism that helped Bonheur rise, but it instilled in her a profound respect for many animals, which manifests itself in works such as The Horse Fair (above, from 1835-1855). Bonheur loved animals and owned horses, lions, and an otter during her life.



Like Thomas Eakins, Bonheur knew animals from the inside out, attending and even performing dissections of animals. Her knowledge of anatomy fueled the realism of works such as Plowing in Nivernais (above, from 1850), which combined her love of animals with the popularity of rural genre scenes in the nineteenth century. During her lifetime, Bonheur became the most famous and financially successful female artist in the world. When social mores denied her and other female artists access to the human figure, Bonheur instead found drama and expression in the struggles of animals at work. Bonheur truly found a soul yearning for freedom in the animals in her paintings that is as expressive and nuanced as any ascribed to human beings.


Because she never married, wore men’s clothing, smoke cigarettes, and lived in houses with women friends her entire adult life, Rosa Bonheur is today held up not only as the one of the first great modern woman artists but also as one of the first great homosexual artists. Bonheur explained her mannish dress as necessary for someone working with animals all the time. Same-sex relationships in the nineteenth century held an entirely different meaning than they do today. Despite no evidence of sexual relationships with her women companions, modern critics looking for gender-based critiques have latched on to the circumstantial evidence to laud Bonheur as a lesbian pioneer. If that serves their needs in some way, then more power to them. However, I think that such labeling diminishes the real power and versatility of Bonheur’s art, especially in works such as Couching Lion (above, from 1872), which beautifully illustrates the power of the spirit of the lion in the same way that William Blake’s illustrated poem “The Tyger” gets to the essence of the creature. Bonheur’s ability to see past the physical into the spiritual realm of the animal kingdom matches her ability to transcend the limitations imposed on her gender and realize a whole new world of expression.

Maiden Voyages

When Daniel Ridgway Knight’s Hailing the Ferry (above, from 1888) first appeared in public, the gallery owners had to replace the carpeting in front of it, which had been worn out by admiring crowds. Born March 15, 1839, Knight studied alongside Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt at the PAFA, but it was in France that he truly found his ideal subject matter—the beautiful peasant girls going about their daily tasks in the bucolic scenes of the French countryside. Seeing Hailing the Ferry at the PAFA today, you’re struck first by its immense size. The two women are nearly life size. You next begin to visually wander around the scene taking in all the tiny details of the flowers and grasses. When looking through Knight’s oeuvre, it’s easy to be distracted by the continual appearance of the fresh-faced young ladies in all kinds of settings and moods, from the active to the pensive, and overlook the amazing technique that built up the landscape they so fetchingly inhabit.

Knight first went to France to study in 1861, returning to fight in the American Civil War in 1863. During the war, Knight sketched scenes of battle and the everyday life of the soldier. After marrying in 1871, Knight worked as a portrait painter until collecting enough funds to return to France once again. Once again in France, Knight became friends with the Impressionists Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir as well as Ernest Meissonier. Drawn to scenes of rural life, Knight later sought out Jean-Francois Millet, the painter of peasants who would later inspire Van Gogh. Millet’s too-realistic depiction of peasant life had the opposite effect on Knight. Knight chose to concentrate on the picturesque, joyful aspects of rural existence. It’s easy to say that Knight chose the easier path of pretty pictures over the harsher reality, but after seeing the bloodshed left in the wake of clashing armies, scenes such as Girl by a Stream, Flanders (above, from 1890) offered the perfect escape.

After gaining financial success, Knight built a home in Rolleboise, a suburb west of Paris. A garden terrace overlooking the Seine provided material for many of his paintings. Knight even built a glass studio so that he could paint from nature regardless of the weather. Knight’s Normandy Maid (above) basks in the warm glow of the twilight that he applied to all his works. Although he returns again and again and again to the theme of a young woman in nature in peasant dress, Knight does his best to give each of these subjects a sense of individuality. Knight allegedly found the subjects for his paintings from the local population, finding a seemingly never-ending supply of unblemished youth to stand in harmony with the never-ending abundance of natural abundance. It’s easy to see Knight as objectifying these young women in these scenes as mere props, but I think he found a real connection between the blooming fertility of these women and fertility of the landscape itself. In a world in which death had been a too-powerful reality, Knight choose life in all its promising ripeness.

Cold, Hard Facts

One of the greatest Swiss painters ever and one of the shining lights of Symbolism, Ferdinand Hodler was born on this date in 1853. With works such as Day II (above, from 1904-1906), Hodler spiritualized the idea of the nude for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These nudes follow the European cult of the body that was taking hold around that time and would evolve later into a component of the master race philosophy of Nazism. Hodler himself believed in humanist ideals, condemning the German military for atrocities committed during World War I. I’ve always thought of Hodler’s Swiss mix of symbolism and classicism as the painterly equivalent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, matching the lyricism of Bergman at his most hopeful in such playful nudes.

Hodler loved the landscape of his native Switzerland. Works such as Der Niesen (above, from 1910) show the pristine, cold beauty of that place. There’s such a range in Hodler’s work, moving from such figure-focused paintings of expressive nudes to completely uninhabited scenes of water, mountains, and snowy fields. The rock face here almost becomes a human face, seen in profile. The clouds nearly vibrate with agitation, expressive in a way that El Greco and Van Gogh have more famously. The slate blue sky speaks of the cold of the mountains but also speaks of the cold of the universe looking down upon humanity. In these landscapes, Hodler matches Bergman in the pessimism of his worst cinematic moments, questioning the existence of a higher being existing in what often seems an icy and unforgiving universe.

When Hodler’s mistress was diagnosed with cancer in 1914, he spent a great deal by her side, often painting her in her misery. Hodler’s The Dying Valentine Gode-Darel (above, from 1915) belongs to a series of paintings the artist made documenting her struggle and his emotional response to it. Hodler’s devotion to his mistress while remaining married was certainly problematic, but his empathy can’t be questioned. Like Munch, Hodler took a fascination with the slow march towards death and depicted it with unflinching realism. Munch’s The Sick Child generates more pathos through the youth of the victim, but Hodler achieves something equally stirring in the passing of an adult, even someone as potentially unappealing as a mistress. The American way of death so divorces us from the reality of the process that looking upon such scenes, commonplace just a century ago in many developed countries and commonplace today in the third world and war-torn lands, is like looking into a dream—or a nightmare. I’ve always wondered if it was a particular trait of people from that part of the world—Munch’s Norway, Bergman’s Sweden, or Hodler’s Switzerland—to look more clearly upon death as a cold, hard fact of their lives and transform it into art.

Picture This

The United States Government recently launched a new arts education program titled Picturing America supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Believing that “[g]reat art speaks powerfully, inspires fresh thinking, and connects us to our past,” Picturing America will offer to schools (kindergarten through grade 12) and libraries 40 large (2 x 3 ft.), high-quality color reproductions of the works they’ve selected as well as a Teachers Resource Book and additional materials and lesson plans available on their website. Any time a government, especially the United States Government and particularly the current administration, gets into the business of selecting the art that will define a culture, it seems to be a complete recipe for disaster in terms of the miseducation of youth along the lines of what the powers that be want them to believe. When the NEH announced this program, I was reading Michael Brenson’s Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Arts in America, which relates the NEA’s rise (the Kennedy and Johnson years) and horrific, seemingly irreversible fall (the Reagan and Bush I years), so I was immediately cynical. I’m still cynical.

Picturing America gathers the usual suspects. Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware appears on the cover of the brochure, of course. Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Grant Wood, Thomas Cole, Edward Hopper, and plenty of other dead white males make up the majority of the list, as would be expected. Realism rules the day, with Richard Diebenkorn representing modern abstract art by himself. Jackson Pollock was good enough to represent America during the Cold War, but doesn’t carry the same rank today. You can argue both the choices of artists and the artists all day, but I’ll mention the first things that jumped out at me. N.C. Wyeth appears with an illustration to The Last of the Mohicans (above, from 1919), but Andrew Wyeth doesn’t. Eakins appears, but with the watercolor John Biglin in a Single Scull. Couldn’t they get The Gross Clinic, perhaps the single greatest painting done by an American? John Singer Sargent, the eternal expatriate, makes the list with Portrait of a Boy, whereas one of his portraits of the rich and powerful would have been much more representative of both him and America at the turn of the twentieth century.

Clearly the people making the choices anticipated special interest group complaints, making nods toward inclusivity, but just barely. Of the thirty-six named artists, only two are women: Mary Cassatt and Dorothea Lange. Where have you gone, Georgia O’Keeffe? Only three African-Americans—Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Martin Puryear–make the cut. Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington (above, from 1996) is the most recent work included, but seems included more for the double dipping it offers in providing an African-American artist honoring an African-American figure in a non-confrontational way, unlike say Kara Walker, who would offer the triple lindy of an African-American woman dealing with racial issues, albeit in an extremely confrontational and controversial way. Perhaps the next occupant of the White House can rectify the lack of women or persons of color in this selection from first-hand experience of what it’s like to be part of one of those groups.

On one hand, Picturing America provides a valuable service in bringing art into American classrooms and libraries. Anything that brings about greater arts education in this country is definitely welcome. In Visionaries and Outcasts, Brenson recounted a 1960 speech by President Kennedy in which he pointed out that America was a country but not a civilization, because a civilization has a sense of its own culture through the arts. Perhaps these images will help foster some civilization in our troubled times. On the other hand, the blandness (literally the “whiteness”) of the selection, especially in the use of familiar images already in history text books, robs the program of any immediate visual impact it may have had. With all respect to N.C. Wyeth and his capacity to inspire young imaginations, I think that a Pollock hanging on a classroom wall would have opened up whole new possibilities for students. Add in the rather tame suggested classroom questions, which instructors unfamiliar with the arts would be presenting, and any optimism I have for this program is muted. The timing of this initiative leads me to believe that the Bush II administration hopes to improve its poor image, especially in the arts, during its last days. That’s the cynic in me. I’d love to be proven wrong, of course.

Demon Child

Girl with a Mask, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1945. Oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 39 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1947.

“In 1920 was born this fragile, sickly demon,” the Mexican poet Octavio G. Barreda wrote of the Mexican artist Juan Soriano in 1945. Borrowing that phrase for the title of the first exhibition of Soriano’s work in the United States at the PMA, Edward J. Sullivan’s Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 brings this well-known name in his native country out of obscurity for an American audience. In doing so, Sullivan not only presents a unique, multi-dimensional artist, but also a whole new way of looking at the perception of Mexican art as primarily the domain of the grand muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. The same alternate “reality” found in pseudo-Surreal works such as Girl with a Mask (above) surrounds the story of Soriano—homosexual and conservative—versus the Marxist machismo of the muralists.

The Dead Girl, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1938. Oil on panel, 18 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clifford, 1947.

Born a sickly child, Soriano’s family encouraged him to paint and draw his fantasies. That encouragement and the imaginative material supplied by the religious processions, home altars, and other sacred rites of his native Guadalajara shaped Soriano’s unique sensibilities. Soriano’s small stature and slight build gave him a child-like air even as an adult. “An eternal child, ageless, bitter, cynical, naïve, malicious, hardened, helpless,” the poet Octavio Paz writes in a 1941 meditation on his friend reproduced by Sullivan in the catalogue. Soriano the demon child finds painting children irresistible. “Soriano’s children are often unruly, misbehaving, fighting, or about to get into some other form of trouble,” Sullivan writes, demonstrating Soriano’s imp of the perverse in multiple works. When Soriano’s children aren’t getting into mischief, they’re dead. The Dead Girl (above) represents just one of many depictions Soriano made of the emotion and spirituality surrounding the death of a child in Mexico. He painted The Dead Girl after seeing a freshly dead girl displayed in the window of a home. A tiny piece of cotton peeks out of her nostril, placed there to hold back post mortem excretions. Disembodied hands hover over the girl, standing in for the devout mourners. Six years later, Soriano titled another painting The Dead Girl, creating a more elaborate setting for the deceased child featuring angels bearing flowered crosses. In such works Soriano taps into the same native spirituality and fascination with death that Frida Kahlo does explicitly in works such as The Dead Dimas and less explicitly in the more macabre elements of her self-portraits. “Death imagery nourished and entertained him,” Sullivan writes of Soriano’s fixation on these dead children, “and he later portrayed death as an amusement, a challenge as well as an inevitability.” Soriano both genuflects and laughs in the graveyard, living up to the collection of contradictions ascribed to him by Paz and others.

Still Life, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1942. Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 27 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph J. Gersten, 1951.

Sullivan excels in presenting Soriano as outside the mainstream of twentieth century Mexican art dominated by Rivera and his brethren, surpassing even Kahlo in straying from that center. While Rivera, Kahlo, and other artists embraced Marxism as Mexico’s best hope, welcoming even Trotsky into their home, Soriano resisted accepting any ideological savior. His political conservatism hurt his chances at obtaining commissions in that politically charged atmosphere. Barreda, the man who called Soriano a “demon” in print, linked Soriano with similar non-political artists who still retained a sense of Mexican-ness in their art. The non-political art of Still Life (above) and other works placed him in a category with Kahlo, whom Soriano loved, in spite of her marriage to Rivera, whom he loathed. “She had a tremendous personality,” Soriano once said of Frida, “like a little child full of life.” Soriano’s homosexuality also marked him as radically different from the macho muralists and mainstream Mexican culture. “Soriano’s frank affirmation of his sexuality in his paintings, drawings, writings, and interviews would remain a hallmark of his personality throughout his life,” Sullivan asserts. Saint Jerome (1942) shows Soriano’s lover, Diego de Mesa, posed nude before a mirror containing a skeleton assuming the same pose as Diego, linking desire and death. Guardian Angel (1941) depicts a falling male nude saved by a winged, male, nude angel in another homoerotic exercise by Soriano. Critic Jose Luis Martinez encapsulated Soriano’s ex-centric (i.e., out of the center) qualities in 1941: “He does not paint, nor does he pretend to illustrate social themes… His painting evidences three themes: eroticism, religiosity, and death, whose expression comes about with the intimate sensibility of the Mexican.” Soriano pushes the envelope of what being “Mexican” could mean in the larger context of the art and society of his time.

Girl with a Bouquet, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1946. Oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1957.

Soriano’s friendship with Henry Clifford, a long-time curator at the PMA, makes the PMA the idea place for this exhibition. Sullivan credits the 30-year correspondence between Soriano and Clifford archived at the PMA with providing the basis of his research. Clifford and his wife donated the four Soriano paintings that make up the core of the exhibition, which offers a fascinating postscript to the epic Frida Kahlo exhibition also running at the PMA. Sullivan concentrates on the period from Soriano’s arrival in Mexico City in 1934 to his departure for Europe in 1951, when Soriano becomes more “universalist” in his themes, although he always carries his own private Mexico with him in his heart. Soriano’s slipperiness arises from his rejection of all convenient labels, even the tag of Surrealist that he resisted placing on works such as Girl with a Bouquet, arguing that the Surrealists practiced a brand of “self-indulgence” he couldn’t abide. Sullivan agrees with Soriano’s self-assessment, arguing that these works “incorporate dream-like or otherwise surprising elements,” but never fully realize the status of Surrealist art. Despite this absence of handles, Sullivan retains a firm grasp on the elusive demon Soriano and brings him vibrantly back to life for us today. As the novelist Carlos Fuentes says in his essay “The Eye of Dawn: Juan Soriano,“ “Soriano, like all great painters, is present in this present that doesn’t sacrifice its past or its future… Soriano in himself is dawning: a beginning charged with pasts, a daybreak that does not deceive us with the promise of an innocent future.” Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 allows Juan Soriano to live again as he once did—fully in the present moment, free of the lies of the past and the false promises of the future.


[Many thanks to the PMA for providing me with a review copy of Edward J. Sullivan’s Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 and for the images above from the exhibition.]

Fleeting Memories

The first issue of a new photography journal titled Photographies is now available free online. In their Editorial Statement, they express a desire “to construct a new agenda for theorizing photography as a heterogeneous medium that is changing in an ever more dynamic relation to all aspects of contemporary culture.” They chose the title Photographies plural to convey the multiplicity of the medium “rather than a monolithic photography” singular. The articles in this first issue are excellent, although they do get rather academic and theoretical for some, if that’s not your thing. Give it a look now, as future issues are most likely not going to be free online.

I found Andre Gunthert’s article "Digital Imaging Goes to War: The Abu Ghraib Photographs" particularly interesting. (WARNING: The actual Abu Ghraib torture photos are duplicated. Not for the queasy.) Gunthert examines the phenomenon in which those photographs became “the first digital images to be counted among the most celebrated icons of our time.” Sadly, it took these photos to garner for digital photography a status it previously lacked, thanks mainly to the ease of manipulation. First, the criminal case stemming from those photos gave them a legitimacy. Later, the adoption by the media and the repeated reproduction of the photos gave such figures as Satar Jabar, better known as the “Hooded Man” (above), iconic status in mainstream culture. “The iconographic repetitions and exchanges between the press and television channels had already organized the multiple occurrences of these visual documents as news: with the evolution of the electronic network, the Internet became a third actor in this redundancy, which contributed to the production and repetition of such icons,” Gunthert writes. “This aspect is particularly true of the photographs of the Iraqi prison from their first diffusion through three concurrent media and, constituted as evidence, inevitably helped the images to become monuments.” It’s difficult to accept these shameful images as “monuments,” but it’s even more difficult to argue against their monumental status in our recent social discourse.

Gunthert also discusses the sea change the Abu Ghraib photos performed on digital photography itself. Previously, digital photography was known for its ephemeral nature—take as many shots as you like and delete the duds later, as Annie and I like to say when trying to capture Alex at his cutest moments. The Abu Ghraib photos, by becoming iconic, have raised digital photography to the same level of permanence as previous photographic technologies. It would be interesting to know what Stephen Eisenman, author of The Abu Ghraib Effect (my review here) would think of Gunthert’s argument. Not to put words in his mouth, but I’d guess that Eisenman would say that any permanence we find in the Abu Ghraib photos comes from the culturally created cruelty embedded in Western iconography. Even though these are new photos in a new digital format of new abuses, they show us nothing we haven’t seen many, many times before. Of course, as Gunthert argues for the permanence of these images, the collective “amnesia” of America and its press has left them long behind as yet another election looms.

525,600 Minutes

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Moments so dear

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
How Do You Measure - Measure A Year?
In Daylights - In Sunsets
In Midnights - In Cups Of Coffee
In Inches - In Miles
In Laughter - In Strife

In - Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
How Do You Measure
A Year In The Life?

How About Love?
How About Love?
How About Love?
Measure In Love

From “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Art Blog By Bob. That’s a lot of typing on my part and a lot of reading on your part. Thanks for listening. I’m absolutely thrilled with the direction this little venture has taken and enjoy every minute I spend writing and reading about but, most importantly, looking at art. Year Two holds new prospects for possible art print media for me, so onwards and upwards.

Many thanks to the beautiful and talented Annie, my wife, and to the precocious and precious Alex, our son, for putting up with me day in and day out, listening to me rave on about the latest discovery, and letting me steal away moments on the laptop when I should really be spending more time with them.

[Many thanks to Gerhard Richter for providing the perfect visual with his Candle (above, from 1982).]