Art Now and Then

Josef Albers

2012-03-21T00:01:00.001-04:00

Joseph Albers and his work.

I suppose there's hardly an artist alive today who doesn't sometimes wonder if his or her life and work will ever make much difference in the overall, greater scheme of things; either in the real world or even in the vaunted, rarefied air of the art world. I have these moments. I sometimes wonder if my greatest achievements in art are not all behind me, perhaps resting in the pregnant brain of some former student, gestating, waiting to emerge in brilliance maybe years after my own death. As a former art instructor, I struggle to come to grips with the fact that my main art legacy may be to have been a minor, influential footnote to some artist far greater than I. Sometimes I wonder if even these musings might be nothing more than self-flattery. However, whenever I lapse into such moments of doubt, there comes to mind a quiet, modest, elementary art teacher born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888. Twelve years he taught little children to paint and draw. His name was Josef Albers.

Tables,1927, Josef Albers, Bauhaus design at its best.

Even as he taught, Albers painted. He discovered Matisse, Cezanne, Munch, van Gogh, the German Expressionists, Delaunay and the Italian Futurists. He painted his first abstract painting in 1918. He studied. He attended the Royal Art School in Berlin, the Kunstgeweberschul in Essen, and the Art Academy in Munich. In 1920, he discovered the newly formed Bauhaus School in Weimar. In 1923, he graduated and joined the faculty, teaching the introductory design classes where he had his students undertaking constructions using wire netting, phonograph needles, razor blades, matchboxes, and other unusual materials. He was influenced by those around him at the Bauhaus, artists such as Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky. He began adding to his paintings glass assemblages, and using stains and sandblasting in his work, concerned with "accidental" ripple and bubbles while exploring balance, translucence, and opacity. Later, he moved up to teaching typography and furniture design (above).

A sampler of Albers' color harmonies--squared.

During the turbulent 1920s in Germany, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin taking Albers with it before being forced by Hitler to close in 1933. Albers immigrated to the U.S. and was recommended by Philip Johnson to a group of Utopian visionaries forming a small college in the back hills of North Carolina. They called it Black Mountain College. Albers had never even heard of North Carolina. His wife thought it was in the Philippines. He spoke not a word of English. Yet, in the years to follow, he was a major influence to such Black Mountain students as Robert Rauschenberg and Neil Welliver. In 1950, he became the Director of Design at Yale. It was about this time that he began his most famous work, his color studies centering on the square (above). This aesthetic/scientific pursuit was to occupy him the rest of his life. His color theories were to influenced young artists of the Pop and Op movements in the 1960s, and later a nascent Minimalism (bottom). Beyond this, his subtle, graded, explorations of color in a purely abstract sense populate the art history books and technical painting manuals we have all studied for the past forty years. Such a man, such a life, such art never fails to inspire this old, pensioned-off art teacher whenever he begins to wonder about his place in the cosmos. Maybe there's hope for me yet.

Untitled Lithograph, 1942, Josef Albers, Minimalism in some of its earliest manifestations.

John A. Ruthven

2012-03-20T00:01:00.001-04:00

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 2007, John Ruthven

Not long ago I wrote mentioning something called "niche art." No, it's not marble statues designed to go into wall niches. Niche art refers to subject matter content of a highly specialized nature. I once painted and sold a lot of cats. I could easily have slipped into the "feline niche." I chose not to. I found them not challenging enough in the first place and the whole idea of niche art too limiting in any case. I like cats as well as the next guy (we have four of them), but only as well as the next guy; and certainly not well enough to make a career of them. I've painted a few dogs in my time too; and that's also a niche. There are artists who only paint horses. Others paint only flowers. And from what I hear, there may even be artists who paint only goats.

Autumn Woods, 1998, John Ruthven

I suppose there's nothing wrong with an artist filling a niche...or several niches for that matter, if you really love the subject and don't mind the limitations. Moreover, there are also different size niches. One of my best artist friends paints only pet portraits. That, of course, is a much larger niche than just cats, dogs, or horses. And along the line of painting animals, perhaps one of the largest niches of all is that of the wildlife painter; which, like pet portraits, includes a number of smaller niches, namely fish, exotic animals, not-so-exotic animals, and birds. And though he first made a name for himself painting birds, one of the best artists in the wildlife niche is 85-year-old John A. Ruthven.

Dusty--Golden Retriever, 1985,
John Ruthven

Cincinatti artist, John Ruthven (pronounced ROOT-ven) has often been called the "20th Century Audubon." The problem with tags like this is they never say who calls him that...perhaps even the artist himself. Whatever the case, it's an apt comparison. Ruthven's work is accurate, inspiring, technically adept, and beautifully rendered. It is fine art. But unlike some in his niche, it's not photographically real. Backgrounds, if present at all, are kept to a minimum, just as in Audubon's work. There's never a suspicion that he might have used photos. Ruthven spends as much time sketching in the field as painting in his studio. As a result, there is a clarity in his watercolor images seldom found in most other wildlife art. Some might call it the Ruthven style, but then again, we have to wonder who the "some" might be.

Ruthven's 1960 Duck Stamp winner,
Redhead Ducks

As a result of this "style" there is an illustrative quality to some of his work. When he began as a professional in 1946, this necessarily made him a wildlife illustrator, which may have been when the first connection with Audubon occurred. John James Audubon was very much a wildlife illustrator too. Today the distinction, if there is one, is largely superficial. Ruthven is a wildlife artist. Although he's rendered most of the wildlife of North American his niche within a niche remains birds. He first gained national recognition when he won the Federal Duck Stamp competition in 1960 with his Redhead Ducks (left). This Pulitzer Prize of the wildlife art world created a national demand for his work, and even as his prices rose into the thousands of dollars, he could not keep up.

So, as many artists have been "forced" to do, Ruthven moved into print reproductions. Fortunately, as a watercolorist, there is little lost in the translation because it's literally exchanging one paper medium for another. In 1971, Ruthven founded Wildlife International' Inc. to publish and distribute his prints. Much of the company's work today is with various wildlife preservation and conservation groups who use his images in public relations and fund raising. In 2004, for his efforts both in art and wildlife preservation, Ruthven was awarded the National Medal of Arts. But lest you think this Georgetown, Ohio artist is just some stuffy old bird-watching brush jockey, Ruthven recently made his debut as a totally different sort of "wildlife" painter. In 2000, he painted a pig. Okay, not a real pig (not even a picture of a pig), though it was somewhat more real than he was used to. It was his entry in Cincinnati art/pig promotion Big Pig Gig. Titled Choo-choo (bottom), it features a face inspired by King Tut and a body inspired by B&O. There's no word on whether Wildlife International will feature a print of this one or not. Probably not.

Choo-choo, 2000, John Ruthven. The painting has also
been dubbed "Sow Great Thou Art."

Jose de Ribera

2012-03-19T00:01:00.021-04:00

Appearances can be deceiving--exquisite detail
from a painting by Jose de Ribera. The entire
painting is pictured at the bottom.

A few days ago several friends and I were discussing the fact that artists from outside a given areas seem to be more appreciated than those with local addresses. Well, guess what, there's nothing new about that. Even Christ made note of that fact in the Bible though if I recall he was he was talking about prophets rather than artists, though some might equate the two. An interesting example of this phenomena is Jose de Ribera. He was Spanish, born in 1590 or 1591 (sources differ) in the small town of Jativa near Valencia, Spain. Art historians guess he probably began his studies in Valencia and even assign him to the classroom of Francisco Ribalta though it's difficult to find any trace of Ribalta's style in his early work.

During this time, the Italian city of Naples was under the control of a number of Spanish Viceroys, making it a Spanish colony, and the richest trade center in all of the Mediterranean. It was there, in 1609, that Ribera migrated, no doubt for the money. And it was there, and in Rome where he picked up the influence of Caravaggio. His own modifications of Caravaggio's intense chiaroscuro made for a very distinctive style of his own. And for the rest of his life he was the most popular painter in Naples. In fact, he and Murillo are about the only two Spanish painters known outside their own country. Later in his life, Ribera began slipping from the strong tenebrist qualities of Caravaggio and began utilizing more color and softer, more painterly tendencies typical of Bolognese painting.

The Beggar Known as Club-foot,
1642, Jose de Ribera

Ribera often surprises us with his images. He seems to have especially loved physical oddities (as seen in the painting at the bottom). In 1642, he painted The Beggar Known as Club-foot (left). It's a teenage boy, his deformed right foot graphically depicted, his body, small for his age, clothed not in rags, but certainly bearing the hallmarks of poverty. He bares a black bag probably containing all his worldly possessions while over his shoulder rests a crutch. In his hand is the highly legible note in Latin: "Give me alms for the love of God." One might expect, given such a description, a pitiable wretch burdened with the fact that he's even alive. Instead, what we see is a charming, not unattractive, essentially optimistic young urchin, very much happy to be alive, his gummy smile, though slightly decaying teeth, at odds with our stereotype of this sort of individual even today.

Archimedes, 1630, Jose de Ribera

The same can be seen in Ribera's portrait of the famed mathematician Archimedes (right). Where we might expect a dour, pasty, colorless scholar, we instead find a rather thin, grimy, balding figure, again smiling, a compass in one hand, a sheaf of papers bearing geometric equations in the other. He is unkempt, his cloak open to nearly the waist, exposing a pale, hairless chest. Again, the painter has broken with tradition, depicting the man, not the myth. Even in his religious works, for which Ribera is most well known, we see the same element of surprise though, hampered by religious expectations, only not quite to the same extent. Without ever having returned to his homeland, Ribera's work was to have a great influence on any number of Spanish painters during the next two hundred years. Like his idol, Caravaggio (whom Ribera managed to meet briefly in Rome), his worked went where he could not, and shaped the painting style of artists he never knew or met.

The Bearded Lady, 1631, Jose de Ribera. Despite the title, it takes
a moment to entirely realize what you are seeing.

Jewish Art

2012-03-18T00:01:00.001-04:00

Probably all of us remember from elementary school science classes how much fun it was to play with a magnet and some iron filings. Whether you made them jump from the table to the magnet or played with them on a piece of cardboard with the magnet below, it was fun to make them "come alive," stand up, and seem to "dance around" as if by magic.

The Fiddler, 1912, Marc Chagall, as in
Fiddler on the Roof.

Artists in Europe during the first forty years of the 20th century were very much like the iron filings in our fondly remembered science labs. They were strewn across the multi-colored, multi-ethnic, multi-national map of Europe from Iberia to Hibernia to Siberia. And given the political unrest before, during, and after World War I, they were all dancing around uncomfortably like the proverbial "cat on a hot tin roof." Europe was a live, vibrant, exciting place for an artist to create, but also socially hyperactive, unsettling, often uncomfortable, and even dangerous place to stir up the kind of artistic unrest that marked this era. Imagine then, if you will, the end of a bar magnet placed beneath the map of Europe, in the middle of France, specifically beneath the city of Paris. The artists of Europe were attracted to this overpopulated, wide spot on the Seine very much like there was a magic magnet hidden beneath its streets among its famous sewers.

The Visit, 1919, Max Weber, not born
but raised in the USA.

Portrait of Chaim Soutine, 1916,
Amedeo Modigliani

The names include notables such as Marc Chagall, Max Weber, Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, and Amedeo Modigliani. Jewish artists led the exodus from all over Europe to Paris, then in many cases fled to New York when Nazism invaded their French refuge too. Their Jewishness is evident in their work, though to varying degrees. Chagall imprints it into nearly everything he does. Modigliani, perhaps due to his Italian birth and upbringing, displays it hardly at all. He's the only one of the above group not born in Eastern Europe. Yet, it is there, in the faces of his highly simplified portraits, brooding, restless, expressive, not just of a way of life but of a particular manner of thinking.

The Village, 1923,
Chaim Soutine

Their works are not cold, collectible, art objects worth millions, but have intimate meaning, often ringing up memories of years lived in Europe during their owners' childhood, or what it was like to be an immigrant from Europe arriving and living in New York almost 100 years ago. Their work is not just the usual "museum" art. They are more than beautiful works of art, more than national, ethnic, or religious treasures. Many are beloved family heirlooms, seldom shared with the rest of us.

One Portrait of One Woman, 1920, Jacques Lipchitz,
though primarily a sculptor, the Jewish "flavor" in his
work is most prominant in his painting.

Jeff Koons

2012-03-17T00:01:00.001-04:00

Jeff Koons poses with his Mylar inflatable
Rabbit, 1986, at the Tate Modern in London.

When you mention the name Jeff Koons, anyone who knows anything at all about art likely has an opinion, either positive or negative, about the man and his work. You either love him or hate him or perhaps love to hate him, maybe even hate to love him. I mean, how can you not like a guy who built a forty-three-foot-tall terrier puppy in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza made of stainless steel, 25 tons of potting soil, and 70,000 flowering plants all watered internally for the amusement and delight of natives and tourists alike this summer. Yet here is a man who friends and enemies alike freely admit will do anything artistic for a buck. Here is a man with few if any of the traditional skills of an artist. He doesn't paint or draw with any skill, and in fact has nearly all of his work fabricated by others. Here is a man intent upon shocking the world with his art yet ends up amusing us instead.

Koons' Puppy, 1981, Rockefeller
Center, New York

The art world uses artists. It manipulates them, manipulates their work, manipulates their thoughts. And in return, if they behave themselves and play by the rules imposed upon them, it bestows a token degree of fame and some degree of wealth, maybe even a modicum of independence, albeit on a relatively short leash. Jeff Koons reverses that. He uses the art world, some would say even abuses it, toys with it, amusing himself with its pretensions. This is why so many critics so readily try to dispose of him as any kind of serious artist. And not satisfied with manipulating the art system, Koons takes on the rest of the world too. And the effect is the same upon those outside the art world who take art seriously. Yet the paradox here is the Koons belongs to both worlds and insists he takes art seriously. And to add irony to paradox, Jeff Koons' work is at its best when not taken seriously--when it's simply laughed at and enjoyed.

Michael Jackson and Bubbles (and Koons),
1988, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Koons is relatively young--born in 1955. He has little or no art training, his background being business, advertising, a senior representative for the Museum of Modern Art, and a commodity broker on Wall Street for six years. He freely admits to lacking art skills, but then too, he knows where to find such skills, and how to work with those who possess them in making that art which he "imagines." His work has variously been compared to Duchamp, Warhol, and Milli Vanilli. All three are apt. From Duchamp and Dada, he borrows from a long tradition of making art from appropriated objects--it's art because I say it's art. From Warhol, he takes the shallowness of the pop culture and applies it to that which he makes into art. And from Milli Vanilli he reaps the aura of being "fraudulent" for seeming to have no talent and only slightly more social relevancy. His enormous, ceramic sculpture, Michael Jackson with Bubbles, is certainly beautiful, but about as socially relevant as Michael Jackson himself (a black man who looks like a white woman embracing a near mirror image of himself in the form of Bubbles, the chimp). A shallow lack of social relevancy is the whole point of the work.

Hand on Breast, 1990, Jeff Koons' painting featuring himself
with his (then) porn star wife. His Made in Heaven series
of nine soft-core works left little to the imagination. Though
controversial at the time, today they seem rather tame.

So, what kind of artist is Jeff Koons? A con artist with little talent and even less depth; or a pro artist with an uncanny knack for adroitly using the system to make snide comments about the system? There's little doubt he's an art icon, a worthy successor to Andy Warhol. He's also a self-made artists, but one skilled not in manipulating art media but in manipulating the mass media--an artist who underlines again and again that it is imagination and intrigue that define the artist, not a mastery of technique. Technically adept artists are a dime a dozen. Koons is an artist who dares to "imagine" art, and then dares to depart from our imagined image of an artist. And that, love him or hate him, makes him justifiably controversial; but also a unique artist, perfectly embodying today's Postmodern art ethic.

Koons' BMW Art Car, 2010. Koons joins a long line of 18 artists who have
decorated cars for BMW. Koons used, not paint, but vinyl wrap. The car ran
at Le Mans but did not finish the 24-hour-long race.

Jean-Francois Millet

2012-03-16T00:01:00.002-04:00

A Snow Day, 1959, Jim Lane,
my first oil painting.

I had a deprived childhood. Not physically deprived. We were never wealthy; but we were never hungry either. No, my deprivation was cultural. I never visited an art museum until I was an adult in college. Growing up, I recall admiring the work of a hack landscape artist named Kelly who painted in oils on dinner plates. I'll never forget being totally enraptured, watching another hack paint dozens of formula landscapes on Masonite which he sold for twenty to thirty dollars each at the Morgan County Fair. He made it look so easy. My own first paintings were in imitation of these. I was around fourteen. My first set of oil paints was a Christmas gift. I recall sitting on the back porch steps in winter painting a tiny snow scene of my school. It was probably the first and only time I ever painted on location (above). Even in reproductions, I never saw much great art. But a couple do stick in my mind. Three peasants, bent over in a field, picking up leftover wheat, one grain at a time, also a similar print by the same artist, a farmer and his wife, at twilight, pausing to say a prayer as they worked late in the fields.

The Gleaners, 1857, Jean-Francois Millet

I didn't know the artist at the time. His name was Jean-Francois Millet. The paintings, of course, were his unforgettable The Gleaners (above) and his even more moving, The Angelus (below). They both hung in our church. Stockport, Ohio, was a small, farming community. It was only natural that Millet's agrarian Realism should strike a knowing chord with my religious ancestors. Millet, though French, would have felt right at home there. He came from a small town himself, the hamlet of Gruchy, some ten miles west of Cherbourg on the Northwest Normandy coast of France. It was there he was born in 1814. His father, though quite talented as a painter, made his living as a farmer. As a child, his son exhibited an undeniable talent at drawing. The boy's education was given over to the parish priest who taught him Latin, Greek, and a love of the Bible and classic literature. His art training began in Cherbourg. Then, in 1838, he moved on to Paris to become a student of Paul Delaroche. Later he was able to travel to Italy where he became a great admirer of Poussin and Fra Angelico.

The Angelus, 1859, Jean-Francois Millet

Perhaps it was fortunate Millet was born a peasant because as an artist, he and his family knew little besides poverty most of their lives. He and his second wife had nine children. And though he had some early, modest success in the 1848 Salon with one of his first peasant paintings, The Winnower (now lost), for the next twenty years he struggled desperately just to feed his family. Yet these years were some of the most productive and creative years of his entire life. It was during this period he did his most important work. In 1849, he took his family to Barbizon, on the edge of the Forests of Fountainbleu for the summer. He ended up staying the rest of his life--twenty-seven years. It was there he came to be noticed by collectors, two Bostonians traveling in France who were, in the years to come, to provide a modicum of financial stability in his life. It was in Barbizon, in 1857 he painted The Gleaners and in 1859, The Angelus. Millet died in 1875. Twenty-four years later, the man who purchased The Angelus from Millet for 2,200 francs also died. The painting gained a degree of fame when it sold at auction for the then astounding price of 553,000 francs; which probably accounts for why a small print of it came to hang in a small village church in Southeastern Ohio, some fifty years later.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze

2012-03-15T00:01:00.002-04:00

Jean-Baptiste Grueze Self-portrait, 1769

All of us are familiar with the phrase, "overnight success." It is applied most often in the entertainment industry or in the business world, and usually it is totally inaccurate. Moreover, the so-called "overnight success" often takes several years of hard work and study to happen; even though the fame that marks it may occur quite suddenly. It happens in art too. During the early years of the 20th century, an ambitious young artists by the name of Norman Rockwell, walked into the Saturday Evening Post offices in Philadelphia with three paintings, one of which he hoped might be suitable for a magazine cover. The Post bought all three and Rockwell walked out with $225 and a career that was to span seven decades--an overnight success if there ever was one. About a 150 years earlier, another artists, not unlike Rockwell in many ways, enjoyed a similar early success. Though much more self-taught than Rockwell and without his charm and wit, in 1755, Jean-Baptiste Greuze went to Paris armed with a single painting entitled Pere de famile expliquant la Bible a ses enfants (A Father Explaining the Bible to his Children, below) Based solely on this one work, Greuze was immediately nominated as an associate member of the French Academy.

A Father Explaining the Bible to his Children, 1755, Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Greuze was born in 1725 in Toumus, France, his father a master tiler who had in mind for the boy to become an architect. His training in art was spotty at best. He studied under an art dealer. A second painting, the same year, L'aveugle trompe (The Blind Man Cheated) was greeted with similar enthusiasm. Both paintings sold to wealthy collectors. At the age of thirty, he was an "overnight success." During the next forty years at least, he continued to enjoy this success. In many ways, his work was not unlike that of his 20th century counterpart. It was bourgeois genre painting with a deep moralizing streak which initially at least, ran counter to the prevalent Rococo style of artists such as Boucher and Fragonard. His work was seen as uplifting and enlightening, while theirs was views as decadent and frivolous. His 1765 painting, The Spoiled Child (below), is typical of his mature work.

The Spoiled Child, 1765,
Jean-Baptiste Greuze

One of the difficulties artists face is that, with any luck, their productive years may span well over half a century. And while this may at first seem like good fortune, the problem is, that changes in the social and political climate happen much more rapidly than that. Today, artists and writers have, to some degree, adjusted to this rapid turnover in ideas, styles, and social manners. Rockwell did. But during the 18th century, while the pace of change may have been slower, it was just as determined. And unfortunately, Greuze was unable to, or chose not to, accommodate its inexorable movement. In due time, his work began to be perceived for what it was, sentimental, somewhat morally ambivalent, preachy, and intellectually dead. The age of archeology, the age of reason, and with them, the rebirth of Classicism, all culminating in the French Revolution; served to do him in. He died in 1805, a broken man; once the wealthiest and most popular artists in all of France, in the end he was totally supported by one of his daughters; demonstrating that with overnight success there can also be overnight oblivion.

An Artist Out of Step

2012-03-14T00:01:00.001-04:00

Jean Dubuffet Self-portrait, 1966

Artists are often accused of being "out of step" with the rest of the world. The excuse is that we "...march to the beat of a different drummer." We often zig when we should have zagged, and as a result, sometimes get zinged. We often fail when we should succeed and against all odds, succeed when least expected. As a result, we're expected to do the unexpected and when we don't we're blamed for selling out. The art history books are full of as many stories of artists who failed to succeed as with those who failed to cope with success. In Le Havre, France, in 1901, was born an artist who knew both sides of this equation. Some forty years later, he would become the second most famous artist in France (after Picasso). Young enough to be Picasso's son, and owing a stylistic debt to the Spanish expatriate, as well as the abstract surrealist, Joan Miro (also Spanish), he was nonetheless quite antithetical to much that Modern Art stood for. His name was Jean Dubuffet.

Apartment House, Paris, 1946, Jean Dubuffet,
oils with sand and charcoal.

Dubuffet came to Paris at the tender age of seventeen to study at the Academie Julian. It was there he came to know Suzanne Valadon, Raoul Dufy, and Max Jacob with whom he studied. He struggled through wave after wave of ignominious failure as a typical Parisian, left-bank, bohemian artist. Eventually, after seven years, he gave it up. He bowed to the demands of his family and went to Buenos Aires to work in the family wine business. There, he married, they had a daughter; he divorced, married again, and when war once more broke out in Europe, he briefly joined the French air force. Age and ill health saw him discharged after only a year. He was one of less than a handful of artists (including Picasso) who sat out the war in occupied Paris where he got back into painting. His first one-man show came in 1944, literally on the heels of the Nazi departure from Paris and the liberation of France, proving once and for all that a great deal of success in art comes from simple perseverance--being in the right place at the right time. Except for Picasso, he was practically the only other working artist in town.

Site Avec 2 Personages, 1975, Jean Dubuffet,
child-like art.

Though in the right place at the right time, the problem was, Dubuffet was the wrong artist for his time. France and the much battered Paris art world (such as it was) longed for normalcy and stability. Dubuffet's work offered neither. It flew in the face of all that was traditional. Critics dubbed it "Art Brut" (raw art). Dubuffet proclaimed that the truest art was that done by children and the insane. His style reflected this. Even his materials, sand, glass, pebbles, asphalt, discarded items, smashed and mashed into his oil paints struggled to refute everything that art in the much discredited past had ever been. Picasso was becoming tame and predictable. Dubuffet seemed the wild one, flinging everything he could get his hands on into his painting, then kicking dirt at it just for good measure. The much hated art phrase, "My kid could do that," was music to his ears, high praise, elevating the commonplace to the exalted, demoting high art to excrement. Eventually, both he and the rest of the world mellowed. By the time he died in 1985, a lifetime of struggle against history, art history, and doing the expected only to have to struggled once more against the unexpected being expected of him, Jean Dubuffet was acknowledged to be the finest postwar artist in all France, in the eyes of many, surpassing Picasso in the esteem in which he was held by his country.

Group of Four Trees, 1969-72, Jean DuBuffet, One Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York,
though appearing much like paper mache, it's really 25 tons of plastic,
aluminum, and steel.

James Rosenquist

2012-03-13T00:01:00.001-04:00

F-111, 1965, James Rosenquist

Until the advent of television commercials, the most garish, godawful form of advertising was the roadside billboard. Hated, despised, loathed, abominated, and abhorred by nearly everyone as a blight upon God's green earth; and even today, regulated by local, state, and federal governments nearly to extinction, they are still often considered the lowest form of advertising. Even though today, most billboards are informational, telling us from far back off the freeway where we might eat, sleep, or refill our tanks at the next exit, we still only barely tolerate them. In many cases, others are public informational, urging us to buckle up, or slow down, stop smoking, or help cure cancer with a generous donation. These we don't tolerate so much as ignore. And while they still continue to dot the landscape in their more abhorrent forms (especially around election time), it's in the big cities where they most prominently reside, often forming their own landscapes, even coming to symbolize big cities themselves.

James Rosenquist

In 1955, a young artist from Grand Forks, North Dakota, moved to New York City to study art. He'd already learned to paint in Minneapolis, but in New York, he could hit it big by studying at a more prestigious venue--the Art Students League. To earn a living, he painted billboards high above the heart of New York's Times Square--the Mount Olympus of billboardism. This of course, was back in the days when billboards were still painted by hand, rather than lithographed onto sheets of plastic and glued on as they are now. It was in the days before television had soaked up a lot of the advertising money that then went into billboards. And it was back in the days when billboard advertising was, itself, something of an artform, albeit at a rather lowbrow level. He didn't sign his billboards, but if he had, they would have read, "James Rosenquist."

Hey, Let's Go for a Ride, 1961, is like a piece of a
billboard Rosenquist might have carried home from work.
7-Up anyone?

Rosenquist and his friends at the Art Students League were a motley crew--Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Claus Oldenburg--struggling to be new and different in a New York art world still enamored with Abstract Expressionism. Like Rosenquist, several of them had experience working in commercial art. Along with Lichtenstein and Warhol, they didn't know it yet, but they were on the verge of becoming what we might call the fathers of Pop...or maybe Pop's pops. No two of them approached Pop in the same way. Lichtenstein took a comic approach. Johns used pop icons. Warhol did too, but chose quantity over quality. Rauschenberg mixed media, often with disturbing consequences. Oldenburg went soft...and 3-D.

Farenheit 1982, 1982, James Rosenquist, sharp, hot, perhaps even deadly.

Rosenquist went large--billboard large--one painting, F-111 (1965 top) was 26 meters wide. His colors were flat, bright, even garish, sometimes shockingly so. Like Warhol and some of the others, he borrowed commercial images, words, compositions, and effects from the consumer product and advertising worlds, but in using them, Rosenquist sliced and diced them into such complex and often confusing compositions, we're tempted to call him a Pop Expressionist. Unlike his Abstract Expressionist forebears, there were familiar images in his gigantic paintings all viewers could grasp and hold onto as they visually probed his work for whatever deeper meanings it might conceal. But in doing so, one was never sure if there really was something intellectually profound to be found, or if the various, often discordant, images were merely slapped together in much the same way Pollock splattered or Kandinsky slathered.

Stowaway Peers out a the Speed of Light, 2000, James Rosenquist,
Pop meets Abstract Expressionism.

Pop passed in the late 1960s. As it did, Pop artists, either became Pop icons themselves (as did Warhol and Lichtenstein) or passed with it. Rosenquist did neither. Even though his work was, and is, undeniably Pop, Rosenquist has continued to merely use Pop, rather than to wallow in its nostalgia or clothe himself in it. In a sense, he has melded Pop and what came before it into Pop and what came after it. In doing so, his recent work takes on elements of Surrealism and Dada, sometimes even Color Field and Minimalism. And in reflecting current art trends, in the glamorous Pop iconography he helped invent, his work today seems much fresher, crisper, cleaner, and sharper than that of any of his fellow fathers of Pop.

Gift Wrapped Doll #37, 1997. Much of Rosenquist's recent work
was destroyed by fire at his Florida home in April, 2009.

James Castle

2012-03-12T00:01:00.002-04:00

James Castle amid his own little art world.

The longer I write the more difficult it becomes to dig up stuff on artists we all know and love that hasn't already been hashed and rehashed a couple dozen times at least. So, I look toward some of the less well known painters from the annuls of art history. I've been accused a few times of deliberately digging up artists no one has ever heard of just for the perversity of it. Well, if I'm going to be accused of such a grievous sin, I might as well accede to that which I've been accused. Unless you stumbled into a little-known gallery on a little-known street in New York City, about twelve years ago, you've probably never heard of James Castle. The gallery was the Drawing Room (now called the Drawing Center) on Wooster Street. And, the artist was from perhaps the most unlikely art area in the whole country--Idaho.

His parents' store

Well, maybe it's time someone wrote about an Idaho artist. James Castle was born in 1899. That's about all that can be said of him that is in any way ordinary, and even at that it must be added that he was born deaf. Given the time and place, he was twelve before anyone made a move to try to in any way mitigate his handicap; and by that time it was too late. When his parents tried to send him to a school for the deaf, he would have none of it. He never learned to read or write, or even speak intelligibly. About his only means of communication was through his drawing. But he did draw and he drew well. Though completely self-taught, there is little that is crude or naive about his work. He drew only that which he knew and saw, and with the same independent spirit that bespoke his other dealings with the rest of the world.

Perhaps James Castle's stork delivered the mail
along with babies.

Castle's parents encouraged him. They bought him pencils, paper, crayons, charcoal, watercolor, but for the most part he cared little for such civilized tools. He preferred his own, sharpened sticks, an ink he made of soot from wood and oil burning stoves mixed with his own spit. For color he preferred tissue paper, made into a spitty pulp and applied with his fingers to cardboard, along with found materials such as string, and sometimes pictures from mail order catalogs. His parents ran a combination dry goods store and post office so there was never a shortage of refuse to fuel his creative binges. His subject matter revolved around his own little world, accurate drawings of interiors, his home, the store, all with a natural feel for one-point perspective, color, composition, and detail. Each work was part art and part historic documentation of a very solitary life lived in the small town of Star, Idaho (a suburb of Boise). When James Castle died in 1977, he had a style and substance to his work, and a technique that was peculiarly all his own. It was an art of which he was the only practitioner. Major retrospectives of his work have occurred at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008-09 and Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2011. His work can also be seen in more than a dozen major museums in the U.S.

Home life drawn with a sharpened stick, soot, and spit on what appears to be a
flattened box.

Hyacinthe Rigaud

2012-03-11T00:01:00.002-05:00

Self-portrait in a Turban, 1698,
Hyacinthe Rigaud

Writers on the subject of art history are often accused of dwelling on the misfortunes of the artists they write about; or accentuating their personal negative traits while at the same time glorifying their art. It's as if to say, despite what this man (or woman) went through, look what he (or she) produced. We hold up what passes for perfection and ponder in amazement how such greatness could have come from such an imperfect, downtrodden, demoralized, desperately distressed soul. And, I'm probably as guilty as anyone of doing this; and probably more often than I realize. A reader once asked me if there were ever any successful artists achieving greatness and happiness in the same lifetime. Of course there were, I told her, it's just that they're no fun to write about. Okay, in the interest of fairness, I propose to write about one such artist now. His name was Hyacinthe Rigaud.

Hyacinthe? What kind of name is that for a man? Moreover, what kind of father would name his son after a flower? Had to be name chosen by his mother. Well, history doesn't record who chose the boy's name only that his father was an artist, and apparently a pretty good one from all indications. He taught his son how to paint portraits. He was his only teacher, in fact. Born in 1659, in 1682, at the age of 23, the young man won the Royal Academy's prestigious "Prix de Rome," a fully expense paid year to study in the great Italian center of art and culture. Apparently deciding he already knew all he needed to know about his chosen profession, young Hyacinthe said thanks, but no thanks, rejecting the highly coveted prize; and instead set up a portrait studio in Paris. Don't you just love a man who knows his own heart?

Louis XIV, 1694,
Hyacinthe Rigaud

It was a smart move on his part. His stylishly dressed figures enhancing insightful faces won him a steady stream of commissions from the start. In 1688 he painted a portrait of Louis XIV's brother and quickly became a favorite of the king himself. This led, in 1694, to a portrait of the king in military dress elegantly showing off the monarch's proudest possession, his legs (left). This in turn led to the much more famous 1701 portrait (bottom) now in the Louvre, a gigantic canvas once more displaying the magnificent royal legs but this time with an equally magnificent royal robe, lined in white ermine, resplendent with gold fleur-de-lis, all framed in scarlet drapery, a black wig that would do Dolly Parton proud, and a pose just like that of the earlier portrait. Today, we would view the whole thing as laughably foppish. But Rigaud excelled at work like this. He had a whole factory of well-paid assistants churning out up to forty portraits a year like this. The master of course, overseeing every detail, but in fact, painting in only the faces himself. I'm happy to say he lived a long, full, productive life, dying in 1743, in his sleep, 84 years old, a very wealthy, highly respected, happy man. There, that wasn't so hard. But that rapscallion, Caravaggio, is a lot more fun.

Louis XIV of France, 1701, Hyacinthe Rigaud

Hubert Robert

2012-03-10T00:01:00.000-05:00

There's an old cliche that proclaims, "Some people have all the luck." I suppose the counterpart to this is, "Some people make their own luck." Perhaps one might add that the really lucky people have both going for them. Many of us could no doubt recount instances of both in our own lives. I know I certainly could, though I could probably use a little more of the latter. God knows I've had my share of the former. But, I'm working on it.

Hubert Robert, 1788, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

Hubert Robert (Frenchly pronounced ro-BARE) seems to have had both. His father was an ecuyer. Don't bother with your French dictionary, it means he was something like a valet. It means Hubert wasn't exactly born in the slums of Paris in 1733. His father's employer was the wealthy and influential Marquis Choiseul-Stainville. And though young Hubert didn't attend the Sorbonne, he did go to the prestigious College de Navarre, a Jesuit institution that might be thought of as pretty close to second best. There the lucky young lad quickly picked up a love of the classics in French, Italian, Greek, and Latin. Later he studied with the French Sculptor, Michel-Ange Slotz from whom he gained an amazing skill in the use of perspective.

The Fire of Rome, of July, 64 AD, 1795, Hubert Robert.
The artist seems to have had a fascination with fires.

In 1754, barely out of his teens, luck struck again when Robert managed to hitch a ride to Rome in the entourage of the newly appointed French ambassador, along with the marquis' son, who later became the Duke of Choiseul and first Minister of France. (This childhood friendship was to pay off handsomely when Robert returned to Paris.) Though as an artist, he'd never entered the competition for the Prix de Rome, much less won it, he found himself rubbing elbows with those who had. He sat next to them, absorbing lectures, drawing, and painting the Roman ruins, antiquities, and landscapes. Though having no official status with the French Academy in Rome, he managed to attend classes there regularly and mooch off the French legation for an astounding eleven years during which time he associated with the likes of Fragonard, Panini, and enough art collectors to keep him in spending money for the duration.

Demolition of the Houses on the Notre Dame Bridge,
1786, Hubert Robert

In 1765, Robert returned to Paris where his painting skills quickly won him space on the crowded Salon walls and admission into the French Academy. (Influential friends no doubt helped a lot on this score.) He earned the nickname, Robert des Ruines, for his considerable ability in painting romantic visions of ancient, and not-so-ancient ruins, including the demolition of the Pont Notre Dame (above) and the Hotel Dieu in flames (from sketches made during the fire).

Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in Ruins, 1796, Hubert Robert

Perhaps his most fanciful work is his Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in Ruins (above). For those not familiar with Paris, that's the main concourse of the Louvre. Painted in 1796, he depicts himself sketching among the ruins, the damaged remnants of the Louvre's art treasures, while squabbling thieves and peasant cooking pots both boil nearby. Incidentally, his fanciful painting actually spurred much needed renovation of the crumbling old palace.

The Bathing Pool (detail), ca. 1753, Hubert Robert

Robert's romantic, ancient vistas made him highly popular during his time, an example of his creating his own luck. Later, his work was an important influence during the early 1800s as the Romantic era in French painting began. Robert died in 1808, though but for another stroke of luck, his death could have come as much as ten years earlier. During the French Revolution Robert was imprisoned. He escaped losing his head solely because someone else was mistakenly guillotined in his place.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

2012-03-09T00:01:00.002-05:00

Composition: Sitter with Wings, ca. 1920,
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

In 2001 an art exhibit opened at Berlin's Bauhaus Archive Museum. The 300-piece show displayed the work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who was once a student at the famed Bauhaus school. She studied under such notables as Paul Klee, George Muche, Lyonel Feininger, and Johannes ltten, who was responsible for formulating the basic instruction courses for entering first year students at the school. Friedl Dicker was such an outstanding student she ended up teaching this course. Later, she and her lover, Franz Singer moved to Berlin with the Bauhaus and there started their own atelier, training students in the design and making of textiles, lace, jewellery, and books. Friedl Dicker's paintings from this period were of the abstract constructionist style then popular with Bauhaus students and faculty. The watercolour and oil paintings in the show are mostly from this period.

Nude Pavel, 1938-40, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Friedl Dicker was born in Vienna, Austria in 1898. Her family owned a stationery shop. Little is known of her early years or her early art education before she began attending classes at the Bauhaus during the time when it was still located in Wiemar, Germany. But as a result of the broad arts and crafts training she received there, far from being merely a painter, Friedl was accomplished in any number of art-related design and fabrication skills. In Vienna, between 1926 and 1931, she designed a Montessori kindergarten and a tennis club, as well as completing numerous other architectural jobs. In her spare time she also worked at various interior design activities, designing stage sets and costumes. In the midst of all of this, she also taught art to children at several private schools. During the 1930s, the rise of Hitler in Germany, and her pro-Communist political activities caused her to flee Berlin for Prague where she became a Czech citizen and continued her work in designing for the theatre, designing textiles, painting, and teaching. Her painting during this time became more traditional, with portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes dominating her work (above). It was in Prague that she met and married her husband, Pavel Brandeis.

Theresienstadt, aerial view, 1940

At a time when her friends and fellow Jews were fleeing Czechoslovakia by the hundreds for Britain and the United States, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis refused to leave. She even had in her hands a passport and entry visa for Palestine. Friends urged her vehemently to go but, instead, she and Pavel moved to the small town of Hronov in north-eastern Bohemia where she worked in a textile factory. Her husband was an accountant. But times there were tough. Several times they were forced to move to a smaller apartment. Eventually, they both lost their jobs and were forced to move to a still smaller village where Pavel found work as a carpenter. Though her paintings were being shown in England, Friedl benefited little from the exposure. Then, on December 14, 1942, they were both deported to Theresienstadt; a German concentration camp set up inside an eighteenth century fortress north of Prague (above).

Children in the cast of Brundibar, a play
written, produced, and performed at Terezin,
1943-44. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis' set design
can be seen in the background.

As noteworthy as her life may have been until this point, it was her time at Theresienstadt (shortened to Terezin) for which Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is most remembered. Of all the German concentration camps, Terezin was sort of the best of the worst. There, facing a world looking sceptically over their shoulder, the Nazis set up a propaganda facade of benevolence toward their Jewish captives. There they ran a model Ghetto, allowing some 150,000 citizens a degree of self-government and cultural life. Where, before, Friedl had counted her young art students by the dozens, there she was teaching hundreds, even thousands. She also helped design sets and costumes for children's plays (above). And she made an indelible impression upon the many children lucky enough to survive the holocaust (some of whom are still alive today). Friedl Dicker Brandeis was not so lucky. On September 28, 1944, with the war going badly for the Nazis, Pavel Brandeis was one of many at Terezin moved to Auschwitz. Friedl volunteered to follow on a separate train (men and women were seldom moved together). Just eleven days later, she joined the millions of other Holocaust victims. Her husband, ironically, survived.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL ON FRIEDL DICKER-BRANDEIS BELOW...

Holocaust Art

2012-03-08T00:01:00.002-05:00

Self-portrait in Automobile, 1940,
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

It's only natural for all of us to notice role models or heroes especially prominent in our chosen field. Artists are no different. Usually we look to those who were basically not too unlike ourselves and then ponder if we could ever measure up to them. But as a former art instructor of young children, it's not often I come upon heroic art teachers. I mean just how heroic can one be with a fistful of crayons and an armload of newsprint?

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was born around the turn of the century. She grew up in Austria, studying art at the Viennese Royal Academy; and like many of her sex at the time, found her niche in teaching art to children. On December 16, 1942, Friedl and her husband were arrested by Nazis from their home in Prague. They were herded to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. As concentration camps go, Theresienstadt was the best of the worst. It was a sham showcase used by the Nazis to convince the rest of the world at the time, that the lot of the Jews in Europe wasn't as bad as some believed.

Theresienstadt Concentration Camp,

the sigh translates: "Work Brings Freedom."

What Friedl Dicker-Brandeis found when she arrived at Theresienstadt were thousands like herself, just sitting around with nothing to do, waiting for the next horror to happen. Bored herself, and as art teachers are prone to do, she rounded up from various sources crayons, watercolors, and paper, then descended into the cellars where the children were kept. There she started preaching the salvation of color and creativity. She brought light to darkness. She allowed children a creative release from the fears, nightmares, and horrible memories within them and all about them. The pictures were not pretty. For the most part, her classes were held in secret, and those few Germans who did know cared only that the children were kept occupied and quiet. In most cases, her young artists did not survive with their work. Indeed, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was a victim of Auschwitz herself. But before she died, she buried, behind a wall at Theresienstadt, two suitcases containing the hundreds drawings her children had made.

Children, We're Not Your Mother, 1943,
She Lieberman, age 16

After the war, as the camp was being returned to civilian use, the suitcases were found by a worker. The artwork was taken to the Jewish Museum in Prague for preservation. In 1999, another art hero entered into the picture, Moravian College Art Historian, Anne Dutlinger. In studying the children's drawings in Prague, she persuaded the curators of the museum to let her bring ninety of them, back to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for an exhibit. Theresienstadt held more than 140,000 Jews. Over 35,000 died from malnutrition and disease. Another 88,000 went to Auschwitz. The odds were not good, but some of the artists from Theresienstadt stood by their work of more than fifty years earlier at the Moravian College exhibit, paying tribute to the brave, resourceful, young art teacher who helped them survive their ordeal. They and their work helped the rest of us not to forget, and added yet another dimension to the Holocaust.

Arrival of the Train of Death,
1944, Pollakova, age 9

The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art

2012-03-07T00:01:00.002-05:00

The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art main entrance.

Yesterday, I wrote about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) as if it were the best thing to come along in the art world since sliced cheese and wine. Perhaps, but MASS MoCA is not one of a kind. In fact, today one does have to roam too far afield to find museums which are comparable.

The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art aerial view

The Japanese have a museum entry into this heady atmosphere of contemporary exhibition space. Like MASS MoCA, it's not where one might expect to find such things but in the "Peace City" of Hiroshima. The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art was the first museum in Japan to dedicate itself solely to contemporary art (there are at least two more recent entries now). Not surprisingly, in Hiroshima, "contemporary" means anything coming after August 4, 1945. In formulating a modern image of urban civic itself, its past having been effectively eradicated, Hiroshima had little but peace upon which to build--hope for the future, and a prayer that nuclear destruction on such a scale might never happen again. Their museum embodies both these elements in it's 100,000 square foot (large by Japanese standards) display space.

A peace loving Vegetable Weapon, 2009, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, HCMCA

There is no feeling of medieval fortress security, aircraft hangar volume, or any kind of factory ambiance such as one finds at MASS MoCA. If anything, the feeling is more closely related to that of the Acropolis in Athens. The museum sits atop a 50-meter high hill called Hijiyama Art Park and was designed by Japanese architect, Kurokawa. Actually, to be more accurate, the museum sits in the hill, some 60% of it's volume being underground so as not to offend Japanese aesthetic sensibilities regarding their precious limited landscape. Besides art and cultural facilities set in a forested, 75 acre area, there is a sculpture park, an outdoor school, vistas, open areas, and nature walks offering bits of quiet pleasure for all ages. Stone, tiles, and aluminum are employed in the exterior facade of the sprawling, four-level complex. And while the Japanese entry into the field of contemporary art exhibition may lack the mass of MASS MoCA, it competes quite handily with its aura of oriental refinement, relaxing ambiance, and sedate style as compared to its Massachusetts counterpart's typically American emphasis on enormous, freewheeling size alone.

The specter of nuclear destruction is never far removed from the art of Hiroshima as seen
in this work for the museum's 65th Anniversary Memorial Exhibition in 2010

MASS MoCA

2012-03-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass.

What happens when contemporary art becomes too big for museums? Some of it, of course, moves outside. The curtain, umbrellas, and assorted gift wraps of Christo come to mind. Or maybe everyone's favorite floral canine at center stage in Rockefeller Center. But what if it's merely BIG as opposed to ENORMOUS? I mean, the MoMA isn't exactly a broom closet, but neither is it big enough for Joseph Beuys' 22-foot tall bronze triangle weighing 3,000 pounds, titled Lightning with a Stag in its Glare to hang from its ceiling. Or how about maple trees growing upside down? Some of this art only works inside where it's size can be juxtaposed to the scale of an interior space. Clearly, a new type of art museum is called for.

The biggest asset SPACE!

In the 1970s and early 80s, North Adams, Massachusetts was a bustling mill town of 18,000 nestled in the Berkshire Mountains. Then its major employer, an electronics firm, went out of business, laying off 4,137 workers. The unemployment rate soared toward thirty percent. Seventy percent of it's storefronts were empty, the hotel went bankrupt (for the third time), and the running joke was that the whole valley in which the town is nestled should be flooded to create lakefront property. That was 27 years ago. Today, the situation is largely reversed. Over two-thirds of North Adams' commercial footage is occupied, a gourmet restaurant flourishes, while whole neighborhoods of pristine Victorian houses have been turned into Bed & Breakfast Inns. And the key to this recovery lies in the very deserted factory that had once made triggers for nuclear weapons, and nearly triggered the town's demise. Now, $35-million later, 105,000 visitors a year trooped through the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) while another 25,000 attended performing arts presentations in the same, reinvigorated, factory complex.

One Floor up More Highly, 2011, Katharina Grosse

Anything this big with a gestation period of fourteen years has to have a colorful and troubled pedigree. MASS MoCA's resembles a roller coaster. First conceived in the mind of Thomas Krens of nearby Williams College as he contemplated traditional expansion of the college's museum of art, gradually, the concept grew to fill the economic and physical vacuum Sprague Electronics left when it closed it's doors in 1985. MASS MoCA also owes its existence to a trend in Postmodern art toward a scale far outstripping traditional display spaces. Often artists were reduced to merely drawing plans for their creations for lack of adequate interior spaces in which to display their work.

MASS MoCA is the perfect venue for Jenny Holzer's projections.

Support first came from the state...and left just as quickly as political winds shifted. Sponsors too came and went...as did leadership and local enthusiasm for the project in the traditionally conservative mill town. The mayor, an early supporter, reported becoming "MoCAed out." At one low point, the press labeled the whole enterprise a costly boondoggle and supporters were nearly hooted out of town. But eventually the economics fell into place. What had once been a textile plant, then a facility manufacturing components for NASA's trips to the moon, found new life as a museum boasting the wide open interior spaces demanded by Postmodern artists for their work. Even so, townspeople, while praising the economic miracle the museum has brought to their previously dying town, aren't quite sure what to make of some of the museum's artwork. Minimalist works sprawl over hundreds of square feet. The cryptic words, "That's interesting," are heard from passing viewers. Some cock their heads in wonder, others stifle laughter. Some don't. But that's the way Postmodern art should be--interesting, mystifying, awesome, amusing, even hysterical at times. Maybe every sleepy little town in American should have a MoCA.

Installation: Colors, No Figures, 2007, Fransje Killaars.
Some works are so large they can only be created on site.

Utagawa Hiroshige

2012-03-05T00:01:00.001-05:00

Utagawa Hiroshige Memorial Portrait,
Kunisada

One of the most persistent stories art historians love to tell involves of one their own, cast in a heroic mode, peeking and poking through the cobwebs, spiders, dirt and dust of some dark, dank, basement archive in search of something (perhaps a broom) when "voile`" they stumble (sometimes literally) over something else of far greater, even inestimable, artistic value. Okay, get ready, I've got a story like that to tell you.

Her name was Amy G. Poster. The year was 1970. She'd just gone to work for the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She was new at the job and was down in the basement (not dark, dank, or dirty at all, by the way) when she came upon an album of old Japanese prints that had been sitting down there on the same shelf for close to forty years. Printed on thick but fragile mulberry paper, in bright, gorgeous color, they were over a hundred years old even back then. They were block prints, one hundred of them, and it would be another seventeen years before they were finally displayed. That was 1987. Today, you can go to the Brooklyn Museum and see "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (modern day Tokyo). It's one of only six complete sets of the prints known to exist. The artist was Utagawa Hiroshige.

36 Views of Mt. Fuji, The Sea off Satta,

1858, Utagawa Hiroshge, today his

Henry Moore

2012-03-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

Carved in Stone: Henry Moore

In modern practice, sculpture can be divided into two types, additive and subtractive. Today, it's mostly the former. In the past, especially up to the dawn of the twentieth century, it was primarily the latter. Michelangelo worked exclusively by "subtracting" one chip of marble at a time from his work until he'd "freed" his slave or his Moses from it's imprisoning monolith. Picasso was one of the earliest to "add" various existing objects and materials together to "make" a sculptural statement, usually in abstract form. In between these is the adding together of bits of clay or wax to form a model (positive) from which a mold (negative), usually of plaster, is created allowing a more permanent material, usually clay or metal to be cast, thus making the final (positive) shape. Usually this shape has to be "cleaned up" by chipping away bits of unwanted material resulting from defects in the mold; thus employing subtractive techniques in order to arrive at the final piece.

Henry Moore, subtracting

Today, those who work using the subtractive method in carving wood or stone, are often called "woodcarvers" or "stonecarvers" rather than sculptors, which has come to be a term reserved for those using more "modern" techniques, either additive or casting. I'm not sure just why this should be; but it seems to be the case. Perhaps the last carving sculptor of the 20th century to attain any degree of fame and influence came out of the Yorkshire coal mining country of central England. Raymond Spencer Moore was a coal miner and the father of eight children. His son, Henry, was the seventh. The boy was born in 1898. Unlike many fathers of artists, Raymond Moore was determined his son not follow in his footsteps, deep into the dirty and dangerous bowels of the Leeds countryside near Castleford where they lived. He had in mind, instead for the boy to follow after his sister and become a teacher instead.

West Wind, 1928-29, Henry Moore, his first

public commission, the Michelangelo influence.

Henry Moore tried it for a time at the tender age of seventeen. Then the First World War intervened. He joined the army and passed through London for the first time on the way to the war. There, he paused to visit a number of museums where he caught the "art bug." He saw combat in France, fell victim to a gas attack, spent two months hospitalized in London, before returning to the front just in time for the armistice. After the war, though he returned to his teaching post, he knew he wanted to be a sculptor. He became the only sculpture student at the nearby Leeds School of Art. They even had to appoint a painter to be his instructor. After two years living at home and commuting he won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy in London. But his real classrooms were the sculpture galleries of London's many museums. He did so well that upon graduation in 1924, he was appointed an instructor. It was back to teaching again, but this time, something he loved.

Gray Tube Shelter, 1940, Henry Moore, the inspiration for much of his later work.

He married, traveled abroad during the 1930s, admired the sculpture of Michelangelo, Rodin, Brancussi; and the massive paintings of Giotto and Masaccio. During the 30s, his work could best be described as "heroic," influenced by the organic, stylized qualities of Pre-Columbian relics he found in British museums. With the Second World War, he was too old to fight, but that didn't keep the Germans from bombing his studio in Leeds, forcing him to reestablish himself in the country at an estate call Perry Green where he lived and worked until his death in 1986.

Family Group, 1950, Henry Moore,
his first major commission after WW II

During the 40's his drawings of London families huddled together in underground bomb shelters (above) led to his sculptural family groups which dominated his work from this period (left). Gradually, his work became more and more organically abstract, his reclining figures, for which he was best known, metamorphosing into primordial shapes with smooth, rounded edges, contrasting positive masses with negative "holes," challenging, our basic sculptural instincts by emphasizing the negative as profoundly as the positive (bottom). Much of his early work was carved from Elm, but he was not afraid of stone either. Later pieces were cast from clay models in bronze. And though he was influenced by Picasso, never did he work purely in Picasso's trademark additive mode. Today, heaped with hundreds of awards and academic honors, his monumental sculptural figures dotting the globe, Moore is considered to have been the most outstanding British sculptor of the 20th century.

Reclining Figure, 1951, Henry Moore, considered his mature style.

Henri Fantin-Latour

2012-03-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

Still Life: Corner of a Table, 1873, Henri Fantin-Latour

For art connoisseurs who love flowers, and those art lovers who also happen to have a green thumb, there's a very good chance they also love the work of Henri Fantin-Latour (pronounced FAWN-TAWN la-TOUR). They were his stock in trade. The vast majority of his works (oils and lithographs) depict "God's art," as some have called it. His Still Life: Corner of a Table, painted in 1873 is quite typical. A table is set with a brilliantly lit white cloth, upon which are the silver, glass, china, and food elements of a light brunch. In the foreground is a large flowering plant I wish I could identify. It's all as elegant and carefully contrived as a stage set in its attempt to look casual. And the overall effect is exquisitely and delicately beautiful. It's not tromp l'oeil, however. There is too much depth for that. It would be more closely akin to what we now call "photo-realism," back at a time when photography was just only beginning to effect the way some painters painted. Did he use photos? Possibly, but in any case, Henri painted dozens of impressively little masterpieces like this, and each one is as perfect as the one before.

Homage to Delacroix, 1864, Henri Fantin-Latour

However, if you're not into floral art, you've probably never heard the name Fantin-Latour before. The exception might be if you're a fan of the Impressionists. Why? Henri was certainly no impressionist except for perhaps sharing some rather imaginative compositional elements with them. Well, for one thing, he hung out with them at the Cafe Guerbois. Along with Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, and others, he was what you might call a "regular" in the place. And coming from a very academic background, painting in a most traditional manner, he no doubt represented a rather conservative point of view in their legendary debates as they raged long into the night. (Degas once complained they drank and argued art so late each night they couldn't get up to paint the next morning.) But drinking and arguing aside, there was much more to Henri Fantin-Latour's association with the Impressionist than mere proximity. He also painted them.

Studio of Battignolles, 1870, Henri Fantin-Latour. Pictured are Otto Scholderer (a painter), Edouard Manet painting, sitting, Zacharie Astruc (artist and art critic), while standing three-quarters with a dark hat is, Auguste Renoir . To his right is novelist Emile Zola and the musician Edmond Maitre, a friend of Henri Fantin-Latour, then the painter Frederic Bazille (in profile) and on the far right is Claude Monet .

Besides being into flowers and tea sets, Fantin-Latour was a pretty mean portrait painter as well. In fact, except for a few faded photos, we have him to thank for our knowing what many of these men actually looked like. Manet, in fact, he painted three different times, first in 1864 in his Homage to Delacroix (above, right), again in 1867 in standing portrait which actually made it into the Salon that year. (Imagine having your work rejected by the salon but having your portrait, painted by another artist, accepted.) And finally, perhaps Fantin-Latour's most famous work, a painting of Manet at work in his studio entitled Studio of Battignolles (above, 1870). The painting depicts Manet, brush in hand, seated before his easel, while in the background, watching in admiration, is the whole Cafe Guerbois crowd. It's strange the tricks art history pulls on its unsuspected artists. Here we have a man who spent his whole life painting the delicate intricate beauty of his beloved flowers in their finest detail only to be most remembered for a somewhat fawning group portrait of a bunch of stogy old men dressed in their Sunday best watching one of their own paint a picture. If it's any consolation to him, he's since had a rose named in his memory.

The Fantin-Latour Rose

Harold Bell Wright

2012-03-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

Harold Bell Wright, 1902

I've written many times about famous artists who gave up promising careers in other fields to pursue their greatest love, often at the expense of their families and their own financial well being. Gauguin gave up his life as a well-to-do stockbroker to paint. Although he was never very successful at it, Van Gogh was once a minister and art dealer. Cezanne once studied law before turning to painting. Kandinsky also switched from law to art. Those are just a few. On the other hand, we don't think about them so often, but there are probably thousands with the reverse story to tell. In fact, we all no doubt know some stories like this quite intimately. In some cases, they could even be our own stories. In Rome, New York, in 1872, began such a story. His name was Harold Bell Wright. He was the second of four boys, and his first love was painting. Although he was largely self-taught, he was pretty good at it. When he was eleven, his mother died, leaving him and his brothers to an uncaring, alcoholic father. Wright left home a year later, bouncing between relatives and flop houses. His schooling was sporadic at best. He more or less painted his way across the country, selling his landscapes and painting signs, enough to pay for supplies and keep body and soul together.

The church in Pierce City, Missouri,
where Write preached his first sermon.

Eventually, as a young man, he ended up in Missouri. He was a friendly, likable, somewhat talkative chap with a gift for storytelling. The elders of a nearby church asked him to come speak. And so, early one Sunday morning in 1896, he mounted his horse, rode 25 miles across the prairie to a small, white, wooden chapel, and there, in front of fewer than a dozen people, he found his true calling. He never set out to become a preacher. For his efforts, he earned eight dollars a week--small compensation even by artist's standards. But the effect he had upon his tiny, but growing, congregation in Pierce City, Missouri, and more important, the effect they had upon him eventually saw his audience grow from dozens to millions. He continued to paint a little, to preach, and most of all to write. Though critical of denominationalism, and despite a general lack of training in public speaking, his homespun Christian values and front-porch humor made his early efforts a success. After a year, he was invited to become pastor of a much larger Pittsburgh, Kansas, church; and it was while there that his first novel, That Printer of Udell's was written.

Ronald Reagan's copy
of Wright's first book

The book was published in 1902 and was really little more than a compilation of many of his better sermons. At the same time, Wright had also become quite an accomplished artist, painting murals in several Midwestern churches. In 1909, his second book, The Calling of Dan Matthews was published. It was then that Wright decided, once and for all, to give up art. He did so in dramatic fashion. He carried out every single canvas, painting, tube of paint, and brush from his studio, heaping everything into a big pile and torched the lot of it. The supplies alone, apart from any artistic value in the paintings, amounted to over $500. Fortunately some of his work still survives (bottom). What also survives are 17 additional literary works including his most popular, Shepherd of the Hills. The book sold millions of copies, was translated into several languages, and came out of Hollywood in four different films. In 1927, Vanity Fair Magazine called him one of the top six most influential "Voices in America." Former President Ronald Reagan credits Wright's books with his own decision to become a baptized Christian. Several individuals have had significant effects upon their times and ours, having chosen to devote themselves to art, but few have had such effects in giving up art for a nobler, more powerful cause.

Painting by Harold Bell Wright, before 1909

Harriet Beecher Stowe

2012-03-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1853, Francis Holl

When the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe is mentioned, the next mention is almost always that of her greatest novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Blamed (or credited) with having single-handedly started the Civil War with her book by no less an authority on the subject that Abraham Lincoln himself, this talented, intellectual, socially conscious, hardworking woman was the epitome of the long-suffering Christian wife and mother of the 19th century. Born in Connecticut in 1811, the daughter of Lyman Beecher, a powerful preacher and Congregational theologian, also the founder of the American Bible Society; she first served as a teacher at a women's academy in Cincinnati during the 1840s. It was there she came to know the evils of slavery firsthand. Her home was a station on the famous Underground Railroad. It was there also she met her theologian husband, Calvin Stowe, who was eleven years her senior. When he took up a teaching position at a college in Maine during the 1850s, she moved there with him and began writing and publishing, in serialized form, her Uncle Tom's Cabin while raising seven children (three of whom died young). The publication of the series in book form during the 1860s made her an internationally know author. The book sold 3000 copies the first day, 300,000 copies the first year, and eventually rose to a total of three million copies in twenty different languages (impressive even in this day and age).

An 1859 poster marking the launch of
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Insofar as most people know Harriet Beecher Stowe, her life's story ended with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In fact, she lived to be 85 years old. She died in 1896. After the war, with the abolition of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe still found plenty to write about. For the next thirty years, she produced almost one book per year. Having "freed the slaves" so to speak, she next turned her writing talents toward the emancipation of women. And it is in this context that this literary artist becomes interesting from a broader, artistic perspective. While she was an amateur painter at various times in her life, it was her book, American Women's Home (bottom, left, written in conjunction with her sister, Katherine) in which she better displayed her creative bent with its innovative designs aimed at freeing women from much of the household drudgery which had always enslaved them.

The Stowe Kitchen,

Not surprisingly, she started in the kitchen, making it smaller, more compact, and better organized. She was the first to separate the room into two distinct areas, segregating the intense heat of the cast iron stove of her day to a separate area behind sliding doors to form a cooking alcove, its walls lined with shelves to store cooking utensils as well as double as a pantry. The other half, a modest 9' X 9' area had a built-in sink with a dish drainer that could be folded over it to increase counter space. Shelves overhead held dishes and table service while beneath the counter was contained bins for bulk staples such as sugar, flour, salt, rye, and corn meal (above, left). The counter top was made up of separate, reversible surfaces for chopping vegetables and kneading dough. The sink came with two hand pumps, one for well water, the other for cistern water which could also be used to pump water to a reservoir in the attic to allow for running water in the upstairs bathroom (one of the first affordable home designs of the era to even include an indoor bathroom).

Stowe's "Christian House"

The house itself she dubbed the "Christian House," so indicated by the crosses on each of its four gables. It was story-and-a-half design of eclectic style, quite modest in proportions (a mere 43' X 25'), consisting on the ground floor of an entry foyer with stairs, drawing room, kitchen, dining room, and two small, roofed piazzas for outdoor living. Upstairs were two bedrooms and the innovative bath. Inasmuch as the first "water closets" were just starting to come into use, Stowe also illustrated a design for what she called an "earth closet." This was a combining of the old familiar chamber pot with the addition of a wall-mounted bin of "kitty litter" or dried earth as she termed it, which could be sifted into the removable receptacle after each use. And although the device demanded a good deal more servicing, it had the "advantage" of not requiring indoor plumbing, the lead pipes of which were notoriously prone to freezing in winter and leaking all year around.

Stowe's American Woman's Home, 1873

And while the house lacked central heating, the two Franklin stoves and the behemoth kitchen cooking stove were all centrally located and fed into the same chimney. Also, Stowe's design was perhaps the first of her era to include duct work for the introduction of fresh air into the family's living quarters, a feature she found dangerously lacking in professionally designed hotels, churches, restaurants, even steam ships of her day. Stowe's American Women's Home may not have been as popular as her first book, but if Uncle Tom's Cabin, was instrumental in freeing the slaves, there can be little doubt that Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Christian House" went a long way in helping to free the women of her day too.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Stowe's own home was
a bit more upscale than her "Christian House."

Hans Holbein

2012-02-29T00:01:00.002-05:00

Hans Holbein (the elder) Self-Portrait

It's no secret in the fine arts that talent is genetic. It tends to run in families. Sometimes it's been known to skip a generation but many is the son or daughter, living in the shadow of an accomplished father or mother, who finds it an uphill struggle to match the greatness of the parent's work. In film, the Fonda family comes to mind. In painting, the Wyeth family; in music, the Bernsteins or the Gershwins; in architecture, the Wrights, I could go on and on. And in the majority of these cases, the offspring, while often exceptional, do not measure up to the success of the first generation. But it does happen. And when it does, for the father, it's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, every father wants to see his son succeed. Yet, think of the dismay of having your own outstanding work mistaken for that of your son. That's exactly what happened to a hard working, really quite talented German artist during the Northern Renaissance.

Ambrosius and Hans Holbein (the younger),
silverpoint by Hans Holbein (the elder), 1511

His name was Hans Holbein. We've all heard the name, right? He's known today for his elegant portraits of a corpulent King Henry VIII of England. No, that's Hans Holbein the son. Art historians refer to him as Hans Holbein (the younger). This time we're talking about his father, Hans Holbein (the elder). His brother, Sigismund, was also a painter. He was born near Augsburg in German Bavaria about 1460. His father was a well-to-do leather worker who saw to it that his son studied with the great German painter, Schongauer. He married the daughter of a painter by the name of Brickmaer, and seems to have worked in several area cities of the time including, Ulm, Frankfort, Basle and Alsace. Records suggest that his travels may have been aimed at escaping indebtedness. In any case, his sons, Hans and Ambrosius (above, left), were born around 1500. Both he trained to become painters.

Death of the Virgin, 1490, Hans Holbein (the elder)

The father's early work shows the influence of Roger van der Weyden, and then that of the Van Eycks. Later, picking up many Italian influences, he was the first German painter to soften his style, favoring the gentle, voluminous qualities of Mantegna and Perugino over the angular, linear style of Durer and others. Though he painted portraits, his best works are the numerous altarpieces he left scattered from Augsburg to Nuremberg. A particularly poignant one in Augsburg, painted around 1515 (photo unavailable), contains a self-portrait, along with likenesses of his two sons who may have helped him with the work. In it, the father points with pride to his namesake, perhaps realizing that his son already showed signs of surpassing him. Unbelievably, even before he died in 1520, indications are that papers were being forged to indicate work by the father had been done by the son. It's the kind of thing than make fathers prematurely gray; and no doubt adds a little silver to the heads of art historians as well.

Goodwin's Williamsburg

2012-02-28T00:01:00.001-05:00

W.A.R. Goodwin

We are sometimes tempted to believe that artists have a monopoly upon visionary images. But not all images are made with marks on paper or canvas. Some, seen in the mind's eye of their creator, take tangible, concrete shape in real life. Architects, for instance, get to see their visual images transferred first to paper then to great buildings. In Nelson County, Virginia, near the town of Norwood, just four years after the surrender of Lee and the Confederacy at Appomattox Courthouse, a child named for his father, William Goodwin, was born. He was the son of a Confederate Army Captain. Raised in poverty in the Virginia hill country, William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin grew up to become an Episcopal minister and history scholar. In 1903, he was assigned to become rector of the Bruton Parish church in the small, backwater town of Williamsburg, Virginia.

It was not a choice assignment. The church itself was becoming dilapidated, the town was, in many cases, already well passed that, and growing ever more so with each passing day. As the pastor took his customary evening stroll, he encountered images from the past, not unlike those of an artist, as the ghosts of the town's illustrious vintage days followed him everywhere. It had been 123 years since the state government of Virginia had pulled up stakes and moved to Richmond. The intervening years, the war, poverty, the Victorian era, modernization, had all left their mark on what had once been a collective masterpiece of Colonial architecture. Dr. Goodwin's vision was to stop history in its tracks, turn back its hands of time, and see the town restored to its quaint, colonial splendor.

The old Bruton Parish Church before restoration

He started with his own backyard, the church. Through his own hard work, good humor, and considerable powers of persuasion, he set about the raising of the funds to see the worshiping place of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, and George Washington returned to it's colonial state. But just as he was getting up a head of steam, he was transferred to Rochester, New York, for fifteen long years. When he had the good fortune to return as rector of Bruton Parrish in 1923, he found his worst nightmares of twenty years earlier had taken shape. The town had become an eyesore, utility poles marched up the middle of the main street, the old courthouse had become a "filling station" sported the sign "Toot-an-cum-in" (King Tut's tomb had just been unearthed in Egypt). There were modern concrete streets, sidewalks, street lights, while next to them, structural decay was everywhere. Many of the colonial era homes had simply vanished. A new school had been built where once stood the Governor's Palace. Fifteen years of the twentieth century and the Model T had done more to rip apart the tattered fabric of Colonial Williamsburg than had the whole century before. If his vision was to be realized, it had to happen fast.

Williamsburg's reconstructed Governor's Palace (rear). The site had once been that of
the town's high school, which was demolished.

Goodwin first went to one source of the problem, Henry Ford himself, who was known to be a history buff and one of the few men in the country wealthy enough to undertake such a project. He was rebuffed by form letters and a newspaper headline: "HENRY FORD ASKED TO BUY ANCIENT VIRGINIA TOWN!" Then, in 1924, almost by accident, Goodwin spoke at a banquet in New York attended by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. One thing led to another and a few months later, Goodwin hosted the multimillionaire for a tour of the town, asking only for the means to buy one particularly important home in imminent danger of destruction, the Ludwell-Paradise House. It didn't happen. It was two more long years before, in 1926, John D. wrote the first check. The house was saved, and during the next twelve years, more checks followed, supporting an army of archaeologists, carpenters, masons, historians, decorators, and other miscellaneous restorationists.

A 1930s era postcard of Williamsburg's Capitol Building

Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin died in 1939, just days before the official kickoff of the Second World War, which effectively halted the restoration and reconstruction efforts for the duration. After the war, Rockefeller continued to support the project, and even lived nearby for the next twenty years until his death in 1960. Today, Colonial Williamsburg is a living, breathing work of art on a scale almost unimaginable at the turn of the century when Goodwin first glimpsed a dreaded future and opted for a vision of the past instead. Today, the restored area has grown to some 150 acres and nearly 85% of the original town. Along with similar efforts in neighboring Jamestown and Yorktown, a four-lane parkway that literally tunnels under the town connects the three, Carter's Grove plantation, and related tourist facilities to support the modern day visitor wishing to step back 250 years. The complex very clearly stands as one of the greatest works of art ever conceived and executed here or anywhere else in the world. And the recreative genius behind it all, Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, deserves the title "artist" no less than Wright, Rodin, or Picasso.

Restored homes, Williamsburg today.

George Segal

2012-02-27T00:01:00.001-05:00

George Segal, 1991, among the cast figures
for his Depression Bread Line.

Artists long ago learned the knack of seeing everyday objects and situations, then capturing them on paper or canvas for the ages following to ponder and enjoy. We have a much better understanding of seventeenth century life, for instance, as a result of Dutch, French, and later English still-life painting. And American, nineteenth century genre painting gives us a nostalgic view of everyday life in this country a century or more ago. In the 20th century, the elevation of the mundane, everyday symbols of our fast-paced cultural existence took on a much more blatantly hard edged tone with the advent of Pop Art in the early 1960s. Though most often associated with painting, Pop sculpture such as that of Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and others may have been even more effective in underlining, capturing, and preserving that which we were at the time. And with all due respect to the others, by far the most powerful sculptural statements in Pop Art belong to a chicken farmer from New Jersey by the name of George Segal...the guy with the plaster bandages, not the actor by the same name.

Depression Bread Line, 1991, George Segal, FDR Memorial, Washington, DC.
Segal modeled himself as the fourth figure in the line.

Segal came out of New York City (the Bronx). He was born in 1924. And much of his art is New York City born and bred. The chicken farm came when he was fifteen and his Jewish parents moved to rural New Jersey (when there still was such a thing). He studied art, art education, and architecture at Cooper Union, Rutgers, Pratt Institute, and NYU, all during the war and for several years afterwards. But when he married in 1946, he gave up painting in favor of what he knew best--chicken farming. He bought his own just down the road from that of his parents. And though he began teaching high school art in 1955, he continued in the business...the chicken business that is...until 1958 when sales of his paintings springing from his first one-man show in 1956, began to earn him a decent living as an artist.

The Holocaust, 1984, George Segal, Lincoln Park, San Francisco

But Abstract Expressionism never was his thing. In 1958, an art "happening" organized by fellow New York artist Allan Kaprow got Segal started doing sculpture. He used those things which he knew best...wood, chicken wire, burlap, and plaster in fabricating life-size human figures which he began installing in starkly realistic urban settings often jerked from real life with a chain saw or cutting torch. In 1961, technology came along and made his life easier with the invention of plaster-impregnated gauze bandages intended for doctors in making plaster casts. Segal began using them to make molds of real people which he then took apart and cast in plaster parts, rejoining them into ghostly white images often reflecting the surreal loneliness of American urban life. Later, he dispensed with the castings and began using the molds themselves to capture the essence of his figures minus the more delicate details. These were no less effective in rendering the eerie feeling on alienation of his earlier work.

Street Crossing, 1992, George Segal, Montclair State University.
What appears to be plaster is really painted bronze.

Yearly solo shows followed all through the 60's and 70's as museums snapped up his work like the golden nuggets of corn on his chicken farm. He used friends and family for his models. A particularly personal piece depicted a slice of the Bronx kosher butcher shop his parents once owned, peopled by his ghostly, lifelike figures. His groupings often took on overtly political messages. His Holocaust Group is especially heart rending. For the FDR Memorial in Washington, he cast his plaster figures in bronze, including a life-size self-portrait standing with others in a Depression Bread Line (top two photos). In later years, Segal's work diversified, as he and it began to shrug off the "Pop" label. And though he never again taught high school, several colleges and universities, and countless students were the beneficiaries of his experience, insights, and technical prowess. A 1998 traveling retrospective of his life's work and a National Medal of Arts in 1999 forever cemented his place in the art history books as not just one of the top Pop Art icons of all time, but one of America's most important sculptors. He died in 2002 at the age of 75.

Circus Acrobats, 1981, George Segal

George Inness

2012-02-26T00:01:00.001-05:00

George Inness, 1890

As artist, we revel in freedom. It's considered the life's blood of art. Unfettered creativity is such a heady experience we often talk about it in awe approaching some kind of mystical, spiritual, even religious occurrence. As artists, we point with elation at some of the works painters have created from within themselves with little or no outside influence. Artists of independent means with no need for patronage, perhaps not even a desire for artistic acceptance, such a Paul Cezanne, have produced works which have changed the course of art in the western world. But I'm here to tell you they are the exception, rather than the rule. Ninety percent of all art is produced under conditions involving some outside restrictions imposed upon the artist, either in terms of his or her need to earn a living from their art, or by a client commissioning a work of art, or by social, religious, or governmental restrictions upon that which they may produce. And I suggest that in very many cases, the best of all the art ever produced came about not in spite of these restrictions but because of them.

The Lackawanna Valley, 1855, George Inness

In 1855, the president of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad Company commissioned the Philadelphia artist, George Inness to do a painting of the fledgling company's roundhouse, railways, and rolling stock. Inness needed the money but as primarily a landscape and figurative painter, he was less than delighted at the prospect of painting the hardware and real estate of an organization he considered responsible for raping the natural rural beauty of the countryside he loved so much. He painted a lush landscape with spreading hills a bucolic farmer, and a single locomotive chugging its way through the lovely Pennsylvania farmlands. The painting (now apparently lost), was rejected. Inness was forced back to the drawing board and obliged to compromise. His second effort, The Lackawanna Valley, 1855 (above), depicts much of the same beauty but with the town of Scranton in the misty middle ground, the roundhouse situated on the edge of town, with a graceful curve of track and the white steam-spewing locomotive (notice, no dirty black smoke) making its way across the tranquil landscape. The result is not only a far more interesting painting, but one that says something about the age in which it was created and the forces coming to bear on its creator. And today, in an age of urban sprawl and endless concrete ribbons, the train is seen as a quaint, benign reminder of days gone by, not as some sort of monstrous iron rapist.

Inness also painted extensively in Italy as seen
in this distant view of St. Peter's Rome, 1856.

Would Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling have been as impressive painted on canvas? Would Wright's Fallingwater have been as powerful built on a Mississippi flood plain? Would the Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty have as much meaning in the middle of a Kansas cornfield? Would the Gettysburg Address be memorized today by school children if Lincoln has droned on for an hour? Restrictions impose discipline upon an artist, regardless of the medium. They demand that the artist work at his or her concept. And in effect, they cause the artist to rise above the subject at hand to strive for greatness, not just the first workable depiction. Even in the hands of a great artist, unlimited creativity often results in mundane art. But, by the same token, in the hands of a mundane artist, restrictions can choke off creativity, resulting in no art. As an art educator, I often saw this. A student's first ten solutions were usually garbage. They werer the obvious paths. It's only after these have been gently rejected with the admonishment, "You can do better," that genius is uncovered. "Make me some art," is likely to drown even a good artist in possibilities not to mention inviting mediocrity. "Paint in oils, that which you fear most, on this 18"x24" canvas board using only white, two primary colors, and their corresponding secondary," builds a sheltering enclosure with known limits in which the artist feels secure to ponder the possibilities.

Frederic Bazille

2012-02-25T00:01:00.000-05:00

Frederic Bazille Self-Portrait,
1865-66

Whether as children on a playground or as adults in some weightier dispute, we've all no doubt uttered the words, "That's not fair." The counter to that is always the question, "Who ever said life was fair?" Indeed, even from birth, some people have it all, while others seem short changed from the first slap on the bare derriere. The same is true near the end of life. There are those who live in misery far beyond their years and those who "die young and leave a good-looking corpse." In either case, it's just not fair. In 1841, there was born in the south of France near the fashionable resort town of Montpelier, a child, the son of wealthy wine producers. They named him Frederic. As a boy he became interested in art in seeing the work of Gustave Courbet and Eugene Delacroix at the home of a family friend and art collector, Alfred Bruyas. As a young man, he studied for two years at the Ecole des Beaux-arts under the tutelage of Charles Gleyre. It would seem that Frederic Bazille (pronounced Ba-ZEE-ah) was never far from the "silver spoon" of his birth.

The Pink Dress, 1864, Frederic Bazille

As befitting a bright young man of means, Bazille's interest in art was seen by his family as a mere avocation, something to amuse him until he managed to pass the medical exams to become a doctor. Except that (whether by accident or design), well...he never did manage to pass them. He actually flunked twice, the third time he was merely late (and was thus closed out). Relenting, his family finally came around to letting him study art full time. It was in Gleyre's studio where Bazille met Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley. The four of them became kind of a clique, not the most endearing group to have in class, nor the most dedicated art students either. They would delight in cutting classes to go peek in the window of the studio of the aged Delacroix to watch him work. During Easter break, 1863, the four of them took off for the Forest of Fontainebleau where they tried painting out-of-doors. Guess what? It was fun. They liked it. Their little alliance was to form the core of the group of artists destined to be called Impressionists.

Family on the Terrace, 1867-68, Frederic Bazille

Not only was Bazille a painting partner to Monet and Renoir, he was something of a lifeline as well. Both his friends came from much less fortunate circumstances than did he. He often loaned them money (usually amounting to an outright gift) as well as shared studio space with them (paying the bulk of the rent, of course). In return he learned from them. As a painter, he lacked the brilliance of either of his friends. His work, such as The Pink Dress (above, left), painted in 1864 is light and sensitive, impressionistic, but not such that one might single it out as exceptional. Bazille favored the figure over the landscapes of his friends, and though he sometimes painted both indoor and outdoor scenes largely devoid of people, it was at portraiture and the effects of natural light upon his figures at which he most excelled. His enormous, 1867 Family on the Terrace (above) is often considered his best. Knowing great good fortune from the beginning of life, and great promise in art during his life, makes the end of his life doubly tragic. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, the adventurous young man enlisted in the colorful Zouave cavalry. He was killed fighting at Beaune-la-Rolande near Orleans on November 28, 1870. He was 29. It would seem, the silver spoon of his birth was not bullet proof. It's just not fair.

Fractal Art

2012-02-24T00:01:00.001-05:00

Photo by Don Archer

Benoit Mandelbrot, digital portrait, 2001

Imagine if you will, a whole, new type of art...an art that didn't exist, couldn't even be imagined, as recently as 35 years ago. It's an art based upon geometry; not traditional, Euclidean geometry, but a whole new type of geometry. It's an abstract art, also one that is largely if not entirely serendipitous. It's an art based upon numbers, real and imaginary, and it's an art that, until the advent of computers, couldn't even be produced on paper. And, while it's based upon a formula, it's anything but formulaic. The simple, yet elegant formula is Z=Z X Z+ C, with C being a constant added each time the multiplication of Z X Z takes place. The result is a series of points, that, when connected, create a graphic image of infinite complexity when enlarged. In nature, a snowflake is a crude example, as are mountains, clouds, aggregates and galaxy clusters. And even though the formula is simple, it was the incredible number of calculations needed to produce this new art form which made it unthinkable, indeed, unimaginable before computers came to be fast enough to perform them and create the images.

Though strictly mathematical in origin, Mandelbrot graphics can be exquisitely beautiful.

It's called Fractal art, and it's first practitioner was Benoit Mandelbrot (above), a Polish-born scientist of French descent who came to this country in the 1970s to work for IBM. It was there he developed both Fractal geometry as a new branch of mathematics, and also wrote some of the first computer graphics programs to print out the art his new, abstract form of geometry could create. Mandelbrot was born in 1924. He came from a highly educated Jewish family. While his father was a clothes merchant, his mother was a doctor and his two uncles were both mathematicians. They fled Poland in 1936 for France where Mandelbrot came of age during the strife and uncertainties of WW II. His education in mathematics, economics, engineering, and physiology was constantly interrupted and irregular. In fact, in many areas, he is largely self-taught. As a result, though primarily a mathematician, he came to have a much more abstract view of geometry than he might have had he attended regularly at a university. He also came to have a much broader grasp of the other sciences and their interrelationship to geometry.

Infinity, a swept fractal based upon the
Manowar set, a more recent application

If fractal geometry images came tightly bound with the development of computers, fractal art came bound with the Internet. A critical element in the definition of art involves it having an audience. It should come as no surprise then that the first fractal artists were some of the first computer "geeks" of the early 1980s. And the first art exhibitions came with one of the first broad, Internet communities in the early 1990s--CompuServe. But during these early years, the art they created was largely just a novelty traded back and forth among its creators. Then in 1994, a New York City high school English teacher named Don Archer, who also moonlighted as a massage therapist, co-founded the Museum of Computer Art (MoCA), not to be confused with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA).

Yes, even Mandelbrot tattoos

Even though this Cornell graduate has been creating and selling fractal art for several years now, perhaps Don Archer's greatest contribution has been in presenting, promoting, and preserving it (and other computer-generated images) through his Internet museum. Although in many ways it operates like any other museum, choosing its artist carefully, presenting them professionally, it has no brick and mortar address. Like Amazon or Ebay, it's only address is a URL, www.MuseumOfComputerArt.com.

Fra Filippo Lippi

2012-02-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

Every day we read about the wild carrying on of actors, musicians, rock groups, sports stars, and others in the entertainment industry. And for every story we read, there are probably ten that don't make the tabloids or the court dockets because of who's involved, their money, and their talent. Painters today have long since slipped below the status of celebrity stars of the entertainment world where individuals can get away with anything (even murder) if they have a big enough name and talent. But five or six hundred years ago that was not the case.

Fra Filippo Lippi Self-Portrait,
ca. 1450

In 1408, in Florence, a child of two was orphaned and placed in the custody of his aunt. When he was eight, worn down by poverty, she was forced to give the young boy over to the local Carmelite convent where he completed his studies and took the vows. He was sixteen. At the time, Masolino and Masaccio were in the process of decorating the Carmelite Brancacci chapel. Their work was responsible for revolutionizing Florentine painting. It also sparked the imagination of the teenage boy-monk. He may even have helped them with their work. His name was Fra Filippo Lippi.

Though his talented hand and eye were immediately apparent, never was there an individual less suited for the cloistered life. Though having taken vows of poverty and chastity, he was anything but chaste. And though his reputation and talent grew quite rapidly; and he was paid handsomely for his work, the poverty vows he had no trouble keeping in no small part because of his lack of chastity. His portraits depict a flat-nosed, thick-lipped, sensual face with a vivacious, outgoing personality. The Florentine court documents of his time are peppered with his name. His most important client, Cosimo DeMedici, had to literally lock him up to get him to complete commissions, and even then, the young rapscallion tied sheets together, end to end, and escaped out a second floor window on one occasion to "do the town." He was constantly in financial trouble and was known to resort to forgery on occasions to extricate himself from various economic difficulties, which in turn only led to further legal embarrassments.

Madonna and Child with Stories from the Life of St. Anne, 1452, Fra Filippo Lippi

But the man had talent. Quite apart from being his jailer from time to time, the house of Medici was also his protector, no doubt sheltering him from retribution for his misdeeds that would have gotten a lesser man hanged. Likewise the church, though undoubtedly embarrassed by his shenanigans, recognized his talent for annunciations, nativities, and adorations; and also served to shelter "one of their own." His tondo (round painting) Madonna and Child with Stories of the Life of St. Anne (above) from 1452 is typical of his work during the middle years of his life. It bears Medieval traces but also the influence of Fra Angelico, Masaccio, and the Florentine architect, Brunelleschi.

Filippino Lippi Self-Portrait, ca. 1480

In 1456, the "frolicking frater" (as Cosimo DeMedici called him) went too far. He had an affair with a Carmelite nun named Lucretia Buti and got her pregnant. They eloped. A son was born the following year; and like his father, he too became a painter. Eventually, Pope Pius II saw fit to release the two wayward Carmelites from their vows and they were married in 1461. A daughter was born in 1465. Yet despite his scandalous private life (which really wasn't very private), all during this time, the "good father" continued to wear his monk's robes (even after being defrocked) and do some of his most impressive work for the church. His most notable pupil was the Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli. "Fra" Lippi's influence can be seen even a generation after his death in 1469 in the painting style of Leonardo da Vinci.

The Vision of St. Bernard, 1468, Filippino Lippi

His son, Filippino, was twelve when his father died. Botticelli took the young boy under his wing, taught him how to paint, and though he never achieved anything like the greatness of his father as an artist, much of his father's influence, and that of Botticelli, can be seen in his work, such as his 1468 painting, The Vision of St. Bernard (left). It's a nervous, busy piece of work. To modern eyes it gives the impression of the Virgin Mary checking into a local Ramada Inn with a rambunctious entourage of childlike angels. Nonetheless it stands as a remarkable narrative painting exemplifying some of the best Florentine art had to offer during the early Renaissance.

Fairfield Porter

2012-02-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

Fairfield Porter under the Elms,
1971-72

He was a painter. Also, a writer, a Communist, an anarchist, an atheist, a husband, a father, a bisexual, and a realist painting in an abstract expressionist world. And though he steadfastly refused to partake of nonrepresentational art, he probably knew more about it and wrote more intelligently about it than anyone of his time. He was the first to recognize and propound the talent of his friend and fellow painter, Willem De Kooning. He had five children, one of them autistic (undiagnosed), a very liberal, understanding, tolerant, poet wife, and for something like 12 years, a gay house guest/lover (below). He came from a wealthy (though dysfunctional) Illinois family, was Harvard educated, traveled broadly, and once painted Leon Trotsky. He was fond of comparing himself to Dagwood Bumstead. His name was Fairfield Porter.

James Schuyler, 1955, Fairfield Porter,
the man who came and stayed.

Porter was nothing if not complex. He was a package of startling contradictions all of which coexisted beneath a surprisingly calm exterior. Born in 1907, it was well into the 1950s before he received any significant recognition for his work. Though some of his early work was steeped in socialist commentary, as he mellowed with age, so did his style and content. He was a wise and witty homebody, painting his family and the environs of his large, rambling house in Southampton, New York, and the family-owned Island off the coast of Maine. Surprisingly, Porter's painting is remarkably consistent. His early work is a little more controlled than that of the last two decades of his life, but never does he depart from his beloved landscapes, interiors, still-lifes, and portraits which are usually more figure studies than traditional posed portrayals.

The House with Three Chimneys, 1972,
Fairfield Porter, the family home.

Often Porter is intimately connected with the New York School, but the connection is more social than stylistic. As a writer, he not only "discovered" De Kooning, but was instrumental in bringing to light the work of Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Alex Katz as well. In turn, each of these abstractionists influenced his work. Porter's artistic roots hearken back to the French painters, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, whom he regarded as the true fathers of Modern Art. Setting aside the domesticity of his subject matter, Porter was a colorist often with decidedly Fauvist leanings. From his Abstract Expressionist friends he borrowed daring compositional proclivities, bolstered by their loose brushwork and sensitivities to the flatness of the painting surface. The illusions of Realism were always there, but so too was the recognition that his art was always first and foremost, paint on canvas. From the late 1950s on, Porter's work gained gradually, somewhat begrudging recognition not as a result of his own evolution as an artist, but as a result of an art world growing tired of Abstract Expressionism. Today, though still largely unknown by the public, he's recognized by the art world as one of the most important American painters of the 20th century. He didn't change...we did.

Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun

2012-02-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun Self-portriat,
1782

When we think of great portrait artists down through history, names like Raphael, Titian, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Ingres, Sargent, and even Van Gogh come to mind. All of them were males. When you think of great female portrait artists, whoa...we draw a blank. Those with very good memories might recall Rosalba Carriera, Angelica Kauffman, Judith Leyster, or maybe Artemesia Gentileschi. There are others, but none of them, or these, are at all in the realm of household names. For those really attuned to the feminine side of art history, perhaps you've noticed an important name missing, and probably the best female portrait painter of all time--Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun.

Her best customer, Marie Antoinette,
1783, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun

She was born in 1755. Her father was the respected portrait artist, Louise Vigee, her mother a peasant hairdresser. Both professionals, neither of them appear to have had time for her as a child. She was shunted oft to relatives in the country until the age of five when she returned to Paris and began taking drawing classes from her father. He died when she was twelve but by that time she was well on her way to stepping into his shoes. In fact, she was so successful, that by the time she was fifteen, she was making respectable sums painting very respectable portraits, so much so that she was threatened with arrest for...get this..."painting without a license." She quickly joined the Academie de Saint Luc. She was nineteen. And if a lifetime store of some forty self-portraits are to be believed, she was also very pretty, vivacious, witty, smart, charming, and talented. At the age of 21, she married an art dealer, J.B.P. Le Brun--something of a gambling playboy given to living off his family's wealth and her considerable earnings as an artist.

Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna,
Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, the granddaughters of
Catherine the Great painted during
her stay in Russia

Elizabeth was prodigious if nothing else. She is credited with painting over 800 portraits during her 87 year life span. Twenty of them were of her best friend and client, Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France. Her influence (or more precisely, her husband's) was responsible for Vigee Le Brun's acceptance into the French Academy in 1783 against the will of its almost exclusively male membership. But when the queen's fortunes fell into disarray in 1789 following the fall of Versailles to a French revolutionary mob, so did hers. She was forced to flee with her nine-year-old daughter, Julie, first to Rome, then Austria, and finally to St. Petersburg, painting hundreds of portraits along the way. Moreover, her private life was not without discord as well. Against her wishes, her daughter married a Russian nobleman and meanwhile, back home, because of her close ties to the monarchy, she was branded an emigre by the revolutionary French government. Her dismal excuse for a husband divorced her to protect his property from seizure.

Prince Heinrich Lubomirski
Posing in Allegory of Alexander I,
1814, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun,
one of her more unusual portraits
painted after her return to Pais.

Twelve years she spent in exile, allowed to return only after a petition signed by 255 international artists was presented to the French government. She continued painting prodigiously after her repatriation, her work becoming an important influence for a new breed of Neoclassical artist such as Jacques-Louis David and his student, Jean-Auguste Ingres. David noted, when Vigee Le Brun's work was compared along side his, that her portraits appeared to have been done by a man, while his own looked like that of a woman. I think that was a compliment (not sure). She took it that way at least. No less a portrait expert than Sir Joshua Reynolds termed her "...the equal of any portrait artist living or dead, including," he added (the Flemish portrait idol of his day), "Sir Anthony van Dyck."

Eliel and Eero Saarinen

2012-02-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

Finnish Pavilion, Paris Exposition,
1900, Eliel Saarinen

In very many endeavors in life, it's not uncommon for fathers and sons to work together. It's a tradition dating back hundreds of years, though we're most usually aware of it when we see the "...and son" painted on the side of a truck as a business name. Painters brought their sons into the business, also musicians, writers, and today moviemakers, actors, sometimes even whole families get involved as in the case of the Fondas, Barrymores, Baldwins, and Bridges. It was also the case with a Finnish father and son who were both outstanding architects--Eliel and Eero Saarinen.

The father, Eliel, was born 1873 in Rantasalmi, Finland. His father was a minister. Early on he had in mind to be a painter. Growing up only a short distance from St. Petersburg, Russia, he spent many hours studying the paintings of the Hermitage, especially those of Rembrandt. But in his mid-twenties, Eliel gave up becoming a mediocre painter for a profession in which he felt he could make more of an impact. Just a few years later, in 1900, he did, with his design for the Finnish pavilion at the Paris Exposition. While not seeming too radical in appearance, he broke with the Beaux-arts tradition of decorating everything that didn't move with motifs from the past. A year later, he made an even bigger impact with his Helsinki railroad station. In the early 1920s, his influential second place finish in the Chicago Tribune tower composition gave him the money ($20,000) and the confidence to move his wife, daughter, and thirteen-year-old son, Eero, to Chicago where he worked with a group of designers, architects, and engineers in an early attempt at urban renewal in downtown Chicago. The plans were too far ahead of their time. They were never implemented.

Photo by Revontuli

Helsinki Railroad Station, 1901 Eliel Saarinen

TWA Terminal, JFK International Airport,
New York, 1962, Eero Saarinen

However, lured away from Chicago to suburban Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the elder Saarinen did make a considerable impact with his designs for the Cranbrook Academy which included a boys school, a nearby girls school (Kingswood), and an art institute where he taught. It was there he began to work with his son, who later graduated not from Cranbrook, but Yale. The younger Saarinen's grand entry into the field of architecture came with his winning design for St. Louis's Gateway Arch in 1948. Though it would be another 16 years before it was built, his majestic, stainless steel monument led to commissions for corporate headquarters buildings from GM, John Deere, Bell Telephone, and his Yale alma mater. These in turn led to his most celebrated structures, the birdlike TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport, and the even more spectacular Dulles International Airport Terminal outside Washington. In each case, there is exhibited an independence in his work from prevailing International Style glass boxes. They are dramatic, functional, often quite sculptural, and inevitably beautiful. Like his father, he detoured from the expected, prevailing styles, to the daring. Unlike his father, he evolved designs in no way evoking the past, and a style never etched in stone, yet always uniquely recognizable as his own.

Photo by Joe Ravi

Washington's Dulles International Airport Terminal, 1962, Eero Saarinen

Edouard Vuillard

2012-02-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

Edouard Vuillard Self-portrait, 1889

Everyone, I guess, has their own little peccadilloes. One of mine is clutter. I can stand a little dust, even the unattractive, but disarray makes me nervous. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a neatness freak or compulsive about it, but too much "stuff" sitting around drives me crazy. I either throw it away or put it away. Don't peek in my closets, however. At least there, it's stacked stuff, hidden, out of sight, though I'm sure Fibber McGee (an old radio character) would feel right at home. For this reason artists who paint clutter make me nervous too. Therefore, Edouard Vuillard is not one of my favorite artists. Busy, busy, busy, not a square inch without stripes, flowers, jim-cracks and gewgaws; pretty well describes his work. I sometimes wonder if he made even Victorian art lovers shudder in dismay at his prim and proper over-decorated interiors (below). But lest I be accused of "playing favorites," I should also point out his work does have certain redeeming qualities.

Interieur, 1902, Edouard Vuillard, here a
restful, relatively benign, patterned clutter.

Vuillard was born in 1868. He died in 1940. I suppose he can be somewhat excused for his penchant toward Victorian excess in that quite frankly, he never knew anything else. He never married. He lived with his mother and sister all their lives. They were seamstresses. Patterned fabrics were their lives. And inasmuch as he often used them as models, his figures and surroundings tend to have a soft, heavily upholstered look about them. Though he was not an Impressionist his style was impressionistic. It was also very individualistic. He's often cast among the Nabis (pronounced NOB-ies) but in fact, shared little with them other than a reactionary distaste for Impressionism. But like the impressionists, his canvases are loaded with paint. Also, his compositions have a somewhat "unbalanced" snapshot quality to them suggesting he was not unfamiliar with photographic art if not in fact, working from photos.

Edouard Vuillard Self-portrait, 1892
Notice the differences in this rather
expressionistic image and the
1889 effort at the top.

In addition to painting, Vuillard was also into lithography. And given the fact that the Paris of the 1890s in which he came of age artistically, was very much "into" posters, it's little wonder that the two meshed. Though not as flat or as well-designed as those of the ultimate poster lithographer, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, his posters, far more than his painting, were to have a broad influence on those artists of the early Picasso era struggling to free art from the very excesses so disturbingly common in so many of Vuillard's paintings. Yet as his 1892 self-portrait suggests, at least some of his painting was not far removed from the second and third generation avant-garde painters who came to idealize him, in spirit if not in their actual painting style. There is a very hard edged, unsentimental, almost cubist look to the strikingly stark image. A contemporary of Matisse, one might expect his work to be quite similar since both men loved to play with patterned surfaces, but that's not the case. Matisse's colors depart reality for points unknown. Vuillard's never do. Nor do his compositions defy reality as do those of Matisse. Unlike Matisse, few have ever made an attempt to paint like Vuillard. But that never kept him from influencing the way they saw and thought about their art.

Breakfast at Villerville, 1910, Edouard Vuillard, a nervous, almost abstract, clutter
of shapes, masses, and colors.

Theodor Seuss Geisel

2012-02-18T00:01:00.002-05:00

Dr. Seuss and his created critters

He was not the greatest artist in the world, nor the greatest writer, but in mixing, mashing, mauling, manipulating, masticating, mutilating, and mystificating a moderate mastery of both, he was able to charm the socks off children, parents, and teachers alike for the better part of two generations. His name was Theodor Seuss Geisel. And since his father always wanted him to become a doctor, he wrote under the name, Dr. Seuss, preferring to save his "real" name for more serious literary efforts. He needn't have bothered. There never was a more serious literary goal than teaching young people to love to read. And even today, some 21 years after his death, he's still the best-selling author of children's books in the world.

The first Dr. Seuss, 1936, now available on iPad

The good doctor of juvenile letters was born in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of the curator of the Forest Park Zoo. There's no record that the zoo ever housed Grinches, Yertles, or cats wearing hats, but there's little doubt young Theodor was intimately familiar with their zoological inspirations. Giesel graduated from Dartmouth in 1925 and immediately set sail for Oxford hoping to satisfy the dreams of his father in acquiring a doctorate in literature. Instead he met and married a Miss Helen Palmer before returning to the U.S. to work as a cartoonist and writer for Judge magazine (kind of a 1930s version of Mad). His work also found it's way into more upscale versions of Life, Vanity Fair, and Liberty.

The first Seuss bestseller, 1954

In 1936, while on the boat to Europe for a vacation, Geisel became fascinated by the rhythm of the ship's engines. He wrote his first book, And to Think That I saw It on Mulberry Street (above). The book was published in 1937, having gone through rejection by no less than 43 publishers (other sources set the count at 29) before a friend put up the money to see it printed. It didn't make any bestseller lists but enjoyed moderate success. The war years saw Geisel working in Hollywood for Frank Capra's Signal Corps Unit where he won a Legion of Merit and two Oscars for such blockbusters as Hitler Lives and Design for Death, both documentaries for the military. His cartoon, Gerald McBoing-Boing also won him an Oscar.

Fifty words for breakfast

Dr. Seuss' first big success in publishing came in 1954 when he became aware of just how boring most children's books of the day really were. Using a list of 223 Dolch Reading List words, he penned the words and illustrations for his immortal Cat in the Hat. It was an instant success. In 1960, in response to a bet from humorist, Bennett Cerf, that he couldn't write a book using only fifty words, Seuss cooked up a batch of Green Eggs and Ham. Cerf welshed on the bet. No matter, Dr. Seuss didn't need the money. A Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and a total of forty-four children's books to his credit pretty well cemented him a place in the literary hall of fame. Fortunately for all the parents and others who have had to read them aloud, the books of Theodor Seuss Geisel are loaded with grown-up wit and satire set to a catchy, if somewhat quirky, rhythm that fascinates at least through the twentieth reading. I know. I've used them dozens of times in the elementary classroom, reading aloud while my meditating munchkin moppets mull their own manifestations of Seuss' sagacious sonnets.

Domenico Veneziano

2012-02-17T00:01:00.001-05:00

The St. Lucy Altarpiece, 1445, Domenico Veneziano

The Martyrdom of St. Lucy, 1445,

Domenico Veneziano

As an artist, do you ever pause to reflect as to how your work will be seen five hundred years from now? Moreover, maybe the real question is if it will be seen five hundred years from now. Things happen. Wars, floods, fires, theft, political insurrection--art, being the fragile luxury it is, often suffers. Given the history of human development, it's a miracle we even have any art more than a hundred or two hundred years old. But even during wars, famine, pestilence, and tribulations of other sorts, heroic men and women risk their lives to steal away man's greatest art treasures, hiding them until better times return. We saw this in our century during the Second World War in Europe; but it happened again and again before that. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't come out of hiding. Those responsible for "saving" it die, get killed, or perhaps just plain forget where they hid the stuff.

St. John in the Desert, 1450, Domenico Veneziano

One of the greatest Florentine painters of the early Renaissance was Domenico Veneziano. Though he undoubtedly painted dozens, maybe hundreds of works during his lifetime from 1400 to 1461, only three major works survive and one of them has been split and split again into three or four separate units, spread between Washington, Berlin, Florence, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. That would be the Santa Lucia del Magnoli Altarpiece (top), the central panel of which is now in the Uffizi. Besides the center panel, there originally were possibly as many as four predellas (side panels), one of which has been lost. The other three are The Martyrdom of St. Lucy (above, right), St. John in the Desert (above, left), and The Adoration of the Magi (below, right)." There is some question as to whether the latter of these, in the Staatlich Museen in Berlin, along with his The Martyrdom of St. Lucy is, in fact, a predella or a separate work. There are others, but they are of doubtful attribution.

Adoration of the Magi, 1440-43, Domenico Veneziano

Veneziano was originally named Domenico, de Bartolomeo di Venezia (no wonder he shortened it). Born and raised in Florence, where he spent his entire life, indications are he studied under the great Florentine painter, Masaccio. However there is not in any way the "heaviness" of Masaccio's style in Veneziano's work. In fact his painting is most noted for the lightness, its carefully organized, spacious perspective, and careful attention to the human figure. In a word, there is a "naturalness" about his painting in marked contrast to that which went before and as a strong influence upon that which came after. Leonardo's work bears traces of it. His perspective is letter perfect, though still on the one-point variety, typical of his day. And his backgrounds, carefully rendered landscapes, spawned later attention to this area of painting among Florentine artists.

Carnescchi Tabernaclel,
1435, Domenico Veneziano

Also surviving the ravages of time, is a fresco, The Carnesecchi Tabernacle (left), painted around 1435 (now in London's National Gallery) in which Masaccio's influence can be detected. And that's about it, folks. A lifetime of painting distilled into a few surviving, masterful works (one of which is in rather poor condition). And while you're pausing to reflect upon your work and the odds of it rendering you some semblance of immortality, keep in mind that Veneziano was one of the greatest painters of his time, yet, we barely know him.

Domenico Ghirlandaio

2012-02-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

Said to be a self-portrait,
figure from Adoration of the Magi,
circa 1488, Domenico Ghirlandaio

To be successful as a professional, an artist must please those with the wealth to afford his services. This fact is as true today as it was five hundred years ago. The Renaissance painter, Raphaello Sanzio once likened this, quite favorably, to being a harlot. Today, as in Raphael's time, talent and hard work are important, but knowing the right people, and knowing how to curry their favor, is just as important if the artist likes to eat, even more so if he cares to live well. Though not from Florence, Raphael studied there for a time as a teenager and one of his best friends was another artist a little younger than he, named Ridolfo. Like Raphael, Ridolfo was quite good at painting portraits, which wasn't surprising considering who his father was. Ridolfo's father ran one of the most successful art workshops in all Florence. His name was Ghirlandaio (pronounced GER-land-EYE-o). Actually that wasn't his real name at all but something of a corporate identity his family and workshop had taken on to advertise the fact that, as goldsmiths, they'd invented and made popular gold garlands for women and girls of high fashion to wear in their hair. Ghirlande is Italian for garland, Ghirlandaio simply meant "maker of garlands." His real name was Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi.

Though no gold hair garlands
survive from the period,
this book of hours has been
attributed to Ghirlandaio's
goldlsmithing workshop
dating from 1485

Domenico liked to design things made of gold, but even as an apprentice, cared little for making them. He preferred to paint. His early work bears the influence of the Italians, Masaccio and Fra Filippo Lippi, along with the Northern influence of Hugo van der Goes. It was a unique mixture. Along with his two younger brothers and later his son, the Ghirlandaio shop competed with that of the other major artist of the Florentine School at the time, Sandro Botticelli, for the important private and church commissions of the day--portraits, altarpieces, gold and silver chalices used to serve mass, and most importantly, the massive frescos needed to decorate all the new churches being built and remodeled under the economic prosperity of the ruling Medici and their wealthy banking partners. Ghirlandaio knew how to please these wealthy families. He was a portrait painter, but more than that, he often used them and their offspring as models, painting their likenesses into important religious works. Add to this the use of their luxurious palazzos as settings and the modern dress of the day, one might think John the Baptist or the Virgin Mary were born and raised in Florence.

Birth of St Mary, 1586-90. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Santa Maria Novello, Florence, Italy

That's exactly the impression one comes away with in viewing Ghirlandaio's Birth of the Virgin, a fresco for Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The fresco, painted around 1486, framed between two highly decorated, square pilasters (with a third, identical one painted in between; becoming part of the scene itself), depicts the interior of the Tornabuoni home (wealthy friends of the Medici). A staircase is displayed on the left, while St. Anne, the mother of Mary, reclines somewhat stiffly on an elevated bed. Five female members of the Tornabuoni family stand by bearing congratulatory wishes, observing the newborn baby (Mary) about to receive a bath. Ghirlandaio was as much a master of the rather complex one-point perspective as he was the standing figures, their portrait faces, and their fashionable attire. A wide, tromp l'oeil, sculptured frieze of putti near the ceiling of the room is especially eye-catching. But perhaps the most beautiful and exciting rendering in the whole painting is that of a lowly maid on the far right, pouring water into a bath basin. Like the illusionary sculpture of the frieze it does not appear to have been painted by Ghirlandaio or any of his brothers. The flowing, dynamic movement of the young girl's dress and the fluid grace of her face and pose suggest it was done by a talented young apprentice studying fresco in the Ghirlandaio workshop at the time. His name was Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Birth of St. Mary (detail) said to be by
the hand of Michelangelo

Diagnosing Dead Artists

2012-02-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

One of the things I find most interesting as I continually probe the lives of famous artists is the amazing range in ages when they died. Of course as little as a century ago the average life span even here in the U.S. was a mere 47 years. Today, we routinely expect people to live well into their 70's, so the numbers are naturally skewed lower in the distant centuries, all of which makes some of the very long life spans of certain artists hundred of years ago all the more remarkable. Raphael was a mere 38 years old when he died. His contemporary, Michelangelo, lived to be 89. Among the Mannerist painters from about the same period, Giorgione and Titian present a similar range. Giorgione died at the age of 33, while Titian, born in 1478, died in 1576 (his birth date is somewhat uncertain) making him around 98 years of age, probably a record for famous painters.

Rembrandt Self-portrait, 1859,
ten years before his death,
Washington National Gallery of Art

Detail of the artist's
left temporal artery

This Rembrandt self-portrait
(detail) dating from 1669,
said to be his last before he
died, shows no indication
of an enlarged artery on
his right side.

Some time ago, a Dr. Carlos H. Espinel, a professor at Georgetown University, was wondering through Washington's National Gallery of Art when he came upon one of Rembrandt's many self portraits (above, left). His doctor's trained eye noticed something unusual. It would seem that Rembrandt's left temporal artery was enlarged. Through this and the study of several other late self-portraits by the seventeenth century master, he has diagnosed Rembrandt as having died from temporal arteritis. Later research from non-pictorial sources have tended to confirm this. A study of Leonardo's Mona Lisa has led Espinel to believe her mystical smile may have been the result of partial paralysis of a branch of a facial muscle.

A detail from Raphael's
School of Athens, 1509-10,
depicts Michelangelo at age 35,
apparently already suffering from gout.

From a portrait of Michelangelo by Raphael, painted as part of his School of Athens (detail at left), fresco in the Vatican, Espinel has zeroed in on some prominent bumps on the sculptor's exposed right knee. He categorizes them as "tophi"--deposits of uric acid salts. Letters and poems by Michelangelo indicate he suffered from kidney stones, all of which has led the doctor to postulate Michelangelo probably died of gout (not an uncommon ailment at the time). He pictures Michelangelo, a confirmed workaholic all his life, as living off a diet of bread and wine (processed by Italians at the time in lead containers) as well as the likelihood he was exposed to lead based paints; all confirmed causes of the typical hunchback indicating gout, precisely as depicted in Raphael's painting. As for Raphael's early death, Espinel speculates it may have resulted from the dashing young artist's penchant for sexual excess carried to unhealthy extremes. Contemporary writings and letters suggest various venereal diseases may have led to the weakening of his heart, which would account for the surprising suddenness of his death.

Raphael da Sanzio, sexual

excesses and venereal diseases?

Espinel writes regularly on the subject of "ArtMedicine" for the British medical journal The Lancet. His studies have also centered on artists of this century, particularly the Dutch-born abstractionist, Willem DeKooning, who suffered from Alzheimer's toward the end of his life, though Espinel has found evidence in his painting that he may have enjoyed a surprising remission, at least in the physical debilitation of the dread disease, for up to a year. DeKooning died in 1997. Espinel considers art to be a valid tool for studying dementia, a framework for studying the mind itself, as well as a means toward gaining a better understanding of the lives and deaths of the great artists of the past.

A Sketch by Daumier

2012-02-14T00:01:00.002-05:00

Perhaps Michelangelo's The Drunkeness of Noah
reminded Picasso of this drawing by Daumier
titled Rue Transnonain from 1834.

When Pablo Picasso obtained enough wealth from his work to allow him to travel widely, like any self-respecting artist, he found that all roads led to Rome. And though not in fact, in Rome, for the artist at least, all roads led to the Vatican. And once in the Vatican, in spite of the looming power of the magnificent cathedral, for the artist, all roads (corridors?) led to the Sistine Chapel next door. Picasso, as artists and tourist alike have done for five centuries, strained his neck and gazed upward in awe at what Michelangelo and Pope Julius II hath wrought. "It's like a vast sketch by Daumier." He said. Not the reaction one might expect, even from Picasso. Who was this sketcher extraordinaire that Picasso should admire him so?

Gargantua, 1831, Honore Daumier

Honore Daumier (pronounced UN-or-AY DOME-yay) was born in 1808. He started drawing at age thirteen and his first job as an artist was in the role of what we would call today a political cartoonist, though at the time one couldn't much think of such a calling as an occupation. But he was good at it. In fact, too good for his own good. His first drawing landed him in jail for six months. He had the audacity to portray the king, Louis-Phillipe, as Gargantua, the gluttonous ogre in a French storybook. Daumier was in good company--his publisher was jailed too. And while the cartooning business didn't pay much (nothing, actually), he did earn his first fees as an artist about the same time--as a sign painter. The king eventually banned all political cartoons so Daumier took to drawing insightful, amusing pictures of the French bourgeoisie instead. One depicted a lady in a blizzard, her "bustle" (a cosmetic device made of springs hidden beneath a lady's skirts to accentuate her derrière) hosting quite an accumulation of snow. A shopkeeper asks, "Would you like a touch of the broom, madam?" With these he was able to earn a modest living.

The Print Lover, 1857-60, Honore Daumier

Daumier painted too, though like his cartoons, his efforts with a brush were so highly individual as to constitute a style unto themselves. Technically, one would have to class him with the Realists though his style was in no way realistic. However his choice of subjects was very much in line with those of Realism's Corot and Courbet in depicting the humble, modest, lower classes as they struggled with the daily grind of 19th century existence. Politically, Daumier was a life-long republican, not to be confused with the American creatures by the same name. Quite the opposite, Daumier was very much a liberal. Being a republican in France at that time meant he opposed autocratic rule, which made him a target for the ruling governments of all but eight years of his life. And it wasn't just autocrats he like to skewer with is steel pen--lawyers and judges took it on the chin too. Only in the last years of his life did his paintings and engravings begin to bring respectable prices; and even then his work appealed more to artists and collectors than to the middle-classes he delighted in lampooning. He died in 1879 and enjoyed a state funeral staged by a friendly republican government (costing all of twelve francs). And from that time on, his reputation began to rise. He was an artist's artist, and thus it should come as little surprise that Picasso, another artist's artist, should compare the great Michelangelo to him.

The Legislative Belly, 1834, Honore Daumier, a cartoon appropriate even today.

Currier and Ives

2012-02-13T00:01:00.001-05:00

Ruins of the Merchants' Exchange, 1835,
Currier & Ives

Each of us have, in our mind's eye, a visual image of what it was like to live a hundred or hundred and fifty years ago. Perhaps the most vivid of these come from movies, westerns such as Stagecoach, small period pieces like Little Women, or great epics like Gone with the Wind. Some of our images come from the genre paintings of the era, such as the work of Eastman Johnson. In some cases, crude photos of great events come to mind, all of which have served to illustrate the ponderous old American history books we all used to lug back and forth to class every day in high school. And, if we still had those books, and peered into them once again, we might realize yet another type of imagery we've probably forgotten about, but which once made up a very great part of how American's saw themselves in the 19th century--the lithographic print. And at the top of that pictorial genre is the name, Currier and Ives.

Awful Conflagration of the Steamboat Lexington in Long Island Sound, 1840, Currier & Ives

In the 1800s, lithographic art was a relatively new thing. It was invented by the Bavarian artist, Alois Senefelder as late as 1798, employing smoothly ground, porous native limestone in a fairly complex printing process involving a grease pencil, water, and oil based inks. It was 1825 before the process found its way to the U.S. as William and John Pendleton began a printing business in Boston using Senefelder's methods. It was there, around 1830, they hired an eighteen-year-old apprentice named Nathaniel Currier to help in the business. Around 1833, Currier left the firm to work with Philadelphia lithographer M.E.D. Brown, who produced printed scientific illustrations. Two years later, Currier moved to New York intending to work once more for John Pendleton who had opened an office there. Instead, he ended up buying the fledgling branch office and starting his own firm--N. Currier.

Not all Currier & Ives prints had to do

with firey disasters, some dealt with

much more "important" matters, as in

Kiss Me Quick, from the 1840s

In the beginning, Currier produced sheet music, letterheads, and other stock in trade printed items, but two early lithographic editions, Ruins of the Planters Hotel and Ruins of the Merchant's Exchange N.Y. (top, left) quickly underlined the marketing potential for pictures of current events, launching the new company in the direction it would take for the next seventy-five years. Currier capitalized on his ability to create depictions of newsworthy events (usually dramatic catastrophies such as the Lexington Steamboat fire, above) just days after their occurrence. In 1852, he hired James Merritt Ives as his head bookkeeper. Five years later, the books in order, and Ives' marketing savvy propelling the firm to new heights, he was made a full partner. Currier and Ives was born. Both men were competent, if not exceptional artists, outstanding lithographers, and shrewd businessmen. They also had a keen eye and gut feeling for that which the various levels of American society wanted hanging on their walls.

American Homestead Winter, Currier & Ives

Whether nostalgic urban dwellers longing for their frontier roots, or Midwestern farmers yearning for depictions of urban sophistication, Currier and Ives' vast selection filled the bill. Their portfolio eventually grew to some 7,500 different images. And whether marketed through big city print shops, Sears and Roebuck catalogs, or country peddlers, this inexpensive form of art reproduction became practically synonymous with middle-class Victorian decor. Currier and Ives brought to life the work of artists as diverse as Frances Palmer, Arthur F. Tait, Louis Maurer, John Schutler, James Butterworth, Thomas Worth, and perhaps most memorably, the snowy, country homestead scenes of George H. Durrie, which we've all seen on Christmas cards (above, left) invoking a simple, agrarian past steeped in sentimentality even when they were first printed in the 1860s. Currier died in 1888, Ives in 1895. The firm passed to their sons who continued together until 1902 when the younger Currier sold out to the younger Ives who in turn liquidated much of the stock and sold the company to a Daniel W. Logan, in 1907. By that time, except in some areas of rural America, the Currier and Ives style and printing techniques had been supplanted by much more modern ones. Today, thanks to revivals of interest in the 1920s and 30s original Currier and Ives lithographs are much sought after by collectors and history buffs, kind of making them the "baseball cards" of the art world.

Cornelius Gijsbrechts

2012-02-12T00:01:00.001-05:00

Self-portrait to Still-Life, 1663, Cornelius Gijsbrechts

During the latter part of the thirteenth century, the great Medieval painter, Cimabue, one Monday morning came to work in his studio and picked up his brushes to continue his work on a large altarpiece, his famed Madonna Enthroned. Climbing up the scaffolding to the top of the nearly thirteen-foot-tall painting, he found a fly on the nose of the Madonna which he'd painted just a few days before. Given the fact that the painting medium was made from egg yolks, flies and other insects were often a problem when the paint was fresh. He tried three time to frighten it off, only to realize finally, that one of his apprentices, the painter Giotto, had painted the fly on the Madonna's nose as a practical joke. That may or may not have been the beginning of what the French dubbed "tromp l'oeil" (fool the eye) painting, but there's no doubt such work has been a persistent presence in art going back nearly that far. Today we see it in what's variously known as "Super Realism" or "Photo Realism" and of course traditional and non-traditional still-life paintings. It's a type of painting that, while not spectacular, is something of a spectacle, beloved by realist artists as a means of showing off their technical virtuosity, and by viewers for its magic in fooling their eyes, if only for a moment, into confusing reality with illusion. It's an area of art I've recently played with though I'm no match for the likes of Cornelius Gijsbrechts (don't ask how to pronounce that).

Reverse Side of Painting, 1670, Cornelius Gijsbrechts

Magic is a good word for this type of art. Gijsbrechts, one might say, was almost as much magician as painter. Don't be surprised if you've never heard of him, he seems to have magically appeared in Copenhagen at the court of King Frederick III in 1668. He played the royal audience for four years then just as mysteriously as he'd appeared, he vanished in 1672, never to be seen again. But during those four years, he certainly wowed the crowd. And when the king died, his show was booked for a second run during the first two years of the reign of his successor, Christian V. This king even build a museum with an entire room, the perspectivekammer, devoted entirely to Gijsbrechts' astonishing images. So, what did Cornelius paint that so enamored the Danish royal court? On a shelf in the National Gallery in London sits a framed painting, leaning against the wall, facing it. Oops, sorry, don't touch, it's not a framed painting at all, but an unframed canvas depicting the back of a framed painting.

Trompe l'oeil-staffeli med frugtstykke'
1768-72, Cornelius Gijsbrechts

Elsewhere in the exhibit stands an artists easel, on it, a still-life in progress, another painting leaning against the legs of the easel, again facing away from the viewer while on the base tray are the tools of the artist's trade. You guessed it, the whole thing, easel and all, is a ruse, painted in one piece on a single wooden panel, complete with rear leg and holes cut in the appropriate locations over and under the painting. Damn, wish I'd thought of that.

An Open Cupboard, 1665,
Cornelius Gijsbrechts

The Dutch loved their vanitas still-life paintings, and judging by his style and name, Gijsbrechts may have been Dutch. Several of his more traditional (if you can call them that) fool-the-eye still-lifes have the typical vanitas elements (burning candles, flowers, bubbles, food, insects, etc.) of this type of painting, though often with a twist, such as an illusionary torn spot in the canvas, edges painted to look frayed, even some painted dirt and grime to make them look old. In one case, a painted tack is posed opposite the real thing. One of Gijsbrechts more remarkable works features a small cupboard (right)with what appears to be glass in its doors. One door is a painted illusion, an identical one to its right is real. And when opened, it reveals the painted contents of the cupboard just as they appear through the illusionary glass. On the inside of the "door" several letters and momentos which appear from the front to be tucked inside between the glass and frame, are painted as seen from the back. Closer inspection reveals the hinged cupboard door is nothing more than a stretched canvas painted on both sides. I love Gijsbrechts work, but in discovering it, I've become somewhat disillusioned. Just when you think you're onto something new, you discover some Dutch genius was doing it over three hundred years ago!

Colonial Architecture

2012-02-11T00:01:00.001-05:00

Post-medieval English, sometimes called Tudor style

Without a doubt one of the most confusing areas of art has to do with architectural styles and in particular those involving domestic architecture...not domestic simply as in USA, but domestic in terms of domiciles--homes. But speaking of USA, of these styles, probably the most difficult and terribly overused is the term "Colonial." Technically, that means those in existence before 1776, but even that limitation does little to simplify the designation. It's like referring to all 20th century architecture as "modern."

The House of Seven Gables, made famous by
Nathaniel Hawthorne (Salem, Mass.), dates from
1668 and is the purest example of early
New England Colonial architecture surviving.

The earliest "colonial" architecture might rightly be called Post-medieval English (above, left) though in appearance the "post" part might be a bit optimistic. It typically features brick construction, a central chimney mass serving two to four fireplaces, small doors, and even smaller, leaded glass window panes. Southern versions sometimes had chimneys at either ends of the gabled roof. The phrase "plain Jane" comes to mind. The clapboard "saltbox" style, sometimes with a front overhang of the second story is a later variation of this style. A little later, small dormers appeared. A little later still, especially in the North, numerous gables developed as in the "House of Seven Gables" (above, right).

Dutch Colonial style dating from 1658,
Gloucester County, Virginia

In the New York area (and elsewhere) there developed what has been called the Dutch Colonial style (left). Usually one-and-a-half stories, the most notable feature being its gambrel roof, having two distinctively different angles of slope. Tradition has it that Dutch carpenters applied ship building techniques, in a sense, creating an inverted "hull" to make up the roof. This had the advantage of creating a great deal of head room on the second level and thus more usable living space. Dormers are also quite common along with flared eaves in the front and little or no overhang on the ends. Small front porches and larger side porches are quite common in more recent adaptations. Stone, and wood were the most common building materials. What we commonly think of as Cape Cod style is an offspring of the Dutch Colonial root.

Photo by A. Balet

The French Colonial Maison Berquette-Ribault,

1789, St. Genevieve, Missouri

In the South we have the distinctly different French Colonial style (right) typical of the Mississippi Delta area. Quite often of brick or stone with a hipped roof (sloping on four sides), they were typically only one-room deep with outside entrances to each room and tall, slender, shuttered, multi-paned windows. Rural versions sometimes have a raised front porch with the main roof overhanging it supported by slender wooden posts. Urban versions often have painted, wrought iron balconies. Dispersal of summer heat and humidity was a prime architectural concern. Brick versions are often painted white. Frequently, a roofed, pavilion style porch extends around on all four sides, even on two-storied structures. Window treatments are usually very simple except in cases where there is an English influence. Arched doors and windows are not uncommon.

The Gonzales-Alvarez House (1727),
St. Augustine, Florida, is probably the purest
surviving example of the Spanish Colonial style.

In the far West and Florida we find Spanish Colonial architecture of brick, stone, adobe, or stucco, sometimes with wooden second stories added later. Exposed beams both inside and out are sometimes seen. Red tile roofs are common in western versions where flat or very gently sloping "shed" type roofs can be found. Doors and windows are often mere holes in the wall differing only in size and shape. The use of wood is mostly limited to floors and roof areas. Doors and shutters appear "homemade" except in areas where English influences reached. Cantilevered, roofed balconies are quite common too on larger, later versions of this style.

Georgian colonial, Reed Creek Farm, eastern
Maryland, 1775

The most common visualization we have of Colonial architecture should, more rightfully be called "Georgian" (right, also discussed in the previous entry). It takes its name from the reign of England's King George III and is common all up and down the east coast and as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains. There are examples with nearly every different type roof mentioned so far. Door and window treatments were simple in the beginning, but as this style grew in popularity, Adam and Palladian styles with their Greek and Roman influences became common. Some grew quite ornate featuring broken pediments, arches, and fancy masonry. Brick was the most common material, especially for those still in existence today Add-on wings, dormers, and roof balustrades helped decorate these homes. Southern versions often included Grecco-Roman or "Mount Vernon" porticoes, ideal for hot, sunny days. In the North, entry porticoes were small or non-existent. Most versions were two-storied but examples of three-storied structures often exist in urban areas along with end-abutted "townhouse" derivatives. This style, in the early 19th century eventually morphed into the still more ornate and urban "Federal" style (below), which is often lumped (inaccurately) in with the Colonial style. So, next time you hear someone talk about "colonial" architecture, tell them to be more specific.

The Federal style, Woodlawn, 1805, William Thorton

Classical Revival Architecture

2012-02-10T00:01:00.001-05:00

Classical Revival style in its purest form seen
here in Benjamin Latrobe's 1798-1804 Bank of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

It would be convenient, in studying early American architecture, if the building of Colonial style homes had ceased promptly on July 4, 1776, and a whole new style had been born that day along with the new nation. Fortunately for us, the Declaration of Independence was about politics, not architecture, though certainly Thomas Jefferson, being the Renaissance man he was, could have written as eloquently about one as the other. Well, actually, he did, though his words on architecture are far outshone by his deeds. His magnificently well thought out and well proportioned statement on Classic Revival architecture embodied in his own Monticello reads as passionately, yet logically in bricks and mortar as does his immortal words to King George on parchment.

Adam style fireplace details, 1770

In general, I don't care much for "revival" architecture. Very often it can best be described as "kitsch," and in most cases, the two terms are synonyms--architecture imitating architecture. Yet, imitative or not, I love Classical Revival (top, right). Part of the reason is that Classical Revival humanized the cold, hard, geometrically dominated Classical style. I suppose, in giving it some thought, all revivalist styles do this, it's just that the Classical style of the Greeks and Romans so badly needed humanizing while all the others, didn't so much. After all, Classical architecture was the style of Roman temples, government buildings, art museums, some churches, hospitals, libraries, and bath houses. It was magnificent and grandiose, but not often very human or even on a human scale. It was the architecture of the gods!

The Georgian style Hammond-Harwood House, 1774, Anapolis, Maryland

In discussing Colonial architecture there's mostly the Georgian period just prior to the revolution (as seen above). Though it appeared before 1776, the first hint of the upcoming Classical Revival came during the 1780s up through the 1820s in the form of what's called the Adam style (above, left). No, it was not a primitive post and lintel architecture named for the husband of Eve; but for the British architect, Robert Adam, who, along with his younger brother, had the most important architectural practice in all England during the latter part of the 18th century. If one were to describe the Adam style, it would be as a transitional movement from Georgian to true Classical Revival. There are still many Georgian elements and proportions present but it's in the details, the window and door designs, cupolas, balustrades, cornices, steps, iron balconies, and other adornments that the Adam style presaged Classical Revival. The decorations were beautiful, like fine jewelry, lots of fanlight windows, arched door frames, masonry insets with carved swags, restrained pediments over doors (or entrance stoops), curved steps, and paneled shutters. Sometimes this style is referred to as the "Federal Style," though this designation is prone to mixing the politics and architecture of the time.

Unlike many "revival" styles, Classical Revival
translates well to domestic applications as seen
in the modest, wood, single story Kempf house,
dating from 1852-53 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Every July Fourth we think back to the American founding fathers. In addition to Jefferson, we might also consider some of the founding fathers of American architecture as well, all of whom came to their profession copying the Adam style of their English cousins before moving on to the full-fledged Classical Revival that was to become synonymous with the democratic ideals of their new nation. From Boston came Charles Bulfinch; from Savannah, William Jay; from Philadelphia, Benjamin Latrobe; from Charleston, Gabriel Manigault; from New York, John McComb; from Massachusetts, Samuel McIntire; and from Maine, Alexander Parris. It would be romantic, not to mention inspirational, to think of these great designers, artists, and builders from all over the colonies as having met somewhere across town from Independence hall to sign some great architectural manifesto of independence from Great Britain. Sadly, it didn't happen. Given the geography and provincial nature of the American colonies, most of them probably didn't even know each other. Yet independently, these founding fathers guided their new nation's carpenters and craftsmen into the molding of a new national architecture reflecting the same noble, democratic, human principals as those of Jefferson and his cohorts.

Church's Olana

2012-02-09T00:01:00.001-05:00

You can tell a lot about an artist by peering into his studio. It's kind of a physical representation of the order of his or her mind. My studio is small, but orderly, bookish, and not always too clean--which unfortunately proves my point. If that is true of an artist's studio, it might equally be true of his or her home, especially if, like ours, it was designed and built (not literally in my case) by the artist. It's an architectural picture of who I am (tempered by who my wife would like me to be). Artists have dabbled in architecture for centuries. Peter Paul Rubens' Antwerp house is an excellent example, though the home was remodeled and expanded by the artist, rather than built from scratch.

Clouds over Olana, 1872, Frederick Edwin Church

In this country, in the state of New York, on a high promontory, overlooking a sweeping view of the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains, one of the most famous and wealthy artists of the 19th century set about creating an architectural representation of himself. He planned and planted every tree, dug his own lake, and in general, created a real landscape as certainly as if he were painting one. Then, in 1867, he set off with his wife on a twenty-month grand tour of Europe and the Middle East. When he came back, trunks filled with hundreds of drawings, his head filled with thousands of ideas, he set about creating the crown jewel of that landscape. He called it Olana. His name was Frederick Edwin Church.

Olana, 1872, Frederick Edwin Church

It's a brave (or foolish) man who tries to label Olana architecturally. The safe word would be "eclectic," but that's about as meaningless as describing a painting as "interesting." Built of native, polychromatic stone, it is somewhat block-like but with mansard roofs, a soaring tower, pointed windows, geometric masonry designs, and strips of blue tile making it reminiscent of Persian architecture. It's kind of a Gothic Revival-Italian Villa-French Mansard-Ruskinian Venetian style castle with shades of Arab and Moorish influences. If it's a representation of Church's mind, then the term "muddled" seems appropriate. Inside, Church agonized over the placement of every urn, mirror, hall tree, mosaic adornment, Persian rug, and Medieval suit of armor. Think Victorian clutter and blend in a generous helping of Middle Eastern souvenir shop chic, and you get some idea where the man was coming from. Nothing was left to accident. Church consulted architects, but in the end did all the design work himself--"Made it out of my head," as he put it. He wrote of working all day supervising construction; then staying up all night creating necessary drawings for the builders.

Olana, court hall

By the time the house was finished around 1872 (a wing was added in 1891 featuring indoor plumbing), Church's paintings had become decidedly out of style. Probably the first American painter ever to become a millionaire, rather than attempt a comeback, Church withdrew from the art world into the fantasy world of his Olana. With money apparently no problem despite the enormous cost of building the house, he poured still more into furnishing it with rugs from Beirut, tiles from Teheran, and furniture from India. And when he still painted, he painted the world as seen from Olana. He died in 1900. The house and grounds remained in the family for another 64 years. By that time, the art and architecture world had gradually come around to acknowledging that Church's paintings, his drawings, and even his peculiar tastes in architecture had some merit after all. His "Victorian monstrosity" was saved from the wrecking ball to become a New York State historic site in 1967, and today, we can traverse through it, revisiting the mind of one of the most unique artists America will ever know.

The exterior stone and tile work were designed by Church to take
into account the effects of lighting at different times of the day.

Christo Javacheff

2012-02-08T00:01:00.001-05:00

Wrapping the Reichstag, Berlin, 1995

One of the saddest things for an artist is to see one of his or her works deteriorate. Art is supposed to be permanent, archival, everlasting, eternal, right? Sometimes it's through misuse, sometimes because of the natural elements, sometimes just poor planning on the part of the artist. Up until the early 1960s, it was taken for granted that all art should last forever. Then came the advent of conceptual art, and its greatest proponent, Christo Javacheff. With an ethnic name like that, it's little wonder we know him today simply as Christo. We also know him as the number one "wrap artist" of all time. His 1976 Running Fence in California, his thousands of umbrellas in California and Japan in 1991, his wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995 (top), and his pink skirted Key Biscayne Islands in 1983 (below, left), have cemented his name in the art history books for all time. Yet not one of these works of art exists today.

Pink Skirted Islands, 1983, Biscayne Bay,
Miami, Flordia, Christo

But they do. They all continue to exist--in the memories of those who saw them and gaped in awe at their daring magnificence; in countless, heavy coffee table tomes, in thousands of photos, and in the documentary films of Albert and David Maysles. There is more to Christo's art than covering up landmarks with plastic or cloth so that they may be seen in a new light. His works have enabled millions to see art in a new light. He takes art out of galleries and museums and made it span rivers of complacency as he did both literally and figuratively when he wrapped Paris' Pont Neuf (New Bridge) in millions of yards of golden fabric, turning its hard stone into billowing softness. Not uncommonly, locals who have scoffed at his projects find themselves wishing they could remain permanently. But that kind of familiarity would again breed complacency. There is nothing natural about Christo's art. It is intended to be startling, both in its visual impact as well as its conceptual daring.

Christo started out small, wrapping cans and
bottles in 1958-59 as the Pop movement and
conceptual environmental art were in their infancy.

Christo was born in Bulgaria in 1935. He grew up studying art behind the "iron curtain" where realism was the only kind of art; and art was only deemed to be of value insofar as it supported national goals. Christo fled to Paris in the 1950s where he met his wife and manager, Jeanne-Claude (who died in 2009). They emigrated to the U.S. in 1964 and became citizens. Christo started wrapping items as mundane as beer cans (above, right), then moved up to ever larger and larger items, finally evolving to whole buildings, bridges, valleys and islands. Moreover, quite apart from the works themselves, coming from a communist homeland, Christo is ever involved in the democracy of his undertakings. Years are spent getting permission from dozens of governmental agencies and citizen groups, involving thousands of individuals and millions of dollars. His personal income derives from royalties from photos, books, and films but in every case, each community demands a cut. He works with local politicians, but ironically, Christo is no great "schmoozer." Even at 77, he waxes eloquently about his art before these many groups yet the man had a sharp temper and takes offense at kissing hands or any other part of the human anatomy.

Over the River, current proposed work since 2009. Christo
plans to cover 42 miles of the Arkansas River with luminous
fabric for two weeks during the summer of 2014.

What's in the future? With the kind of "lag time" involved in each of his projects, Christo has to plan ahead. The Reichstag wrapping took over fifteen years to come to fruition, which makes the Running Fence seem like a "Flash in the Pan." It took only four years to negotiate. The Miami project took three years, and the Pont Neuf work, ten. For the past twenty years, in Abu Dhabi, Christo has been planning a gigantic pyramid of 390,500 oil barrels. Given its location, there should be no shortage of art materials.

Richard Morris Hunt

2012-02-07T00:01:00.002-05:00

The John Griswold House, 1864, Newport, RI,
Hunt's first Newport house and one of his
earliest, bears traditional English Tudor styling
before Hunt glamorized his French influences.

When we think about various influences having to do with American architecture we usually dwell mostly on the English, and with good reason. Of course it's not hard to find Spanish/American architecture, especially in the Southwest. But except for some French colonial structures in the deep South there was very little French influence on American architecture, at least until one Mr. Richard Morris Hunt came on the scene. He was the first American to study architecture at Paris' Ecole des Beaux-arts. He hit town around 1843 and spent the next twelve years soaking up everything French he could find. Then he brought so much of it back to the U.S. he might well have needed an import license. At the time, the prevailing style in France was called Francis I. The same thing we here in the U.S. call the Chateau style or sometimes Chateauesque. And running parallel with this, was a somewhat more restrained, boxier style most often referred to in the U.S. as Beaux-Arts.

Photo by Daderot

Hunt's Marble House, Newport, RI, 1888-92

Although they differ considerably in appearance, it's fitting these two styles should be discussed together in that, first of all, they came from the same country; second, they were popular during roughly the same era in the U.S. history, and third, in both cases only the wealthiest could afford them (and sometimes, even then, just barely). I think it was Mark Twain who referred to the 1870s through to 1910 as the "Gilded Age." Richard Morris Hunt was the architect of Twain's Gilded Age. He was the architect of the Vanderbilts, and the...well, when you have the Vanderbilt family as clients, who needs anyone else. Both the Chateauesque and Beaux Arts styles would be quite minor ripples in the mainstream of late nineteenth, early twentieth century architecture except for Newport, Rhode Island, and a couple other east coast venues where costly, exuberant, megalithic examples have been preserved as tourist attractions and architectural oddities. Richard Morris Hunt designed several of them. He didn't, however, design for the "man on the street." Thus, you'd have to live in some pretty ritzy neighborhoods to spot more than one or two.

George Washington slept here...George Washington Vanderbilt, that is,
Hunt's most lavish work, Biltmore, Asheville, NC, 1889-95.
Even in France, few chateaus could match this scale and opulence.

In picturing the Chateauesque style, think French chateau, with it's mixture of Renaissance Italian and Gothic influences. Since they were exclusively architect designed, they are surprisingly pure in their translation to the American architectural idiom. Unlike other American styles, it would be quite difficult to craft a cheap rip-off of either of these French flavors. Seldom, in fact, do you even see one made of brick, and never of wood. Sizes varied somewhat from the merely large to humongous. Rarely, in fact, do you see an example of either style in a house to small for the larger-than-life masonry and decorative details. And once you acclimate yourself to the style, accepting that overbearing, over-decorated, and pretentious are "good," in fact, the hallmarks of the style; then get used to the mindset that more really is better (or was thought to be, at least), then they can be really quite beautiful. Biltmore (above), near Asheville, North Carolina, the home of the youngest of the three Vanderbilt brothers, is the perfect example of this style.

660 Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1885,
Hunt's Chateauesque edifice for George's
big brother William K. Vanderbilt
(since demolished).

The Chateauesque style has a country look to it, as indeed, most of them both here and in France are located in the country, Hunt's Vanderbilt mansion, (left), in New York City being an exception. The Beaux Arts style though is thoroughly citified. In certain parts of Paris, you can see block after block of them, culminating in the glorious Paris Opera House. In the U.S., today at least, you'd have to go to Newport, Rhode Island, to see that many Beaux Arts homes and even then, they are set spaciously amid acres of grassy landscapes. Picture a turn-of-the-century bank building in nearly any major or minor city in this country and you'll get a pretty good idea of the Beaux Arts style. Roofs are usually low-pitched or flat. Porticoes feature arches at least as often as columns, and there is as much an Italian Renaissance flavor to them as French. Decoration is more restrained than in the Chateauesque and tends toward the lower, heavier, levels of the structure. Mansard roofs and dormers are quite common; and even though they occasionally rise to as much as four stories, insofar as homes are concerned, the tendency is for horizontal lines to predominated. Marble or limestone is the favored architectural medium with symmetry a must. In cities often the style is limited to the street facades of the buildings to save costs. And although curves are occasionally seen, in window groupings, most other aspects are severely rectilinear.

Americans have always loved the French and all things French. The French have panache. However, when it comes to architecture, from Richard Morris Hunt to the present, few could afford it. Moreover, whether Chateauesque or Beaux Art, any attempt at a less costly version always comes out looking...well...fake.

Charles-Francois Daubigny

2012-02-06T00:01:00.002-05:00

The River Seine at Mantes, 1850-60,
Charles-Francois Daubigny

It's strange how we develop "notions" regarding various things that may or may not have any basis in reality. For instance, in art, we commonly think the Impressionists "invented" the divided brush stroke, the sketchy, unfinished look of their paintings, and even the act of painting outside "en plein air" as it's called. Actually none of these things are true. One only has to look at the work of Charles-Francois Daubigny (pronounced DOE-bin-YEE), his date of birth (1817), and the dates of some of his early landscape paintings to realize otherwise. He's commonly regarded as a Barbizon painter, and while it's true that he, Rousseau, and others once frequented this tiny village on the edge of the Fountainbleu Forrest to paint, actually (especially after 1850), he spent very little time there. And while, sometimes he did work in his studio, painting his loosely handled landscape masterpieces, he was one of the first French artists to advertise the joys of painting outside. And as for his painting style, his work was criticized as early as 1852 by the art columnist, Grunn: "Is Monsieur Daubigny afraid of ruining his work by finishing it?"

le Meuel, 1826, Charles-Francois Daubigny
When Daubigny painted hatstacks, he didn't
mess around. Perhaps this was the inspiration
for Monet's.

Daubigny came from a whole family of landscape painters. His father, Edme, and his Uncle Pierre were both accomplished landscapists, though both worked in a traditional, highly conservative style. And Daubigny passed on his style, his love of art, and the twilight riverscape, to his own son, Karl Pierre, who continued his father's painting legacy until his death in 1886. Charles-Francois' training in art came largely from his family as well, though he had a smattering of formal input from the academician Paul Delaroche, and a yearlong painting sojourn to Italy. Surprisingly though, given his style, Daubigny had a fair amount of success in entering Salon Shows through most of the 1840s. He even managed to win a Salon prize in 1848. Though his family was well-to-do and he seems to have lived much of his life on a stipend from his father, by the 1850s, he was making a respectable living as an etcher and illustrator even as his paintings began to win popular acceptance and respectable prices in spite of their style being a good deal "fresher," as we might say today, than was common at the time.

l'Atelier Flottant en 1874, Claude Monet,
Daubigny with his son and his floating studio.

But Daubigny's real impact, aside from spending every spare franc he could muster in buying the art of his impressionist friends, came in 1857 when he was award the legion of Honor leading to his election to the Salon jury itself in 1865 and again in 1868. It was from this position of some influence that he was able to play a role in shining a public light on the younger generation of plein air daubers such as Monet, Pissarro, and Boudin, even Cezanne, helping them to get their work into salon exhibitions. He was also responsible for introducing several of the impressionists to his agent, Paul Durand-Ruel, who later helped promote their careers. But despite dabbling in the "art politics" of the much-hated salon jury system, Daubigny was first and foremost a landscape painter, traveling all over France and neighboring countries, setting up his easel on some of the most picturesque, and then unspoiled, riverbanks in the country. He even acquired a houseboat allowing him to paint his beloved rivers while on the river. (Monet later got the idea for his own such floating platform from Daubigny.)

Coucher de Soleil, 1865, Charles-Francois Daubigny
While it could be said that Daubigny made an
"impression" on the impressionist, Impressionism
seems to have made an impression on him as well.

Daubigny is important, not so much for his golden, watery landscapes themselves, though they are exquisitely beautiful, but for being another of what I term "transitional" artists--painters who effectively served as a bridge from one dominant style (Academicism in this case) to another (as in here, Impressionism). Daubigny didn't "invent" Impressionism, but late in life one could easily say he became one. By the fact that his style presaged theirs by some twenty or thirty years, gaining acceptance several years earlier than did Impressionism, he was instrumental in bringing about the ascendancy of the impressionist era shortly before his death in 1878. His early moral and financial support of these hapless young artists carves a deep niche for both them and himself in the art history "wall of fame."

Charles Demuth

2012-02-05T00:01:00.001-05:00

Charles Demuth Self-portrait, 1907

I don't suppose it's quite so much a factor today as it once was, but there was a time, throughout much of the 20th century, when girls had an easier time of it than guys when it came to studying art. Though they never outnumbered the male sex until perhaps fairly recently, time was when it was definitely not considered very manly to study art. In fact, in many rural parts of the country, for a teenage boy to take art lessons was "sissy stuff," only a little less so than studying ballet. Against this backdrop, around the turn of the century, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a talented teenage boy took his first art classes. The only thing available locally was china painting, mostly fruit and flowers. He was good at it. He continued to favor such subjects for the rest of his life. He moved on to watercolors, then oils, studied at the Drexel Institute (until they closed their art department) at which time he moved to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was thin, walked with a limp as a result of a childhood disease, was always frail of health, and always felt the sting of being a man pursuing what was seen as a feminine calling. On the plus side, he had the best art education money could buy (including trips to study in Paris), he was a doted-upon only child, he was bright, intellectual, sensitive, his family was comfortably well-off, and he came from a long line of amateur painters. His name was Charles Demuth.

My Egypt, 1927, Charles Demuth

Demuth was born in 1883. He was, in fact, homosexual. All his best friends were men except for a long, affectionate, professional relationship with Georgia O'Keefe. He is often credited with leading her into the painting of flowers. When he died, he split his work. His watercolors went to his lifelong friend, Robert Locher. His oils, to O'Keefe. His watercolors were mostly small, fresh, sensitive handlings of his favorite subjects--still-lifes and flowers. His oils, ranged from abstracted, nonfigurative portraits of close friends to a sort of post-impressionist or cubistic landscape scenes of Bermuda, Provincetown, and his hometown of Lancaster. Two of his most famous paintings are from this collection of oils. In 1927 he painted My Egypt. It's a grain elevator. Influenced by Picasso, Duchamp, and Cubism, it is a monumental rendering of a middle-American staple. But imposed upon its dominant verticals is a pattern of diagonal and horizontal lines, creating planes of subtle color variations seldom seen at the time, west of the Hudson. He brought Cubism to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, 1928,
Charles Demuth

One of Demuth's closest friends was the poet, William Carlos Williams. Often considered his greatest painting, Demuth's I Saw the Figure Five in Gold is a homage portrait to "Bill." There is no face, no body, only the number "5" three times, and part of his friend's name at the top, amid a forced, Cubist perspective of surging, gray planes. At the bottom it is signed with his own initials and those of his friend. Demuth considered the work a collaborative effort. It's based upon a line from a poem by Williams, The Great Figure. "Among the rain and lights, I saw the clangs, siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city." Demuth's "portrait" of his friend is the wild, cubistic, headlong flight of a fire truck through the dark, deserted streets of New York. It's often considered the most quintessentially "American" painting ever created. Unlike his friend, Bill, who lived to be eighty years old, Charlie, as he was known to his friends, died in 1935 at the age of 53. He might have died some thirteen years earlier had it not been for a new, experimental drug. A diabetic for much of his adult life, Demuth was only the second individual in this country to receive Insulin. And though he was notoriously careless about maintaining his treatments, they literally saved his life. Demuth was affluent enough that he never had to sell his work. What he did sell during his lifetime was primarily representational watercolors. And though he could move effortlessly back and forth between these and his more experimental oils, it was only after his death when O'Keeffe's husband, Alfred Stieglitz, began to handle the paintings which his wife had inherited, that his more avant-garde efforts began to dominate his life's work.

Turkish Bath with Self-portrait, 1918,
Charles Demuth

Chaim Soutine

2012-02-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

Portrait of Soutine, 1916,
Amadeo, Modigliani (one of several)

We all have our idols. Not surprisingly, painters idolize other painters. I drool over Salvadore Dali. I respect Norman Rockwell. I love John Singer Sargent. I'm in awe of Rembrandt. I can lose myself in a Caravaggio. The thing we don't often think about is that our idols also had idols. Abstract Expressionists tend to idolize Kandinsky, DeKooning, or Pollock of the New York School. Ever wonder whom they idolized? There were several. Amongst them were Picasso, of course, Chagall, Matisse, van Gogh, and also a man whose name is not a household word (I'm talking an art household here) among nonrepresentational painters--Chaim Soutine.

Nature Mort a la Soupiere, 1916, Chaim Soutine

If the name is not familiar, it's little wonder. First of all he is, by art history standards, relatively recent. He was born in 1894 in Smilovich, Lithuania to an impoverished Jewish tailor and his wife. He was the tenth of eleven children (which would no doubt account for the poverty). He landed in Paris in the early 1920s where he took a few art classes and seemingly enjoyed the Bohemian lifestyle which characterized the art community all over Europe between the wars. His painting from this period was thoroughly expressionistic, even at times abstract expressionistic twenty years before there was such a term. He loved to buy used canvases at flea markets upon which he painted. His work was thought of as "naive." In fact, a shrewd American collector of such work, named Dr. Albert Barnes, spotted his paintings in Paris and gobbled them up for a song--all fifty-two of them (one of which is pictured above). Soutine was suddenly successful beyond his wildest dreams. And success changed him.

Piece of Beef, 1925, Chaim Soutine

He immersed himself in Rembrandt. he critic, Clement Greenberg, called him a victim of the Louvre. He also devoured Chardin and Courbet. And if you liked his early work, you'd probably not care much for that which followed. Soutine discovered the slaughterhouse next door to the to the tenement commune where he lived, as well as more traditional French subject matter. His style, his palette, his content from this period is raw...as in raw beef, painted from a carcass (right) which hung in his studio until health authorities forced him to dispose of it. (One of these carcass paintings sold for $13.8 million in 2006.) Though the Paris art world of the 1920s hadn't cared much for Soutine the savage, uncouth, immigrant Lithuanian, they loved the "new" Soutine. They loved his series of uniformed servants, his 1925 Page Boy at Maxim's (below, right) and his 1927 Pastry Cook (below, left), for instance. In each case, you have the feeling that the artist and his model were at war, the canvas the battlefield, and that, though it was a close call, Soutine eventually "won." But in due time, this war ceased being figurative and became real. Hitler invaded France. Soutine was Jewish. For three years he hid out, on the run, the trauma precipitating a perforated ulcer. Eventually, as allied forces were pushing the Germans out of Paris, Soutine found his way to a hospital there (or what passed for one under those circumstances). But it was too late. He died in 1943. He was 50.

The Pastry Cook, 1927,
Chaim Soutine
(one of several by the same title)

The Page Boy at Maxims, 1925,
Chaim Soutine
(one of at least three by the same title)

Epilogue--Just seven years after his death, Soutine's work came to New York. A retrospective in 1950 at the Museum of Modern Art coincided perfectly with the nascent period of Abstract Expressionism. Many critics, looking back, consider it the spark that ignited the popularity of the New York School. DeKooning and Pollock both have called Soutine an idol, one of their greatest influences. I can believe that.

The Carracci School

2012-02-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

If you look up the word "eclectic" in the dictionary you'll find it refers to a mixing of different styles usually in philosophy, architecture, or interior design. As in mixing various flavors in cooking, the hope is that the chosen styles will complement one another. However, just as too many cooks, very often spoil the broth; in art, too many styles are very often just as tasteless, even distasteful. Thus the term "eclectic" has come to have something of a negative connotation. The Victorian era of the late 19th century is sometimes held up as a prime example of this.

However, in the late 16th century there developed an eclectic school of art, perhaps even the first use of the term as related to art. It was founded in Bologna in 1589 by the painter, etcher, and engraver, Lodovico Carracci, and called the Academy degli Incamminati (Academy of the Progressives), taking as it's motto, "The school of those who regret the past, despise the present, and aspire to a better future." The Italian Futurists 350 years later echoed this same sentiment.

The Lamentation, ca. 1582, Lodovico Carracci

Lodovico Carracci was, at best, a rather pedestrian painter. Though he studied under the great Mannerists, Tintoretto, and later Fontana; not only they, but his fellow students tried to talk him out of a career in art. By all accounts he was a rather dull, "plodding" painter, though he has two or three excellent pieces of work to his credit such as The Lamentation (left) from around 1582. However, Lodovico was best known by the work of those whom he trained, and particularly by his talented proteges, his nephews, Annibale, and Agostino. For eleven years, they worked with him, teaching and painting in their popular art academy, establishing what has since come to be known as the School of Bologna in painting. Other students include Albani, Guido Remi, Domenichino, Lanfranco, Spada Riarini, and Bonzi (Il Gobbo)--none of them exactly household names today, but all outstanding practitioners of the painter's art of their time.

Farnese Palace Ceiling, ca. 1600,
Anniale and Agostino Carracci

The Carracci school in Bologna had as its eclectic ideal to combine Michelangelo's line, Titian's color, Correggio's chiaroscuro, and Raphael's symmetry and grace. Yeah, nice trick if you can do it. Actually, in large part, they did; in effect, "reforming" the Mannerist style and laying the groundwork for the Baroque period that was to follow. Annibale and Agostino left the school around 1600 for Rome, there employment by the wealthy and powerful Farnese family in the decoration of their ornate palace. Their work is often considered the seventeenth century secular equivalent of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling. They took as their theme that of Ovid's The Loves of the Gods (right)merging mythological, religious, and tromp l'oeil virtuosity into a magnificent, celestial masterpiece of massive proportions and truly eclectic content.

The Flight Into Egypt, 1604, Annibale Carracci

The star of the show, Annibale (pronounced ann-IB-aly) encored by producing numerous religious works, principally his 1604 Flight into Egypt (left), which became a model for later Italian landscapes and was to have a profound influence on both Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. On the lighter side, he left behind a number of very natural genre paintings such as The Butcher's Shop (bottom, left) and a surprisingly diverse collection of caricatures (bottom, right), an artform which he is generally credited with having invented. An eclectic man, from an eclectic family, and an ecelectic school--who says eclecticism has to have a bad name?

The Butcher Shop, 1580-90,
Annibale Carracci

A Sheet of Caricatures,
1595, Annibale Carracci,
note that they're all in profile.

Carleton Watkins

2012-02-02T00:01:00.003-05:00

el Capitan, Yosemite Park, California, 1861,
Carlton Watkins

We all think of sitting in our living rooms watching the "idiot box" as something of a 20th century phenomena. Well, guess what? It's not. Americans in the last quarter of the 19th century could do it too. In fact, they had a certain advantage over our high-tech electronic contraptions. They could view their "shows" in 3-D! Granted, there was no color, and no sound, and no brilliant illumination, but they could peer into an attractive, two-foot-tall wooden cabinet, turn a knob on the side, and view a surprisingly realistic "movie" of San Francisco Bay or Yosemite right from their victorian parlors. Although it was closer to a modern-day Rolodex than television, or even the movies, it was surprisingly advanced for its time. Buyers could choose from eighteen different models averaging about $23 in price (the equivalent of several hundred dollars today). It was all the brainchild of the pioneering photographer, Carleton Watkins.

Watkins' camera, definitely not for amateurs.

Watkins was born in 1829, at a time when photography hadn't even been invented yet. He got his start in San Francisco in 1853 as an assistant in a portrait photo shop. When we think of landscape photography, especially that of Yosemite, we think first of Ansel Adams. Watkins was taking outstanding, large-scale photos of Yosemite long before Adams was even born. In fact, some of the equipment Adams used, Watkins invented including the stereographic camera used to create the 3-D photos which amazed and delighted victorian armchair travelers. Dissatisfied with the quality of photos from existing box cameras of the Civil War era, Watkins had a cabinet maker build an enormous piece of equipment (below) capable of handling wet glass Collodion plates as large as 18 by 22 inches.

Watkins' custom camera--no wonder
he needed a railroad car.

It wasn't easy. Watkins' camera and glass plates (four pounds each) weighed hundreds of pounds. Moreover, the photos had to be shot and developed while the plates remained wet, which usually meant within a time span of no more than a half-hour to forty-five minutes. For the would-be landscape photographer, this entailed carrying with him his own portable darkroom to some of the most remote but beautiful places on earth. The gear was so heavy, bulky, and fragile it would fill a railroad boxcar, which is exactly what Watkins used. But in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with railroads probing even the most inaccessible corners of the country, this was no problem. He even got the railroads to support his efforts.

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, you can see his art. You can even peer into his victorian motion picture viewer and see why someone decided television (even without 3-D effects) would be a marked improvement.

Watkins' studio and most of his fragile glass plates were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Despondent, Watkins (then 78) is seen being led from his studio in advance of the fire. A few years later he was commited to an insane asylum where he died penniless in 1916.