Dahesh Museum of Art

Saleem Moussa Ashi--Dr. Dahesh

There's a new museum in New York. Actually, new being a relative term, it's really about fifteen years old now. The collection isn't actually in the city but permanently on tour with merely a recently opened gift shop and offices in New York's SoHo district (just south of Central Park) marking its physical presence in the city. The museum collection numbers some two thousand works of art so it would have to be considered a major player in the New York Museum world. Originally, the museum opened right in the heart of mid-town Manhattan at 601 Fifth Avenue at 48th Street then moved to 580 Madison Avenue at 56th Street. And the chances are you've never heard of it. It's called the Dahesh Museum of Art. And, except for a minor little civil war in Lebanon, it might now be in Beirut rather than New York City. The core of the museum's collection is made up of the art amassed by the writer and philosopher, Saleem Moussa Ashi who took the name Dr. Dahesh. And the reason you might never have heard of the Dahesh Museum, aside from the fact it opened its doors as recently as 1995 then took to the road in 2008, is that it has as its stated goal, the preservation and promotion of 18th and 19th century Academic art...in New York, yet...not exactly a hotbed of Academicism.

Gallic Soldier and His Daughter Imprisoned in Rome,
1847, Felix-Joseph Barrias, is typical of the Dahesh
Museum collection.

The self-proclaimed Dr. Dahesh is something of the proverbial "mystery wrapped in an enigma." Born in 1909, during the 1930s he began the establishment of a mystical cult today known as Daheshism. The Dahesh Museum takes pains to distance themselves from this group, though they appear to be funded by the same Saudi Arabian family, the Zahids. Dr. Dahesh began collecting Academic Art from the Zahid mansion in Beirut during the late 1950s up through the mid-1970s. European Academic art at the time was being sold in the Middle East for what amounted to garage sale prices. He bought everything he could lay his hands on including a surprising amount of Orientalism (European art inspired by Oriental art). The collection grew to over two thousand pieces, ranging from near trash to near priceless. How he funded his purchases, even at rock-bottom prices, is something of a mystery too, though it's assumed he used monies contributed by his religious followers. Then came the Lebanese Civil War. With the help of the Zahid family, he managed to move the art, the furniture, and all his half-million book library, bag and baggage to New York (he'd made quite a number of political enemies in Beirut).

The Birth of Venus, 1863, Alexandre Cabanal,
is probably the Dahesh collection's most famous  and valuable work.

In New York, he continued collecting, though by this time, he was not alone in his appreciation of things Academic. Names such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Malcolm Forbes were starting similar collections. Dr. Dahesh died in 1984. The Zahibs first sought a home for his collection in Rockefeller center but were turned down. The museum instead moved into an office building next door to a business called "The Fine Art of Hair Replacement." The Guggenheim it's not. But its influence brought to the Guggenheim a show called "1900: Art at the Crossroads," which explored much the same territory the Dahesh has in displaying the work of early twentieth century art pariahs such as Cabanel, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Jean-Leon Gérôme, and Rosa Bonheur. The Zahids continue to search for a permanent New York home for the museum, but in the rarefied air of the Manhattan real estate market, it may take a while.

Odalisque, 1857, Eugene Delacroix,
is typical of the Dahesh Orientalist works.

Though the Dahesh Museum collection is now a "museum without walls," it may have sparked renewed interest in Academic art among a new breed of collectors, celebrities such as Jack Nicholson, Madonna, and Sylvester Stallone. Sotheby's sold a large Bouguereau belonging to Stallone for $2.6 million, a record price for the artist. The Guggenheim show raised eyebrows in lumping Academic work as well as Impressionist paintings into the single classification, "Nineteenth Century Pictures," pointing out that the separatism proclaimed over the last hundred years may well have been more a marketing ploy rather than a scholarly reading of the era. Its Crossroads show displayed these in a seminal context out of which grew work by Picasso, Matisse, Miro, and others which were also featured in the show. You won't find any Picassos in the Dahesh collection, nor Mirós either; but what you will find is a second look, a glance backward to a time and a type of art long vilified as stultified, beneath contempt, and practically valueless. The Dashesh Museum collection displays none of this.

Jaffa, Recruiting of Turkish Soldiers in Palestine, 1888, Gustav Bauernfeind,
was voted by Dahesh Museum visitors as their favorite work.

E.E. Cummings

Self-portrait with Sketch Pad,
1939, E.E. Cummings

Today, we seldom hear much about one of the most important elements in art. The word is "aesthetics". I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps, with regard to representational art, we get so involved in painting "things" we have little interest in talking about that which makes our "things" beautiful. By the same token, non-representational painters, those for whom one would most expect aesthetics to be even more of a major concern, almost never mention the word either. There is often the claim on their part to have internalized all aesthetic principles. And to some extent, this may be valid. But to exclude external aesthetics from their vocabulary makes them as guilty as painting mere "things" (as in framed paintings) as the most tightly bound realist. I think the reason we hear so little today about aesthetics is that they demand a high degree of intellectual involvement on the part of the artist and the viewer in the appreciation of art. "I like this" or "I don't like that," is not intellectual involvement. It may be emotion, or personal taste, or prejudice, or instinct, all of which are important, but it's not aesthetics. Aesthetics is a technical reasoning as to why we like something, both at the creative stages and at the exhibition stage. That requires an overt intellectual input into art which most people are simply too lazy and/or too incompetent to contribute.

Noise Number 1, 1919, E.E. Cummings

Probably all of us have heard of the poet, E.E. Cummings. Critics have often labelled him as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. His poetry is often cited for its experimental form, typography, grammar, word coinages, sensitive feelings, and subtle perceptions. It is the work of an idiosyncratic individualist belonging to no school or movement. It's work that has led rather than followed. Yet as popular as the poet was in the first half of the century, probably few today have ever read a word of his poetry. And it would surprise many people to learn that this well-known, highly experimental, highly intelligent writer was also a highly experimental painter as well. In fact, Cummings considered his painting efforts on an equal footing with his writing - what he called his "twin obsessions." And he applied the same curiosity, attention to craft, and aesthetic principles to both.

Self-portrait, and American Cubist,
E.E. Cummings

Cummings began to paint shortly after W.W.I, about the same time he began to write. Writing, of course, paid the bills. And in doing so, it allowed him to devote even more time to his paintings. For the first thirteen years or so, up until about 1928, Cummings considered himself and his work to be abstractionist. The avant-garde loved it. He wrote copiously on nearly everything he painted (sometimes literally). During the same time, his drawings and caricatures were highly visible critical and publishing successes. His paintings were considered American Cubist works. And while utiliszing generally recognizable subjects, his use of color could only be considered wildly exuberant, even fantastical. His detailed writings on the aesthetics of color theory and human form fill thousands of pages.

Flowers and Hat: Patchen Place,
 1950, E.E. Cummings

However much the critics in the art world of the 1920s may have loved his paintings, Cummings gradually began to distance himself from them. He considered them hopelessly anti-intellectual. And it was in 1928 that he abandoned abstract art and the critics who validated it altogether. Despite the fact that they generally liked his work, cummings' contempt for art critics was rooted in the belief that they considered artistic value and intellectual rigor mutually exclusive. Cummings said of his work that it "...pushes abstraction beyond the abstract and returns to nature," adding that, "as soon as you cut yourself off from nature, all you get is decoration." Recasting himself as an artist, Cummings spent the rest of his life refining his aesthetic principles in terms of representational art.

Marion Morehouse,  1933, E.E. Cummings

Cummings was nothing if not versatile. He explored every artistic and aesthetic venue with the same intellectual rigor and painterly vigour that he'd displayed in his abstracts, from nudes and erotic works to landscapes, still-lifes, even the technically demanding art of portraiture. In fact, his portraits are often considered some of his best works. He travelled extensively abroad and for long periods of time, painting and drawing like some people shoot snapshots. His artistic interests also extended to the circus and the burlesque theatre with marvellously dynamic sketches often drawn practically in the dark. With swift, fluid, seemingly instinctive pencil strokes, cummings' drawings of strippers and exotic dancers, capture in rapid, yet succinct drawings a surprising amount of detail, movement, and atmosphere.

Words and images are not just
related, but often incestuous.

In viewing the art of  E.E. Cummings, it's tempting to say he was even more of an artist than a writer, especially inasmuch as his art seems easier to digest than his writings. In fact, indications are, he devoted much more time to his art. Cummings was a purist when it came to his art. He viewed representational painting as more of a challenge than abstraction, calling those who worshipped Picasso as "super submorons" who ignored the fact that their hero himself had once declared that there was no such thing as "abstract" painting, crying out instead for artists to "respect the object." Whether painting in a representational or non-representational manner, Cummings rose above even that. He painted more than "things." He painted art, and always generously imbued it with the power of reasoned aesthetics.

The Craftsman Style

Sears & Roebuck's ultimate DIY kit.

There is hardly a one of us who hasn't spent endless hours perusing plan books and magazines, studying in some detail the various floor plan features of the houses depicted; and imagined ourselves living in them. I've done it since I was a kid and still do. I pick them up instead of the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line. Gotta stay on top of what's happening now in the world of architecture don'tcha know? Although I never have, some people go so far as to order plans from these "house catalogues;" and in extreme cases, actually build houses from such plans. In the early 1900s, Sears and Roebuck not only sold plans, but what could only be termed "house kits" which could be shipped by railroad to your small town or city and erected by local builders, even the owners themselves sometimes. Sears even sold churches in this same manner.

The Gamble House, 1908, Pasadena, California, Greene & Greene,
one of the earlier and larger Craftsman houses, displays a distinct oriental influence.

Despite the fact the style has come to be called the Craftsman style, a name Sears now owns in a slightly different context (home building tools); they didn't start the practice of selling complete houses from a catalogue. That began with a couple designing brothers in Southern California, Charles and Henry Greene, who lived and worked in the Pasadena area. And even though their plan books and the popular architectural and women's magazines of the day spread the style far and wide across America, the best examples are still located in this area. And unlike a lot of other more minor American housing styles in this century and the last, Craftsman homes were seldom huge, grandiose mansions. And though they sometimes outgrew the popular designation used by the Greenes of "bungalows," in most cases they were single-storied structures, or at most contained attic bedrooms making them technically story-and-a-half.

A classic, with virtually all the distinguishing features of the Craftsman style.

I think most of us have seen them. The Craftsman's most distinctive feature is their unenclosed eaves supported by actual or fake rafter ends and cross beams. Roofs were low gabled designs, porches were often enclosed under the main roof, and carports were sometimes enclosed under trellises. Most were frame, clapboard structures with brick, stone, even early concrete blocks used for foundations, steps, porches, and columns. Gables often faced the street and some of the earliest examples of modest-size "picture windows" can be found in this design. Only the eave braces contained much in the way of decoration. Foundations and masonry porch details were often sloped (called battered) toward the top. They were easier to build than vertical walls. Quite often, especially in their Southern California birthplace, there is a distinctly oriental quality to Craftsman designs.

"...the house my father built." Nixon's childhood home.

In history, the most famous Craftsman home may have been the one Richard Nixon's father built for his family in Yorba Linda, California. It was a catalogue house. It came by rail, pre-cut, in a kit, with an instruction book, and was put up in less than three months. (Not exactly Mount Vernon.) Although the Greenes started building them as early as 1893, the style didn't become popular until around 1905. The style bears traces of the English Arts and Crafts movement of a couple decades earlier. And, like so many housing styles in the twentieth century, they could almost be termed a fad. By 1920 their popularity was fading. By 1930 few if any were still being built. By and large, those coming from plan books, built from kits, unless lived in by former presidents, were unexceptional, often downright "homely." Made of wood with structural elements often exposed to the weather, unless they were well maintained, many deteriorated quite rapidly. Some of the larger manifestations come off looking so eclectic one has to check out the telltale roof line to determine their ancestry. But the best of them, the moderate ones, those not too big to be called bungalows, nor too small to look cheap, have a quiet, modest dignity and warmth about them. And, despite the fact many of them came in identical kits, in that they were built often by amateurs, injecting their own little architectural quirks, this style is endlessly fascinating to study as they unexpectedly pop up around the corner and up the block of some of our smaller towns and cities.

Inside, the best that can be said about the Craftsman houses is that they are "homey."

Converting to Museums

The Denver Art Museum, when does the spacecraft depart?

The British Museum, London,
--columns anyone?

When one utters the word "museum" nowadays, one of two images comes to mind. Either you visualize some massive, Greek Revival edifice of grey limestone from which you might expect Socrates or Plato to saunter forth a la Raphael, or, conversely, a massive contemporary pile of polished stone, chrome, and glass that looks to have been created by an alien architect homesick for Delos 4. And, frankly, I'm not sure which is most intimidating to the average viewer who makes a pilgrimage to the vaunted and vaulted temples of fine arts only once every decade or so. I love art and love museums, but even I find either type as intimidating as they are exciting. In either case, the first thing I look for after the restrooms is a brochure map so I don't get lost in the damned place.

The Orsay Train Station, Paris

The Orsay today, only tourists arrive and depart.

But, thankfully, museums aren't all like that. Today, many new museums are being designed and built as works of art themselves, perhaps so that if you don't like the art, you can at least enjoy the building. The Guggenheims and the Gettys come to mind. Older museums, designed and built for the purpose of sheltering and showing art, of course come in styles as varying widely from Gothic to lavish Beaux-arts confections. But almost from the beginning of the very concept of public museums in the eighteenth century, countries and cities have also been in the business of converting antiquated existing buildings into museums (hence the plethora of Renaissance and Greek Revival museum structures). Former palaces, it was thought, made excellent museums (at best, a questionable idea today). The Hermitage and the Louvre come to mind. More recently however, other structures have come into play, such as the Musee d'Orsay in Paris (above), a former train station, and most recently, Vienna, Austria has converted the former imperial riding stables into a contemporary arts centre (below).

Vienna's Museums Quatier Wien--so big only through distortion can it be encompassed.

The Austrians call it the Museums Quartier Wien. In fact, the complex is not one, but several, related museums of various sizes housing both a permanent collection and traveling shows. As well, the complex contains artists' studios, dance studios, children's art classrooms, also film and recording studios. In the 4,500 square foot Winter Riding Hall, where once Lippizan Stallions pranced and danced, today, more traditional dancers make their leaps in leotards and tutus. The new complex is a meeting of the Baroque and Cybertech - eighteenth century and twenty-first century architecture blending for dramatic effect and creative purpose. At 60,000 square feet (the size of six soccer fields), the five museums and ten other arts institutes make the MQ Wien one of the ten largest arts complexes in the world.

You can't beat Michelangelo in adding
a touch of class to any museum.

In Cleveland, Ohio, is an even larger museum - it measures its space in acres. But it too has been "converted" from an earlier purpose. It still goes by the name, Lake View Cemetery, but it's now also referred to as an "outdoor museum." You won't find many paintings there, or dancers, or artists' studios, but you will find some of the best monumental architecture/sculpture on this side of the Atlantic marking the graves of the famous and the infamous. The centrepiece of the "museum" is the burial monument to President James A. Garfield, but the Cleveland Rockefellers also have a presence as does Michelangelo. No, he's not buried there, but a bronze replica of his famous Vatican Pieta makes his presence felt. Like any first class museum, Lake View also has visiting exhibits. The museum likewise has an education program, a benefactor program, and guided tours. Boston and Buffalo have similar cemetery museums. But only Cleveland's is open year around. Admission is free, but tickets are required because (to resurrect an old joke) people are just dying to get in.

Color Field Painting

Vir Heroicus Sublimus, 1950-51, Barnett Newman,
a scale and simplicity previously unknown.

Abstract Expressionism took some getting use to. It still does. Some sixty years after it was born, this kind of painting still isn't accepted by probably nine out of ten Americans today. At its peak of popularity in the fifties, it was responsible for the widest gulf in history between American artists and the American public. It was a gap that had been growing since the turn of the century with every new step taken by artist beyond strictly representational, Grant Wood, American Gothicism. And it was a separation that would not begin to close until Modernism gave up its last gasp and died a natural death, starved for anything "new" with which to shock the art world and the rest of the world.

Bridge, 1964, Kenneth Noland

If the American public was aghast at the "paint slinging" assaulting the American art world in the 1950s, one might be surprised to learn that Abstract Expressionism ala De Kooning, Kline, Pollock, Rothko and others was not embraced wholeheartedly by quite a number of the Avant-garde painters in what we loosely call the New York School either. Artists such as Barnett Newman (top), Kenneth Noland (right), Ad Reinhardt (below), Ellsworth Kelly (bottom), and Frank Stella, among others, decided such loose, gestural, painterly brushwork was not exactly their cup of tea. This group is sometimes referred to as the second generation (though it's more of a labeling device than a reference to their birth dates). This "second generation" of abstractionists were anything but expressionistic. While they embraced the total freedom from illusion or representation in painting, they yearned for a much more intellectual, aesthetic, analytical approach to their work. However, their work did nothing to narrow the gulf between New York art and traditional art appreciators.

Suprematist Composition:
White on White, 1918
Kasimir Malevich

More accurately, this group of painters came to be known as hard-edge color field painters. Like the Abstractionists, they denied any other reality other than the surface of the canvas. Going beyond this, they glorified in two elements this freedom afforded them--pure color and pure, geometric design. They rediscovered the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich and his 1918 painting, White on White. And taking what would at first glance appear to be a dead end in terms of the painting development (which it was for thirty years), they struck off in a totally different direction than their expressionist counterparts, working on paintings of enormous scale, bearing tightly controlled, almost overwhelming, wall-size fields of stark, vibrant, pure, in-your-face color so powerful as to hurt ones eyes at close range. They explored Malevich's squares and rectangles, intermixing them with a few arcs, angles and other geometric minutiae in what amounted to a left-brained reaction to the right-brained excesses of their friends painting in lofts just across town.

Abstract Painting, Gray, 1950, Ad Reinhardt
--all background, no foreground, but a very colorful gray.

Meschers, 1951, Ellsworth Kelly, strips of stripes.

Sand Sculpture

The "Little Tramp" isn't so little any more, here depicted in
sand as the towering giant of silent films.

There was a time when, if one mentioned sculpture, the image brought to mind was that of Michelangelo patiently chipping away at his massive David. There was a time when going to the beach brought to mind children (of all ages) patiently packing petite pails to produce palaces made of sand. That was then, this is now. Very few sculptors carve marble anymore. And, while sand castles still rise from the sloping shores of our major oceanic swimming holes, very often sculptors that might otherwise be attacking solid rock now enjoy the much more malleable medium of shifting sands. There are even classes and contests conducted in promoting this old, but now revitalized, creative endeavor.

Building the bulwarks--
Concours de Châteaux de Sable,
 Quebec

Classes teach how to choose the best sand, methods of tamping it down, the dos and don't of carving and smoothing, lighting, using color, preserving your efforts, even the most creative methods for destroying your work. Most works have a theme, sometimes political or profound, sometimes puns, platitudes, and plays on words. Sand artists draw their inspiration from the classics, from the movies, from pop culture, from poetry, painting, architecture (naturally), marine life, and attempts to "get a life." Moreover, beach sculpture is not just an American phenomena. Sand sculpture competitions turn up in Italy, Canada, Portugal, Mexico, the Far East, Australia, and of course, here in the U.S., where sometimes prizes range into the thousands of dollars. Often winning works are family efforts. It's hard to pinpoint when sand art moved from castles to competitions, but many such contests have been around for more than 20 years. In Quebec, there's even a competition for purists, which limits entries only to castles, which sometimes threaten to become almost life-size.

The Big Three at Yalta, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin from a 2010 Moscow competition.

The tiny village of Fiesa, Portugal, bills itself as having the largest sand sculpting festival in the world, where dozens of artists put to use over 35,000 tons of sand. 2012 marks the tenth anniversary of the festival with this year's theme being "idols." Works are preserved to semi-permanence and displayed outdoors for several months as a tourist attraction. And lest you think sand sculptors limit themselves to fantasies and flowers, they also do figures, even historic tableaus such as the Big Three at Yalta. Besides realism, styles include cubism, very abstract expressionism, Dada, surrealism, and Disney.

Cubism at a contest at
Federal Way, Washington

The King of Pop, adding color to the art.

Others memorialize famous celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin (top), Marilyn Monroe, or Michael Jackson. Some of the works reach towering heights and feature exquisite attention to details while others are simply displayed flat on the ground in low relief. Some such sculptures migrate from the beach to the art museum or shopping mall thanks to various polymer protective coatings. Whatever the case, in recalling such works of art, either from photos or from the beach, you'll never again pack another sand pail with quite the same carefree abandon. I wonder if Michelangelo could do his David in sand.

Besides "watercolors," color sometimes comes from various forms of illumination such as
this bas relief nativity from a competition in Jesolo (near Venice), Italy.

Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau, 1916, Pablo Picasso

When we think of Surrealism, the first image to come to mind is Salvador Dali's limp watches (The Persistence of Memory). Then we may picture the later work of Duchamp, Magritte, and others as an afterthought, and....well...that's about it. That's unfortunate because the visual images of Surrealism were, in fact, the afterthought. Surrealism was first and foremost a literary movement, for some time before artists latched upon it and gave it vivid imagery. Surrealism was the brainchild of French writer, Andre Breton, who nailed it down with his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. And the link between Surrealism's literary and visual incarnations can best be found in one man--Jean Cocteau.

Though he always disputed any links to the Surrealist, and in fact considered them rivals, only Cocteau's broad creative talents in both literature and the visual arts are sufficient to bridge this gap. Cocteau was a poet, a dramatist, a scenarist, novelist, filmmaker, and illustrator; not necessarily in that order; and not always equally successful in all his talents, but surely one of the most multidimensional creative geniuses of the 20th century. Add to this list the character traits of congeniality, originality, homosexuality, and a deeply introspective personality, and you have one of the most engaging geniuses of the century as well.

Cocteau: a man of many talents

Cocteau was born in 1889 into a wealthy, bourgeois family in Maison-Lafitte near Paris. His father was a stockbroker who longed to be a painter. His mother's father owned the brokerage house where his father worked and several of the houses where the family lived. She was an art collector who owned several Stradivarius violins used to entertain the family in the hands of visiting musical virtuosos. It must have been an interesting home life. The boy was educated at the Lycee Condorcet where he insisted later he was the prize "boob" in the class (his school records say otherwise). He was, undeniably something of a class clown though; and was expelled for his antics before graduating. It was at Condorcet however, at the age of fifteen, that Cocteau encountered his first homosexual infatuation with a boy named Pierre Dargelos, a haunting figure that would later appear in various literary incarnations throughout his life. More desperately though, the ideal love of his life seems to have been a mirror image of himself.



la Lampe d'Aladin, 1909,
Cocteau was a teen prodigy.

Cocteau made his first literary splash just a year later as the teenage protege of the middle-aged homosexual actor, Edouard de Max, reading his poems aloud in the Theatre Femina; and later with the publication of his first book of poetry, La lampe d'Aladin, in 1909. At the same time he was doing ballet scenarios for the famous Ballet Russes and hobnobbing with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Amadeo Modigliani, the writer, Guillaume Apollinaire, and anyone else he deemed likely to advance his name and career. His fragile health kept him out of World War I though he served for a time as a civilian ambulance attendant.

Jean Cocteau working on a mural in London, 1959

Following the war, Cocteau's reputation as a writer and man of many talents soared. He wrote and illustrated books, wrote and produced plays, flirted with the Surrealists, adapted Greek dramas to modern interpretations, painted, drew, designed tapestries, type fonts, became a literary critic, and promoted American Jazz and Charlie Chaplin. During this time also he lost a friend and lover, the writer Ramond Radiquest, to death at the age of 23, took up opium, then religion, while at the same time writing his first novel, The Blood of a Poet. The 1930s saw his prodigious output cement his place as a French literary icon. During the Second World War he was suspected of collaborating with the Nazis though in retrospect, the lifetime bon-vivant was probably merely being friendly with those who were.

His play, Orphee, turned out to be
Cocteau's most important work,
spawning both a novel and a film.

After the war, he turned his creative talents entirely to film, creating a deeply introspective trilogy, Le Sang d'un poete (a film version of his novel), Orphee (based on his 1925 play), and nine years later, Le Testament d'Orphee which he intended as his own last testament, laden with his theories and beliefs, and crowded with his lovers and friends, including Picasso, Yul Brynner, the bullfighter, Dominguin, and Brigitte Bardot. In 1955, Cocteau, the self-styled enfant terrible of the arts was named one of the "Immortals" of the Académie Française. Immortal or not, he died in 1963; accused by critics of vacuity and hailed by his admirers for profundity.