Pierre Charles L'Enfant

Though many departures have been made from L'Enfant's original plan, its spirit continues
to guide and inspire the urban planners of Washington, DC, and cities around the world.

A couple weeks ago I presented to you the most beautiful new city in the world, Brasilia (02-21-13). In today's world, beauty is planned. That which grows unplanned, ugliness is more often than not the result. I could cite any number of urban centers in the world today to validate this fact, most of which are ancient cities. Any beauty they might have acquired over the centuries has been the result of the imposition of modern day planning, or simply a matter of accident. On the other side, Paris, France, is today considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Two hundred years ago it was one of the ugliest cities in the world. One man made all the difference--Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III, imposed order over medieval chaos, squalor, and fetid urban sprawl. But he was not the first urban planner. Before that, the Romans had dabbled in the art/science with their rectilinear-grid military cities, and it's likely the Egyptians laid out planned urban centers a few thousand years before that. Only trace remnants of either survive.

 

Pierre Charles L'Enfant

However, a generation before Haussmann, another Frenchman sought and won the opportunity to do what had not been done for centuries, perhaps millennia. The result of his efforts still thrives. His name was Pierre, Charles L'Enfant. The year was 1790, the place was a swampy little stretch of wilderness on the Potomac River just outside Georgetown, Maryland, in the brand new nation of the United States of America. There he would scratch out in the 18th century wilderness that new nation's capital city...a beautiful city, a practical, efficient city, a grand, monumental city--a planned city. 

 

The Capitol (Senate wing), ca. 1800.
That's Pennsylvania Ave. going off to the right.

The area had little in the way of natural beauty and what there was likely went unrecognized by the sparse inhabitants. Moreover, despite L'Enfant's radical, radial, farsighted plans, his new capital city was far from beautiful for more than a hundred years after the first survey team chopped away the wilderness undergrowth to form Pennsylvania Avenue. Money was scarce. Time was of the essence. The new nation's government was due to arrive in just ten years. Land speculators descended upon the place. Politics raised its ugly, inevitable head. On top of that, L'Enfant himself, though an excellent engineer, lacked tact. He was a stickler for details in an era when the niceties of city planning were little understood, much less appreciated. Washington eventually fired him, replacing him with a political hack.

 

From Georgetown to the Anacostia River, L'Enfant's plan foresaw a century of growth with
remarkable foresight.

Pierre Charles L'Enfant was born in the northern French province of Eure et Loir in 1754. His father was a portrait artist to Louis XV. Young Pierre studied at the Royal Academy in the Louvre before seeking adventure fighting the hated English on the other side of the Atlantic in the American revolution where his talents as a military engineer were highly valued by the Continental Army. Though wounded during the siege of Savannah, he recovered and by the end of the war was serving under fellow Frenchman the Marquis de La Fayette, a major general on Washington's staff. When the war ended, L'Enfant set up a highly successful civil engineering business in the rapidly growing, but very unplanned, city of New York.

 

Washington, DC, owes it's appearance today to three factors, L'Enfant's planning,
 the Tidal Basin Potomac Park revitalization of 1880-1900, and the freeways of the
1950s and 60s. Compare the map above to the aerial photo. Most of the park
area west and south of the Washington Monument was once part of the river.

When you want to be a city planner it helps to know the right people, and L'Enfant knew the President of the United States. More importantly, Washington knew the talented French designer, engineer, and architect; recognizing, trusting, and appreciating his aptitude for such a grand endeavor as planning an entire city. L'Enfant applied for the job in 1789, though it was a full two years before he was commissioned and submitted his initial plan to Washington (and Thomas Jefferson, who assisted the president). Though the new federal district encompassed a hundred square miles, L'Enfant's plan occupied less than one-fourth of that. Yet, within its mesh of diagonal avenues and grand, grassy vistas overlapping the standard grid of streets and alleys, were the seeds of the beautiful city we know today. The marshes have been conquered, the canals drained, the monuments dedicated, the cherry trees planted, the landmark government buildings erected, all gracing the broad, grassy mall that was the heart of L'Enfant's masterful, groundbreaking design.

This Civil War era map of Washington, DC, gives an indication of just how much the
20th century changed the face of the city. Note the original design for the Washington
Monument in the lower left corner.

 

David and Florence

Florence, Italy, today--Jerusalem's rival as the "City of David."

The great cities of the world each have within them a great work of art that, through civic pride, or sometimes largely by accident, have come to be seen as symbols of that city. New York has its Empire State Building, London its Tower of Big Ben, Paris its Eiffel Tower, Washington it's Capitol, Orlando has Cinderella's Castle, Cairo its pyramids, San Francisco its Golden Gate Bridge, Rome its Coliseum, and Moscow its Cathedral of St. Basil. All of these monuments to artistic expression were, however, created for other than symbolic purposes. In 1501, the city of Florence needed a symbol. It had been suffering for some years something of an identity crisis, unsure whether it wanted to be a republic or an oligarchy, buffeted internally by Machiavellian politics on the one hand and righteous Savonarola outrage on the other. The ruling family, the de Medici had been overthrown and banished, followed by a republican form of government reinstalled, temporarily at least.

 

Michelangelo's Florence, 1493

David, 1430, Donatello

For as long as anyone could remember, the city had always identified with the heroic figure of David from the Old Testament, idealizing themselves (with some justification) as giant killers. Donatello had cast a David (right)  in bronze in 1430, the first fully nude sculptural figure since antiquity. It wasn't very heroic though. It was the life-size figure of a sensuous, adolescent boy wearing a slightly outlandish hat, very closely aligned with scripture perhaps, but not a very impressive civic icon. Verrocchio had made another life-size figure of David (below, left), about 1476, somewhat more idealistic, but bearing something of a teenage "smart-ass" look at having bested a superior force in slaying Goliath, whose head lies at his feet. Not only was this figure not quite the look a proud city could be proud of, worse than that, it was a Medici creation. They turned to a longtime favorite son for something better--a giant killer of gigantic proportions himself--a monumental David.

David, 1473-75, Verrocchio

The city fathers of Florence didn't have much to offer the upstart rising star of the new century. The brash, young sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarroti, was 26 and of a mind that he could do anything. Carve a David? Sure, how many you want of'em? Originally the figure was planned for the a buttress of the cathedral, high above the ground. (Later it's location was changed to the square in front of the town hall.) The money was downright insulting and the marble was an old twelve-foot hunk of stone another sculptor had hacked away at some twenty years before. Once the monolith was raised from the weeds out back of the cathedral and carted gingerly to a warehouse where Michelangelo could work on it, he saw the problem was worse than he'd thought. The stone was too shallow. Some twelve feet in height, the irregularly shaped marble was, in some places, barely 18 inches deep. Undeterred, Michelangelo borrowed a friend and posed him nude, started sketching, did some measurements, and pronounced the project doable--though barely (no pun intended). It occupied him for most of three years, reportedly some of the happiest of his working life.  

David (detail), 1501-04, Michelangelo

My own heroic view of David.
Florence actually boasts three
Davids, two of them copies. This
copy stands outside the Palazzo
Vecchio where the original stood
 until 1873 when it was moved
inside to the Academia. The other
copy dominates the Piazza
Michelangelo across the Arno on
a hill overlooking the city.

The result was a supremely classical figure, at least until one's gaze lifted to the face of Michelangelo's giant with it's determined gaze and youthfully, heroic spirit unlike anything Greek or Roman. It was Florentine. It announced to the world that Florence the city, and Michelangelo the artist, were powerful forces to be reckoned with in the future.

The third copy, David in bronze,
Piazza Michelangelo, Florence, Italy.
Other works by the sculptor adorn the base.

 



Manet, the Bridge

An Atelier in the Batignolles (detail),
 1870, Henri Fantin-Latour, depicts
Manet better than most of the man's
self-portraits.

One of the things that has always fascinated me in studying various eras, or schools, or movements in art isn't the artists whom art historians have tucked neatly within whatever period or stylistic grouping they've ordained, but those artists who don't fit within these groups--what I've come to call "bridge" artists. Van Gogh is a perfect example. He's not an Impressionist, and though he's sometimes referred to as a post-Impressionist, his work finds little comfort among that of Gauguin, Matisse, Vlaminck, Kokoshka, and the others of that era. Van Gogh is a bridge between Impressionism and their work, just as Cézanne is a bridge between Post-Impressionism and Cubism. In fact, Cézanne might well be considered an even longer bridge between Impressionism (skipping completely over Post-Impressionism) to Picasso and Cubism. Another such bridge is the work of Edouard Manet.

Despite no small amount of philosophical influence upon the artists involved, it might be going to far to say that, had it not been for Manet, Impressionism would never have happened. Yet some knowledge of Manet, his background, and his work, makes the development of Impressionism much more understandable. Manet was trained as an Academic artist. Indeed, though he dabbled some in Impressionism, he never displayed with the Impressionists and never considered himself one of them. By the same token, no one, least of all the academicians, would ever have considered him an academic. In fact, for the most part, they hated his work. Yet his content is very often of the old school. It was not what Manet painted that alienated him from the Academic traditions but how he painted. And this is what makes him a bridge between the two diametrically opposed groups.

The Mocking of Christ, 1865, Edouard Manet

Perhaps one of the best examples of "Manet the bridge" can be seen in his 1865 work, The Mocking of Christ (above, sometimes titled Jesus Being Mocked). It's a large, life-size canvas depicting a mostly nude Christ, seated, being taunted by a bearded Roman soldier and two other figures. In various forms, it was a scene frequently painted by academic artists. Yet this is a thoroughly modern painting. It has much the feeling of a snapshot from a performance of a passion play. It appears staged, set before a backdrop of infinite blackness, sharply, even harshly lit, with figures appearing more contemporary than biblical. The helmeted Roman wears a full beard. Roman soldiers were traditionally clean shaven. (His head may have been added to the body of another figure, inasmuch as it appears slightly too small, given the hulking bulk of the soldier, below, left.) The kneeling figure wears what could only be considered Medieval garb, while the standing figure bearing Christ's cloak seems rather barbaric, neither Roman nor Jewish (although perhaps quite French). The figure of Christ seems to have what looks very much like a fake beard, somewhat redder, fuller, and longer than the rest of the hair on his head (below, right). Manet was criticized for using a common laborer as his model in painting Christ. His knees are knobby and graceless, his feet large and misshapen, his body scrawny and pale. Nowhere in this scene is there to be found any beauty, color, or warmth. To modern eyes, at least in his depiction of Christ, Manet appears to be right on target--a poor, unattractive, hardworking, tortured man of immense spiritual strength. The Academics cringed.

The Mocking of Christ (detail), 1865,
Edouard Manet

One of the things that has always linked Manet with Modern Art is the apparently flatness in his figural modeling. That's especially the case in The Mocking of Christ. I've always had the theory that Manet used the crude, flash powder photography of his day to photograph his models and then painted mostly, if not exclusively (in some instances, even slavishly), from the resulting prints. Such a method would explain a lot about the technical aspects of this painting and much of Manet's other work as well (such as Luncheon on the Grass). Here it would explain the rather tight composition, the news photo-like cropping of the kneeling figure's posterior. It would explain the relative lack of color and the tendency toward sepia. It would explain the total lack of background detail. It would explain the frontal lighting, the total absence of shadow, the minimal modeling, the "sturdy" feet, even the apparently fake beard. In the mid 1860s, photography was no longer in its infancy, but neither was it advanced enough to be a common or convenient tool for painters. Manet appears to have been learning how to use the newest photographic technology of his time and, tellingly, falling victim to some of the obvious pitfalls artists painting realistically today have long since learned to expect and avoid.

The Mocking of
Christ (detail), 1865,
Edouard Manet

If Manet made heavy, and somewhat clumsy, use of photography in creating this work (and the clues are too numerous and too obvious for me to believe otherwise), it would appear that, in addition to encountering the pitfalls of photographic sources, he also seems to have discovered the advantages as well. There is an immediacy to this painting that is far outside the Academic tradition. The drama is not in the action of his figures or in their authenticity (as was the Academic habit) but in their visual impact. Manet has cast such a glaring light upon the physical, and here even more on the emotional, torture his Christ endures with such incredible peace and passivity that it seems to almost literally smack the viewer in the face. His captors are not seen as ugly or evil but, like the viewer, mere mortals, incapable of understanding the perfect goodness of the man in their midst. Manet's attempt to instill a "you are there" presence is only partially successful. He succeeds only in capturing a re-enactment of the mocking of Christ, but it is one as powerful as any painted retelling of the event before or since. This painting, for all its technical, academic faults, "works" in the modern sense. Like Manet, the artist-bridge, it bridges the gap of 2000 years between Christ's humiliating death and our understanding of it today.

Male-Female Content

Boy art or girl art?

More than any other element in art, content is the first and most important factor an artists considers in choosing to do art. What shall I paint today? Shall I decorate or pontificate? Shall I shock or schlock. I have noted many times in my writing on this subject that all artists tend to paint (or recreate) that which is important to them. This first decision, coupled with one as to size, are the beginning of a chain of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decisions making up the creative process from conception to signing. Two factors play a determining role in this decision. The first is gender. After forty years of teaching painting to people from 6 to 60, I've been an observer of male/female subject matter choices for quite a long time. And, I must say that what was true in 1972 when I graduated from college and began giving evening adult art classes for $3.00 per session (2 1/2 hours), isn't necessarily so today. The second factor, and the most interesting one to me, is age. Maybe not so much in the past, but today, age may be the most important determining factor in male/female subject matter selection.

Only in early elementary school does gender
not play a significant roll in content choices.

At the first and second grade level I've never seen much difference in subject matter choices between boys and girls. However as the child passes the age of eight, the traditional, expected, stereotypical choices begin to emerge. It is at this age that boys and girls are starting to explore their gender roles. With the girls, all is cuteness, sweetness, hearts and flowers (I know it's not politically correct, but that's the way it is). As expected, boys tend toward sports, wild-life, and violent subject matter. This continues to be the case until about the seventh or eighth grades when there is a more structured art program and the choices by gender seem to begin merging somewhat. At the high school level, there seems to be (now at least, more so than in the past) a tendency for girls to be attracted to traditionally male subject matter, though where animals are concerned, they prefer pets to wildlife, and female athletes to male. This undoubtedly reflects the broadening of female gender roles in more recent years. Conversely, boys continue to show little interest in traditionally female subject matter.

Syllia's Dream, Diane Ozdamar

At the adult level is where I think times have changed the most. Thirty or forty years ago female subjects included pets, still-lifes, florals, landscapes, and portraits. Male subject matter then often included wildlife, landscapes, portraits, sports, and large antiques (planes, trains, and automobiles). Today I find few women interested in still lifes or florals at all (except, perhaps, in the case of seniors). Today, the favorite subject of women seems to be women. For centuries, the female nude used to be the special province of men. Not anymore. Google "paintings by female artists," and it's like a nude deluge. Beyond content, and speaking just in terms of painting, there is also a much greater desire to mix media today than in the past with women seeming more likely to do so than men. Likewise, women seem to have fallen in love with abstracts in recent years far more than have men. The one new area of content for men seems to be that of fantasy art. Here again, age makes a difference. Younger artists tend toward the darker, Gothic realm of this genre. On a higher plane, the question all this raises is, can we, or should we, differentiate as to content by gender? In any case, it's getting more difficult to do so. Of course these observations are based largely on the work of amateur or semi-professional painters, but from my past experience, and in perusing the Internet, they carry over pretty well into the professional realm as well.

The Way, Truth, and Light, S. Williams (male or female artist?)

 

Postmodern Portraits

Chuck Close Self-portrait, 2000

Portraits have been around almost as long as artists. Except, perhaps, during the Paleolithic era with its wild animals painted on the walls of caves, some form of human representation has permeated virtually every culture and art era since artists started painting using the stiffened tails of dead animals. Type into a search engine, any art era that comes to mind then add the word "portrait;" you'll see what I mean. With the passing of the era of Modern Art in the 1960s, and all the changes the Postmodern era has brought to the way artists think and work, there is no reason to believe the portrait should be immune to such pressures. Warhol kicked it off, his Pop portraits so iconic at this point in time as to demand no more than minimal mentioning. The Postmodern portraits of Chuck Close (top) fall into the same category, though, since he still lives, his work continues to evolve.

Russian collage artist Maxim Ksuta skips paint, preferring paste in producing portraits.

What separates a Postmodern portrait from those of the Modern era and all that went before? In large part the differences boil down to two factors, technology and thought processes (how the artist thinks). These two factors are, by no means limited to portraiture, but "people pictures" may be the best way of illustrating them inasmuch as the human face is a narrowing factor in art. Chief among the technical factors have been photography and the computer. Warhol's silkscreen portraits were all photo-generated. Chuck Close's mini-abstract squares would not be possible without photography. Tie the computer to the camera and then kick in the "outside the box" creative thinking of the typical Postmodern artist and portraiture demonstrates in a nutshell the impact postmodernism has had on what artists do today. It's not just a matter of acrylics over oils, photos over live models, computers over trial and error, but instead, revolution over evolution. It's the difference between a candle and an LED.

The Russian artist Maxim Ksuta's work (above, 2010) with giant photo collage portraits, though superficially similar Chuck Close, differs in that Ksuta eschews the use of paint, instead using tiny photos of famous works of art. Unlike Close, who toils laboriously for months over a single painting, Ksuta allows the computer to do all the tedious work while he simply "cuts and pastes" to his canvas as directed by his PC. That's Postmodern technology married to a new way of thinking about what an artist does and needn't do in producing art.

Chi Sono Self-portrait

Postmodern Portraiture Staggers
with Simultaneous Art, Nigel Tomm

If the artist happens to be a photographer, the results can be even more Postmodernly outrageous, as in the "cycloptic" self portrait of lens-master, Chi Sono (above, left). Nigel Tomm (above, right) takes the portrait photo and crumples it. In effect, he destroys it. Then making amends, he flattens it again, re-photographing the results. Notice how many Postmodern artists reject the needless, time- consuming step of painting their creations. One who didn't was Shepherd Fairey in his now famous portrait of Barack Obama, titled Hope dating from the President's 2008 campaign for office. Fairey was criticized (and sued) for using a copyrighted photo as the basis of his work. Nonetheless, art critics (albeit liberal ones) have recognized the painting as the Postmodern equivalent of the "Uncle Sam Wants YOU," poster illustration of the Modern ear nearly a hundred years ago.



It'll probably never adorn the walls of the White House, but Shepherd Fairey's much-
criticized and highly-praised political portrait is nothing if not Postmodern.
(Notice the bipartisan reds and blues which predominate.)

I know something about Postmodern portrait artists. I am one. My own effort along this line (bottom) involved technology, my pocket digital camera; digital print processing; and a reflective glass golden globe (not exactly new technology but not seen since the Renaissance in the art of portraiture). Most of all, however it reflects a Postmodern mode of thinking as to what a portrait should be. Naturally it depicts my physical appearance, though significantly distorted by my environmental contact with daily life (a garden ornament I pass by at least once a week). Likewise, the painting's very existence demonstrates the "outside the box" thinking I mentioned earlier, as well as how I work, how I think, and how I have fun doing both.

A Postmodern Self-portrait, 2011, Jim Lane

HTML Part 1

 

Over the past several hundred years, the list of skills an artist might acquire in order to succeed have gradually increased along with the complexity of our modern world. For instance, the advent of photography alone added substantially to this skills list, whether one works from photos, employs them as part of the work itself, or merely photographs one's own work. But almost nothing on the list is absolutely necessary for success. There's little in the way of artistic or business services that money won't buy. However there are quite a few skills for which an artist has to pay dearly if he or she chooses not to get involved in that area of expertise. Photography is only one. Framing is another. Bookkeeping comes to mind. And still another is Web design services. Fortunately, none of these skills is beyond the intellectual grasp of even the average artist if that individual has the will to devote a little precious time to pursuing them.

In my book, Art THINK, I touched briefly on one of these skills--Web site design. I talked about the why, when, where, who, and even if an artists should have a Web site. But I did not mention the  "how." Despite the common usage of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software designed to make site construction as simple as possible, before an artist can write, or even edit HTML he or she must first be able to read it. In the interest of helping along this line, I'm going to begin a highly simplified discourse on the subject.   

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It's not rocket science. It sounds pretty intimidating but really it's merely a means of editing text so various browsers can read and present the contents in something like a consistent manner, given the hundreds of software and hardware configurations out there online. This editing function is accomplished by means of the use of "tags." The tags are contained in sets of "less than" and "greater than" symbols, "<" and ">." An example is the first tag at the top of an HTML document.  This tells the browser what it's looking at. It's called an "opening" tag (above, left). At the end of the document, is a closing tag which is identical  

With few exceptions, in HTML coding, every opening tag must be followed at some point by a closing tag.

In future episodes, (in small doses) I'll continue helping would-be artist become masters of their own Web destinies. I'll go as slowly as I can, not as a tutorial, but so artists can get past the fear of the unknown. Hopefully, if you can read it, you may one day be able to edit it, and perhaps beyond that, even write it. (Even with a WYSIWYG program, editing skills are quite valuable.)  In the meantime, if you've never looked at HTML code before, try right-clicking in any blank area of this or any Web page, then selecting "View source" from the window that appears. (This blog was created using BlogSpot's WYSIWYG software.) Within seconds your eyes will glaze over as you scan down over the page behind the page. Reread the text above then try it again. Try to separate content from tags. Compare the source code to the Web page. Concentrate on the similarities. Don't try to understand all the tags, just try to identify what each section does.  Now, close the page, uncross your eyes, and go lie down. It gets easier.

French Provincial Architecture

French Provincial style in a fairly modest incarnation--restrained, yet stately.

As a nation, our most notable cultural influence has always been English. This is especially true with all things architectural. However two other European influences have also had a lesser impact upon that in which we live--Spanish and French. It's hard to say which has had the greater weight...they're highly geographical of course...maybe also because that influence may be about equal in each case. Spanish style architectural influences are quite obvious. French influences are much subtler. And although the deep South contains a few examples of French colonial architecture, most of what we know now elsewhere (other than Chateauesque and Beaux-Art) came as a result of the First World War when those who had served in France came home intimately aware of the subtle, warm, romantic aura these homes seem to possess. Some might prefer the name French Eclectic for this style; I prefer to call them French Provincial, because they are in fact, a largely rural styling more common as a typical French farm house than an urban dwelling.

French Provincial features (facades are seldom this symmetrical).

Unlike some housing styles, French Provincial is dominated by its roof...steeply pitched, hipped, with or without dormers (more often with). Beneath that there is an attachment to masonry--brick, stone, even concrete and rubble--makes no difference. Three basic shapes prevail--the symmetrical cube (one or two story), the "L" shape with a round, corner tower housing the entry, and the asymmetrical double cube (one slightly larger than the other). Chimneys are tall, rectangular, and slender. Windows are often fairly plain, seldom adorned with much beyond shutters. Entries too are usually pretty simple, often arched, occasionally ornamented with side columns and some decorative masonry. The key element in this style is simplicity and understatement. On the "low end" they can be quite unadorned, finished in white stucco (above). On the high end, in rare cases, the style may veer toward the Beaux-Art, and occasionally aspire toward becoming chateaux. Those influenced by the architecture of Brittany and Normandy (below, North-western French provinces) may have a half-timbered Tudor look as well.

French Provincial with a Normandy influence.

French Provincial suburban style,
rather low-end for a style than
often yearns toward the grandiose.
 


In this country, the style came sandwiched between the wars as we searched diligently for a truly "American" housing style ironically by imitating our European cousins. After the war, as we seemed to "find" our own style in places like Levittown, New York, and its carbon copy suburbs outside ever other city in the country, we became deeply introspective, rejecting as impractical, or uneconomic, or even vaguely un-American, anything more lavish than the ubiquitous, all-American, sparkling white, vanilla-flavored, ranch-style bungalow. But that's another story. French Provincial is but one more eclectic influence able to banish the bland, thus flavoring American domestic architecture.


French Provincial country style--
one might almost expect a cow to
stick her head in an open window.

French Provincial
--chateau wannabe