Charles Demuth

Charles Demuth Self-portrait, 1907

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

My Egypt, 1927, Charles Demuth

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

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

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

Turkish Bath with Self-portrait, 1918,
Charles Demuth

The Modern Look

The Barcelona Chair, 1929, Mies van der Rohe,
the quintessential "modern" look.

When we think of something as being "modern" looking, we tend to think in terms of its being simplistic in design, sleek, streamline, functional not given to excessive (or perhaps any decoration, having "style" without being "busy" or "pretty". We often think in terms of less being more, a tendency at least in the direction of abstraction, or "form follows function", but in any event a sort of cold, hard-edged refinement to the bare essentials. Now, having defined, to some extent, what we mean by "modern" looking, perhaps we begin to wonder just where these aesthetic qualities originated and how they became fixed in our national (indeed, international) design psyche.

Antigraceful, 1913, Umberto Boccioni,
a portrait of his mother--old modern.

One thing about them, they are not new. "Modern" design, like modern art is about as new as our grandparents (or in some cases, our great grandparents). It didn't begin in this country. During the first half of the 20th century, very few things that were truly "new" in art originated in this country. No, much of what we now consider "modern" originated in Italy, about 1910, with a group of antiestablishment artist who called themselves collectively Futurists. Among them were Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carra. They held their first exhibition in Paris in 1912. And while their paintings tended to have a "modernizing" effect upon art in Europe, in the U.S., Joseph Stella and Charles Demuth were the proselytizing disciples of the "modern" look in art and design. Though not actually Futurists, they derived much of their influence from this movement.

Battle of Lights, Coney Island, 1913, Joseph Stella,
(Jackson Pollock was a year old at the time.)

Sailboats and Roofs, 1917,
Charles Demuth

Stella's Battle of Lights, Coney Island (above), painted in 1913, is a glorious, every-color-in-the-rainbow confetti confection bordering so closely on Abstract Expressionism as to make Jackson Pollock worry about being labeled a copyist. Charles Demuth's Sailboats and Roofs (left), painted in 1917, has a look of 1990s corporate art at a time when "corporate art" meant nothing more than an attractive logo. By 1939, when Stella painted his famous The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, the "modern" look had been set in stone and had acquired a monumental quality as well. It was sharp, pointed, soaring, smooth, shiny, linear, and geometric, waiting only for cubism to migrate to this country to add the rectilinear quality we also now associate with modern looking art and architecture. The problem with the "modern look", is that it became soo old there had to be another term invented to differentiate between modern then and modern now. Art historians have somehow settled on a mobile (but barely adequate) term, contemporary, a sort of test-of-time entrance portal through which all that is considered modern today must pass in order to survive.

 

The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme,
1939, Joseph Stella--forever modern.

 

Paintings I've not Done Yet--Abstracts

I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928, Charles Demuth

One of the hallmarks of abstract art is that the work's design--composition, color, texture, shapes, and spatial relationships--are more important than the content of the work. They, in fact, become the content of the work. The two of the most persistent misunderstandings in art have to do with the term "abstract." The first is its use as a shorthand designation for Abstract Expressionism (not all abstract art is expressionistic). The second being the false notion that both Abstract art and Abstract Expressionism are synonymous with non-representational art. Though some (but certainly not all) non-representation art is abstract, by the same token not all abstract art is non-representational. As an example, the painting by Charles Demuth I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (above), from 1928, is abstract, yet it is not expressionistic, nor is it non-representational.

 

Copyright, Jim Lane

I Saw the Figure 15 in Gold.
Photo from Deck 15, Oasis of the Seas.

In a similar vein, photography has long been associated with Realism, almost to the point of being synonymous. Early on, that probably was the case as photographer's took on the onus of accurately recording the "real" world faster, easier, and better than could a painter. However, as photography developed more and more into just another art form, it began to follow painting into expressionism and abstraction (notice, I did not link the two). As I mentioned above, they are two different entities. Although I seldom paint abstract images and almost never in an expressionist manner, I am always on the lookout for "photo-ops" which suggest one or the other. The photo I have labeled I Saw the Figure 15 in Gold (above) is in the Demuth context, neither Expressionist nor non-representational, but it is abstract in that it represents an abstract numerical concept. Today, in keeping with my newfound spirit of sharing photos which I've taken, but not used, with other artists more likely to do so, I want to offer my "abstract photography." At the same time I'd like to demonstrate that the use of the two words together is not oxymoronic.

Copyright, Jim Lane

At the Orsay--the abstract concept of time.

Along the same line of thinking comes a photo I shot from the historic Orsay Museum in Paris (above). The museum was once a train station. The giant window clock is actually one of two built into the northern facade of the building. It measured and represented the passage of time. It wasn't until the development of rail transportation that time became such an important factor in daily life. Relatively rapid transportation demanded both accuracy and consistency. Around the world, time zones were established to cope with the fact that, for the first time, man could now "race the sun."

Copyright, Jim Lane

Balconies of the Seas, aboard the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas.

Abstraction can also involve visual elements as well as a intellectual concepts. For the photographer, one of the surest ways in which to demonstrate this fact is to shoot a large number of items of roughly the same size, shape, color, and visual texture grouped (or cropped) in such a way as to mostly eliminate any obvious or immediate association with familiar content. In the photo I call Balconies of the Seas (above) some, but not all, the units are Identical, differing mostly in the placement of the round table and cabin draperies. Only in two or three cases can be seen the intrusion of any human presence which, in effect, grounds the image in reality.

Copyright, Jim Lane

High in the Hyatt, Atlanta, Georgia, abstract design of a
more complex nature without a clue as to context.

The photo I call High in the Hyatt (above) takes the same content as Balconies of the Seas but presents it in a more complex form with little or no contextual clues as to scale or content. Even the one-point perspective or the sharp diagonal of the elevator housing (far right) doesn't help much. The futuristic Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, with its 22-story atrium, opened in 1967--hard to believe this groundbreaking architectural wonder is almost fifty years old.

Copyright, Jim Lane

Bluish Blooms Basking in a Field of Greens.

Even when shooting nature, the repetitious visual element, though usually not as tightly bound as in manmade examples, still presents many opportunities for abstract photography as seen in the photo I call Bluish Blooms Basking in a Field of Greens (above). I think this title suggest an abstract painting rather than a landscape or a floral arrangement. The key to good abstract photography is consistency as to shapes, color, and content.

Copyright, Jim Lane

Hearst's Ceiling, San Simeon, California

With the exception of certain carefully chosen elements of nature, abstract design tends to be of human origin. Even as applied to nature, the human factor is passively present with regard to the way the photographer chooses the content, as well as in the framing, lighting, and cropping of his or her shots. On the other hand, when dealing with manmade abstract fields, very often, in shooting repetitious elements of art or architecture, the photographer is, in fact, making art from art. An example can be seen in the photo, Hearst's Ceiling (above), from the living room of the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, California. The ornate, coffered, tessellation once more makes use of one-point perspective as the overriding compositional element coupled with stark, dramatic natural light. Thus the photographer, far from copying or simply recording the original work of art, is adding compositional and environmental elements in creating a new (though derivative) work of art.

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As with the other photos in this series, these are available free of charge for use by painters as source material for their own work on an individual basis. Simply e-mail me with a request to do so at jimlane@jimlanart.com and indicate which photo you would like to use as well as your full name (no nicknames) and geographical location. If you have a website, include the URL, and please, when finished, e-mail me a photo of your painting. These images are not for publication as photos (except on a royalty basis) nor are they in the public domain.

Cecilienhof Palace, Potsdam, Germany.
I'm not sure if this falls under the heading of
abstract photography but I was at a loss for
any other classification.

 

The Whitney Museum, New York

The Whitney Museum of American Art open last year (2015) on
Manhattan's lower west side. Day or night, it's an impressive
piece of Postmodern museum architecture by the Italian
architect, Renzo Piano.

For more than a year I've been making plans to visit the art capital of the world, New York City. Besides the memorial at Ground Zero and maybe a Broadway play or two, I had on my "must-see" list three major museums, the Met (of course), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Guggenheim. Then this morning, I got a set of photos from an e-mail friend of mine that he'd taken at a new museum which I'd all but forgotten--the Whitney Museum of American Art. When I say "new," actually only the building at 99 Gansevoort Street in Lower Manhattan (near the meatpacking district) is new. Since 1966 the museum had been ensconced at 945 Madison Avenue in a landmark architectural masterpiece designed by Marcel Breuer. Before that, it had been on 54th Street (though having originally opened its doors at 8-12 W. Eighth Street).

Breuer's Whitney Museum has been a New York landmark for more that fifty years. It has now been least to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum was founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (below). Her grandfather was Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and her husband was the playboy-financier Harry Payne Whitney. Within a few years of her marriage in 1896 Gertrude Whitney discovered that her husband was unfaithful. Divorce was likely not an option for social, as well as financial reasons. In lieu of a happy marriage, Gertrude decided to become a sculptor. She took up with a group of artists who formed the Ashcan School--Robert Henri (who painted her portrait below), John Sloan, William Glackens and others. They were fighting to establish artistic realism in a conservative atmosphere of society portraits and soothing landscapes.



Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916, Robert Henri

In 1907 Gertrude Vanderbilt bought a studio on Macdougal Alley, a street of stables serving the flanking rows of houses on Washington Square. Truth be told, she proved to have only moderate talent as a sculptor. However, she excelled as an organizer. In 1914 she took over the adjacent row house at West Eighth Street as a meeting place and gallery for other artists on the outs with the establishment. Gradually, she added the townhouses at 10, 12 and 14 West Eighth Street--as well as their corresponding stables on Macdougal Alley. This became the Whitney Studio Club, a center of advanced thinking in American art. John Sloan and Reginald Marsh both had their first one-man shows there and in 1924 the club mounted the first exhibit of American folk art. It marked a complete reversal of the old-master theory of collecting which had dominated the 19th-century. Mrs. Whitney also directly supported artists with gifts, loans and purchases. By the late 1920's she had amassed a collection of about 500 works by Hopper, Bellows, Prendergast, Sloan and others.

Gertrude's first museum, circa 1931,

My Egypt, 1927, Charles Demuth

Gertrude offered her collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929 along with $5-million for a new wing. She found she couldn't even give them away. The Met rejected the offer, under-scoring its longstanding, much-criticized reputation for collecting only dead artists while ignoring the living. Works such as Charles Demuth's My Egypt (left) de-fined Gertrude Whitney's taste in living American artists. In the face of what was, in essence, a slap in the face, Ger-trude Whitney and her friends decided to start their own museum specifically to serve American artists while they were still alive. Mrs. Whitney retained the architects Noel & Miller, who in 1931 rebuilt 8, 10 and 12 West Eighth with a coating of salmon-colored stucco and a modernistic entrance (above). The stuc-co veneer was a standard solution for redoing old houses, but the doorway shouted out the novelty of a brave new Depression era architecture.

Art you will only see at the Whitney Museum...wherever it's located.

The Whitney Museum opened in 1931 with George Bellows' Dempsey and Firpo (above, near the top), a painting of a boxing match as a centerpiece symbolizing its challenging stance. "There may be pictures here that you do not like, but they are here to stay, so you may as well get used to them," the museum's director, Juliana Force, declared at the opening. The following year marked the first of the Whitney's Biennial exhibitions, which was instantly blasted by the press. The museum, largely reflecting the personalities of Gertrude Whitney and Juliana Force, continued to join in controversy without reservation for the next decade.

The new Whitney Museum as it was still on the drawing board.

The new Whitney is far removed
from New York's"arty" precincts.

Construction on the new Whitney Museum began in 2010 and was completed in 2015 for a whopping $422-million. The new structure spans 200,000 square feet rising to nine stories including the city's largest column-free art gallery. There's also an education center, theater, a conservation lab, and a library with reading rooms. Two of the floors are fully devoted to the museum's permanent collection. The only permanent artwork commissioned for the site was in the form of its four main elevators as conceived by Richard Artschwager. The new building's collection comprises over 600 works by over 400 artists.

Solid white walls, vast hardwood floors, lofty ceilings, and acres of glass--
the interior spaces of the new Whitney Museum differ little from
similar museums around the world.

In the Air, T. J. Wilcox, (temporary exhibit)

Joseph Stella

If you think the painters and paintings of the Ashcan School, in depicting the urban landscape with their social realism was a bit grim, take heart. There is another side to the coin. There was also a school of artists (though it's an ism rather than a school this time) that looked upon the urban landscape not with foreboding but with an exciting, optimistic outlook, reveling in the soaring skyscrapers, the gaudy neon, the noise, the perpetual motion, and the gargantuan scale that was the American cityscape in the first half of the twentieth century. This movement included artists such as Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and Joseph Stella. This movement was called Futurism (sometimes Precisionism).


Coney Island, Battle of the Lights, 1913, Joseph Stella


The city might be New York, but the movement, as well as its most prominent practitioner, were both imported. Joseph Stella was one of the original signers of the Futurist Manifesto, which, like Stella, was born in Italy where he happened to be a student at the time; and where he was greatly influenced by Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, and Umberto Boccioni, the real founders and leaders of Futurism in Europe. However, even though he was born in Italy, Stella had been an American since the age of 19 and thus was able to endow the American brand of Futurism with a delightful, bustling vigor not seen in the work of his European counterparts. His painting, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, done in 1913, is a fantastic example of this. Though stylistically quite abstract, one can nevertheless make out a melange of roller coasters, sea gulls, Ferris wheels, and neon signs rising from a dark well-littered base to a towering pinnacle replete with searchlights and skyrockets. You can almost smell the popcorn and cotton candy!

Brooklyn Bridge: Variaton on an
Old Theme, 1939, Joseph Stella

However Stella's most famous work came some 26 years later and is, coloristically at least, more subdued, lofty, and grand. The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an old theme, came at the high point in his career (he died in 1946). Rising this time from a base depicting the city's skyline, steel cables sweep upward majestically to a pinnacle illuminated by the beam of a single searchlight, between the lofty, Gothic arches that are the trademark of this landmark. Through these arches are the stylized skyscrapers that symbolize his version of the urban landscape, soaring daily to new heights amidst the chattering of the jackhammers and the shrill sirens of emergency vehicles. Here it seems, Stella has replaced the delicious smells of the amusement park with the vibrant sounds of the big city.

The Arensberg Circle

It is hard to overstate the profound effect the 1912 Armory Show in NewYork had upon modern art in the U.S.  For example, on the last day of the show, a man named Walter Arensberg and his wife, Louise, happened to drop by.  Walter was a Harvard educated journalist who had studied in Italy and wrote poetry.  They were impressed.  With an almost spiritual zeal they began to collect work by many of the artists exhibiting at the show.  In no time the walls of their West Sixty-seventh Street apartment were covered with works primarily by Duchamp and Picasso, with representative pieces also by Braque, Gris, and Miro.  They apparently were also quite taken with the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi.  They owned 19 of them.  Their collection eventually grew to include some 400 works of contemporary art, with its centerpiece, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase which coincidentally was the Arensbergs' first purchase that final day of the Armory Show.   
   
However, more than merely collecting, the Arensbergs, like their expatriat counterparts, the Stein's in Paris, let their apartment became a mecca for the Avant-Garde in New York.  Marcel Duchamp actually moved in with them for a time when he first arrived in the city, fleeing the conflict of WW I.  This may account for why they ended up with so many of his paintings.  In any case, out of this enclave of progressive artists and poets eventually grew The Society of Independent Artists founded in 1917.  Among the members of this group were Man Ray, Duchamp, Walter Pach, Katherine Dreier, George Bellows and William Glackens.  
   
By the 1920's, the Arensberg's had taken their art collection and moved to California, but the group they fostered, nicknamed the Arensberg Circle, continued to grow, at various times including such younger, American artists as Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, even dancer Isadora Duncan.  Gradually, under the leadership of Duchamp and Man Ray, this group evolved into the American branch of the Dada movement and that in turn led to the founding of yet another group, the Societe Anonyme, which held annual exhibitions promoting some of the most progressive artistic experimentation to be done in America at the time.  The Societe even purchased works by many of their members, and though the organization remained active for only a few years, their art collection eventually became the basis for the founding of New York's famous Museum of Modern Art in 1929.  Makes one wonder what might have happened if Walter and his wife had decided to take in a movie that afternoon in 1912, rather than an art show.



New York's Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) today



The Academie Julian

In the Studio, 1881, Marie Bashkirtseff. Classes were segregated by gender.

Roldolphe Julian, 1870s

In the more than three years that I've been perusing the lives of famous (and near-famous) artists, I keep encountering one name quite consistently--Paris's Academie Julian. Although the school was rather small by today's standards (in fact, those of the 19th century, as well) it seems to have had an outsized impact on the fine arts of not just the late 1800s but much of the first half of the 20th century too. With one or two exceptions, the instructors were not famous artists. Rodolphe Julian was mostly famous for having founded the school rather than for his painting. Adolphe-William Bouguereau was probably the most famous painter to have taught there and he was merely "moonlighting" from his day job at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he was something of a kingpin instructor. Perhaps even more than the high and mighty Ecole des Beaux Arts, the Academie Julian is remembered not for its instructors but for its instruction, and the seemingly endless list of major figures in art history from that period who passed through its doors.

Bouguereau's Atlier (class), 1891, Jefferson David Chalfant. Drawing the nude human figure was the cornerstone of the Academie Julian curriculum.

Passage de Panoramas, home of the
Academie Julian from 1868 to 1959.

Those doors were on the Passage des Panoramas, the first covered shopping mall in Paris, located in an artsy area about three blocks north of the Louvre and a block or two east of the Paris Opera House. When Roldolphe opened his storefront operation "in the mall" he didn't start out to compete with the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In fact, he intended his atlier to be a private "prep school" for art students seeking to pass the rigorous entrance exam for France's premier artist training school. His chief competition was the Académie Colarossi, on the Île de la Cité (near Notre Dame Cathedral), opened by the Italian Sculptor Filippo Colarossi in the 1870s. Both schools accepted women. The Ecole des Beaux Arts manifestly did not until around 1898. Though the classes were separated by gender, the instruction, using nude models, was identical. Students of both sexes began by drawing from plaster casts. Judging by paintings done by students such as Marie Bashkirtseff (top) in 1881, facilities were somewhat cramped and congested. One of her "friends" drew a caricature of her at her easel (below, right). College kids in those days were apparenly not much different from today. Jeffereson David Chalfant's Bouguereau's Atlier (above)from 1891, seems more relaxed and orderly.

Marie Bashkirtseff at her easel.
Ladies' fashions during the late
1800s were not well suited
for working all day at an easel.

It could well be argued that the inclusion of female art students, unable to obtain academic art training elsewhere, made the Academie Julian more than just a prep school. Certainly a number of male artists (many of them Americans) saw it that way. It was undoubtedly cheaper, less formal, and far less regimented than it's official counterpart across the Seine from the Louvre. Yet the art instruction at the Academie Julian was at least on a par with that of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and some might say even better. There was official recognition of this fact when, in the 1880s, Academie Julian students were made eligible to compete for the Ecole's prestigeous Prix de Rome (an all-expenses-paid year to study art in Rome).

The list of famous artists who attended classes at the Academie Julian is enough to make your eyes glaze over, (but, to name just a few) they include Grant Wood,, Jean Arp, Cecilia Beaux, Henri Matisse, Kahlil Gibran, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, Thomas Hart Benton, John Singer Sargent, Diego Rivera, Emile Bernard, and Charles Demuth (and those are just some of the ones I've written about).



The Acamemie Julian today.

Study of a Male Nude in Julian's Atlier,
1902-03, Alfred Munnings. Apparently a
slender physique was not considered
essential for male models.

Much like successful private art schools today, during the next few decades, until his death in 1907, Rodolphe Julian expanded his educational enterprise, branching out to as many as five locations all over Paris. Art students still attend classes at the Academie Julian (above), located not far from where it was first founded. Today, however, and since 1959, the school has become a part of ESAG (École Supérieure d'Arts Graphiques) Penninghem, founded by painter/ceramist Guillaume Met de Penninghen and the decorator Jacques d’Andon in 1953. This school has branches in major cities around the world, though they tend to emphasize graphic design more than traditional fine arts.

An Academie Julian brochure from 1903
--lots of staring at the model but not much art happening.

 

Romaine Brooks

La Trajet, 1900, Romaine Brooks. The model was Ida Rubenstein.

Romaine Brooks
Self-portrait,1923, perhaps
her most recognized work.

I've never written about a lesbian artist before (not knowingly, at least). I have, however written about several gay male artists such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Leonardo da Vinci, Andy Warhol, and some others. For the majority of these artists, their sexuality was mostly incidental to their work, if not their lives. In writing about such artists I make it a habit not to dwell on gender preferences. That's not the case with the American expatriate painter, Romaine Brooks. Brooks was a lesbian, and her sexuality permeated virtually every aspect of her life and her work. She dressed as a man, she painted portraits of mostly women, she lived with writer, Natalie Barney, for over fifty years, and though she was married briefly to a man, (who was gay) it seems to have been a turbulent marriage of convenience for them both (she was rich, he wasn't). Moreover, had she not been one of the few openly gay female artists of her time, she would probably be little remembered today.

 

Beatrice Romaine Goddard had a difficult, one might even say tragic, childhood. Born in 1874 in Rome to a wealthy American family, her father deserted his wife, two daughters, and mentally ill son when she was four. She grew up in New York, emotionally abused by her mother, who gave all her attention to her violent son. Eventually, Romaine was put in foster care with a relatively poor family only to have support payments cut off, causing them to sink into poverty. Even though her maternal grandfather was a multi-millionaire, Romaine refused to divulge his name or contact him for fear of being sent back to her mother. Her foster parents eventually located her grandfather on their own. She ended up in an Episcopal boarding school.

 

Romaine Brooks, ca. 1900,
much more attractive than
seen in her self-portraits.

After graduation, Romaine obtained from her mother money enough to move to Paris where she briefly trained to be a singer, working in a cabaret. Later, moving on to Rome she studied art, the only woman in her life drawing class. Not surprisingly, she was a victim of sexual harassment, which she quickly ended by decking her tormentor with his book of underlined pornographic passages. Constantly battling money problems, Romaine returned to Paris for more art studies, then to the island of Capri where she was to spend much of the rest of her life. With the death of her mother and brother in 1901, Romaine and her sister inherited her grandfather's considerable estate. Now independently wealthy, men suddenly found the struggling young artist quite attractive. In 1903 she married an unsuccessful homosexual pianist, John Ellingham Brooks, who objected vehemently to her masculine mode of dress not to mention her tight control over her wealth. He refused to be seen in public with her. They separated after less than a year, and though they were never divorced, neither were they ever really married in the first place.

 

The Black Cape, 1907, Romaine Brooks, 
one of her few feminine portraits.

Disposing of her husband (though, for some reason, keeping his name), and dissatisfied with her painting as well (particularly her colorful palette), Romaine Brooks rented a studio in St. Ives on England's Cornish coast where she delved into shades of gray, influenced greatly by the work of another American expatriate, James McNeill Whistler. Having no need to sell her work, she also had no need to pay heed to the swirling modernist movement during the first decades of the 20th century. Her palette was dominated by black, white, and gray, with occasional tints of ochre and umber, all of which caused her to stand out artistically as much as her lifestyle did socially. Moving to Paris, Brooks ignored the avant-garde, her wealth allowing her to mingle among, and paint the upper class social celebrities of the time, several of whom she briefly took at lovers. Recognized by the art dealer, Durand Ruel, who fostered an exhibition of her work in 1910, her reputation as a portrait artist grew along with her high society friendships.

 

Natalie Barney, 1920, Romaine Brooks,
her companion for more than 50 years.

After a lengthy relationship with actress/dancer Ida Rubenstein (top), whom she painted more often than any other model, Romaine Brooks met the left-bank American writer, Natalie Clifford Barney (right). Today we would call it an open, same-sex marriage, though in pre-WW I France, such arrangements were, of course, unheard of. They built a house with two separate wings joined by a dining room to accommodate their need to be together, yet separate. Though frequently apart, their "arrangement" lasted more than fifty years. Brook's list of paintings from this period might also be termed her list of female lovers as well. Her short hair and masculine attire became fashionable, as seen in many of Brook's portraits at the time (including her own).



The Impeders, 1930, Romaine Brooks.

After 1925, Romaine Brooks quit painting self-portraits. In fact, she quit painting almost entirely. Only four portraits are known to exist from that point on. She was, however the subject of numerous literary portraits by Natalie Barney and her friends. Brooks turned more to drawing, especially complex line drawings. The Impeders, from 1930, is typical of her style in later years. When an artist fails to produce, they sink into oblivion. Even though she lived to the ripe old age of 96, by the 1960s, Romaine Brooks was largely forgotten. Only in recent years, with the advent of the LGBT movement, has Brooks' art come to symbolize the openness and lifestyle freedom of expression that only her independent wealth would allow one-hundred years ago.

Romaine Brooks poses in her studio around 1960. The writer, Truman Capote, termed
her studio, "the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935, or thereabouts."

 

Painting with Light

Self-Portrait Aerograph, Man Ray

Everyone likes to grow as an individual. And as artists, it's practically demanded of us. But I wonder how often any of us have stumbled into a new medium which turned us totally around and pointed us in a new direction with our art. That's what happened in 1915 when painter, Emmanual Radnitsky, purchased a camera to photograph his work. He was twenty-five years old, about the same age as modern photography at the time. And, though he never quite gave up traditional painting, more and more he became known by the title the poet, Jean Cocteau, called him, "The artist who paints with light." At a time when anyone serious about photography had to develop his or her own work, Radnitsky discovered he could create exciting "paintings" by simply manipulating with various objects the light striking a sheet of photographic paper (which required very long exposures at the time). He called them "rayographs" which was not only technically accurate but also a clever pun utilizing his newly adopted name--Man Ray.

Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her
Shadows, 1917, Man Ray

Today, the "rayograph" is more often called an aerograph. It's a neat little trick commonly done in high school photography classes (before darkrooms became obsolete), but in 1917, it was both cutting edge painting and photography, erasing forever the line between the two. Man Ray's most famous painting is a nearly abstract, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows which he also recreated using aerography. As a painter/photographer, he had the best of both worlds, creating equally exciting work with or without a camera. He was already successful as a painter with his first one-man show in 1915 where he sold six paintings for some $2,000 to a single collector. He was also a fixture at the weekly soirees of the Arensbergs in New York where he met all the important American painters of his time including Charles Demuth, Georges Bellows, Joseph Stella and the French expatriate, Marcel Duchamp (then living in New York to escape the war). Duchamp introduced him to the current art rage, Dada, and after the war, persuaded him to move back to Paris with him where he became an important leader in the Surrealist movement.

Aerograph Nudes, 1919, Man Ray

Ray spent the next twenty years of his life there, not so much painting as creating. He loved shocking the artistic sensibilities of Parisian cafe society with his outrageous forays into surrealist sculpture. Today, his flat iron with nails welded to its bottom is a classic illustration of surrealist sculpture--a familiar object whose purpose is deliberately negated by the artist. Forced to return to New York by the Second World War, Man Ray found himself more in vogue as a photographer than a painter. In fact he found his work IN Vogue (the magazine), as a fashion photographer while in his spare time, he was also experimenting with yet another photographic medium--motion pictures. His first movie, The Return to Reason which he made in Paris in 1922, while not a commercial success, certainly broadened the medium, allowing him to explore movement, coupled with painted light and sculpture. Being interested in movie making caused him to gravitate toward the West-coast for a time in the late 40s before returning to his beloved Paris where lived until his death in 1976. He was 86.

Albert Pinkham Ryder

Toilers of the Sea, 1882, Albert Pinkham Ryder

In our on board, mental history of art, which we each develop, we are not in the habit of giving American artists much in the way of a leadership role in the development of modern art at least until after WW I and often not until after WW II. For the most part, this is a fairly accurate mental picture. But that's not to say there weren't some artists in this country, even as early as the last couple decades of the nineteenth century that, while perhaps not leaders in any sense of the word, were still doing work that, minus its historical background, could easily pass for some of the Modern Art being done as much as fifty years after its date. The painting, Toilers of the Sea comes to mind, and its artist, Albert Pinkham Ryder. The painting was done in 1882.

Roadside Meeting, 1880,
Albert Pinkham Ryder

The work is so heavily identified with Ryder it's often the only thing people think of when his name is mentioned. For those unfamiliar with his work, it's a seascape, the horizon of which is set in the lower half of the painting, a glowing moon with it's yellowish halo glows in the sky while the silhouette of a boat with a single triangular sail labors mightily to make its way against the surf. Except for the suggestion of a few clouds in the sky and the foamy surf, there is little in the way of detail that has not been simplified away in a work that approaches abstraction so closely it's not unlike what Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, or Georgia O'Keefe were doing in the 1930s. And though it's not typical of the artist's work in general it's this rich, thickly painted, abstraction that makes him an important link between the academic tradition (which he more often adhered to) and the Modern Art which he was to influence.

Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 1888-91,
Albert Pinkham Ryder

Born in 1847, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as a child, he had a few lessons from an amateur painter, but when the family moved to New York, he not only was able to study at the National Academy, but fortunate enough to make several brief trips to Europe as well. And, though his presence in Europe during the 1860s and 70s would put him in the midst of the Impressionist era, he seems to have been academically oriented. However, his personal style was so strong that more important than any artistic influence he might have picked up, was a love of Gothic literature and the Scotch-English flavor his work acquired, such as seen in his 1880 painting, Roadside Meeting (above right), or his 1888-91 effort, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens (directly above). A colleague of Louis Tiffany, Stanford White, John La Farge, and his dealer, stained-glass artist Daniel Cottier, Ryder was a romantic at heart, working on the same painting incessantly for years, layering colors and adjusting his compositions until often the paint weighed more than the canvas and frame combined.  But it is not his thick paint or heroic subjects for which Albert Pinkham Ryder is remembered, but his ability to distill his compositions to their most elemental essence and his willingness to paint for emotional impact rather than academic detail that has endeared him to the legions of Modern artists whom he has influenced.