Parmigianino

Parmigianino Self-portrait, 1523-24

It's one of the most amazing little paintings I've ever seen. It's a self-portrait. The young artist was barely twenty when he rendered his precocious, reflected image from a convex mirror onto a round, wooden panel barely nine inches in diameter. In the foreground is the graceful image of his right hand, slender, feminine, and delicate. A window lights the scene from the left, illuminating his and brown hair and boyish face most effectively. It looks much too young to belong to such an accomplished artist.  The painting was done in 1523 just a year before he was to arrive in Rome to begin his professional career. His name was Girolamo Francesco Mazolla. He was born in 1503 in Parma, Italy, and it was from his hometown that he derived the name by which we know him today--Parmigianino--the boy from Parma.

The Conversion of St. Paul, 1528,
Parmigianino

The youthful face in the mirror gives no hint of the misfortune that was to befall the talented young man in Rome. He died, a tired, worn-out man in his thirties. But in the seventeen years of his professional career, he managed to master the painting style of his hometown hero, Correggio, as well as Rome's Michelangelo, Raphael, Rosso Fiorentino, and Giulio Romano. Parmigianino had been in Rome for just a short time when it was Sacked by invaders from the North in 1527. He was imprisoned. Yet even there, he continued to paint. Upon his release, he was forced to flee Rome for Bologna where some of his greatest works were completed. One of the best, his 1530 painting, The Conversion of Paul, demonstrates a mastery of both medium and message. Parmigianino may have been the first artist to be considered a "Mannerist" painter. In this work, we see the full force of that much misunderstood and maligned style. It's a tour-de-force of his elegant, sometimes exasperating painting skill.

Madonna with the Long Neck,
 1535-40, Parmigianino

Parmigianino's most famous work was one of his last, painted in 1535 but still considered unfinished at his death. It is an enormous, full-length Madonna and child known as Madonna with the Long Neck. Critics have loved it and hated it for centuries because it is about as far removed from any other painting of its type either before or since as can be imagined. I mentioned that Parmigianino is exasperating. On the one hand he is probably the best painter of his time (excluding Michelangelo). Yet he insists upon an elegantly elaborate, anatomical (not to mention unbiblical) distortion of the mother and child as to be irreverent and even erotic. Some have likened it to an abstraction; others probe its setting and peripheral figures for deep symbolic meaning; while others simply have trouble getting past the massive thighs, petulant breasts, gossamer clinging garments, and stylish hairdo, not to mention the damnable goose neck from which the painting gets its name. Among art historians, Mannerist painting is not the most beloved period in art. Though Parmigianino, along side Tintoretto and Pontormo, are obviously the best of the lot, it's work such as this enigmatic Madonna that gives the style such a bad name.

Paolo Uccello

Paolo di Dono (Uccello)

Artists and their students have struggled with it for centuries. Since the Renaissance, mastering it has been an important rite of passage for any painter seeking to graduate from the ranks of the amateur to professional status. No one artist discovered or "invented" it. In point of fact, one might say it's been in a constant state of development almost since cave painting. We call it perspective--the creation of an illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. Very early artists first used it by varying the size of objects in the foreground of their compositions with distant objects in the background. In fact, they found that placement of objects near the top of a composition tended to denote distance while those at the bottom nearness. About the same time, they began overlapping nearer figures over those in the distance. As painting developed, brighter colors and increased detail came to be used to indicate foreground objects. And with the popularity of landscape painting, distance began to be indicated by differentiating the sharpness of edges of near object with those at a distance.

But the final, most difficult development in the art of perspective came only in the fifteenth century--what we call linear perspective, and what we all tend to think of first when we hear the word today. The Florentine architect, Brunelleschi, is often credited with developing this final step. Perhaps, but it would also seem to have been something of a group effort in that several artists seem to grasp it and begin experimenting with it almost simultaneously. One of them was Paolo di Dono. Today we know him as Uccello, a nickname meaning "bird," probably picked up from an early fascination with them. Though Vasari scoffs at Uccello as being "intoxicated" with perspective, if so, it was a gradual addiction. There are indications based upon some of his early works that linear perspective was something Uccello struggled with, and mastered the hard way, through trial and error. For this reason, Brunelleschi notwithstanding, many art historians give Uccello credit for being one of the primary forces in it's development.

St. George and the Dragon, 1458-60, Paolo Uccello

Uccello was born in Florence in 1397, the son of a barber-surgeon. He must have been something of a child prodigy because while still a boy of ten he was already working with the first true, Renaissance artist, Lorenzo Ghiberti as he designed, cast, and installed the great bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence. Little is known about where Uccello learned to paint though it would appear to have been from a Gothic master. He married and trained both his son and daughter to be painters. Between church and civic commissions, he seems to have made a decent living painting scenes on wooden chests and other household furnishing. Probably because of this, most of his early work is lost. Uccello can be seen as a transitional artist, which makes his work hard to categorize. But that which  we have is all the more interesting because, through them, we are able to chart the gradual movement away from Gothic ideals toward the more natural style of the Renaissance.

St George and the Dragon, circa 1470, Paolo Uccello

For a Florentine painter, a staple item on his workshop shelf would be a St. George and the Dragon.  Uccello painted just such a scene around 1458-60 (top). While seemingly having a pretty good handle on the action, he apparently struggled with the perspective. Some twenty years later, he painted the same scene again (above). As might be expected, there is a vast improvement in every aspect of the second painting over the first. There is still some Gothic stylization yet it's very much a work of the early Renaissance--an important backdrop to the work of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, all of whom would have been familiar with his work from his mosaics in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Novella (below).

Green Cloister: Adam and Eve, after 1440, Paolo Uccello, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Out of the Way Art

In our world of one-stop shopping and Internet instant access, our ever-simplifying minds have a tendency to think all the great art in the world is located in half-a-dozen big cities in an equally inadequate number of big museums. Let me dispute this myth. While New York, London, Paris, Rome, Florence, St. Petersburg, and Vienna have more than their fair share of the world's great art treasures, they do not own them all...or even the best. All of which makes it inconvenient for the art-oriented tourist, but serves to encourage people to venture into the hinterlands of art in search of local treasures of international importance.

The Lamentation, 1304-06, Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy

An excellent "for instance" can be found in the Italian Town of Padua. It dates from the early fourteenth century by the greatest fresco artist of the day, Giotto. His frescoes are located in the Scrovegni Chapel, what's known as the Arena Chapel (built on the site of an ancient Roman arena). Giotto's cycle of encircling frescoes depicting the Life of Mary may be the great work of narrative Christian art anywhere in the world. His most famous work, The Lamentation (above) is part of this exceptionally well-preserved fresco group. Even today, despite it's medieval style, visitors have been moved to tears in seeing it.

Burial of Count Orgaz, 1586-88, El Greco,
Santo Tomo, Toledo, Spain

One reason for the geographical displacement of many of the world's greatest art masterpieces is that they are often not in museums, but in churches. Like the Giotto fresco, this is also the case with Grunewald's emotionally charged Isenheim Altarpiece (Alsace, France) and Jan Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece. The same is true of El Greco's incredible Burial of Count Orgaz (left), located in the small church of Santo Tomo, in Toledo, Spain.

Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-81, Auguste Renoir, Phillips Gallery, Washington, DC

But by the same token, several little-known museums own some pretty impressive masterpieces as well.  Washington, DC's modest, Phillips Gallery has Renoir's Impressionist masterpiece, Luncheon of the Boating Party (above). Also in the U.S., at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, one can see Pinky (below, right) by Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy (below, left).  Detroit's Institute of Art displays Artemisia Gentileschi's horrifying Judith and her Maid Servant with the Head of Holofernes.

The Blue Boy, 1770, Thomas

Gainsborough, Huntington

Library, San Marino, California

And this just covers some of the most famous works. Nearly any flagship museum of even medium-size cities sports a Monet or two, a dozen or so other Impressionist works, often a Raphael Madonna (one of hundreds) plus works by important artists as diverse as Rubens, Remington, Rembrandt, Renoir, and Rodin (and that just covers the "Rs"). So, the lack of a passport or even a plane ticket to New York, is no excuse for not seeing the real thing, instead of squinting at photos in books or on the "net."

Pinkie, 1794, Thomas Lawrence,
Huntington Library, San Marino,
California

Otto Dix

Otto Dix Self-portrait, 1926

William T. Sherman said it best, and in the fewest words: "War is Hell." The German writer, Ernst Junger used a few more words but painted an even starker picture. "One day while I was forcing my way, alone, through the undergrowth, I was surprised by a gentle whistling and gurgling noise. I moved towards the sound and fell upon two corpses which seemed to have been called back by the heat wave to a kind of life in death. The night was heavy and silent; I remained there for a long time, fascinated, watching this disturbing scene. The war was the "war to end all wars" which in itself is a cruel statement of the nature of war. Besides generals, writers and artists go to war too. And after it is all over, the hell they have absorbed pours from within them. Otto Dix went to war. He saw what Junger saw and he drew it. He drew it in a series of fifty etchings known as the War Cycle Etchings. He saw heads blown apart, body parts missing, the process of putrefaction, and he drew it all. In every gory detail he brought home to a defeated, debased, decadent, diseased Germany of the 1920s the horror and hell of war.

Parents of the Artist, 1921, Otto Dix

Sylvia Von Harden, 1926, Otto Dix

He painted too. Dix's first painting, from 1921, a portrait of his parents, portrays the debilitation of war behind the lines. His mother sits sullenly on a torn, green, Victorian sofa, its color nearly matching that of her haggard face (above). His father, tired, pale, and bony, very nearly tumbles forward, out of the picture plane, into the viewer's lap. There is no love, no sympathy, no tenderness, and no reason for hope. And as bad as the war was, Dix saw an even worse state in postwar Germany. His portraits, such as that of Sylvia Von Harden (left),  painted in 1926, or Woman Lying on a Leopard Skin (1927, below), which depicts the German actress Vera Simoilova, are a mix of repulsion and seduction, opulence and vulgarity. Both paintings are rife with sexual ambiguities, figures ostensibly female with disturbingly masculine characteristics. Dix knew the seamy side of Dresden and Berlin well. He wallowed in it:  "Do not bother me with your silly politics, I'd rather go to a whorehouse.

Woman Lying on a Leopard Skin, 1927, Otto Dix

Otto Dix was born in 1891 near Gera Germany. As a teenager, he served apprenticeships both in painting and as a decorator before attending the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. The war found him groveling in the trench on both, France and Russia. After the war, in Dresden, he co-founded a secession called "Gruppe 19" and later "Young Rhineland." During the 20's and 30's, he dabbled in Dada and a movement he started himself called "Neue Sachlichkeit" (new objectivity). Despite the ravages of war upon his body and soul, he moved up to first-rate galleries in Berlin during the early 1930s until Hitler came to power and branded his work "degenerate." He was dismissed from the Dresden Academy where he taught and his work, totaling over 260 paintings and prints, confiscated by the Nazis; then used to form the bulk of their traveling "Reflections of Degeneracy" show between wars. World War II found him too old to fight, but under virtual house arrest, his work severely restricted. In the end, he was conscripted into the "Volksstrum" home defense force and ended up a French prisoner of war. His postwar work was largely religious in nature, perhaps a refuge from an even more horrible war making sardonically laughable the "end of war" claims of his first conflict.  He died in 1969 as the world was once more learning that WAR is spelled HELL.



War, circa 1928, Otto Dix



Oskar Kokoschka

Self-portrait of a "Degenerate Artist,"
1937, Oscar Kokoschka

Second only to writers, or maybe third behind writers and musicians, artists have this romantic public image--emotional, illogical, psychotic, mentally unstable, tied to wild, creative outbursts of sheer genius. Gee, I wish my life was that exciting...once in a while anyway. I've written on artistic stereotypes before and there are a couple others, the loner, quiet, unknown, and unappreciated until after his death at some obscenely young age; or his opposite, the shrewd, overblown entrepreneur who multiplies a modicum of talent backed by a maximum of personality and an overabundance of business savvy into a one-man-band of giddy, gaudy success. I don't need to name names in any of these categories, each have their readily identifiable poster boys. And if you're wondering why I'm speaking only of the masculine gender it's because few if any women artists fit into any of these almost completely male stereotypes. I'm not sure if the feminine gender should express comfort or dismay in this phenomena but such seems to be the case.

Kokoschka's Alma Mahler doll and it's designer,
Hermine Moos, 1918

I call the first type the "van Gogh syndrome," and here's an artist that fits that group almost as well as its namesake. He was born in Austria in 1886. Given his rather temperamental personality, as a young man, he was drawn to a group of early twentieth-century artist, not too unlike himself, who have since come to be known as the German Expressionists. Among them were Max Beckman, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Edvard Munch (Norwegian), and Vassily Kandinsky (Russian). They were not all wild-eyed psychos but in virtually every one there was at least a thread of emotional instability running through both their work and lives. Oskar Kokoschka's thread of emotional instability was as big as a cable and just as taunt. Influenced heavily by the elegant art of Gustave Klimt, both his portraits and his landscapes exhibit an energetic, stylistic and coloristic freedom few in his Teutonic clique dared approach.

Bride of the Wind, 1913, Oskar Kokoschka, a seld-portrait.

Kokoschka did hold a steady job for a time, as an art instructor at the famed Dresden Academy after the First World War. It was one of the few stable periods of his life following his recovery from a torrid love affair with Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. His painting, Bride of the Wind (above) from 1913 is a romantic, swirling, tempestuous testament to just how completely in love he was with her. But alas, the archetypical femme fatale rejected him for another. He reacted by building a life-size doll resembling her which he carried with him at all times (above, left). Reacting also to the political instability in eastern Europe in those years, Kokoschka migrated to Paris, then London, then New York for a time, finally settling in Switzerland after the Second World War. There's no indication at which stop along the way he ditched the doll, but his colorful, dramatic, romantic cityscapes such as Polperro II (Cornwall, England, 1939, bottom) soared to the top of Expressionist art in whichever country he happened to be in at the moment. And surprisingly, he did break with one of the usual elements common with the "van Gogh syndrome." He lived to a ripe old age. He died in 1980 at the age of ninety-four.

Polperro II, 1939, Oscar Kokoschka, Cornwall, England

The Oscars

Margaret Herrick, an Academy employee,
is said to have first given the statuette
 its nickname,in 1931, claiming it
reminder her of her "Uncle Oscar."

The traditional art world of painting, sculpture, printmaking, etc., has nothing to compare with it. Maybe we should though. Maybe we should have our own version of the AMPAS with our own nominating committees to selects five or six outstanding artists, that many more outstanding paintings, sculptures and prints, then put them in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet for other artists to vote on for "Best Picture," "Best Sculpture in a hard medium," "Best Relief Print," or "Best Serigraph." What we need is an "Academy of Traditional Fine Arts and Sciences." We could call the awards "Georgias" or "Sargents" or "Alfreds" after famous Americans who worked in promoting the traditional arts. We could get NBC to televise it and David Letterman to make bad jokes about the artists ditching paint-splattered t-shirts in favor of paint-splattered tuxedos and evening gowns.

1929...and the Academy Award goes to...Hollywood...err Hollywoodland

Janet Gaynor collected the first
Academy Award as "Best Actress"
for her performance in Seventh Heaven.

By 1926, the motion picture industry in this country had grown from an idea in the back of Thomas Edison's head to an art form so revolutionary there was virtually nothing in the dusty pages of art history to compare to it (even photography itself). Hollywood godfather Louis B. Meyer took one sniff at the factory town he'd helped build in the suburbs of Los Angeles and smelled unionism. Something had to be done. So, he invited three top industry bigwigs, (actor, Conrad Nagel, director, Fred Niblo (silent version of Ben-Hur), and Fred Beetson, head of the Association of Motion Picture Producers out to his Santa Monica beach house for dinner. There, they concocted what was at first just an organization to mediate labor disputes. But the longer they talked and smoked, the more ambitious their brainchild became, eventually evolving into an elite group of actors, directors, writers, technicians, and producers. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences became a legal, nonprofit organization on May 4, 1927. Douglas Fairbanks was its first president, membership cost $100, and awards banquets grew larger and larger, eventually topping 300 members. "The industry" had a mouthpiece. The Academy Awards were an afterthought.

The first Academy Award
(1928-29) winner for
"Best Picture" was the
silent film, Wings.

A committee to study the awards concept was appointed less than a week after the Academy opened its doors, though. A whole year, later they'd come up with little more than a voting procedure. It was much like they use today only simpler. Silent films dominated the market so "talkies" such as the newly minted The Jazz Singer were ruled ineligible. Comedies were such a powerful force a special award for directing them was instituted along side the "Best Director" award. "Best Screenplay" was divided then, as now, into "Best Original" and "Best Adaptation" categories but a special award was giving to "Best Title Writing" (remember, this was the silent era). Although the Academy set strict time limitations for eligible films, (those released August 1, 1927, through July 31, 1928), it quickly became apparent that academy members were ignoring them, nominating films that were, in some cases, two or three years old. So, they had to vote all over again.

Every "Best Picture" winner since
The Jazz Singer DIDN'T win
in 1929 has been a "talkie."

The naked man with a sword came just weeks before the first awards ceremony. The design came from MGM art director, Cedric Gibbons. The actual statuette was created by an unemployed art school graduate named George Stanley. It was sculpted in clay, cast in a tin and copper alloy, then gold-plated. His "baby" measured 13 1/2 inches tall, topping out at 6 3/4 pounds. The figure had as its base, a reel of film with five holes in the reel representing the five branches of the academy. The nickname "Oscar," didn't come until a few years later. After the membership voted nominees, the awards committee, which included Louis B. Mayer himself, made the final decisions. He kept the others up all night arguing for his choice for "Best Picture." Eventually, a compromise was reached. The 1928-29 award for "Most Artistic Quality of Production" went to 20th Century Fox's Sunrise.  A separate award for "Most Outstanding Production" went to Wings (what we now call  "Best Picture"). Janet Gaynor won "Best Actress (above, right)," Emil Jannings, "Best Actor."  The Jazz Singer (above, left) garnered a special technological award and a certain degree of "I told you so" bragging rights. A year later, all the "Best Picture" nominees were talkies. Maybe that's the problem with paintings, why they have no Academy Awards--they don't talk...or sing...or move...or make millions of dollars for their creators. 

Orson Welles

Orson Welles, age 21, 1937

The term "genius" may be one of the most overused words in the English language, especially in the arts, especially in this century. Picasso had it. So, of course, did Einstein. In literature there was Hemingway, possibly Eugene O'Neill. In music--the Gershwins, Irving Berlin. In poetry--Frost and Sandburg. I know I'm leaving out dozens of others, but it's hard to know where to draw the line. Where does genius stop being genius and become merely outstanding? Overused, yes, but what else can you call a young boy who is memorizing Shakespeare by the age of six, studying art, music, writing poetry, and publishing cartoons by the age of ten; writing plays, producing them, and acting in them by the age of fifteen; and is doing Broadway by the age of eighteen? Want more? By the age of 25 he was writing, producing, and starring in his first Hollywood production, a film that today is ranked by film critics as among the best two or three films ever made. To put it in perspective, if Michelangelo had been such a genius, he would have finished the Sistine ceiling in his mid-twenties (instead of 35).

Panic radio, H.G. Wells meets Orson Welles

George Orson Welles was bedecked with the "genius" label almost from birth. Underneath, in parentheses could also have been the French "L'enfant Terrible." Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1915, the son of a part time alcoholic inventor and a talented pianist, who died when he was six (his father died when Orson was fifteen), Welles had a troubled, turbulent childhood until the age of eleven when he was enrolled in the highly progressive Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. There, given practically the run of the drama department, he wrote, directed, produced, and acted in everything from nativities (he played the Virgin Mary) to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in which he played both Antony and Cassius so effectively the production was disqualified from a drama competition for cheating (the use of ringers).

Run for your lives, the Martians have landed!

His first professional roles came at the age of sixteen when, on a vacation in Ireland to paint,  American actress, Catherine Cornell, tagged him for her touring company of Romeo and Juliet. He played Mercutio, and later, on Broadway, playing both Chorus and Tybalt. His deep, resonate voice won him roles both on stage and in radio during the thirties, most notably in the famous The Shadow. He was so busy he was often unceremoniously dumped into an ambulance to get him from one job to another on time. Working for the Federal Theater Projects he learned the arts and crafts of directing, staging such innovations as the first all-Negro production of Macbeth in a Haitian setting. In 1937, he founded his Mercury Theater Players and opened with a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar which drew bold comparisons to Fascist Italy of the time. But it was his 1938 Halloween radio production, War of the Worlds (above, left), about a Martian invasion of New Jersey which brought his name to national prominence; and despite disclaimers at the beginning, was so realistic it caused a national panic (above).

Three Oscar nominations, one win.

Three years later, in 1941, Orson Welles was in Hollywood with carte-blanche to do just about anything he wanted with the film medium. What he did was Citizen Kane (right), a thinly disguised film biography of William Randolph Hearst. So devastating was his portrayal of Kane, the script which he co-wrote with Herman Mankiewicz, and the cutting-edge film techniques he employed as the film's director, he was nominated in three categories for an Academy Award. He and Mankiewicz won for their script.  Enormous pressures were put on RKO not to even release the film (principally by the Hearst media monolith); and while it was a critical success, it was never a box-office hit.

No other single individual ever mastered
virtually all aspects of the dramatic arts.

Welles went on to direct and perform in over forty productions during the next twenty years, among them such classics as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Jane Eyre (1942), The Third Man (1949), Othello (1952, left), Touch of Evil (1957), and Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff (1966).  Add to that work as an actor or narrator in another 42 films, everything from Canterbury Tales to Bugs Bunny Cartoons. Awards flooded his last years--an honorary Oscar in 1970, a Life Achievement Award in 1975 from the American Film Institute, the French Legion of Honor in 1982, and The Directors Guild's D. W.  Griffith Award in 1984. Yet, ironically, he may be best remembered for his "We will sell no wine before its time" TV commercial for Paul Masson wines, or for his 300-pound bulk. Welles died of a heart attack in 1985. Friends complained in his later years, that those in Hollywood most willing to applaud his accomplishments were the same ones who wouldn't give him a job. But perhaps his greatest contribution to the arts came from the fact that his work probably inspired more filmmakers than that of anyone since D. W.  Griffith.  And not only that, he was also known to be quite a good painter.

Orson Welles Self-portrait, early 1980s