The Gateway Arch--St. Louis, Missouri

Eero Saarinen's St. Louis Gateway arch at sunset.

Every city needs its symbol. Some, such as Washington D.C. have more than their share. Other cities rather than having a symbol consider themselves badly in need of one, such as Columbus, Ohio, the capital city of my home state. That was the case in the 1930s with the important river city of St. Louis, Missouri. Historically the city had been like the mouthpiece of a bugle through which much of the great anthem of westward expansion of the United States had emanated. From its founding in 1764 by the French fur trader Pierre Laclede, through it's annexation by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, and its famous world's fair a hundred years later, St. Louis had played a pivotal role in the westward growth of the nation. Yet, by the early 1930s, the Mississippi riverfront from which this march westward had commenced was an ugly tangle of warehouses, small factories, disreputable hovels, and railroad tracks. There was nothing of importance presiding over this ignoble mess but an old church and a courthouse (most remembered as having been the site of the first two Dred Scott trials).

 

The St. Louis Riverfront, 1942, the progress after only nine years.

One man, Luther Ely Smith, referred to as a civic leader, but really just a single private individual, unelected to any public office, started the ball rolling. He talked to the mayor, who talked to a lot of other people who, talked amongst themselves and formed the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Association (JNEMA or Jenny Mae). Notice they completely ignored the Frenchman founder. That was in 1933 amid the depths of the Great Depression, a proposal for "stimulus spending" designed as much to boost construction employment at the time as to foster community pride. Ground was cleared, money was raised, a war was fought, a design competition held, and in February, 1963, construction got underway. Why did it take thirty years for Luther Smith's idea to start taking shape? Politics, race relations, labor relations, court challenges, a world war, a Korean War, fund raising challenges, design difficulties, engineering problems, not to mention those who contended it couldn't be done and others who contended it shouldn't be done.

Architect Eero Saarinen with
a scale model of the Arch.

The second generation Finnish-American architect, Eero Saarinen won the design competition over 172 of his peers. Both Eero and his father, Eliel, had submitted separate designs while the wife and mother, Lily Swann Saarinen, a sculptress, aided in the conception of both designs. Eero Saarinen's inspiring stainless steel arch, soaring 509 feet (later growing to 580 then to 630 feet in height) to frame the St. Louis skyline won out over all the others, despite the fact that no one was quite sure it could even be built (including the architect). In any case, they had plenty of time--some fifteen years (seemingly a lifetime) to debate and design the structure of the tallest monument in the United States.

The Catenary Arch

October 28, 1965, the capping steel section
is gingerly raised into place.

Saarinen's design structure is called a catenary arch. Though optically it doesn't appear so, it's exactly the same distance wide as it is tall, its "legs'' being equilateral triangles some 54 feet each, tapering to a mere 17 feet at the top. As beautiful and accepted as the arch is, or has become, as with all such projects, the design had it's critics. Some called it a giant hairpin while another detractor referred to it as a stainless steel hitching post. Others cried plagiarism (a catenary arch wasn't all that new or original), while others were reminded of Benito Mussolini's use of such an arch as a Fascist symbol. Saarinen considered the criticism surprisingly muted, however, and amusing. He won the $10,000 prize. His company, Saarinen Associates, won a hefty design contract, and for roughly $13-million ($94-million is 2013 dollars), St. Louis got a civic symbol to rival the best any city in the country had to offer.

A dizzying view--the Gateway Arch Observation room at the top.
Trams climb the inside of both legs, which are mostly steel-encased reinforced concrete.

 

Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin Self-portrait, 1650

As artists, we all think from time to time about our legacy. Will our work still hang on walls a hundred years after our death? Will they be museum walls or bathroom walls (over the commode, perhaps)? Will anyone know who painted them, despite our name at the bottom. Nicolas Poussin probably didn't have such misgivings. He was well enough known and admired in his own time to have assuaged such doubts. Yet strangely, his legacy today as an artist would probably surprise him. He is better remembered for those artists he influenced than for his own work or that of those he trained to follow him (who are mostly unknown). Those he influenced became art icons themselves, Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Paul Cezanne, even Picasso all knew this legacy. And those were just the legitimate ones, he had dozens, maybe hundreds of imitators (which keeps art authenticators fully employed).

 

Landscape with a Calm, 1650-51, Nicolas Poussin

The bulk of Poussin's work involved massive religious paintings (although only one was commissioned by a Pope), and historical or mythological subjects. Yet, he would probably be chagrined to know that he is best remembered for his background landscapes such as his Landscape with a Calm (above) from 1650-51. Although there were usually figures, biblical or pagan, in virtually all his paintings that are essentially landscapes, it is for these romantic, idealized depictions of contrived nature (few were of actual locations) for which he is most loved and revered. Why is this? Simply, there were dozens of artist as good or better at painting God, gods, and goddesses in his time. Rome was polluted with them. Poussin eventually rose above most of them, but few, if any, artists of 17th century France or Italy were turning out painted canvases which had as their primary purpose the glorification of God's green earth.

 



Venus and Adonis, 1624, Nicolas Poussin, his last painting before decamping to Rome,
and relatively tame as compared to some of his other works from that period.

Nicolas Poussin was born in northern France in 1594. He began studying art in his native Normandy before running away to Paris when he turned eighteen. He arrived in Paris during an awkward time in the history of art, when the old apprentice system was starting to give way to academic training, thus he did not benefit from either to any great extent. He bounced around among the studios of a number of French artist of the time, remembered now mostly for having trained Poussin. Many of these eventually formed the core of the French Academie des Beaux Arts, but that was not until 1648 by which time Poussin was in Rome, already well established in his career. His early work in Paris mostly involved the illustration of the poet, Giambattista Marino's version of Ovid's Metamorphosis. Many of these early works are quite erotic (above), more Rococo than of the prevailing Baroque style.


The Death  of Germanicus, 1627, Nicolas Poussin

Poussin's association with Marino, and more importantly, Marino's association with the court of art patroness, Marie de Medici (then regent of Louis XIII) allowed him his "big break" as an artist, his move (along with Marino) to Rome in 1624, where he was to remain for the next sixteen years of his life. Rome was where the money was, where the church was, where the commissions were. Poussin's blockbuster Death of Germanicus in 1627, painted for the fabled Barberini family, cemented his place among the leading artists of Rome, bringing him almost more work than he could handle.

Spring: Adam and Eve                        Summer: Ruth and Boaz
1660-64, Nicholas Poussin

It's likely Poussin's landscapes were appreciated to some degree during his own lifetime as seen in a series of four seasonal paintings with biblical titles (though barely more than that). His Spring  depicted Adam and Eve.  His Summer is sometimes referred to as Ruth and Boaz, his Autumn was also titled, Spies with Grapes, while his winter scene depicted The Deluge (the titles here have become somewhat arbitrary over the years).

         Autumn: Spies with the Grapes                               Winter: the Deluge

1660-64, Nicolas Poussin

 

Titian Ramsay Peale

Starting today on my second thousand entries in this blog.

 

 

Titian Ramsay Peale III
Self-portrait, ca. 1845

When you're the sixteenth son born into an American family famed for it artistic, scientific, and entrepreneurial pursuits, there rests upon your shoulders something of a burden in upholding the family name. If, also, you happen to be named for a younger brother who died just the year before (at the age of 18) the birthright becomes even more onerous. That was the case with the birth of Titian Ramsay Peale, November 2, 1799. He was the son of Charles Willson Peale, painter, scientist, collector, writer, museum owner and, obviously most of all--father.

 

As I've written before in detailing the lives of the father (09-19-11), his eldest son, Raphaelle (01-02-12), a second son, Rembrandt (11-25-12), and Charles' younger brother, James Peale (11-11-11), plus an overview of the remaining Peales (sons and daughters, 09-14-10), virtually the whole family painted, and if male, bore the name of a famous painter (even one of several daughters was named for a famous painter, Angelica Kauffman Peale). There was also a Rubens Peale whom I've yet to write about.

 

Four Elk, Titian Ramsay Peale

As the youngest son in a huge family already overburdened by an abundance of professional artist, Titian Peale might have been excused from following in the family tradition of becoming a painter. He wasn't...or chose not to be. In any case Titian Ramsay Peale took up the brush. He was no Rembrandt or Raphaelle, but he could paint up a respectable landscape, especially if it was populated by some form of wildlife, as seen in his Four Elk (above), which became his area of specialization. Though he was a modestly successful painter's, Titian Peale's real interest was in the rapidly developing field destined to destroy the family's primary source of art income--photography. You see, the Peale family was best known for painting miniature portraits.

 

Kilauea Volcano, 1842, Titian Ramsay Peale. It looks like hell.

Though early photographs were crude, expensive, and came in only one color--sepia--almost overnight, they replace the costly painted miniatures the Peale sons and daughters turned out by the hundreds over the first fifty years of this country's history. I'm not sure if he was seen as betraying the family's interests, but Titian Peale certainly embraced photography in fulfilling his own interests. Though the science of making images was still too slow for actually photographing animals (even up to the time of his death in 1885) Peale was instrumental in developing both art and science of photography as well as preserving the actual animals themselves (he wrote on taxidermy as well as collecting butterflies). His butterfly collection still exists.

 

The Peale Museum, 225 N. Holiday Street, Baltimore (1814-1830),
the first building on this side of the Atlantic designed and built as a museum.

Titian Ramsay Peale inherited his father's penchant for collecting, traveling widely throughout various frontier regions of the U.S. and the rest of the world collecting specimens of just about anything that moved, then shipping them home to be displayed next to his family's painted portraits and giant Mastodon skeleton in one of two museums. Unfortunately, Titian was unable to carry on the family tradition of operating private museums (Philadelphia and in Baltimore). Faced with bankruptcy, in 1843, he oversaw the forced sale of the family's last remaining museum collections at a sheriff's sale. Many artifacts were destroyed while others were spread broadly to other museums. He had been however, successful in founding the nation's first gas lighting company in Baltimore around 1818.





Leonid Pasternak

This posting marks my one thousandth entry  in this blog.

 

Leonid Pasternak Self-portrait, 1908

Impressionism was not limited to just the French. The English, the Germans, Americans, even the Russians found the need to indulge. The first Russian to take up the cause was Leonid Pasternak. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, you're probably thinking of the author of the best-selling Russian novel, Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak. He was Leonid Pasternak's son. The 1965 American movie based upon the younger Pasternak's book starred Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. Not to be a name dropper, but Leonid was also friends with Leo Tolstoy of War and Peace fame. Working under the tremendous pressures of daily deadlines, Pasternak illustrated Tolstoy's epic novel as it was first being serialized in a Moscow magazine.

 

 

Leo Tolstoy, 1908, Leonid Pasternak

Boris Pasternak, 1910,
Leonid Pasternak

The elder Pasternak was born in 1862 in Odessa, the youngest of six children in an Orthodox Jewish family. Young Leonid showed exceptional artistic talent even as a child. He sold his first painting at the age of seven to the local street cleaner. His family insisted he study to be first a doctor, then later a lawyer at Moscow University. Pasternak was twenty-one before he finally broke free from his family's insistence on a secure future to study art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, not in Russia but Munich, Germany. After two compulsory years in the Russian army, Pasternak began his career in 1889, and by all indications, did very well, falling in with the Moscow intellectual elite of the time. 



Moscow in Winter, 1912,
Leonid Pasternak 

Pasternak sought to stand apart from other Russian artists by declaring himself an impressionist, the first Russian artist to openly embrace the French painting movement. Although he espoused Impressionism early on, Leonid Pasternak's work is usually consider Post-impressionism both chronologically and stylistically. However his portraits and interiors bear little resemblance to that of his French counterparts. Only his few landscapes seem to have been influenced by Fauvists as seen in his Winter in Moscow (left) of 1912. If one were to compare Pasternak with a French painter of Post-impressionism it might well be Paul Cezanne, but without Cezanne's groundbreaking cubist tendencies or structural masses.



Albert Einstein, 1924,
Leonid Pasternak

In 1900, Pasternak was awarded a medal at the Paris World's Fair for his illustrations of Tolstoy's novel. In 1921, he journeyed to London for eye surgery, leaving behind his two sons. In recovering, Pasternak decided not to return to Russia but spent the next several years in Germany. The portrait of a young Albert Einstein (left) is from this period. Being Jewish, with the rise of Nazism in Germany in 1938, Pasternak fled back to England. There he died in 1945.





 

Hair Art



Marie Antoinette--hair by Leonard, ca. 1790

His name was Champagne. He lived during the 17th century, migrating from southern France to Paris. He's remembered in history as being the first hair artist remembered in history. No one remembers when he was born but the women of Paris certainly remembered when he died--1658. His Paris salon popularized the rise (literally) of the fanciful hairstyles we've all come to know and love from paintings of the French court, though Champagne was so popular he often styled the female royalty from as far away as Poland. What about the men? Well, it seems that if they cared about their hair at all, they relied upon the services of their valet or covered it up with fanciful wigs. The best that can be said for male hair art down through history is that it's boring (at least as compared to that of the feminine gender).

A persistent problem

Champagne was one of a kind. Legros de Rumigny was not. He was first of his kind--the first recognized professional hairdresser. He also served the French court, carrying on the "high and mighty" hairstyles of Monsieur Champagne. His main client was the King's mistress, Madame Pompadour (who contributed her name to a men's hairstyle ala Ronald Reagan). De Rumigny even wrote a book on the subject, containing 38 of his greatest creations. Ironically, he met his end by being crushed to death by a frenzied mob celebrating the marriage of Marie Antoinette to Louis XVI. The queen was not one of his clients, but that of his more flamboyant competitor, Leonard, whose hairy confections sometimes rose to a height of five feet.

Marcel Grateau demonstrates his wave and his invention.

Egyptian coif

Though women have been using heat in curling their hair for centuries, dating back as far as the biblical Pharaoh's daughter, another Frenchman, Marcel Grateau, is remembered in history as the inventor of the modern curling iron, sometime during the late 1800s. I used the term "modern" in a figurative sense because there was little modern about heating the rounded rod over a gas burner to create his "Marcel wave." Too cool, and the wave didn't set. Too hot, and it burned the hair. It was only with the advent of the electric models in the 1920s that his curling gadget with adjustable heat controls could in any way be considered modern. He gave birth to the Marcel Wave and made millions from his invention.

For some, like Ella Fitzgerald, curling
was less important then straightening.

In the 20th century, motion pictures not only dictated hair styles (both men's and women's) but also made hair stylists as rich and famous as Marcel Grateau. Among them was Sydney Guilaroff, Alexandre de Paris, Raymond Bessone, Vidal Sassoon, and Gene Shacove, while in this century the names Christiaan Houtenbos, John Sahag, Chris McMillan, and Oribe rise above the rest. Though certainly creative and in some cases startling in their design, few could match the elaborate "heights" reached by the 18th century French hair artists. Part of the reason may be they don't make doorways as tall as they used to.

Of course, today, men's hair art could hardly be considered boring.

 

Alice Neel

Alice Neel Self-portrait, 1980

In studying the lives and works of hundreds of artists over the years, the one subject virtually all of them share is themselves. I've never done the numerical research, but my feeling is that artists, as a whole, paint an average of  between five and ten self-portraits over the course of their careers. I'm about average, not counting sketches and drawings, I've painted around five and currently have plans to do another before I die. That makes Alice Neel unique (especially for a portrait painter). Having begun to paint at around the age of twenty-six, she waited fifty-four years to do her first and only self-portrait at the age of eighty. Moreover, if that wasn't enough, she painted herself nude (top). The portrait is every bit as startling (some would also say, disturbing) as one might expect under the circumstances.

 

Carlos Enriquez, 1926, Alice Neel

Alice Neel was born in 1900 in rural Pennsylvania where she grew up. During the First World War, she worked as a civil-service clerk while taking night classes in art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, choosing an all-girls school to avoid the distraction of the opposite sex. She began painting in 1925, the same year she married Carlos Enriquez (left), a wealthy Cuban playboy. They moved to Havana where she began painting and gave birth to a daughter, Santillana. There too, she fell in with the burgeoning Cuban intellectual elite where she developed an astute political consciousness that was to permeate her life's work.

 

Well Baby Clinic, 1928, Alice Neel

Santillana died of diphtheria shortly before her first birthday. After her daughter's death, Alice returned to the U.S. to live with her parents, whereupon she discovered she was once more pregnant, giving birth to a second daughter, Isabetta in 1928. Her painting from the same year, Well Baby Clinic (above), was executed from memory, depicting a bleak atmosphere not far removed from an insane asylum. Carlos joined her and they moved to New York until 1930 when Carlos took his daughter and returned to Cuba. Having lost two children, Alice Neel's work took on a darker tone, embracing motherhood, but with stark expressionism which formed the basis of her style from that point on. Life was not easy in Depression era New York, especially for a deserted woman, especially if she happens to be an artist. Alice suffered a severe nervous breakdown, was briefly hospitalized (sent to an asylum). She tried to take her own life, and was then confined to a hospital suicide ward.

 

Kate Millet, 1970, Alice Neel

Alice was released in 1931, returned home for a time, then returned to New York, determined to make a name for herself as a portrait artist. She painted her friends and neighbors, as well as various New York public figures. She flirted with the Communist party, then in 1933 joined the WPA. Shortly before the Second World War, Alice had two sons (Richard and Hartley) by two different lovers. For the next ten years she painted little, a single mother eking out a living doing illustrations for a Communist magazine, Masses and Mainstreams, though she did have her first solo show in 1944. During the 1950s, her figural work was quite out of step with mainstream Abstract Expressionism. However, with dawn of the feminist movement of the 60s, Neel found her art in demand, painting a number of New York political and cultural leaders, including a Time magazine cover portrait of the radical feminist Kate Millet (left).

 

Alice Neel, 1984, Robert Mapplethorpe

During the following years, Alice Neel's work won critical acclaim with numerous exhibitions and awards, having been a feminist before feminism was in vogue, she became the official feminist artist, attaining a degree of financial security and access to the rich and famous who populate her many portraits. It was during this era she managed to find time to finally do her own portrait. And, having encouraged many of her portrait subjects to pose nude (some did, some didn't) she felt obliged to painter herself in the same state. Alice died in 1984. Her grandson, Andrew Neel, made a documentary featuring her life and numerous works, which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Festival. In 1984, shortly before he death, Alice posed for a portrait by another artist, the controversial photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. She insisted upon posing with her mouth open, her eyes shut, claiming she wanted to see what she would look like when she was dead.


 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The Light Space Modulator, 1930, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The one type of artist we are most likely to take for granted is the designer. Only in rare cases is their name attached to their work, and only then when their "line" has gained such a level of popular appeal that it has moved from the realm of "art" into that of pop culture. Thomas Chippendale is one of the earliest of these, Christian Dior is another, along with Buckminster Fuller, Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Pucci, and Versace. Even at that, as you can see by the small sampling above, the list is heavily weighted in favor of fashion designers. Be that as it may, designers are probably the most important artists working today. They touch virtually everything we touch long before we touch it. They are the ones who decide what things look like and then very often are called upon to entice us into buying that which they've designed.

 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Self-portrait, 1944,
part of his early experimentation with color transparencies.

A good designer must be a sort of jack-of-all-trades where art is concerned, with impeccable aesthetic tastes coupled with an astute sense of the possible versus the "forget about it." Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one such man, a photographer, a painter, a writer, a teacher, a sculptor, set designer, printmaker, lighting designer, industrial designer, architect, interior designer...there was little he didn't try his hand at and little at which he did not excel. Laszlo was born Laszlo Weisz in Bácsborsód, (southern) Hungary, in 1895. Though born Jewish, he rejected Judaism for Calvinism at a time in Europe when it was prudent to do so. It was then he adopted the name of his hometown (Mohol) hyphenated with that of his mother's Christian lawyer. Sandwiched into his study of law, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army during WW I.

 

Nuclear II, 1946, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
art imitating physics.

After the war, while still studying law, Moholy-Nagy attended a private art school where he was exposed to German Expressionism and Communist political activities, though he had no part in the so-called "Red Terror" government. After the defeat of the Hungarian Communist Regime in 1919, Moholy continued his study of art in Szeged, Hungary, where he first exhibited his work before moving on to Vienna and in 1920 to Berlin. In 1923, at the age of 28, Moholy-Nagy got a job teaching the basics course at the famous Bauhaus school in Weimar (later in Dessau) where he was instrumental in moving the curriculum away from Expressionism toward industrial design arts and crafts. It was while teaching at the Bauhaus he absorbed a broad scope of technical knowledge. What he learned there, he later taught there, becoming one of the school's strongest influences beside Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Hannes Meyer.

 

An untitled Moholy-Nagy Photogram, 1923-25

It was while at the Bauhaus that Moholy-Nagy "invented" his famous "photograms" made by laying various objects on photo paper then exposing the paper. His photography tended toward much the same emphasis on patterns and shadows. Later he moved on to building abstract kinetic sculptures (top and at bottom) coupled with lights to cast moving shadows, all of which he photographed, thus creating a chain of media associated with a single work of art. Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus in 1928 to work in Berlin until the Nazis came to power in 1933, whereupon he very wisely decamped for Holland followed by London where he worked as a photographer and graphic designer. He even worked as a special effects designer for the futuristic Hungarian motion picture, H.G. Wells' Things to Come, being shot there at the time.

 

Stage set, Tales of Hoffman, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

In 1937, Moholy-Nagy came to the United States to join an effort to transplant the Bauhaus School to more friendly soil in Chicago. The effort failed after only one year. Moholy-Nagy went to work for the mail-order house of Spiegel as their art advisor before joining other Bauhaus alumni in founding The Institute of Design, which later became a part of The Illinois Institute of Technology. He died of leukemia in 1946. However, his native Hungary did not forget its most famous designer. They honored him by naming their Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest after him.

A demonstration of a Moholy-Nagy light-space sculpture.