A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Ever since seeing Michael Palin’s documentary Michael Palin and the Mystery of Hammershoi (which I reviewed here), I’ve become an unofficial “Friend of Hammershoi,” the unofficial organization Palin proposes in his documentary to help raise the profile of Vilhelm Hammershoi in the art world. Born May 15, 1864, Hammershoi’s life story is as elusive as the subject matter of his paintings. Although he did paint landscapes in the open air, Hammershoi focused on Vermeer-inspired scenes such as Interior with a Girl at the Clavier (above, from 1901), which recalls Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and many other scenes of young women at keyboards. Whereas we can imagine Vermeer’s young lady turning around or turning to face her teacher, it’s hard to imagine Hammershoi’s keyboardist acknowledging our presence, so self-absorbed in the music she seems to be. Hammershoi’s paintings speak of loneliness, even when people are present—often even more so when people are there.

Hammershoi’s White Doors (aka, Open Doors; above, from 1905) reminds me of Edward Hopper’s famous remark that all he wanted to do was paint light falling on a wall. Hammershoi takes great pleasure in painting the play of light on doors and walls as they reveal more walls and doors. Andrew Wyeth’s approach to painting doors often suggested the presence of his friends, particularly Christina and Alvaro Olson in Alvaro and Christina. Wyeth paints those doors to symbolize his now-dead friends. Hammershoi, however, paints the doors with no feeling of human presence. The sense of absence, of crushing loneliness is palpable. You can almost hear the distant echo of solitary footsteps treading the wooden floors. From the little that is known of Hammershoi, it’s easy to assume that he had a crushing sense of shyness that made contact with others nearly impossible.

Hammershoi painted the interior of his Copenhagen apartment at Strandgarde 30 over sixty times, including Interior, Strandgarde 30 (above, from 1903-1904), which depicts his wife, Ida, holding a serving plate and looking away, as always. (Amazingly, nudes of Ida by Hammershoi exist, showing that he had overcome his shyness at least in one case.) As “shadowy” as the subject matter is in Hammershoi’s works, they are almost always flooded with light. That light reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s amazing short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," in which an old waiter keeps his café clean, brightly lit, and open well into the night for those lonely ones who “do not want to go to bed,” but rather “need a light for the night.” Like Hemmingway, Hammershoi seeks a clean, ordered, well-lit place to fend off the loneliness that filth, disorder, and darkness would only exacerbate. Hammershoi’s paintings, the landscapes excluded, may seem claustrophobic even when all the doors are open, but they served as cocoons in which he could grow, feel safe, and create.

An Unfamiliar Name

Anyone who has toyed with painting watercolors knows the name Cotman from the Winsor & Newton’s line of professional and student-grade paints. Of all the great watercolorists, the name Cotman usually doesn’t ring a bell, but it should. Born May 16, 1782, John Sell Cotman painted some of the most beautiful watercolors of the Romantic period in England. Cotman’s Ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire (above, from 1803) rivals similar works done by J.M.W. Turner, Cotman’s better known contemporary and colleague. It would be easy to mistake such a Cotman for a Turner—the quality is close, the technique is similar, but, most importantly, they’re both painting at the same turning point in British culture. The same Romantic fascination with ruins that fuels Turner and Cotman exists in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and others. If Rievaulx Abbey had been titled Tintern Abbey, the connection would have been complete.

Cotman’s a great “test case” for Turner, the more famous artist. Why did the reputations of two artists so similar diverge? For one thing, Turner had John Ruskin to champion him critically. Nobody ever stood up for Cotman. Turner’s financial success and lack of family responsibilities freed him in a way that Cotman’s need to provide for his family, which required him to take up teaching, limited his opportunities. Another difference that I see in their work lies in the subject matter. While Turner turned to the seas, Cotman turned inland in works such as Ruins and Houses, North Wales (above, from 1800-1802). Again, if you titled this The Ruined Cottage, all kinds of Wordsworthian bells would jingle in my head. Turner’s Romanticism follows a marine course while Cotman goes rustic, which may be truer to the British Romantics, or at least the Wordsworthian strain, but didn’t offer as many picturesque opportunities that a moneyed, elite buying public would pay for.

Interestingly, both Cotman and Turner published etched editions of their works called Liber Studiorum. Turner etched his version in 1807, looking to expand his public and develop an international reputation through reproductions that couldn’t be generated by exhibitions of his original works. Cotman prints his version in 1838, just four years before his death, hoping to ease his financial woes. Cotman The Devil's Bridge, Cardiganshire (above, from Liber Studiorum: A Series of Sketches and Studies, from 1838) shows Cotman’s skill at etching as well as his continued eye for the Romantic ruin—here the arresting view of the strikingly named Devil’s Bridge. Fortunately, Cotman’s art found an audience in the Victorian era, as Ruskin’s promotion of Turner led critics to “discover” similar artists. If you’re ever in an art store and find yourself in the watercolor aisle, skip over the Van Gogh and Rembrandt brands and muse for a moment on Cotman.

All Grown Up

Anyone who has seen one of the many great animated films for kids over the last decade or so knows that the animators always remember who’s actually paying for the tickets and popcorn and throw in a little joke for the adults, hoping it soars over the heads of the kids as they sit agog at the cute pictures swirling before them on the big screen. Out of Picture, Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking in, from the people at Blue Sky Studios (creators of Ice Age and Robots), shows you what these artists can do when they know the children aren’t watching. These artists “dance for years at a time, around a monster called an animated movie,” writes Blue Sky Studios director Chris Wedge in his introduction, “giving only what is asked of them” in the spirit of collaboration, all the while holding back “a reservoir of creative potential that roils, impatient for escape within their hearts.” In Out of Picture, the levy breaks, flooding the pages with images and ideas that amuse, bemuse, and refuse to accept the status quo of twenty-first century America. The term “out of picture” originates in the studio practice of cutting sections out of a film. Although these short pieces by the creative minds never actually touched the cutting room floor, they clearly represent the passions that their day jobs as animators for kid flicks would never allow to see the light of day.

Ever since Bambi’s mother met her fiery end, death and separation anxiety have been the twin towers of children’s animation, extending the gruesome legacy of fairytales and folk legends. If animated films highlight the bright side of the equation with their happy endings, Out of Picture highlights the unresolved reality in which light and dark exist in continual tension. Daisuke Tsutsumi’s “Noche y Dia” (above) enters into the carnival-esque psyche of a woman undergoing therapy to rid her of her dark side. In the end, she recognizes that dark and light are two sides of the same inseparable coin. In “Newsbreak,” by Michael Knapp, the terrorist demons brought to us daily by the media follow us even after we turn off the tube. Those terrorists morph into cuddly characters in David Gordon’s “The Wedding Present,” in which Snuggles, Puppybear, and others sneak a plutonium bomb into the United States. Art Spiegelman’s trick of embodying evil in cute animals in Maus becomes even more sinister in Gordon’s hands thanks to the contemporary setting. Nash Dunnigan imagines a “not so distant future” in which the seeds planted by the Bush administration’s erasure of the line between church and state bloom into a society that forces children to attend a special “Night School” to learn the truth while other children enforce the “law.” “Separation of church and state and evolution just won’t stay dead. Will they?” one character asks, as we hope the answer always remains yes.

But it’s not all doom and gloom in Out of Picture. Vincent Nguyen’s “Domesticity” shows the members of a family all facing their personal nightmares in the dark and then reuniting in the rational light of day, joined by love. In “Four and Twenty Blackbirds,” Greg Couch whimsically recasts The Maltese Falcon with Little Jack Horner as Sam Spade, Humpty Dumpty as the Fat Man, Mary (who had a little lamb) as the femme fatale , and the black birds as the Falcon itself. In “Yes, I Can,” Andrea Blasich wordlessly follows a man helping a dragon to fly. Your heart will finds its wings in Robert Mackenzie’s “Around the Corner,” which hopefully offers the advice: “On those days when the clouds have bottled up the light—/ Don’t look so down./ Look within. / Look ahead, / The world you’ve imagined is waiting for you.” As bleak as the world around us can seem, these illustrators all tell us, the world of imagination within us can still change everything for the better, if you only believe.

A second volume of Out of Picture is set to be released in June. It seems that this effort has tapped a rich, perhaps endless source of imaginative energy. On one hand, these stories are for adults, despite the children’s book style of illustration often used. On the other hand, these stories are for both adults and children—basically anyone who loves to see through the eyes of artists to better picture the world around them. “It was one of those old books not meant for us children to read,” Daniel Lopez Munoz writes in his story “Silent Echoes,” “but up on that shelf it invited the occasion.” Put Out of Picture on the highest shelf, where the kids are sure to read it, and invite them (and yourself) to an occasion of the imagination.


[Many thanks to Villard Books for providing me with a review copy of Out of Picture, Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking in.]

New World Disorder

When you serve as an officer in not one but two world wars, the whole world starts to take on a surreal tint. Paul Nash fought in both World War I and II for England, recording the war in his own personal way, which was shaped largely by the modernist art movements he studied before the conflicts. Born May 11, 1889, Nash acerbically titled his dystopian landscape of the bloody sun rising over the trenches in We Are Making a New World (above, from 1918). There are still places in Europe upon which the violence of World War I and the years of trench warfare are clearly written upon the landscape. The Great War (an oxymoron, if there ever was one) aimed at creating a new world, and succeeded, but not in the way it imagined. Nash loved the writings and paintings of William Blake, whose vision of hell on earth and sense of caustic irony emerge in We Are Making a New World. Nash’s surreal landscape captures the unreal reality of warfare without straying too far from the photographically documented truth.


Between the wars, Nash returned to civilian life in England and interacted with British abstract artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In Pillar and Moon (above, from 1932-1942), Nash paints a sculpture similar to those by Moore and Hepworth. The moon in the sky echoes the moonlike sphere sitting atop the pillar, as if the stars had fallen to earth. The trees in the background seem borrowed from the paintings of the German Expressionists, twisted and gnarled with the angst of having lived through war with a soul not completely intact. That German touch may be a gesture towards understanding that all sides suffered greatly during the war, erasing the dehumanizing rhetoric employed to get the murderous job done. Even when not facing a hail of bullets, Nash couldn’t remove himself from the theater of the military absurd.


During World War II, Nash photographed a field full of damaged aircraft. Looking upon the wrecks, he imagined the shapes of the fuselage to be the waves and breakers of a vast sea frozen in place. Totes Meer (German for “Dead Sea”; above, from 1940-1941) beautifully transforms the machines of death into a roiling sea of grey metal. Only a few scattered German crosses on broken wings identify the “waves” for what they truly are. Whereas We Are Making a New World documented how war transformed peaceful reality into a nightmare, Totes Meer documents how imagination transforms harsh reality into something beautiful. From these ashes, Nash rises with a sense of hopefulness, remarkable given that 1940 and 1941 marked the nadir of British life during the war, when the Blitz rained down death upon London and FDR battled isolationists in the United States just to initiate the Lend-Lease Act to help England survive. Surrealism, which often took the everyday and made it nightmarish, here in Nash’s work takes the tragically horrific and finds a slender ray of beauty and, perhaps, hope.

By Any Other Name

When 22-year-old Frank Stella came to New York City in 1958 and began painting a series of austere black paintings, right in the middle of the Abstract Expressionist craze, few people knew what to make of him. But just one year removed from Princeton University, where he studied history, Stella made a splash with Die Fahne Hoch! (above, from 1959), a series of methodically painted black lines on a metal plate that ushered in the age of Minimalism. Born May 12, 1936, Stella’s star rose quickly in the art world heavens. Die Fahne Hoch! appeared at the MoMA in a 1959 exhibition of rising new artists. In 1970, Stella became the youngest artist ever to receive a retrospective at the MoMA (which The Guerilla Girls claim, in one of their many grievances against the MoMA, may have been helped by the fact that Stella’s dealer was related to a MoMA curator). While the last of the Abstract Expressionists roared, Stella very quietly became the next big thing.

Die Fahne Hoch! is a line from the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and translates to “the banner raised.” What black lines signified in relation to Nazism still mystifies. "What you see is what you see,” Stella later said tautologically. “Painting to me is a brush in a bucket and you put it on a surface. There is no other reality for me than that." In later, more colorful works such as Takht-i-Sulayman Variation I (from the Protractor Series; above, from 1969), Stella gets even more outlandish with his titles, taunting the viewer to tease out some narrative from narrativeless abstraction. This allusive quality makes Stella both intriguing and frustrating—there’s either something there or nothing, but nobody can say for sure. By this point in his career, Stella, a restless stylistic chameleon, had already begun to move beyond Minimalism and into Color Field abstraction.

In the late 1980s, Stella took on the great while male of American literature, Herman Melville, and his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb (above, from 1988) belongs to a series of abstract painting-sculptures that take snippets of the novel as their title—in this case, one of Melville’s Shakespearean “stage directions” found throughout the tale. Many elements in the work seem to suggest something in Melville’s work (perhaps Ahab’s body can be seen in the amorphous mass rising through the center), but, again, we can’t find anything concrete to grasp other than the title itself. Abstract art, by definition, thrives through its abstract power to suggest. Many artists use the tension between specific titles and unspecific form, but few give us so little as Frank Stella to go on. ''A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere,’’ Stella says, inviting us to see all his art as pure medium at work, and then pulling the rug out from beneath with his titles.

Sing the Body Eclectic

Frida Kahlo kept a copy of Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" at her bedside to read before going to sleep. A gift from a lover, the book of Whitman’s self-celebratory and self-analyzing verse clearly struck a chord with Kahlo, whose both celebrated and analyzed her own life in her paintings. In Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself, psychiatrist and Kahlo expert Salomon Grimberg takes the results of never before published psychological tests performed on Kahlo, modern-day readings of those results, a compilation of Kahlo’s medical history, and his own assessments to sing a new, more personal song of the woman we feel we all know so well from her portraits. “We come close to knowing what it would be like to be a friend of Kahlo’s,” Hayden Herrera writes in her introduction to the book, “how she dressed, how she entertained, what her pets meant to her, how she spent her days… The image that emerges is of a life that was both lonely and festive.” As Kahlo illustrated in her Self-Portrait Wired (above, from 1949), her life was connected to so many different emotions and ideas that contradictions and paradoxes abound. If Whitman could say “I Sing the Body Electric,” Kahlo could say “I Sing the Body Eclectic.”


Grimberg bases much of his book on the memories and work of Olga Campos (shown above with Frida), who first met Frida and Diego Rivera at Diego’s birthday party in 1947. Campos soon became close friends with the Riveras. Campos was then a psychology student working on “a book that would explore the relationship between emotion, color, and line” and was performing interviews and psychological tests on artists to gather material. Kahlo agreed to be interviewed and tested over many months in 1949 and 1950. Unfortunately, the book never materialized and Campos’ findings moldered until Grimberg literally saved them from the rats. Grimberg, who met Campos in 1989, translates these findings into English. As James Bridger Harris, a present-day psychologist who assesses some of Campos’ findings, writes, “Publication of Kahlo’s psychological assessment based on psychological testing is unprecedented. No one else of international stature in the art world has ever exposed so much.” These revelations—in both Frida’s own words and through images created especially for this testing—truly open a new door on who the living woman was behind the modern-day phenomenon of Fridamania.

Campos performed the Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test, Bleuler-Jung (Word Association) Test, and Szondi Test on Frida. In addition, Campos asked Frida to draw abstract compositions based on emotionally charged words such as hate, pain, love, mirth, peace, anguish, jealousy, and rage. Kahlo’s drawing for Laughter (“Risa” in Spanish; above, from 1949) shows interlocking circles with bright yellow and purple coloring, generating a sense of movement and energy that almost recreates hearing the artist herself laugh. These illustrated emotions truly bare Kahlo’s soul in a way that her portraits, which are always composed to create a specific effect or follow a conscious narrative, do not. In fact, Grimberg sees the portraits as a way of hiding this “true” Frida rather than revealing her. “Kahlo used up much of her vital breath attempting to reaffirm her identity in the eyes of others,” Grimberg writes. “The performance was mesmerizing, but it entailed the sacrifice of her true self to a mask.” That mask illustrated Kahlo’s insecurities but also reaffirmed them, allowing others to see her as she wished to be seen—as seductress, lover, wife, victim, etc. “By having chosen to walk into a mirror,” Grimberg writes of Frida’s assemblage of self through the self-portraits, “Kahlo had, without realizing, entered a dead end from which there was no way out.” From a psychological standpoint, Frida’s self-portraits become a trap that reinforces rather than breaks the cycle of dependency.

“The Riveras were always in crisis,” Campos writes. “If it wasn’t their love that was in question, it was their health, their finances, or something else.” Frida’s drawing for Disquiet (“Inquietud” in Spanish; above, from 1949) illustrates this continual turmoil in her life with Diego. “As children do, Frida Kahlo sought gratification rather than satisfaction in relationships,” Grimberg believes. “In her mind, if she was not in a relationship, she was being rejected.” Kahlo’s arrested emotional development emerges in Campos’ memories of playing “candy store” and “dollhouse” with Frida, who in “playing with her dolls… would truly transform into a child.” In such passages, Grimberg skirts the dangerous ground of infantilizing Kahlo and falling into the classic trap of denigrating a woman as a child based on her sex. However, he remains respectful of Kahlo’s full oeuvre—both as an artist and a psychologically complex person—to include this side without harming the other facets of her personality. The number of clarifications and amendments Grimberg inserts into Henriette Begun’s 1946 compilation of Kahlo’s medical history, based on many of Kahlo’s own statements, proves that personal history was a fluid concept for Frida with facts such as birthdays as pliable as anything else to her psychological needs.

The most beautiful passages of Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself come when Frida’s speaks in her own words as recorded by Campos. After presenting a brief personal statement by Kahlo of her personal history, Campos organizes Kahlo’s thoughts under categories such as “My Body,” “Sex,” “Love,” and “Death.” Several passages sound almost Whitmanesque but for a lack of formal meter, as in “Myself and Others”:

I am satisfied with my relationships.
Sometimes one dominates without seeming to.
Sometimes I am interested in and affected by opinions about me.
I am frequently offended and hurt.
People who give themselves airs are foolish and vain.
People exaggerate my qualities.
I do not compare myself often with others.
I am quite inept in getting to know the character of people.
All types of people interest me, but I am attracted to the intelligent ones.
I have no heroes.
Of actors, businessmen, or politicians, I admire actors. I admire the artist.

Under “Love”:

Sometimes I think about the end of the affair when it is just beginning.
I am more afraid of being abandoned than of being disappointed.

In such naked revelations, Kahlo opens up her heart in a way that Whitman himself did so expansively in his poetry. There are many contradictions, as there are in the mind and heart of any individual. “Do I contradict myself?” Whitman asks in his “Song of Myself.” “Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Among the multitudes in Frida’s soul lay both the artist of the graphically sexual, often gory self-portraits as well as the gentle soul who loved feeding ducks with her dogs (above). The final diagnosis Harris gives for Kahlo based on his analysis of the test results is “chronic, low-grade depression and periodic overlays of major depression” along with “chronic pain syndrome” that led her to become a “professional patient.” Such a diagnosis seems coldly analytical, but Kahlo’s own words and drawings add a human warmth to the clinical chill.

In addition to the danger of infantilizing mentioned before, the whole exercise of analyzing the dead should be viewed warily. “Understanding the individual is a daunting task that requires both scientific and creative ways of knowing,” Harris admits. Add onto that problem the distance of decades of time, and the task becomes that much harder. However, the professionalism of Campos’ collection of primary source material gives credence to these findings that analyses of the other famous dead personalities lack. In the final analysis, we see more of Frida than we ever have before and become even more conscious of how much more is now lost to the grave. The sensitivity that Grimberg brings to the subject and her art saves the study from becoming psychological grave robbing and allows it truly to breathe new life into Kahlo’s work. The standard view of the self-portraits as purely cathartic—heroic statements of a soul struggling against emotional and physical pain—should make room for Grimberg’s view of them as equally constricting—reinforcing the insecurities that led Kahlo back to Diego and the operating table time and again against all reason. “She knew how to transform herself into a sensational beauty, irresistible and unique,” Campos says of Kahlo’s makeup regimen. In Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself, Salomon Grimberg presents that same “sensational beauty” in all its variety, uniqueness, and irresistibility.

[Many thanks to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a copy of Salomon Grimberg’s Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself and for the images from the book.]

Riddle Me This

In 1939, Winston Churchill called Russia “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same could be said for Salvador Dali. Born May 11, 1904, Dali was, to put it kindly, a nut, but a nut who could paint. No other artist in history mugged for the camera so shamelessly, as in the photograph above showing Dali dipping in the sea with flowers impaled upon the tips of his signature mustache. Some people wish that the self-promoting cartoon character that Dali became had never existed, theoretically leaving the masterful artist intact. As much as I groan at Dali’s high jinks, I still realize how they were part of the total package. While other Surrealists worked in that style and then went home to relatively conventional lives, Dali truly lived and breathed Surrealism, which almost required that he become a totally irrational being, a caricature of the great artist he actually was.

As The Dali Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940 (my review here) argued, the Surrealist Dali of the 1920s and early 1930s differs greatly from the wartime and post-World War II Dali. For many people, Dali dies for all intents and purposes in the war, at least as an artist and a person worth listening to, mainly for his unfortunate dalliances with dictatorships, beginning with his painting The Enigma of Hitler (above, from 1938) and ending with the death of Franco in 1975. I remember coming across this painting, which I had not know before, at the PMA’s Dali exhibition in 2005 and not knowing what to think. Hitler’s face appears on a scrap of newsprint resting on a giant plate dominating a typical Dali-esque, enigmatic landscape. By 1938, most rational people should have realized that Adolf Hitler wasn’t on the side of the angels, but Dali’s painting leaves the issue up in the air a little too much for comfort. That grey area turns more black and white with Dali’s later dealings with Franco and even Mao, who becomes an intellectual hero for Dali through the Cultural Revolution that, in truth, was more about ruthlessly murderous tyranny than cultural renewal.

So, how do you balance the books of a simultaneously lover of dictators and a great lover of art and art history? Dali’s Self Portrait as Mona Lisa (above, from 1954) shows his wonderful affection for the Old Masters such as Leonardo da Vinci. In many ways, Dali’s art is one long meditation on the nature of art, a string of quotations from the past re-imagined for the present and future. In some ways, Dali’s ideas about art achieve the same crackpot status as his takes on politics, religion, and science. That crackpottery grows exponentially as Dali throws his ideas on these different topics all into the cauldron of his mind and brews up a strange mix that sounds bizarre, yet less bizarre than it truly is thanks to Dali’s gift for assimilating lingo that gives the illusion that he knows what he’s talking about. The more I know about Dali, the less I tend to like him, but, oddly enough, the harder it is for me to totally dismiss him. If we were related by blood, Dali would be my often insufferable uncle spouting off in the corner of family gatherings to nobody in particular on nothing in particular, charismatic yet kooky, but who always remembers to say goodbye with a twinkle in his eye and an engulfing bear hug.