Highway Painting

Franklin's Footpath, Gene Davis, 1972, Philadelphia.

Before I ever start a painting, I go to great pains in stretching and preparing the canvas to accept both the drawing and the acrylic hues I apply in creating my chosen image. That makes me a canvas painter. An artist painting on paper is usually a watercolorist. So, what do you call an artist who creates him images on a sidewalk? A concrete artist? Perhaps, but usually they're referred to a sidewalk artists. Over the years I've written about at least two, Joe Mangrum and Kurt Wenner. Joe creates complex abstract designs using colored sands; Wenner uses colored chalk to render his startling 3-D illusions on sidewalks literally all over the world. The next level beyond the works of Mangrum and Wenner is using a street, road, or highway as a base for creative expression. The difference is that when you switch to art on such a scale, the impermanence of sand and chalk dictate you also find a new color medium. In this case, it's highway (sometimes called asphalt) paint. Chalk and sand are fine for relatively small-scale works but when you're a "highway painter" you need paint and lots of it...gallons and gallons and gallons of it...not too mention the money to buy it and lots of help laying it down.

 

Mueller combines the natural features of the street with his catastrophic paintings to heighten the realism.

It all started in 1972 when the American painter, Gene Davis, a former Washington, D.C. sportswriter, decided to paint the world's largest work of art (414 feet long). He and a small army of volunteers set about painting the broad avenue leading up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He called it Franklin's Footpath (top). The work consisted of a series of ten-inch-wide stripes (the width of a paint roller) in red, yellow, blue, aqua, white, pink, and green. The work has since been destroyed. In more recent years, street painters such as Edgar Mueller (above), are not satisfied in painting color field stripes but have manage to combine it with the best of 3-D illusions on a scale (above) rivaling Davis street stripes.

Though not as extended as the volcanic inferno seen in the previous painting, this one "works" visually from any point across its base.

One of the fundamental limitations of 3-D sidewalk art is the fact that, being relatively modest in size, they has only a single point of view beyond which the illusion becomes distorted, and eventually loses touch with reality. However the, larger the image, the larger that ideal "sweet spot" becomes. With an extended, elongated image, a camera positioned at virtually any point on the street will still capture an illusionary image.



This one ought to stop traffic, or at least slow it down.
In some cities, 3D illusionary speed bumps have been used successfully to do the same.

the Swiss-American art duo Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann have made over the Strelka Bar in Moscow, as part of "Bistro 16," a collaborative project with fashion designers and artists. Lang and Baumann have transformed the outdoor street and the interior of the bar with iconic, simple and ergonomic forms, adding a burst of light and color to the environment. They have also maintained a naturalness as the streamlined forms highlighting the architecture while mimicking the lines of the surrounding road. Their flat installation continues their interest of integrating psychedelic geometry into unexpected spaces.

The Strelka Bar (on the left) with Lang and Baumann's
broad geometric strips just outside. Imagine
staggering out of a vodka bar at one a.m.
(Moscow time) and encountering this.

 



Not just any paint will do.



Lang and Baumann have worked together since 1990. Not ones to limit themselves to the confines of exhibition spaces, they have become known for creating works of art on an ambitious scale that all but takes over the public sphere (below). Attracted to unexploited public spaces, they compellingly intervene and in doing so, have gone on to create a range of on-site artworks including, murals, sculptures, and install-lations that play with architectural design elements. Their creations have included inaccessible staircases and parasitic inflatable structures that literally grow out of buildings. The streets of various cities are treated, then turned into a massive urban canvases which explore the overlooked dimensions within them. Always surprising and invasive, their art still manages to blend in perfectly with the urban and rural spaces that host them. With six paintings already completed in various locations since 2003, Lang & Baumann went on to create their seventh installment in the series in Rennes, France (below). Laid out along Jules Simon Street, it was right in the heart of Rennes where it remained until May of 2014.

While street paintings are far more durable than such art done in chalk, they have never come to be considered as permanent.

Conceptual art has even found it's place on the street. First you dump a substantial quantity of paint at an intersection, then let traffic do the rest.

Street art teaches young
children about safety.

If I were to say that street painting is not easy, the comment in return would be, "obviously." Actually some of the greatest difficulties in street painting have little to do with art, the paint, or the skills involved in applying it. Choos-ing a good location comes first followed by persuading the "powers that be" that such a massive work of art is just what they need to put their town on a map. That usually means closing the street to vehicular traffic for a short period (with geometric de-signs) and a much longer per-iod for those involving 3-D illusions. Obtaining donations to pay for the paint and still leave something for the artists is never easy. Then there's the matter of security. Street paint tends to dry fairly quickly, but even with the street closed to traffic, you don't want pedestrians tracking through the artwork. And finally, there's the matter of negotiating the timespan for the display (usually a year or two at most). Rome wasn't built in a day, but then again, neither Romulus nor Remus had in mind to paint stripes on the streets.

DETOUR !

Slow! Children at play.

TURN OFF YOUR SOUND !

before playing.
 

 

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Oval Composition with Abstract Motifs, 1922, Sophie Taeuber-Arp



A couple days ago I wrote about a husband-wife team of landscape painters--Marion and Elmer Wachtel (the second item below). If ever there were polar opposites it would be the Wachtels and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and her husband Jean Arp. In terms of their art, though they lived and worked during the same decades of the 20th-century, that's about where any similarities begin and end. The Wachtel's were American artists while Sophie Taeuber was born in Davos (eastern) Switzerland. Jean Arp was born in Strasbourg (now near the far eastern border of France, but in 1886 a part of the area known as Alsace-Lorraine). That's about as close too Switzerland as you can get without crossing the border (he called himself Hans in German, and Jean when speaking French).

Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles,
1930, Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a leading figure in the Zürich and Paris Dada movement. She pushed the limits of abstraction in paintings, sculpture, and textiles. She was also something of a dancer and set designer for Dada performances. She was known as one of the foremost artists of geometric abstraction, very much like the style of today's doodle. Abstract art is often denigrated as "looking as it a child could do it." Sophie Taeuber-Arp showed that abstract art was, in fact, closely related to child’s play. Such art is often said to have originated in the strongly spiritualist ideas of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Yet Sophie Taeuber-Arp invented, along with Hans (Jean) Arp, a different kind of abstraction that accepts chance and finds its roots in the physical rather than spiritual world, much like a utopian game.

Dada with a feminine touch.

Dancer, 1917-24,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Born in 1889 as Sophie Henriette Gertrude Taeuber, she left home at eighteen to study textile design in Munich. Returning to Zurich in 1915, she began to produce non-representational paintings, which she termed "concrete” paintings. The paintings were influenced by her training in textile design, as well as Cubism. From 1916 through 1928, Taeuber-Arp taught textile design at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. At about the same time, Sophie met her future husband, Jean Arp, a French sculptor, painter, and collagist.

Sophie and Jean Arp with Sophie's famous marionettes.
 

The pair famously created vast, abstract multimedia works under the name of Duo Collages. Sophie and Jean Arp moved to Meudon, near Paris in 1928. Together with her husband and artist Theo van Doesburg, Sophie Taeuber-Arp received a commission to design the interior of the Café de l’Aubette in Strasbourg, France (destroyed during WW II). It was one of the first modernist spaces to unify form and function.

 

Café de l'Aubette, 2014-17, Strasbourg (reconstructed).

The café commission marked the beginning of the most productive period in Taeuber-Arp's life. She exhibited her work throughout Europe while Jean Arp befriended the celebrated Surrealist, Max Ernst. Along with Sophie, the three of them are considered founding members of the anarchic Dada movement, which celebrated the avant-garde, conceptual approach to creating art. Such work often resulted in unorthodox materials appearing in abstract, unusual compositions. Taeuber-Arp and her husband fled to southern France when the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940. They returned to Zurich in 1942. Sophie Taeuber-Arp died there in 1943. Jean Arp died in Basel, Switzerland, in 1966 at the age of eighty.

Relief at Three Levels, 1937 or 1938, Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Marionettes by Sophie Taeuber-Arp in 1918 for Konig Hirsch

 

Visual effects before CGI

The Ten Commandments, 1956, Cecil B. DeMille

If you are a lover of classic cinema such as I, you've probably wondered at one time or another how Hollywood filmmakers managed to create some of the astounding visual effects way back before computers generated imagery (CGI). As a child, one of the earliest movies I can remember was Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments. His immortal scene of the parting of the Red Sea (above) was so realistic I often wondered it God himself didn't have a hand in it. The truth is, DeMille filmed two large "dump tanks" being flooded with water, then ran the film in reverse. The two frothing walls of water were created by water dumped constantly into catch basins. The churning water images were then flipped sideways to make the walls of water. A gelatin substance was also added to the water in the tanks to give it more of a seawater consistency. Incidentally, the catch basis still exists today on the Paramount lot. It can still when the need arises to film floods on a biblical scale. Otherwise it's an extension of a parking lot.
 

How it all began--The Enchanted Drawing--Stuart Blackton

It all started with beheadings in an 1895 Edison Film when Alfred Clark recreated the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. He had all the actors hold completely still, with the exception of the actress playing Mary, while he paused the camera. Then he replaced her with a dummy before filming started again and the dummy lost its head. Clark's effect may seem minor, but it was not only the birth of motion picture special effects, but also stop-motion videos and animations. It's been said that some audience members thought a woman had actually sacrificed her life for the picture. A few years, later in 1902, a Frenchman shot for the moon with an entire movie titled Straight to the Moon based upon Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. The visual effects were...let's call them fantastic...with the emphasis on fantasy. Melies brought together the effects from films he'd made earlier into one work of art, including double exposure, split screens, dissolves, and fades. As for animation, you may want to see The Enchanted Drawing (above). In the film, the cartoonist for the New York Evening World, Stuart Blackton, draws a cartoon character and then adds things like a top hat, a bottle of wine and an empty glass. He then pulls those items out of the picture, causing the picture's expression to change as art and artist interact together. It's safe to say, the film inspired the entire future of animation.

The Lost World, 1925, special effects by Willis O'Brien

One of the most famous early examples of model usage was 1925's The Lost World (above). This ground-breaking film featured actors interacting with giant monsters. Willis O'Brien, who was later involved with King Kong (below), used small puppets that were filmed one frame at a time on mini-sets. The actors were then added by putting two negatives together on split screens. If that sounds complicated, it was, especially in the beginning. When The Lost World portrayed humans running away from stop-motion animated monsters, they actually had to film things with an optical printer. This required blacking out all but the actors on the top film, then blocking out where the actors would appear on the stop-motion film and printing them onto a third roll of film. This all became a lot simpler with the advent of "blue screening." The first film to use a blue screen behind the actors (which made it easier to print only them on the film) came in 1940 with The Thief of Bagdad. Using this method, the film would be developed with a number of color filters to ensure that the blue background would disappear, while the actors and intended background would show up. Now days, a green background is more commonly used in that blue is a more likely color for clothing.

King Kong, 1939, stop-motion photography artist Willis O'Brien

Kong, the giant gorilla, was actually not so "giant." He was a mere 18 inches, a poseable model, covered with rabbit hair. The scene with actress Fay Wray at the top of the Empire State Building was filmed one frame at a time using stop-motion photography by visual effects artist Willis O'Brien and his crew. The producers filmed Kong and Fay Wray, separately. They then projected the two films together to create the effect of Fay Wray in the grip of Kong.
 

The skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts, 1963, Ray Harryhausen.

Stop-action photography was also the key in making the four-minute skeleton fight (above), which was orchestrated by visual effects genius Ray Harryhausen. It took almost five months to shoot via stop-motion animation. Harryhausen also rear-projected footage of the actual actors (who, when filming, were basically battling air behind the animation) and then combined the shots to make a realistically scary skeleton-Argonaut battle.




Fantastic Voyage, 1966

By 1966, the art and science of visual effects had come a long way (above). The science-fiction classic, Fantastic Voyage (Raquel Welch never looked so good) won that year's Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. The story revolves around miniaturized human beings voyaging into the bloodstream of a human body (if you buy that premise, you might be interested in a bridge or two). It was created using a full-size high-tech navy submarine that was supposedly shrunk to microbial dimensions on film. The interior of the body was created by using large, highly-detailed sets of various body parts (i.e., the brain, the heart). Actors were suspended on wires to journey through the body. Only Fantastic Voyage's fantastic visual effects could make such a fantastic plot believable.

The spaceship Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, Stanley Kubrick

The visual effects of Stanley Kubrick's futuristic masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey included a 30-ton rotating "Ferris wheel" set (above) built by a British aircraft company. Kubrick laid out $750,000 in creating the apparent use of centrifugal force to mimic the effects of zero gravity. The set rotated at a speed of three miles per hour. The actors would stand at the bottom and walk in place, while the set rotated around them. Chairs, desks, and control panels were all firmly bolted to the inside surface.

The UFO landing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977, Steven Spielberg.

And finally, we come to the unchallenged master of visual effects, Steven Spielberg. His 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind used a 400 lb. fiber-glass model that was four feet high and five feet wide to create the famous landing scene. (It probably would have been cheaper to build the real thing then turn it into a theme park ride afterwards.) The UFO model was wired and lighted by fiber optics, incandescent bulbs, and neon tubes. Not only that, but they all had to be coordinated to the musical tones used by the aliens to communicate. I guess that was better than hubcaps dangling from nylon fishing lines as seen in the 1959 classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space (below).
 

Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959.
The attack of the hubcaps. You
can hardly see the fishing lines.

Elmer and Marion Wachtel

Lone Pine--Cypress Point, Marion Kavanagh Wachtel

There are surprisingly few husband-wife art couples either now or in times past. One would naturally think, inasmuch as artists tend to congregate, painting in groups, or in just socializing, that boy meets girl, they paint a few pictures together, they fall in love, they get married, and live happily ever after. That does happen of course, but not as often as one might think. And inevitably the wife usually works in the shadow of her more famous husband--Willem and Elaine de Kooning, for example, or Josef and Anni Albers, or Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, to name just a few. Two Californian painters, Elmer and Marion Wachtel, break that mold.

 

California Mission, Elmer Wachtel

Though Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel did all she could not to overshadow her husband during his lifetime, after his death in 1929, her oil paintings of the rugged western landscape became much more collectible than her late husband's work ever was. Inasmuch as he painted in oils, she chose watercolors so that their work was not as likely to be compared. She was born in 1872 (or 1877, you know how women are about their age). He was born in 1864. She was from Milwaukee; he was born in Baltimore. Her mother and grandfather were also artists. Elmer Wachtel went to California in 1882 where he was employed as a ranch hand, who worked his way up to become a furniture store salesman. He saved his earnings enough to study art at the Art Students' League in New York for two months and then briefly at the Lambeth School of Art in London. Otherwise he was self-taught. Marion Kavanaugh trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, and later under William Merritt Chase in New York. Later, she taught in public schools and at the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Two talented artists, painting the California landscape
while it was still largely pristine.

The couple met n 1903 When Marion journeyed to California, where she had an offer from the Sante Fe Railroad which changed the direction of her life. They commissioned her to paint murals for the Sante Fe Railroad ticket office in San Francisco. The railroad trip west brought Marion to Sante Fe and to the Grand Canyon, places she would return to paint later on. While in California she took the opportunity to study under William Keith. It is said that Keith introduced Marion to his good friend and former student, Elmer Wachtel. While a student of Keith herself, Marion and Elmer fell in love. They married in 1904 and settled in the Arroyo Seco section of southern Pasadena.

These are not watercolors but oils, painted after her husband's
death in 1929.

Marion Wachtel had painted primarily figures and portraits in the east (bottom), but changed to landscapes of the dramatic Californian and Southwestern terrain. Elmer Wachtel was likewise best known for painting California's landscapes, rather than European scenes. Elmer painted mostly in oil while Marion painted watercolors. In the 1920s Marion was honored with two one-woman exhibitions at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. Her works might best be described as Tonalist in inspiration but with Art Nouveau overtones in her lyrical interpretations of nature. She exhibited in New York City as well as in California. In 1911, she became an elected member of the New York Watercolor Club, and a year later, an associate member of the American Water Color Society. She was a founding member of the California Water Color Society in 1921.



His landscapes. Compare them to his wife's.



During World War I, Elmer Wachtel became an informant for the U.S. Justice Department by reporting to federal authorities alleged pro-German and antiwar statements by militant socialists and fellow artists. It has been said, in speaking of the work of these two painters, the one in oil, the other in watercolor, that the classification of oils as epic and water colors as lyric in quality, can hardly be made In this case. Very often we see both qualities in both artists work.

Pueblo at Walpi, Marion Wachtel

The couple traveled throughout the Southwest, painting as they went. Marion became known as the best watercolorist in California with her masterful control of tone and color. On August 31, 1929, Elmer Wachtel died suddenly while on a painting trip in Guadalajara, Mexico. After her husband's death, Marion Wachtel's interest in painting waned temporarily. But in 1931, she picked up her brushes again; switching to oils, she began painting the hillsides of the San Gabriel Mountains near her Arroyo Seco neighborhood. Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel died at her Pasadena home in May, 1954. Depending upon which of her two birth dates you believe, she was either seventy-five or eighty years of age.

At Play, Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel

 

Derold Page

Fat Marbled Cat, Derold Page

When we speak of Folk Art, people primarily (and perhaps exclusively) tend to think of landscapes. Moreover we also tend to think only of American Folk Art. Of course, virtually every country in the world has its own folk art. In fact, in some countries, it's virtually the only art they know. I've no idea if Folk Art is as popular in European countries as it is in the U.S. but I do know that it's not got the same "look" to it we've come to know on this side of the Atlantic. I'm not sure the designation "Folk Art" is really the best tag for such work. Some writers and critics have come to refer to it as "naïve" art or "untrained" (that is, the work of self-taught artists). Derold Page is British, completely untrained, and seldom paints the usual nostalgic landscapes from memory we're so used to seeing from his American counterparts.

 

Tinkle Cat, Derold Page

Artistic Cats, those which
write poetry and paint pictures,
By Derold Page

What does Page paint? Cats--big cats, small cats, fat cats, lazy cats, and sometimes, some pretty damned ugly cats as well (top). And perhaps the main difference in his work, and that of other such artists of the U.K. and the U.S. is that few folk artists in either country dwell on such content so consistently. He's even published whole books on them, each featuring his own peculiar visualization of his feline friends (above, left).

Derold Page's landscapes bear little or no resemblance to
those of his American Folk Art counterparts.

That's not to imply that Derold Page never paints landscapes. In fact, some of his first paintings (above) were birds-eye views of the English landscape so neat and tidy, as if "arranged" within it's hedgerows. To express this feeling, he ;arranged his part of Somerset in a favorite basket, which he tried to better show its care, and his affection for its beauty. Page's harmonious, highly-detailed, peaceful paintings are often philosophical metaphors, expressing his belief that all natural things are precious and that all are brothers, who should live together in harmony. He has also found a unique way of painting dreams, sounds, and ideas making his work highly personal.

Can you imagine, painting with cat in your lap (even a sleeping one)?

Derold Page was not born in England but in South Africa, and didn't take up painting until his mid-twenties. His first painting was a birds-eye view of the historic village of Pilgrim's Rest, located in Mpumalanga province of South Africa. A very astute publisher immediately bought it to sell as a print. It was an immediate success. It wasn't until 1976 that Page moved to England where he settled into a 16th-century thatched cottage in Somerset.

Instant success with an Italian accent.

Derold Page's first one-man show was not in England, but in Rome. Every one of his paintings sold. In 1985, the Bridgeman Art Library began handling Page's work. His prints are now published and sold all over the world--conquering the art world one cat at a time.






When you look like an owl,
it's easier to hunt them.



Hey, I'm a dog!
You mean Derold
paints dogs too?

 

Doug Ohlson

Not For Over The Couch (NFOTC) installation by New York City
painter Doug Ohlson. (Is that a bench just beneath the painting?)

Some art demands a gallery setting. It only looks good on neutral walls in large, virtually empty, deftly lit rooms. In some cases, it merely looks best in such spaces. That's true of most non-representational painting and especially the case with large color-field works and their derivative Minimalist cousins. That includes Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Lewis, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Arshile Gorky and probably a few others. One of those "few others" would be Doug Ohlson. Though certainly not as well-known as the others, his broad, vertical color stripes on massive fifteen-foot-wide canvases, or painted stretched canvas strips hung separately side by side, definitely fits the type--NFOTC (Not For Over The Couch) display.

 

Rousillon, 1997, Doug Ohlson.
"Welcome to my living room art galley;
just find a seat and make yourself comfortable."

Unless your home is the size of an art gallery, work by Ohlson and the others would totally dominate most living rooms (even those without a couch). Any room scoured free of most creature comforts, would certainly not be conducive to much "living." That, of course, presents a problem for art galleries in selling such work. It limits their clientele to large corporations, "non-profit" organizations, and millionaires out to furnish their second or third homes. There they spend very little time, and quite a lot of money for art chosen to impress friends and colleagues who can't afford to do the same.

 

Doug Ohlson at work. That's probably the longest handled paint "brush" ever used by an artist.

Over the years, in writing about art, I've encountered and talked about dozens of different effects to be had in applying paint with various unusual tools, from tableware to underwear. Doug Ohlson's painting tools were not all that unusual...if you're painting the aforementioned living room. Ohlson painted his canvases primarily with a paint roller. Moreover, he made little or no attempt to disguise his very appropriate painting tool. Doug Ohlson was born in Cherokee, Iowa, in 1936. He's of Swedish parentage, not Native American. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota then moved to New York City in 1961, where solo exhibitions have been almost continuous since 1964. Prestigious galleries such as Fischbach, Susan Caldwell, Ruth Siegal, Andre Zarre and Washburn galleries handle his work.

"Yellowish pink...and red-orange sunsets: Doug Ohlson

After moving to New York, Ohlson studied at Hunter College under abstract sculptor Tony Smith, but dropped out when he could no longer afford tuition. It was then he began working as an assistant to Smith. He started teaching at Hunter College in 1964. Ohlson's work is sharply defined with repeated geometric shapes characteristic of his earliest painting. His early work has been described as depicting "yellowish pink and green dawns, blue noons, and red-orange sunsets that swiftly slide from purple to black." It would seem that Ohlson's experience working long days on the family's farm in Iowa may have given him a unique passion for color. It's certainly his strongest suit and the primary reason I like his work.


Heroic Abstraction, Doug Ohlson

Ohlson's rise as an important New York abstract expressionist gives credence to the old saying: "It's not what you know but who you know." Ohlson was helped along in his career by established artists such as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Tony Smith, and various gallery owners. Doug Ohlson would have been the first to embrace the NFOTC label. His work is so strong as to color and format he can be forgiven the fact that it demands large doses of spatial sterility to function. Doug Ohlson died in June, 2010, after a fall in front of his Manhattan apartment. He was seventy-three.

An Ohlson gallery installation.

 

July Paintings

Reading the Declaration of Independence to the Troops,
Mort Kunstler--why we celebrate.

July has only one major holiday, but some thirty minor ones, namely the rest of the days of the month. Although we usually think of August as being "vacation month," surveys tell us that far more people (taking vacations) do so in July (45%) than the following month (only 35%). One week seems to be the preferred duration (23%) with about half of all vacationers leaving their home state. Florida, and then California lead the list of favorite vacation destinations. For those leaving the U.S., the Bahamas and the U.K. lead the list. And the most favored activity seems to be relaxing away from home with the family. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this is the fact that none these vacation statistics correlate in any way with July's one major American holiday, our Independence Day, better know as the Fourth of July.

It would seem that our old friend Norman Rockwell
took Independence Day quite seriously (above, top),
but vacations...somewhat less so.

It's been quite some time since most Americans have viewed the Fourth of July as the sedate, even sacred commemoration pictured by John Lewis Krimmel in his Fourth of July in Center Square in 1812 in Philadelphia (below), painted, oddly enough, in 1812. It looks more like Sunday morning after church services. I'm curious as to the smoke emanating from the dome in the background. That must be where they hold the barbecue.

Fourth of July in Center Square in 1812 in Philadelphia,
John Krimmel

The solemn, silent guest
of honor at the picnic.

Today, our image of the Fourth of July is more in line with a picnic bill of fare--hamburgers, chips, corn-on-the-cob, and watermelon (below). Thom-as Jefferson would probably have approved, but I'm not so sure about George and Martha of Mount Vernon. The American impressionist, Childe Hassam gives us a glimpse (below) of what the Fourth of July was like 101 years ago.

The Fourth of July, 1916,
Childe Hassam

Folk Artist, Sharon Esther Ascherl (below), provides a rural version of the Fourth of July to juxtapose next to Hassam's red, white, and blue Fifth Avenue extrav-aganza. The painting she titles 4th of July Sunday School Picnic. Wish I could make out the food spread on the tables a little better.

4th of July Sunday School Picnic, Sharon Esther Ascherl
 

Signing of Declaration of Independence, 1818, John Trumbull, as seen by  Parade Magazine. What were they thinking?