Jose Ortega y Gasset

We all like to reminisce. The "good old days" are as ubiquitous to American life as Fritos and the remote control. Note, I could have said hot-dogs and mom's apple pie but my "good old days" aren't all that old. The past few days, friends of mine have been reminiscing about their "goodoledays" (we might as well make it all one word for convenience sake), the war years, and perhaps some goodoledays that, while certainly old, perhaps weren't all that good. Personally, I'd take the nowadays (a phrase already a single word) over the goodoledays any day. They might be a good place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. Which brings me around to what might be considered the goodoledays of art--approximatelyone hundred years ago, when art still meant something, when art was still important, when artists of all stripes were real celebrities.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, 2008,
Manuel Pardo
 

The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset lived through those days. He was born in 1883 and died in 1955, so he not only experienced them but lived to tell about it in the modern context. He draws a diagram of society as a very large circle with those at the centre working to control the movement and direction of the quivering masses of humanity all around them. Within this circle he draws dozens of smaller circles, each a "world" of its own, each with its movers and shakers in the centre doing their moving and shaking to influence the context of their world, and to some degree, that of the rest of the world. Art is one such circle. One-hundred years ago, in the goodoledays, it was very near the center of Gasset's "big circle." Painting, poetry, literature, music, drama, all had an enormous impact upon the other worlds around them.

But as early as 1925, Gasset was already longing for the turn-of-the-century goodoledays as he took note of the fact that, even then, the "art circle" was moving significantly further and further from the center of the larger circle of human society, becoming less and less important in the overall scheme of things. He blamed what he called the "dehumanization" of art as the culprit in this change. He wrote specifically of painting but at the time, his words could have applied to several art disciplines. By dehumanization, Gasset meant art's veering away from human forms or the depiction of real objects into a reality of the artist's own making. He doesn't denigrate this movement, he only takes note of it as being more and more "art only for artists." And by artists, he doesn't mean only those who create, but all those who understand. The problem, as he saw it however, came down to the fact that artists were deliberately going to greater and greater extremes in trying to make this understanding more and more difficult. And in doing so, they were shifting the center of gravity of the art world, moving it more and more toward the periphery of the rest of the world. It was a very cogent, early realization of a trend that continued, even accelerated, during most of the rest of his century. And what has filled the vacuum near the centre of Gasset's big circle? Try sports.

Gifford's Hunter Mountain, Twilight

Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866, Sanford Robinson Gifford

Sanford Robinson Gifford,
Self-portrait, 1880

Seldom does a single work of art have any kind of lasting impact upon a nation's social, political, or environmental course, especially in today's media-driven public consciousness. This, however, is the story of a painting that moved a nation. In 1866, Sanford Robinson Gifford painted Hunter Mountain, Twilight. Gifford was a card-carrying member of a late generation of painters making up the fabled Hudson River School. But if the title of this painting brings to mind any kind of breathtaking, pristine wilderness scene reminiscent of Thomas Cole or Frederic Edwin Church, think again. Picture a bright, twilight sky, a distant, bluish mountain of modest proportions, and a landscape where the predominant colours are not deep forest greens but brownish, tannish earth tones with far more tree stumps than trees. This was Hunter Mountain as Gifford saw it and painted it shortly after the Civil War. And lest you link the two, although it might look like one, Hunter Mountain was in no way a Civil War battleground. It is in an area about a hundred miles or so north of New York City, overlooking the West bank of the Hudson River. It was a wilderness all right, but desolate, not pristine. It was a shameful mark of just how low we'd sunk as guardians of the virgin landscape we'd wrested control of from its natives little more than a hundred years before.

James Pinchot, (1831-1908)

In the years following the Civil War, much of the state of New York was overrun with small farms, strip-cut logging, erosion, and in some areas, early forms of industrial water pollution. About 75% of the state's once-forested areas were a thing of the past. New York, and the lower Hudson Valley in particular, were some of the first documented areas of large-scale ecological destruction in this country. And one of the men responsible for this sad state was James Pinchot, a New York City logging and lumbering millionaire. He bought Hunter Mountain, Twilight from the artist sometime during the 1870s and the painting was to remain in the family for the next 90 years. His son, Gifford Pinchot, was born in 1865, the year Sanford Gifford made his first sketches for the painting. The boy was named after the artist. But if James Pinchot was an early "robber baron," he was not one without a conscience. He was also an art collector and in his later years, one of our nation's first conservationists. He helped found Yale University's School of Forestry and persuaded his son to go into the field.

Gifford Pinchot, (1865-1946)

Hunter Mountain, Twilight was a sort of "smoking gun," in effect, tangible proof that not only had the nation failed miserably in protecting its birthright, but that something had to be done to correct such a grievous sin. What remained for Pinchot the younger to do was to stir the political pot and prove that something could be done to repair the gross damage of a century of environmental rape. Gifford Pinchot took the family calling much further than even his father could have imagined. In the turn of the century Progressive era of American politics, President Teddy Roosevelt made him the first head of the newly established United States Forest Service. Later, he was twice elected Governor of Pennsylvania. And for a generation he was the most well known spokesman for conservation in the entire nation - with the possible exception of naturalist John Muir.

John Muir, 2003, Robert Shetterly

Muir was to the West what Pinchot was to the East and yet the two men were always at odds in their conservation philosophies. Pinchot saw the forests as renewable, manageable resources to be used and cultivated. Muir was more extreme, insisting that the wilderness should be left untouched by man in its most pristine state. Muir saw the devastation of Hunter Mountain, Twilight and vowed to protect his Sierra Nevada Mountains from such a fate. Pinchot saw his work as correcting the desperate problems of Hunter Mountain and the plundered Eastern landscape while controlling the various economic forces so that both might thrive. And both men (and their followers) have been successful. Today, photos of Hunter Mountain show a rich, vibrant, reforested green. The small farms have been abandoned; the Adirondacks have become a woodland recreation area. Large scale lumbering has largely moved to Muir's backyard where, ironically, Pinchot's forest management philosophy prevails - a shifting from art to science. And just as ironically, Muir's pristine wilderness ideals now dominate the area just north of New York where the city has been buying up thousands of woodland acres to protect its natural water supply and avoid the cost of large filtration plants. And in doing so, it has necessarily placed these areas off-limits to hiking, camping, and other forms of human encroachment.

Today, Hunter Mountain is safe, if you don't count the dozens of ski trails, condos, parking lots, and campsites dotting the recreational Mecca.

Today, Hunter Mountain and Hunter Mountain, Twilight are both safe. In some areas near the mountain trees are often so dense you can hardly even see the mountain. And with the death of Gifford Pinchot in 1946, and his wife, Cornelia, 14 years later, the painting was literally ripped from the mantel of the Pinchot home where it had been framed into the panelling for decades. Twice it was resold in the 1980s. It now rests in Chicago's Terra Museum of American Art. The National Forrest Service inherited the rest of the Pinchot art collection. Unfortunately, these Hudson River landscapes, numbering over 200 works, did not enjoy the same good fortune. In fact, they've all disappeared. Twenty-five years ago, works by Hudson River School artists were out of favour. Appraisers valued them as worth no more than the canvas they were painted on. Pinchot family members believe they may have simply been left in the basement of the house where they were stored and been bulldozed over when the structure was demolished and the area reforested. Today, such 19th century Hudson River School paintings often bring five and six figure bids at auction. Thus, in the greatest irony of all, valuable art was likely sacrificed in the name of conservation.

Tourism is nothing new to Hunter Mountain as evidenced by the old Cold Spring Hotel
near the resort. Conservation doesn't extend to the antiquated. Perhaps some artist
should paint it to preserve it.

Gerome and Goupil

Jean Leon Gerome Self-portrait, 1886

One of the most popular and successful artists in recent times was Thomas Kinkade. Most of the art world didn't think much of him, their feelings for him ranging from an intense disinterest or secret envy to outright hatred. In that sense, and in some other ways too, he was the modern day equivalent of Norman Rockwell, and certainly appealed to that crowd as well as their baby boomer offspring. Some might consider Rockwell and Kinkade to be peculiarly 20th century phenomena. Actually there's a very close 19th century equivalent as well. Except that instead of freckle-faced, button-nosed kids or charming little cottages ablaze with lights in every window, this artist preferred dramatic, biblical scenes, Roman gladiatorial bouts, and mildly erotic historical subjects. But he and his publisher were no less successful than Rockwell or  Kinkade in bringing his art, in reproduction, to every economic level of society in nations all over the world.

Adolph Goupil

The artist was Jean Léon Gérôme. But just as important was his dealer, publicist, and publisher, Adolphe Goupil. Gérôme was an unabashed academicist, and given his popularity in France and elsewhere, he was probably responsible as much as anyone else for giving this style of painting a bad name in Paris art circles. He (and Goupil) found something that worked and exploited it to no end. The similarities to Kinkade especially are almost endless. Gérôme came to prominence in the early 1860s. He was of the same generation as Manet though the two were hardly on speaking terms. Critic Emil Zola, who loved Manet's work, considered Gérôme something of a hack, "obviously work(ing) for the house of Goupil."

Pollice Verso, 1872, Jean Leon Gerome

The house of Goupil was a well-established Paris art gallery and publishing company before Gérôme ever painted his first gladiator. It's uncertain whether Goupil started publishing Gérôme's work before or after the artist married his daughter, but in any case it was a lucrative business relationship for both that stretched to some 58 years. Goupil would buy Gérôme's works, such as his popular Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down, above) and Duel After the Ball (below) outright, including all reproduction rights. The key to his success with them was variety. Goupil printed Gérôme's images in reproductions as small as playing cards and as large as the paintings themselves. Sometimes he even employed Gérôme to paint copies of his work. Some works were hand-colored lithographs and intricate etchings, while others were merely postcard photographs selling for as little as one franc. Prices were further broadened in range depending upon the quality of paper used.

Duel After a Masquerade Ball, 1857, Jean Leon Gerome

But more than a printer, Adolphe Goupil was a marketing genius too. In part because of the popularity of Gérôme's work, Goupil was able to open up galleries in Alexandria, Egypt; Athens, Greece; Johannesburg, South Africa; Geneva, London, Melbourne, and New York City. But possibly his greatest success in marketing Gérôme came in the United States. There was just enough of an exotic flavor to Gérôme's work to make it popular while keeping within established Victorian tastes and moral bounds. And the traditional realism and subject matter of his work struck a chord with the same conservative core of the art buyers who came to love Rockwell in the first half of the next century, and Kinkade today. It's a segment of the market not tied to a single artist nor subject matter, but to a type of art--nostalgic, simple, basic, narrative, and easily interpreted. And, it has always been a segment that responds as much to mass marketing as to mass appeal.

The Slave Auction, 1866, Jean Leon Gerome--erotica, thinly disguised as Roman history.

 

Genre Painting

From Leonardo to Lucy, genre painting depicts our lives.

It occurred to me today that, broadly viewed, painting has always been a lot like TV. Or, more accurately speaking, inasmuch as painting preceded TV by a few thousand years, maybe I should say, TV is a lot like painting. Whatever the case, it's interesting to compare the two. On the one hand, we have history painting, on the other hand, news and documentary channels. We have landscape painting and the Discovery Channel not to mention dozens of travelogues every night. We have the Romantic style and on TV we have everything from Gray's Anatomy to soap operas and reality TV. And perhaps most popular of all, there are the TV sitcoms, which would be analogous to what we call in art, genre painting. And interestingly enough, while this type of painting no longer seems very popular, its TV counterpart has never been more so. Perhaps that's more than just coincidence.

Aprile, 1470, Francesco del Cossa, a Renaissance sitcom?

Just as the sitcom is as old as TV, older in fact, if you consider that it grew out of similar radio shows, so too is genre painting quite ancient, dating back to at least the sixth century BCE when the ancient Greeks decorated their pottery and walls with scenes of labourers, athletics, and partying. In Medieval times, such scenes found their way into various "books of hours" or prayer books, serving as calendars, illustrating the work and play associated with the various seasons. In 1460, Francesco del Cossa took this formula out of the prayer book applied it to fresco, painting an amazingly realistic series of scenes from various months of the year (above). One of the more impressive is a painting depicting workers preparing a grape arbor. It can still be seen today in remarkably good condition in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy.

The Bean Eater, 1580-90, Annibale Carracci

On a much more intimate, perhaps even humorous level, Annibale Carracci's The Bean Eater (right) from around 1585 is an unidealized man caught between bites while on the table before him is a strikingly naturalistic still-life of food and drink allowing us an interesting, if somewhat unappetising, insight into the daily diet of the Italian middle-class during the Renaissance. Such works were often not intended for display but as painting and drawing exercises for art students. The Carracci family ran one of the first formal art academies.

The Dissolute Household, 1660, Jan Steen--definitely not Ozzie and Harriet.

Just as in TV production we have wide shots, medium shots, and close-ups, it would seem the electronic media learned their craft from painting, or more precisely from motion pictures, which took their cues from genre painting. The Dutch were fond of the wide-angle, room-size genre interior. Jan Steen in his 1660, The Dissolute Household (above) depicts no less than eight characters, a dog, and a monkey enjoying such pastimes as music, smoking, eating, dozing, courting, and card playing in a very much "lived-in" scene of middle-class domestic comfort. We're tempted to compare it to The Brady Bunch.

Woman Baking Bread, 1854,
Jean-Francois Millet

During the nineteenth century, genre took a very much more serious turn with the work of Jean-François Millet’s various depictions of peasants in what has been termed the Realist style (right). By that time, genre had worked its way down the academic painting hierarchy to just one notch above pet portraits. At best, it was not deemed a fit subject for "serious" painters (though many of them indulged in it anyway) and at worst, attracted the suspicion of being vaguely subversive in it's holding up to light the harsh realities and desperate plight of the peasant class in all the subdued nobility of their tiresome daily labors. Genre painting, even in depicting the daily life of the upper classes, a common subject during the late 19th century, has always lacked much in the way of glamour. It wasn't portraiture, the momentary activity depicted always superseded the figures themselves as individuals. And, insofar as it does study humanity, Genre depicts stereotypes, in fact perhaps even going so far as creating stereotypes. It then invites us to apply meaning to the scene or event, implying morals, and/or wringing new, insightful messages from its images and activities.

The Street Enters the House, 1911,
Umberto Boccioni

In the 20th century, we immediately think of Norman Rockwell as the ultimate genre painter, though in fact, artists as diverse as Umberto Boccioni in his 1911 The Street Enters the House (left), and Roy Lichtenstein in his 1963 In the Car (bottom) have also employed various forms of genre in their work. But that was almost fifty years ago. Why is genre no longer popular today? Perhaps TV does have something to do with it. Genre has narrative elements, and along this line, television, with it's moving images, dialogue, plot-lines, laff-tracks, and incredibly efficient delivery system is vastly superior to the painted image. But that's no news to anyone, least of all painters. Today, if we still had a viable painting hierarchy, we'd have to place genre well below pet portraits, perhaps just a notch above pretty little cottages with candles glowing in all the windows. Apart from TV, is it our values, the painting market, changes in interior decorating tastes, the high level of technical expertise demanded of genre painters, why is it there's so little contemporary genre done today? Could it be--all of the above?

In the Car, 1963, Roy Lichtenstein--genre, no dialogue necessary.

 

Gauguin and de Haan

Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1888, Paul Gauguin--too alike, yet too different.

When you were growing up, the chances are your parents, at one time or another, preached: "People are known by the friends they keep." Probably falling on deaf ears sometime during our teen years, this "bon mot" so to speak, nonetheless lodged in the back of all our minds, and at one time or another has probably influenced, maybe ever so indirectly, the "friends we kept." If our friends help tell who we are, then they might well tell us a lot about who various artists were too. Take Paul Gauguin for example. Though it was a tortured soul, knowing that he and Vincent van Gogh were like-minded enough to share a friendship tells us a lot about both men. The fact that their friendship ended so shortly and abruptly tells us even more. At times, too much alike, at times too different, van Gogh needing Gauguin far more than Gauguin needed van Gogh. Both men were among the most neurotic and volatile artists to ever wield a brush.

le Pouldu, 1889, Meyer de Haan

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut at one time exhibited work involving yet another Gauguin friendship. Although we usually focus on the Gauguin/van Gogh relationship, shortly after they split up, Gauguin went off to the rustic fishing village of Le Pouldu on the northern Brittany coast of France. There he met Meyer de Haan, a slightly younger Dutch painter who had come all the way from Amsterdam to study with the notorious Frenchman. They lived and worked together for a little over a year (1889-90). De Haan paid the bills. Gauguin had acquired something of a reputation as an artist by that time but was consistently broke. And, it must be said, they developed a kind of a friendship, though in de Haan's case, it should be added that, with a friend like Gauguin, he didn't need much in the way of enemies.   

de Haan and Gauguin, 1889-90

Both de Haan and Gauguin were deep thinkers. Both were into philosophies, dreams, fantasies, and Eastern mysticism. De Haan was a hunchbacked, scraggly redhead with a beard, pointed ears, and eyes that seemed to slant not unlike those of a cat. Gauguin was a dashing, not unattractive, though somewhat heavyset man replete with a thin, "French" moustache. He was a rather vain, former family man who fancied himself as having a "way" with women. For some time when they first met, the two men worked side by side, whether on still-lifes, landscapes, or seascapes, seemingly trying to out dazzle one another with ever more experimental palettes of bold, even jarring, colours. What they came up with delved deeply into symbolism and early abstraction, stumbling way past the latent Impressionism they each sought to escape. Gauguin tended to paint general views, de Haan often zeroed in on smaller areas. Unlike the Gauguin/van Gogh relationship, both men seemed well-suited to one another.



Maternity, 1889, Meyer De Haan,
Marie Henry, the girl that drove
the two artists apart
(and De Haan's daughter).

Then they both met a pretty young innkeeper and both fell in lust with her. Gauguin made numerous advances and apparently was rebuffed. The girl and de Haan, at the same time, were having an affair. To be rejected for one so "common" as de Haan was a terrible blow to Gauguin's masculine French ego. And though the two continued working together and even living together for some time after that (Gauguin no doubt needed the money), one could hardly call what they had from that point on a friendship. Gauguin appears to have respected de Haan's intellect, but in the dozen or so paintings that came thereafter, de Haan is depicted by Gauguin, either symbolically or in fact, as a pervert. For example, The Loss of Virginity (below) displays a female nude reclining on her back amid a rolling field of grass, ablaze with neon colours of red, blue, and green. In one hand she holds a lily, with the other she pets a small fox which appears to be pawing her breast. The features of the fox, his eyes and pointed ears, are those of de Haan.



The Loss of Virginity, 1890-91, Paul Gauguin



Nirvana (Portrait of Meyer De Haan) 1889,
Paul Gauguin

In another painting, de Haan is seen as a smirking devil gripping a writhing snake. Later, Gauguin painted his "friend" as hunched like some demon over a bowl of fruit. In another work, de Haan is seen leering lecherously at two young girls easily half his age. The Wadsworth show, "Gauguin's Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu 1889-90" was a collection of more than forty works by both artists. The title work from the show, Nirvana (left), depicts de Haan as the devil himself, clutching a golden snake in the shape of the letter "G," the first letter in Gauguin's name. Female nudes signifying life and death are stretched out seductively in the background while in the foreground, the word "Nirvana" apparently bears satiric reference to an evil de Haan having achieved a Buddhist oneness with the universe. It's a painting as filled with homage as ridicule. Even after they split apart and Gauguin was off to Tahiti, he got in a parting shot with a sumptuous painting of two voluptuous Tahitian nudes reclining on a beach. The title reads, "Are you Jealous?" .

Are You Jealous?, 1892, Paul Gauguin

Future Housing

Billed as "the most futuristic house in the world," but is it the future?

One of my favourite pastimes is looking into the future. Of course, I'm not alone. Whether it's comedians or supermarket tabloids, everyone pretends clairvoyance. In discussing American domestic architecture, I'd like to indulge in a bit of prognostication. So, peering out the old crystal bay window looking into the future I see...hmm...can't see much of anything. I seem to be steaming up the glass. Maybe we ought to look out the other side, at the recent past.

Montreal's Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie, prefabricated
concrete boxes held together with glue and cables.
Futuristic? certainly, but certainly not the future,
then or now.



Despite all the eclecticism, and enough revivalism to win over the Devil himself, these trends are not the ones leading into the future. Housing styles seldom suddenly spring to life out of the sheer genius of a single designer, engineer, or architect--not anymore anyway. Today, housing styles, like most other innovations, develop in a lab--in this case out in the field (literally)--in the form of experimental housing, sometimes called folk housing. The surest indicator of future housing styles is that which is today highly experimental. But even here four criteria must be met. First, a house must be economical; second, it must be practical; third, it must be environmentally friendly; and fourth, if not exactly "beautiful," at least not bug-ugly either. It is by this set of criteria that we should measure the viability of various recent housing trends.

The venerable Quonset--one of the happier
adaptations of the old "GI" housing staple.

After the Second World War, one of the first experimental housing designs came from the military - the venerable Quonset hut. Let's look at how it stacked up to our criteria. It certainly was economical; the military had seen to that. Practical...well, aside from the sloping walls and metallic structural elements, it allowed for an infinite variety of floor plans, provided you could figure a way to put in windows. Environmentally friendly? Effectively insulating them was difficult if not impossible, although few trees had to die to afford the humans of the specie shelter from the cold. Attractive? Well, it wasn't a look designed to endear itself to former GIs who'd had to live in them under conditions they'd mostly like to forget. And while not exactly ugly, with a few flowers, a coat of white paint, and a little decorative trim the term "homely" might come to mind.

The A-frame, not really futuristic, but having a
lot going for it, if you can get past the "pup tent"
look and feel.

Another architectural experiment which developed in the 1950s we call the "A-frame." For once, it's a very aptly descriptive label. It rated high in being cheap and easy to construct, but had the uncomfortable feeling of living in a lofty attic. And like the Quonset, windows were best built in one end or the other. Dormers took the work of a skilled carpenter and drastically increased the cost. Environmentally, though built of wood, they were often situated on "stilts" and were compact, so they tended not to disturb the woodland landscape in which they often sprouted like the over sized pup tents they resembled. As many American then and now have decided, though reasonably attractive, they're a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.



The geodesic dome, no, it's not an igloo, it just looks
that way.  Futuristic, perhaps, but their future came
and went, leaving them a housing oddity.



Buckminster Fuller had a good idea. He suggested everyone might like to live in geodesic domes. Though geometrically complex to design and engineer, once the experts did that, any layman with a screwdriver and a putty knife could put one together for a very modest cost per square foot. Unfortunately, they not only tended to look like igloos; they were not much warmer in winter either. Also their circular shape, while offering flexibility, certainly demanded more than a little ingenuity in devising a practical floor plan. And attractive? Well, perhaps - certainly not by mid-twentieth century standards - but, I guess one might get used to them in the future. So this one rates a qualified "maybe."

The seeds of the future--a vintage "house trailer"
not unlike that which my grandmother once
owned, minus the flashy red paint job.

The real success story to come out of the past century of experimental housing seems to have come from a most unlikely source--the circus. No, not the tent, but the tin cans on wheels the circus people called home. Actually, if you want to press the point, you could even trace their lineage back to the Conestoga (covered) wagon or even European Gypsies. In any case, what started out as a little camping trailer (a term that still makes the manufactured housing industry cringe) before the war, after the conflict they grew in popularity like the baby-booming kids living in them. Soon it took far more than a car to pull one. My grandmother once lived in a sweet little Marlette, thirty feet long and eight feet wide; and small as it was, even then it took a truck to move it. By the fifties they were ten feet wide; by the sixties, twelve; and unbelievably, each decade since has seen them grow by another foot or two in width or length, reaching  up to 80 feet.

The manufactured home, where the future led.
My wife and I once lifed in something like this.

Economical? You betcha--the cheapest "permanent" housing you can buy in cost per square foot. Practical? Well, I've lived in a couple, and...you "adapt." Environmentally friendly? Yes, at least until they get old. Unfortunately, few are recycled. They tend to hang around the rural landscape in some areas looking worse than junked cars. Attractive? Well, they went through an awkward mid-life identify crisis when designers couldn't decide whether to make them streamline like cars or boxy like houses; but eventually, as they developed into multiple-unit modular homes, boxy won out. Today, there's a sort of uninspired, uniform sameness to them, but they're no worse than most low-end stick-built models. And on the inside, having come from drawing boards of professional designers, they're often far more attractive than their "un-manufactured" cousins.

The modular present--our new neighbors.
Home wasn't built in a day (it took two).

So, is the future of American domestic architecture to be found in assembly line modules stacked together like so many giant Legos? Frankly, yes, though like many one-word answers, there are qualifications. Actually, practically all housing today is manufactured. The differences have to do with the size of the modules and where they are assembled. Virtually all doors, windows, cabinets, bathroom fixtures, lights, flooring, siding, roofing--you name it--comes from a factory. In a sense, these are all modules. Today and in the future, the trend is for the modules to get bigger and bigger. If they're not "trailer" halves pulled to the site by semi trucks, at least I think we'll see a lot of smaller modules such as whole bathrooms and kitchens take this form. These are the two most expensive rooms in any home. Also, they're the elements in all homes demanding the most careful design/planing and where the greatest cost savings can be found in factory construction. Though it's possible any number of "retro" skins may cover these and other modules--and quite likely that multifamily units will proliferate even more as real estate becomes ever more expensive and limited. If the past is any clue to the future, the 21st century will see ever bigger, more attractive, more economical, and more environmentally friendly homes than ever before, with a greater emphasis on flexibility and versatility in the use of space than ever before too.

Futuristic, and modular (it just doesn't look that way)--a long ways from my
grandmother's house trailer.

 

From Weirdness to Insanity

All artists work under the burden of being thought "just a little bit weird." Some of us even enjoy it. For some of us it is a license to pursue the "road less traveled" as Robert Frost termed it, without looking in the rear-view mirror to see who's following, nor caring who's staring at us with their head cocked in dismay. Of course those artists who aspire to greatness often pass beyond the "little bit weird" to "downright weird." And some go beyond that to become certifiably eccentric. Now, beyond that, things get a bit "iffy." The term "crazy madman" comes to mind. To make matters worse, there is but a very fine line between each distinction and the tendency on the part of some artists is to traverse across these lines without realizing it. And, despite the best efforts on his own part and those around him, that was the distressing, and ultimately self-destructive path Vincent van Gogh could not avoid.

Asylum in Saint Remy, 1889, Vincent van Gogh

All his adult live Vincent had been a troubled soul. He was misunderstood, unloved by all but his brother, Theo, and pretty much a dismal failure at all the many different efforts to succeed at any thing he tried. Even when he found painting and the satisfaction of creating beauty, he found little or no appreciation of his efforts and no financial success whatsoever. He sought a professional and personal relationship with Paul Gauguin that ended in his attacking his only friend with a straight razor. And with Gauguin's hasty departure from Arles after Vincent's much-touted self-maiming, came the realization that professional help was needed. Vincent, with his brother's financial backing, voluntarily committed himself to the St.-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Remy (above).

Dr. Felix Rey, 1889, Vincent van Gogh

As asylums go (at the time, mental hospitals were known as asylums), the institution at Saint-Remy was a good choice. It was one of the more humane, and pseudo-scientific retreats he could have chosen. There he came under the treatment of Dr. Rey who had the good sense to advise him not to drink. (Vincent did a portrait of him, right.) Also, Dr. Theophile Peyron, the director of the hospital, was understanding of Vincent's condition, diagnosing him as epileptic, which was close, (for that era) if not entirely accurate. Vincent remarked of St. Remy, "It must be easy to treat the sick here: absolutely nothing is done for them." What was done for Vincent was more along the line of saving him from himself, allowing him to paint the people and places he knew there in relative peace, and yet keeping him under a doctor's care. Vincent's "condition", whatever it was, improved there for a time until a second "attack" in which he is said to have ingested some paint. Shortly thereafter, in May of 1890, he left the hospital for Auvers and the care of Dr. Gachet (below, left). The road downhill from there was short and steep. He died on July 29, 1890 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Dr. Gatchet, 1890, Vincent van Gogh

Vincent's grave, in Auvers-sur-Oise,
next to his brother, Theo's,
who died about a year later.