Mother and Child Reunion

When The Guerrilla Girls first began to practice their entertaining and enlightening brand of feminist art protest, they decided to protect their identities behind gorilla masks and to assume the names of the great female artists of the past. The two leading Guerrilla Girls assumed the names of their favorite inspirations—Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz. Born July 8, 1867, Kollwitz lacks the Hollywood treatment and colorful life history of Kahlo, but deserves equal recognition based on her lifetime of artistry and relentless humanism. Kollwitz’s Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead (above, from 1910) belongs to a set of self-portraits that lack the overt psychodrama of Kahlo’s self-portraits but quietly add up to the same single document of a woman dealing with the forces opposing her, both as an artist and as a woman. Kollwitz dealt with the added horror of seeing her native Germany plunge the world into two world wars, which took her son and her grandson from her. Whereas most of the German Expressionists were men dealing with the wages of war, Kollwitz as an Expressionist woman gave a whole new perspective as a mother.

Kollwitz married her husband, Karl, a doctor in 1891. Karl specialized in treating the poor people of Berlin. Kathe watched these poor people seek her husband’s help and took those observations to help them in her own way. Works such as Hunger (above, from 1925) depict in stark black and white woodcuts the harsh reality of poverty and starvation. The bulging eyes of the little girl and the reduction of her parents to a few simple lines as they disappear into the black void conveys the reality of hunger like few other images ever have. Kollwitz identified with these people and championed their causes in series of works based on peasant revolutions and workers’ strikes. She wore accusations of socialism and communism as badges of honor, which soon became dangerous bull’s eyes as the Nazis assumed power.

First, the Nazis stripped Kollwitz of her teaching position. Later, they denied her outlets to sell her work. The Gestapo even threatened Kollwitz and her husband with internment in a concentration camp, but her international fame saved her. Sadly, allied bombing of Germany destroyed many of her works. Kollwitz died in 1943, never seeing her country freed from Nazi tyranny. In many ways, Kollwitz became the mother of her country, giving shape to the maternal instinct of German mothers faced with the destruction of their families in works such as Mother and Daughter (above, from 1919). Rather than present the bond between a woman and her children in flowery terms of “soft” femininity, Kollwitz shows the strength of the bond with her stark black and white imagery. Kollwitz loved with a tough love that even death could not tear asunder. Such universal emotions allow Kollwitz’s art and its message to cross both national borders and historical eras as long as mothers continue to lose sons and daughters in senseless conflict. All Kollwitz is saying is such works is give peace a chance.

Stars and Stripes Forever

A Happy Independence Day to all Americans all around the world! We all have our differing opinions, especially in election years, of what direction our country should take, but we can all agree that we want our country to be the best that it can be not only for ourselves but for all the people on our fragile planet. Jasper Johns’ Flag (above, from 1954-1955) shows his Cold War-influenced take on Old Glory, which still makes us look at the flag afresh as something alive rather than a relic of the past. I recently watched the masterful anti-war film In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, and recommend it to anyone who thinks that the flag no longer has any meaning.

Of course, the Fourth of July is primarily a day of rest and recreation for Americans. I plan on grilling up something tasty for the family. Perhaps Bobby Flay will drop by for a Throwdown! I’ll be ready with my big, blue insulated glove to meet the challenge. John Lewis Krimmel painted some of the earliest scenes of Independence Day celebrations, including one from 1819 shown above. Growing up in Philadelphia and working my entire adult life literally a block away from Independence Hall, I’ve always been fascinated with the history of Independence Day and how Philadelphia, despite all its current problems, always becomes the center of attention on that special day.

If you’d like to channel all those patriotic feelings you're experiencing today into a good cause, please consider signing up for eMail Our Military, which takes the idea of pen pals into the electronic age. eMOM will connect you with a service member looking for some mail to brighten their day. For people whose lives are often pure chaos, the normalcy of your life, which may seem boring to you, is pure ambrosia to them. Just the idea that someone is out there bathing babies, chopping vegetables, or even grilling burgers on the deck brings a slice of home to them and makes their sacrifices seem worthwhile. I’m no supporter of the war, but I support every man and woman fighting it and would bring them all home in a second, if I could. Failing that, bringing home to them seems the least we can do.

[Many thanks to Christine at PurpleCar for letting the talented and beautiful Annie know about eMOM and to Annie for passing it on to me.]

The Most Arrogant Contest in Blogging

Money for nothing, Courbet’s chicks for free…

--From “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits (sort of)

“I am the most arrogant man in France,” Gustave Courbet once bragged, doing his best to live up to that reputation through the boldness of his art and personality. Thanks to the generosity of the awesome people at Abbeville Press, Art Blog By Bob hosts the first Art Contest By Bob in which a copy of Ségolène Le Men’s Courbet will be given to one lucky reader. (See my review of Courbet HERE.) Are you arrogant enough to think you deserve a free copy of this lushly illustrated, beautifully written, coffee-table book retailing at $135 USD? Or will you dreamily let this opportunity slip by, like Courbet’s sister Zélie strumming her guitar in Girl Dreaming (above, from 1848)?

“What do I have to do to win?,” you may ask, palms already sweating with anticipation. It’s this easy:

(1) Go to the Abbeville Press web page for Courbet.

(2) In honor of my recent audition with Jeopardy!, provide the question to the following answer by searching the Courbet page:

Ségolène Le Men, the author of Abbeville Press’ Courbet, attended this superior institution of higher learning in France.

Please note that your answer MUST be in the form of a question. Alex Trebek expects nothing less.

(3) E-mail me at ArtBlogByBob@hotmail.com with your question by 12:00 PM EDT Friday, July 11th. All correct entries will be placed into an actual hat (probably my beloved Philadelphia Phillies cap) and Alex will pull out the lucky winner. The winner will be announced on Monday, July 14th, Bastille Day, of course. Vive la France!

Don’t miss this opportunity to score one of the truly encyclopedic collections of the art of Courbet! And while you’re strolling around the Abbeville Press site, check out The Abbeville Manual of Style blog by Abbeville’s Arbiters of Style, the best art publisher blog in the business.

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for sponsoring this amazing giveaway.]

Faux Legalese:

(1) Please, only one entry per e-mail address.
(2) All employees of Art Blog By Bob and their families are ineligible for this prize. Sorry, Mom. Alex, you’ll have to wait until you’re strong enough to lift Daddy’s copy.
(3) Any disputes regarding the outcome of this contest must be submitted to the official contest judge, Alex. He’s two. Ever try arguing with a two year old? If you have any success, please let us know your secret.

Catch Me If You Can

Writing about his 1855 painting The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life (a detail from which is above, from 1855), Gustave Courbet dared viewers to “work it out if you can.” In Abbeville Press’ mammoth, slip-cased, new tome Courbet, Ségolène Le Men points out The Painter’s Studio’s problematic subtitle, evoking the mysterious “real allegory” of Courbet’s life that pervades Courbet’s entire oeuvre and makes his art so compelling still. “The work of no other painter has led to such a divergent range of interpretations inspired by current trends in art history,” Le Men writes. “This is why, in France at least, the debate on ‘over-interpretation’ has become polarized around the figure of Courbet.” Like a epistemological bar of soap, Courbet slips from each critic’s grasp just at the moment he or she believes they have a firm grasp on just who “Courbet” is. Le Men sees such frustration built into Courbet’s art by conscious design. “I shall argue that Courbet himself implanted the contradictory readings and fables in the structure of his works and in the way individual paintings relate to each other,” Le Men states from the very beginning. Breaking down Courbet’s career into rough chronological periods, Le Men leads the reader on a critical chase of the elusive artist that is simultaneously a scenic tour of one of the truly great artists of the nineteenth century.



Le Men begins with Courbet’s youthful Romantic phase, showing quaint childhood works rough in execution but telling in subject matter as harbingers of things to come. Writing of Courbet’s decision to go by his last name only, Le Men states that, “[f]rom the start, Courbet expressed his intention to be seen as a great artist, a self-made man freed from his social origins, whose name would become legend.” That legend begins in many ways with Courbet’s Self-Portrait with Black Dog (above, from 1842), his first work accepted by the Salon in 1844. Self-Portrait with Black Dog sets off a chain reaction of landmark self-portraits hidden within genre and landscape paintings “like an open secret.” “As with Goya,” LeMan writes, “the shadow here reveals the truth that lies behind a face, which is only a façade and a social mask.” Hence, Courbet harks back to Goya while simultaneously addressing modern critical concerns of identity. Once part of the Parisian scene, Courbet embraces la vie boheme, assuming the next role in the great pageant of his life. Courbet’s works soon become even more “puzzles… legible for those who took the time to decipher them but utterly ‘sauvage’ (wild, unfathomable) for those who did not understand,” Le Men writes. Courbet soon marries “image play deriving from popular culture and satrical sketches for the press” with “an execution inspired by the style of Dutch and Flemish masters from Rubens to Frans Hals.”

In retracing the familiar ground of After Dinner at Ornans and A Burial at Ornans, Le Men recaptures the moment of controversy those revolutionarily realistic works generated by recreating the spirit of the moment with enlightening context. Even more stirringly, Le Men recreates the psyche of Courbet himself. “Far from perceiving violent reactions to his painting as a faiure,” Le Men writes, “Courbet took them as confirmation of his success, and he would deliberately exploit them for self-promotion through his provocative attitude and his later submissions to the Salon.” Courbet scores a marketing coup when his friend Francis Wey seeks out the opinions of the twin towers of French painting at the middle of the nineteenth century—Delacroix and Ingres. This “bipolar couple” see two different Courbets that each affirm his greatness. Delacroix loves Courbet—genius praising genius—while Ingres fearfully turns away—the dead past unable to comprehend the future. Courbet finds crossover appeal with the masses through such painting. “This was an art espoused by patriotic republican humanism according to the three criteria of generation, epoch, and country,” Le Men writes of Courbet’s pull with the people. Soon, however, Courbet pushes the envelope of reality “to the level of fantasy” in works such as Sleep (above, from 1866) and the notorious The Origin of the World, which remained unseen by the general public until 1988. “With their variety of materials and colors, these props all serve as foils to the magnificently rendered skin of two abandoned bodies, emanating like an aura the drowsy calm of an erotic dream,” Le Men writes of Sleep in a beautifully evocative passage characteristic of the entire text, especially when speaking of the works themselves.

Le Men succeeds in presenting the diversity and amazing inventiveness of Courbet through little-known works as Fantastic Landscape with Anthropomorphic Rocks (above, 1873), in which Courbet playfully places human faces within the landscape for inquiring minds to find. While most surveys of Courbet jump between the greatest hits, Le Men’s work finds wonder in such smaller masterpieces. “The phenomenon of the hidden images allows us to see how the type of Realism that [Courbet] practiced as he moved away from Romanticism, is also inscribed in the emergence of Symbolism, and thus how his work could interest the artists of that generation,” Le Men asserts, presenting the case for how artists such as Gauguin, Redon, Magritte, and Picasso all took inspiration from Courbet. “For Courbet, natural images were like ‘readymades’ that he found in the middle of nature,” Le Men adds, invoking the name of Duchamp among Courbet’s clan. In pulling together all of Courbet’s works, no matter how diverse, Le Men follows Courbet’s own cue when he described his oeuvre as a “cathedral”—complex in construction and full of multiple side chambers, yet all belonging under one roof. Only by seeing Courbet whole, by giving him a full-body workout, can we ever begin to understand.

Courbet’s mother died in 1871, followed two years later by his exile from France thanks to the change in political fortunes that struck Courbet and his allies from the heights to which they had risen. Sunset on Lake Leman (above, from 1873) “becomes a bloodied horizon” during Courbet’s exile, Le Men writes. From that sad ending, Le Men raises Courbet from the ashes and reaffirms his central role in not only nineteenth century art but all modern art, even today’s. “Courbet… invents the notion of contemporary art,” Le Men argues, “based on two premises: first, the artist interprets his time, and second, the singularity of his individual style arises from a dialogue with art, without distinguishing the present from the past or hierarchizing forms of artistic expression.” Through an amazing array of big, beautiful reproductions—many of which focus on details that often get lost in the greater panoramas—and Le Men’s encyclopedic, critically engaged, yet highly accessible and beautifully written prose, Courbet shows Courbet the artist to be a man of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for providing me with a review copy of Ségolène Le Men’s Courbet and for the images from the book above.]

Stuck in the Corner

“There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol,” Tracey Emin once said of fellow member of the Young British Artists, Damien Hirst. Born July 3, 1963, Emin brings a very, very personal feminist perspective to that group in works such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (above, from 1997), a blue tent in which she has placed the name of every person she has slept with in any sense—from boyfriend and fellow artist Billy Childish to her grandmother to two unnamed (but numbered) fetuses she presumably aborted. Emin’s sexual history took physical form under the prompting of curator Carl Freedman, with whom Emin was having a sexual relationship at the time. Charles Saatchi purchased the tent and placed it in his Momart warehouse, where a fire destroyed it and many other Young British Artists’ works in 2004. The British public showed little sympathy for the lost works, especially Emin’s sex tent—the ultimate case of “too much information.”

Emin stuck with the sex theme in her next major work, My Bed (above, from 1997). Like Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 work, Bed, it is an actual bed owned by the artist set up as a work of art. Unlike Rauschenberg, however, Emin stained the bed sheets with her own bodily fluids and scattered condoms, panties stained with blood, and even a pair of slippers around the bed itself, just to drive the coital theme home. I’ve always seen the Young British Artists movement as a poor echo of the punk music movement in 1970s led by the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten surely would have gleefully sneered at Emin’s work, but there’s such a commercialized feel to Emin’s work (although not nearly on the scale of the master, Hirst) that it seems more market-targeted posing than anti-establishment punk. Saatchi purchased Emin’s Bed for £150,000, a nice rate of return on the initial investment by Emin. Billy Childish, “star” of Emin’s sexual history tent, offered to sell another of Emin’s old beds for the more reasonable price of £20,000.

For all her excesses, Emin does have another side to her, and I don’t just mean the side shown in The Last Thing I Said to You was Don't Leave Me Here II (above, from 2000), a photographic self-portrait of Emin in a tiny beachside hut she owned in 1992, before fame and riches called. Along with Childish and other artists, Emin pushed the new art movement of Stuckism, which called for a new appreciation of the figure in contemporary art. “When I think about sex it makes me realize how alone I feel,” Emin once said, and this photograph, reminiscent of the self-portraits of Egon Schiele, one of Emin’s major influences, shows the private side of sexuality that public statements such as her tent and bed broadcast publicly. I find this aspect of Emin’s art much more intriguing than the bombast of the sensationalist conceptional art. Unfortunately, the headline-making, infamy-earning works attract wealthy patrons, Turner Prize nominations, Venice Biennale slots, and membership in the Royal Academy of Arts. Emin offsets all that glamour with great charity work, especially for HIV and AIDS charities. Perhaps if the contemporary art world valued that more compassionate, more thoughtful work, Emin’s secret identity wouldn’t be stuck in the corner.

Self Exile

Compared with his old friends—Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka–Max Oppenheimer’s name has faded from the memory of all but specialists in German Expressionism. Born July 1, 1885 in Vienna, Oppenheimer, who later called himself “Mopp,” bounced around Europe, moving from Vienna to Prague to Zurich and finally fleeing from the Nazis to the safety of America. Schiele admired Oppenheimer’s work enough to paint a portrait of the artist in his signature skeletal style. Oppenheimer returned the favor, in a way, in his gallery poster (above, from 1912) borrowing from Schiele’s tortured take on the human figure while also fleshing out the depiction with some Kokoschka touches on the side. Like many other German Expressionists, such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oppenheimer created many graphic works, such as this advertisement for a larger exhibition of his work. Oppenheimer’s work may lack originality, but it does reflect the same raw, primitive quality of the Expressionist school.

Despite showing some talent, Oppenheimer matched his geographic rootlessness with a stylistic nomadic streak. It seems as if Oppenheimer tried out every style that came his way as easily as trying on a new hat, discarding each new fashion as quickly as he put it on. Before Schiele even died, Oppenheimer had moved on to Futurism in works such as The Klinger Quartet (above, from 1916), which does make innovative work of trying to link the worlds of music and painting. Reducing the musicians to a swirling vortex of hands and instruments, Oppenheimer’s painting seems like one of Picasso’s Cubist guitars caught in a blender. But Oppenheimer arrested even this promising development when he moved to Zurich and fell in with the Dada crowd, adopting the “Mopp” moniker probably just to fit in.

Because of his Jewish background, Oppenheimer fled from the Nazis in the early 1930s and moved to America, where he lived out his days in seclusion until 1954. In New York at Night (above, from 1951), Oppenheimer returns to his graphic arts roots but no longer in the Expressionist style. Instead, he works in a cleaner, almost Vorticist style of blacks and whites arranged in contrasting planes. After donning so many styles, Oppenheimer seems to want to leave all of them behind along with all his other unpleasant memories of Europe. Like so many European exiles of World War II, Oppenheimer idealized his adopted country, depicting a purer, cleaner, and more hopeful ideal rather than the everyday reality. In his final years, Oppenheimer allegedly tried his hand at the newfangled Abstract Expressionist style, reverting back to old form but in a whole new world.

An Amusing Question

For the June Art Poll By Bob, in honor of Kristi Yamaguchi winning this season’s Dancing with the Stars, I thought I’d ask, “Which of the following paintings of dance is your favorite?” You picked Edgar Degas (Blue Dancers, 1898) and John Singer Sargent (El Jaleo, 1882) as co-favorites with 22 votes. Henri Matisse (Dance (II), 1910) with 14 votes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Dance at Bougival, 1883) with 9 votes, and Pablo Picasso (The Three Dancers, 1925) with 6 votes rounded out the field. Many thanks to everyone who voted.

For July, I did a great deal of musing on what question to ask and came up with the idea of musing itself—namely, Who is the greatest painter’s muse of all time? (Gustave Moreau’s Hesiod and the Muse, from 1891, appears above.) The candidates are:

Jeanne Hébuterne, muse and common law wife of Amedeo Modigliani (shown in Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, 1918)

Joanna Hiffernan, muse of James McNeill Whistler and Gustave Courbet (shown in Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862)

Aline Charigot Renoir, muse and wife of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (shown in The Bathers, 1887)

Elizabeth Siddal, muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (shown above in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, 1864-1870)

Helga Testorf, muse of Andrew Wyeth (shown above in Day Dream, 1980)

Marie-Therese Walter, one of many muses of Pablo Picasso (shown in The Dream, 1932)

Obviously, this is a short list of the many people who have inspired artists with their physical charms and personality, and a clearly heterosexual male one at that. (I was tempted to include Francis Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer.) Of all the many wives and husbands who have posed for artists, I restricted myself to Modigliani and Renoir’s better halves. I also exercised restraint in picking just one of the many women Picasso drew inspiration from—exercising much more restraint than Picasso ever did, in fact. If you have any other candidates for the top muse, especially men who inspired female artists, please speak up in the comments. As always, thanks for reading and thanks for voting.