A Moment to Reflect

I just had to share the beauty and poignancy of the cover of the November 17, 2008 issue of The New Yorker (above) by Bob Staake titled “Reflection.” The simplicity of the illuminated Lincoln Memorial reflected in the reflecting pool captures this moment in America when the actions taken by Abraham Lincoln a century and a half ago have finally reached fruition and the gaping wound of slavery in America’s past can finally begin to heal. As much as Barack Obama compels us to look hopefully to the future, we should pause to reflect on the past as well.

Dreams in Stone

It is so easy to just pass by Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, dwarfed by the PMA looming so close by. Set back from the traffic surging down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Rodin Museum stands as an oasis from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Born November 12, 1840, Auguste Rodin took the course of nineteenth century sculpture and set it back hundreds of years in order to send it soaring into the future. Works such as Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (above, 1876) harked back to classical sculpture as well as to Rodin’s heroes, Michelangelo and Donatello. The anatomic accuracy of The Age of Bronze led some to accuse Rodin of cheating by simply casting around the live model. Rodin, of course, didn’t need to cheat, but the physical realism of the figure seems almost unimportant beside the psychological realism of the pose. Rodin patterned The Age of Bronze after Michelangelo's Dying Slave. Both sculptures show a figure at the moment of ecstasy, whether the release of death, of sex, or both. Rodin recognized the eroticism embedded in Renaissance sculpture and secularized it for a modern audience. So many artists overreach in tapping the dramatic, but Rodin always seems to be pitch perfect in sculpting human emotion at its peak.

I read years ago an article by a psychologist arguing that Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (above, from 1889) illustrates all Five Stages of Grief. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross formulated her model of grief seventy years after Rodin sculpted his Burghers, but you can persuasively argue that Rodin knew enough psychology simply by studying human nature that he approximated the stages pretty well. The Burghers tells the story of six men who sacrificed themselves during the Hundred Years' War to save the people of Calais from destruction at the hands of King Edward III’s army. Fortunately, Edward’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, pleaded on their behalf to the king, who spared their lives. Rodin shows the sestet walking to their doom and still believing they are about to die. Few emotions strike so deeply to the heart of who we are as the anticipation of death. In The Burghers of Calais, Rodin prepares each one of us to meet our maker through the example of the torments of even these brave men of history.


I’ve always thought of Rodin’s finest figures as dancers. Sure, The Thinker remains the poster boy for immobility and The Kiss is the romance after the dance, but works such as I Am Beautiful (above, from 1882) look like a scene from a ballet or a contemporary dance piece to me. I Am Beautiful actually belongs to the suite of sculptures comprising the gigantic whole of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, the pandemonium over which The Thinker muses. The male figure lifts the woman up as if to show the world just how beautiful she is, at least in his eyes. Rodin stole the title from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Je suis belle” in Les Fleurs du mal:

I am beautiful, O mortals! Like a dream in stone,
And my breast, upon which each is bruised in turn,
Inspires in a poet love silent and eternal
Like that of the material clay flesh and bronze bone.

For a man who treated women so horribly (such as the sculptor Camille Claudel), Rodin knew how to depict human relationships of every shade, from tender to almost destructively passionate. For me, every work by Rodin seems “a dream in stone” where inanimate materials seem as alive as flesh and bone.

Back to Reality

Born November 11, 1947, Ai Xuan has lived through all of the great upheavals of China over the past six decades, ranging from the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square to the recent Summer Olympics. Perhaps the defining moment for Xuan came when the Chinese government ordered him to work on a military farm in Tibet between 1969 and 1973. Seeing the people of Tibet suffer firsthand from the oppression of the Chinese government led Xuan to question the ideals of the Cultural Revolution. Xuan later painted With Ambition (above, from 1980), which shows a disabled girl on a single crutch devoting herself to her studies in the hope that she can make a better life for herself. The distance between the ambitious ideal embodied in Xuan’s painting and corrupt reality in Mao’s China slowly dawned upon the artist. Ambitious himself, Xuan continued to work hard and win national, state-sponsored awards for his realist works celebrating the best in Chinese culture, all the while still longing to align the ideal with the reality in his homeland while working the system from within.

The people of Tibet, especially the children, soon became Xuan’s means of shaping a better future. Xuan claims that an epiphany struck him one day while painting the snowy landscape of Tibet that made him feel small, helpless, and alone. That momentary feeling of insignificance drove Xuan to incorporate the Buddhism and Zen of Tibet into his works, infusing the realism with a new spirituality. Xuan’s Girl in the Daylight (above, from 2002) works on both realistic and spiritual levels. His highly sympathetic, deeply identifying style of realism reminds me of the approach of Andrew Wyeth to his models. Lift Wyeth from the Chadds Ford of his youth and transplant him to Tibet, the result would be stunningly close to that of Xuan’s in terms of mood and feel. Like Wyeth, Xuan celebrates the simple existence of these people without enveloping them in pathos. Xuan makes a political statement through the plain expression of the humanity of these Tibetans more powerful than an overt “free Tibet” work could ever be.

The fact that Xuan concentrates on the young, particularly small children, in most of his works lends them a sense of innocence in accord with the Zen Buddhist ethos. In Reeds in Chill (above, from 2002), the child seems to meld into the landscape as the color and contours of her coat echo the rocky, snow-capped hillside behind her. The reeds beneath her almost reach up to embrace her against the chill winds. Anyone who has taken the time to read even the briefest description of Buddhism knows that such peace and harmony lay at the heart of that belief system. The little girl’s eyes look up not in the convulsive ecstasy of so many Baroque saints of the West but rather in a gentle acknowledgement of a larger reality beyond herself. This gentleness in Xuan’s works has aided him in continuing to work within a Chinese system that continues to deny the independence of Tibet and its people. Like a tiny stream slowly eroding away hardened rock, Xuan’s Tibetan realism may one day change the course of Chinese and Tibetan history for the better.

A Little Night Music

During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period of China’s history, as Emperor Li Yu reigned over the Southern Tang Dynasty, the emperor grew concerned about the hard-partying lifestyle of one of his advisors, Han Xizai, who hosted wild parties featuring wine, women, and song that stretched long into the night. “It was said that the emperor sent a painter to record these goings-on,” writes Michael Sullivan in The Night Entertainments of Han Xizai: A Scroll by Gu Hongzhong, “hoping to shame Han Xizai into reforming his ways.” Whether the emperor succeeded in his intervention by art is unrecorded, but the painted scroll of Han Xizai’s nightly entertainment eventually became a cult classic in Chinese art history, surviving centuries of political upheaval as old dynasties fell and new ones rose. Sullivan, author of the valuable survey The Arts of China, takes us on an in-depth tour of Gu Hongzhong’s scroll painting and lingers over the images just as the emperor and, perhaps, Han Xizai himself may have done centuries ago. For anyone who has ever longed to lift one of these fragile scrolls and read it as it was intended to be read, Sullivan’s extended exploration is the closest you’ll ever come.

The Night Entertainments is “not a fit painting for a gentleman’s collection,” a fourteenth century critic sneered. “It should be considered as a warning against licentious music.” As much as critics railed against the scroll over the centuries, the very licentious nature of the art ensured its survival. Sullivan believes that it may have actually been more daring originally. The scroll “opens so abruptly, so suggestively, that one cannot help wondering if this is indeed the original opening of the scroll,” Sullivan muses. In that opening scene (above), we see the party already in full swing. A glimpse into the sleeping chamber, where rumpled bedclothes suggest non-musical entertainment, leaves little to the imagination. Han Xizai appears on the right-hand side, in a golden robe and black hat, presiding over the amusements. Han’s grey beard attests to his age. After a long career in several government jobs, Han grew tired of politics and retired. “Han Xizai kept open house for bright young men,” Sullivan writes, “and, a talented musician himself, he attracted around him musicians, singers, and dancing girls.” As if to stave off age itself, Han surrounded himself with youth, hoping that their exuberance would somehow rub off on him.

In the next section, Han casually sits on a throne-like chair. His loose white robe hangs open in the front, suggesting he has just enjoyed the company of one or more of the young women flitting about. One of the important historical aspects of the scroll is its depiction of furniture and other items, such as the musical instruments being played. The furniture is considered “typical of the Song period,” Sullivan explains, “although that may be because there is so little evidence—apart from this scroll—of what Southern Tang domestic furniture actually looked like.” The Night Entertainments presents such a rare glimpse into this time that all assumptions are based on faith to some degree. However, Sullivan defends his reading of the scroll’s story. “The reader may well feel that I am reading far more into these scenes than the evidence warrants,” Sullivan writes. “But the scenes are so compellingly real, the gestures and glances of the participants so full of feeling and meaning, that it is difficult not to give one’s imagination free rein.” Sullivan’s reconstruction of the Han Xizai party scene will free you to make the necessary leap of faith to indulge in these flights of fancy that allow us to appreciate the remarkable humanity and naturalism depicted by the artist. It’s easy to imagine pulling up a chair, raising a glass, and enjoying the music with these long-dead figures.

The final scene shows Han Xizai waiving goodbye to his guests as he retires for the night. Han slips away after reading the cues that his male guests and the female musicians and dancers were ready to move on to the next stage of the revels. At the end of the scroll appear a series of signature stamps identifying previous owners and a long inscription allegedly added by the 18th-century Emperor Qianlong. Because the earliest stamp belongs to Emperor Gaozong of the 12th-century Song Dynasty, Sullivan and other experts believe that the scroll is a copy rather than the original work. As the Song armies approached Emperor Li Yu’s territory and eventually conquered the Tang in 975, Li Yu had most records and paintings destroyed rather than fall into enemy hands. The Night Entertainments may have survived purely as a legend later reconstructed by an artist perhaps familiar with the actual original work. The copy passed down through the hands of the emperors in the Imperial Palace of the Forbidden City until “The Last Emperor,” Pu Yi, smuggled it out in 1921 and gave it to his brother to sell. Sullivan doesn’t see the lack of an original as a black mark against the scroll. “[W]hile the style of The Night Entertainments may have been transformed,” Sullivan asserts, “the message of the painting is as clear and as disturbing to us today as it must have been to Han Xizai when, more than a thousand years ago, the original scroll was first placed in his hands.”

Over the centuries, The Night Entertainments became a touchstone for Chinese artists. Newer, less sexually explicit versions arose in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In 2000, Wang Qingsong created a photomontage parody titled The Night Revels of Lao Li (detail above; a full comparison with the original is here). The Night Entertainments continues to find a place in the modern, rapidly changing culture of 21st-century China, two millennia after its conception. Sullivan’s study of this landmark in Chinese art vibrantly brings together history, art, and culture in a fascinating, cross-disciplinary fashion. The landscape format of the book itself helps recreate some of the feel of a scroll as you linger over the beautifully colorful reproductions. I did find myself wishing for more contact, perhaps in the form of a companion CD-ROM with which I could virtually scroll through the work as originally intended, but that’s more of a credit to Sullivan’s ability to generate enthusiasm in the reader than an actual complaint. In The Night Entertainments of Han Xizai: A Scroll by Gu Hongzhong, Michael Sullivan plucks a precious piece of Chinese art history out of time and places it in your hands for your edification and, yes, entertainment.


[Many thanks to the University of California Press for providing me with a review copy of Michael Sullivan’s The Night Entertainments of Han Xizai: A Scroll by Gu Hongzhong and for the images above.]

Natural Progressions

Rodolphe Töpffer often gets credit for being the first comic artist, but I think an equally strong case can be made for William Hogarth. Born November 10, 1697, Hogarth made illustrations for books and poems that showed sequentially the dynamics of seventeenth century English life. In A Harlot's Progress, Hogarth traced the slow descent of an innocent girl into the world’s oldest profession and, finally, total dissolution. The third image in the sequence (above, from 1732) shows the “harlot” Moll moving on from the semi-respectable position of “kept woman” to the level of common prostitute. Hogarth witnessed how English society allowed young women to fall into such situations by limiting their prospects essentially to marriage, destitute spinsterhood, or the exchange of sex for money. A few years after A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth designed the series titled A Rake's Progress in which he showed how young men took advantage of their position in the English patriarchy and wasted their lives in vice. With a clear eye and savage remorselessness, Hogarth struck directly at the heart of English society and showed it the face it wanted to ignore in the mirror.

Despite such moralizing in his work, Hogarth remains hilariously funny. Hogarth’s six paintings derived from the satiric comedy play Marriage à-la-mode show how marriage wasn’t that much better an option than prostitution in some ways. In the third panel of the series (above, from 1743-1745), Hogarth shows the Viscount, the “catch” of the story, visiting the doctor to demand a refund for the mercury pills prescribed for his syphilis. A young prostitute beside the Viscount touches an open sore on her mouth that represents the onset of syphilis. For Hogarth, the venereal disease of syphilis stands in for the larger spiritual diseases of the twisted sexual politics of English society at the time. The double standard in which men could frequent prostitutes yet woman had to remain pure or else become “damaged goods” results in a tangled mess of morals rather than a sound foundation of civilization. Such imagery seems strikingly modern for Americans in light of the culture wars in which, among other issues, fundamentalist religion calls for sexual abstinence instead of sexual education despite hard statistical evidence proving how America’s youth suffers from enforced ignorance.

In The Abu Ghraib Effect (reviewed here), Steven F. Eisenman praised Hogarth for not playing along with the violence embedded in Western civilization and its art. Eisenman specifically cited Hogarth’s 1751 series The Four Stages of Cruelty. In four panels, Hogarth traces the life of a young boy who begins by torturing animals and later graduates to killing people before dying himself at the end of a hangman’s noose. In the fourth and final panel, The Reward of Cruelty (above, from 1751), Hogarth shows the subject’s final fate, in which anatomists dissect the murderer’s body as sanctioned by law. Hogarth, who loved animals and actually kept a pet cemetery for his birds and dogs behind his home, knew that childhood cruelty to animals often led to violent, sadistic behavior as an adult, a phenomenon that psychologists today also recognize. In Hogarth’s day, cruelty to animals and, in the case of murderers, people didn’t seem at all unnatural. Not until the Anatomy Act of 1832 did the practice of dissecting murderers end in England. (The Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835 addressed animal abuse just a few years later.) Literally ahead of his time, Hogarth saw the cruelties and foibles of his society and drew them in the hopes that others would draw the same conclusions that he did.

Group Effort

Growing up and reading superhero comics as a kid, certain artists jumped out at me—Neal Adams, Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Frank Frazetta, and others. Something with those artists just clicked with my sense of art at the time. As an adult, I find myself remembering artists that I took in unconsciously rising to the surface of my mind, such as Dave Cockrum. Born November 11, 1943, Cockrum’s work on the X-Men, such as his Giant Size X-Men #1 cover (above, from 1975), revitalized a dying title for Marvel Comics. Cockrum created the look for such characters as Storm, Nightcrawler, and Colossus and helped make the X-Men the lucrative cultural phenomenon they are today. Alas, as seemingly with all the great comics creators, Cockrum saw little of the money generated by his creations. When illness struck in 2004, Cockrum desperately needed help, which came in the form of friends Clifford Meth, Neil Adams, and other comic industry movers and shakers. Their efforts shamed Marvel Comics into acknowledging Cockrum’s contribution to the X-Men franchise and resulted in monetary compensation that helped Dave and his family in his final years. The man who excelled at creating groups of superheroes found himself on the receiving end of kindness from fans and peers on a superheroic scale.

Although Cockrum’s work on X-Men and earlier on The Legion of Super-Heroes brought him the most attention, Dave’s occasional work on other Marvel Comics titles showed his versatility and dramatic sense of composition as well. In the cover to Daredevil #143 (above, from 1977), Cockrum shows the hero dramatically plummeting from a rooftop as a lion threatens to maul him. The plunging verticals of the composition give the picture an amazing sense of movement. The foreshortening of Daredevil’s hand as he reaches outside the picture plane for his billy club rivals similar effects used by Jack Kirby. Cockrum certainly fell under the influence of Kirby, as did so many artists of the 1970s, but you sense more influence than mimicking in Cockrum’s work. As a young man, Cockrum wrote insightful letters to the publisher of the Fantastic Four commenting on creations of Kirby such as the Inhumans. Years later, Cockrum found himself designing covers for that same title, a dream literally come true.


As a kid, I was a sucker for superhero teams—not just the biggies, like the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the Justice League of America, but hastily cobbled together groups such as The Defenders, The Invaders, and The Champions. Cockrum did his best to save what was a shaky union with art such as that on the cover of Champions #13 (above, from 1977). “Hercules! Black Widow! Angel! Ghost Rider! Iceman!” the covers breathlessly promised. I ate it up. The Champions lasted all of 17 issues, but I probably read more than half of them. Looking at the covers Dave Cockrum did for The Champions and other second-line titles, I find myself traveling back through time and remembering such books like old friends. As I said before, Cockrum’s talent seemed best suited to group efforts, usually sprawling compositions full of flailing limbs and laser blasts—a modernized version of a Baroque fresco of mythological figures duking it out. Dave Cockrum’s talent also inspired the group effort that rescued his best work from being lost in the wake of corporate maneuvering. Sometimes the good guys actually do win.

UPDATE: Clifford Meth has asked me to pass on the following announcement:

"On behalf of Dave Cockrum's widow Paty, I am in the process of grading hundreds of comics from Dave's personal collection collection. This includes Silver and Golden Age books, as well as many of Dave's personal file copies. Contact me at cliffmeth@aol.com if you're seriously interested."

If you're a comics fan, please consider helping out one of the great comics artists and getting a piece of history in the bargain.

And the Winner Is…

Alex the Judge contemplating how wonderful life is over a plate of French fries.

Then, a moment to contemplate the Phillies’ World Series Championship as the entries are tossed into the hat for the drawing to see who will win a copy of Nicole Dacos’ The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art Treasure, published by Abbeville Press.

Alex the Judge pulls the name from the hat…

Alex the Judge drunk with the sense of power that the Art Contest by Bob can bring…

And the winner is… Michael C.! Congratulations, Michael!

Thank you to everyone who played and thank you, again, to Abbeville Press for sponsoring this amazing giveaway!