The Lincoln Memorial

A monument as noble as the man.

In a city full to the brim almost with famous architectural landmarks, it would be precarious to claim that one stands apart from all the others. The Lincoln Memorial does not. But if our currency is any indication, it easily ranks with the White House and the Capitol in prestige. Of course, it's difficult to say whether this is a tribute more to the man or the monument. Inasmuch as the two are matched together on both our one-cent "penny" and our much-used five-dollar bill, it may well be a moot point in any case. Though less than a hundred years old, architect, Henry Bacon's Greek Doric tribute to our 16th president has taken its rightful place near the front of the pantheonic parade of monuments and memorials gracing our national mall. It has served as a standard of excellence in design and execution to be met by more recent arrivals--the Jefferson Memorial (1943), the Vietnam War Memorial (1982), the Korean War Veterans Memorial 1995), the FDR Memorial (1997), the World War II Memorial (2004), and most recently, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial (2011). If we keep building memorials at that pace, we may have to get a longer mall.

Daniel Chester French's Lincoln--larger than life (about three times larger).

Henry Bacon, architect

The Lincoln Memorial is a tribute to three men and three speeches. First and foremost among the men is Lincoln, himself--modest, forceful, compassionate, wise--the list of adjectives is nearly as long and noble as the man and the myths surrounding him. The other two men were more intimately associated with the Memorial itself--Henry Bacon, the architect, and Daniel Chester French, the sculptor whose iconic seated statue of Lincoln has become nearly as famous as the building housing it. Of the three speeches, two were by Lincoln and are carved on the interior walls of his memorial--his Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address. The third speech associated with the site is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered before a national civil rights rally in front of the memorial in 1963.

 

The Lincoln Memorial, 1914. Much of the building's foundation was built above
ground on what was, at the time, little more than reclaimed swampland.

Daniel Chester French, sculptor

The first Washington, DC, tribute to Lincoln went up barely two years after his death, an equestrian statue erected before the District of Columbia City Hall in 1867. Sculptor, Clark Mills, around 1875, proposed a more fitting tribute (to Victorian tastes, at least) a 70-foot tall structure with six equestrian statues and 31 pedestrian statues of Lincoln topped with still one more twelve-foot statue of the man. The man would have been embarrassed. Even for the Great Emancipator, that was a bit over the top. Donors agreed. The plan was scrapped for lack of funds. It wasn't until 1910 that a more rational approach gathered steam in Congress under the leadership of Illinois Senator Shelby Cullom, who finally succeeded in getting his bill authorizing the memorial passed after five failed attempts. By 1913, Congress had approved both the site and Bacon's design.

Lincoln is assembled. What?
You thought it was all one piece?

Work began in 1914. There were changes as the building came together. The statue of Lincoln grew from ten feet in height to nineteen. A bronze and glass set of doors was scrapped in favor of an open portal making French's statue of Lincoln visible from a great distance. The work was dedicated in 1922 by Chief Justice William Howard Taft (a former president), President Warren G. Harding, and Lincoln's only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln (then 79 years of age). Remarkably, the memorial was finished on time and on budget ($300,000), something that's not happened in Washington since.

Hal Wallis' Casablanca

Casablanca title card.

In choosing the ten best American films of all time (06-17-12), I positioned the Hal Wallis film, Casablanca at number seven. For most critics, the film is more a sentimental favorite than a great work of cinematic art. However, if you were to choose the movie having the most memorable dialogue, it would be hard to justify any other film. The American Film Institute features six quotations from the film in their list of top 100 of all time (far more than any other film): "Here's looking at you, kid," "...I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," "Round up the usual suspects," "We'll always have Paris," "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine," but not "Play it again, Sam." That famous line is actually, "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By'." No one is quite sure where the iconic shorter version came from.

 

Bogart and Bergman: Rick and Ilsa

Casablanca and Dr. Strangelove are undoubtedly the two best "B" movies of all time. Nearly all films are collaborative efforts. Dr. Strangelove was not so much, Casablanca was more so than most. Casablanca was the title Warner Brothers gave an unproduced play by Murray Bennett and Joan Alison they called, Everybody Comes to Rick's. The screenplay adds three more names, the Epstein twins, Julius and Phillip, as well as Howard Koch. Then there's the film's producer, Wallis, and its director, Michael Kurtiz. And if you want to include all the 1942 A-list cast, the group of collaborators grows even larger, but certainly Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman must be mentioned. That makes nine film making personalities having a direct impact on Casablanca as a work of art.

 

Meet the Epsteins of Casablanca.

The two most important figures in making Casablanca the iconic period piece it has become were not the film's producer or director of even its two stars, but the Epsteins (above). They were thirty-three at the time. Pearl Harbor was still front-page news, the war was not going well for the Allies, and the nation was still rubbing its eyes from the Great Depression. After Pearl Harbor, Wallis lost them to Frank Capra for a time while they worked on Capra's Why We Fight series. Howard Koch took their place and produced some forty pages of dialogue, much of which the Epsteins later decimated. Like many twins, the Epsteins were two who thought as one, lobbing possible dialogue back and forth like tennis balls. Virtually every memorable line from the movie was their work. Production began in April of 1942 with the film being shot in sequence simply because the second half of the script hadn't yet been finalized. Three months later it was "in the can" at a cost of just over one million 1942 dollars ($75,000 over budget).

The Coconut Grove, Ambassador Hotel, Hollywood, 1943. Jack Warner grabbed
the Casablanca Best Picture Oscar before Hal Wallis could even rise from his seat.

Casablanca was nominated for eight Academy Awards. It won three, Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Bogart and Claude Rains lost out in the acting categories. Ingrid Bergman wasn't even nominated. It was successful, raking in $3.7 million in its initial release, far more than Warner Brothers or any of its collaborating filmmakers expected. In no way does it compete in the realm of all-time box-office revenue. However, most of the movie's success in recent years has come from TV and home video where it has been a perennial favorite, ranking number one as the most rerun movie on television.

 

Bogart and "Sam" (Dooley Wilson) with the club's "toy" piano.
Wallis considered Ella Fitzgerald for the part of Sam...(Samantha?)

It's likely one of the reason the movie "works" so well on TV is its low-budget look and feel. Shot in color on location, the story would have seemed pretentious. A Turner colorized version has been roundly panned by critics and viewers alike. Moreover, there is little in the way of memorable cinematic imagery in the screenplay or as a result of Curtiz's direction. The fog-shrouded final scene may stand out in our minds, but even then, the moist atmospherics were all done on a studio soundstage with a cardboard airplane and midget extras. The fog was simply to cover up the cost-saving shortcuts. Only one scene was shot on location (the nearby Van Nuys, California, airport). The "atmospherics" which made the movie memorable all rested in the screenplay and the cast of veteran actors Wallis brought to the table at Rick's Café Americain.

 

Rick and Ilsa at the airport with their fog-shrouded, cardboard airplane.

Bogart and Bergman would seem to be an inspired casting, but in fact, it came largely by accident. No one can accurately predict movie chemistry. Ann Sheridan and Hedy Lamar were also considered. Wallis got Bergman as the result of an earlier trade with her "owner" David O. Selznick, who wanted Warner's Olivia De Havilland for GWTW. However, chemistry aside, Paul Henreid, Claude Raines, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre were not just competent (all that was really expected of them), but each, in their own way, was indelibly memorable. And that's where the war-time storyline and carefully crafted script came into play. Except for the screenplay, it would be easy to write off Casablanca as simply a "happy accident." However, the movie was handcrafted to be precisely the right story at precisely the right time and right place. Down through the years it has come to epitomize that beleaguered time and place with a "love versus virtue" romantic quandary young people, and those who were young people in 1942, have taken as their own; as Rick put it: "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."

Final showdown on the tarmac-- Hans Twardowski (in a minor role as a German officer), Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Bogart, and Bergman.

 

 

People Who Live in Glass Houses

Carlo Santambrogio's glass house, Milan, Italy, (an ice cube?).

There's an old story about a jungle king who grew tired of his antique marble throne. So he went on line at Ikea.com and ordered up a new, modern, vibrating recliner. When it arrived via FedEx, he was overjoyed with his new throne and had the old one stored away. One night, as he was having dinner with some guests, there came a violent earthquake whereupon the old throne came crashing down upon the king from the attic making an incredible crack in his crudely crowned cranium. The moral to this story: those who live in grass houses should stow thrones. That's an incredibly long way to go for a bad pun, but an apt introduction for a piece on those who live in glass houses...or at least those who design them. In the case of American architect, Philip Johnson, they were one and the same.



Philip Johnson's Glass House--more like a cottage, actually.

One of the major problems for an architect designing a glass house is literally where to "stow the throne." Here I'm referring to the one usually encountered in the bathroom. By inviting the outdoors in, privacy literally goes "out the window." However, privacy would seem to be considered a must in disposing of bodily wastes, even for those living in glass houses. Johnson solved the problem with a single circular enclosure, rising through the roofline, contrasting strongly with the otherwise rectilinear lines of his glass and steel house (above). Mies van der Rohe, in designing his glass and steel Farnsworth House, had chosen a more traditional elongated, rectangular core containing all utilities (two baths, kitchen, and laundry). Philip Johnson chose to live in his glass house for some 58 years. In fact, a critic once cracked that only Philip Johnson could live in such a place.

 

The Farnsworth House, 1945-51, Plano, Illinois, Mies van der Rohe

The van der Rohe glass house was designed for Dr. Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago nephrologist looking for a quiet getaway where she could engage in her hobbies of playing the violin, translating poetry, and communing with nature. The sixty-acre rural site she chose was on the Fox River near Plano, Illinois, some fifty-five miles southwest of Chicago. (Today it's far from rural.) Designed and built for a cost of around $100,000 over a period of six years from 1945 to 1951, the 1,500 square-foot house served as a private retreat for Ms. Farnsworth for some 21 years. In 2006, the picturesque Fox River which had been the main attraction of the site, flooded, bringing water some 18 inches deep to the main floor of a house already resting on five-foot "stilts." There was some damage to woodwork and furnishings but the glass and steel structure otherwise "weathered the storm" quite nicely.

 

The Johnson house living room demonstrates that living in a glass house is as much about looking out as looking in. Ironically, the minimalist furnishing are by van der Rohe.

Built in 1949, the Philip Johnson house in New Canaan, Connecticut, rests on a concrete slab and is, in some ways, purer than the earlier Farnsworth House which, influenced it. The Farnsworth House (that which is not glass) is painted white and thus imposes itself upon the landscape, in making a stunning architectural statement. The Johnson abode is charcoal gray except for its central bathroom turret, thus becoming a part of the landscape. In effect, we have two groundbreaking architects with surprisingly different approaches to the same concept. Of course, what we're really talking about is as much glass walls as glass houses. And since Johnson and van der Rohe, glass walls have become stock-in-trade for modernist architects all over the world.

The glass bookcase and stairs. Would you feel comfortable climbing glass stairs?

However Italian architect, Carlo Santambrogio, was not satisfied to just erect four glass walls and call it a house. His glass "cube" (top) takes Johnson's purity a step further. Virtually everything in the house is glass (except for the beds). The walls are glass, the furniture is (mostly) glass the floors are glass, the roof, the stairs, presumably even the privy. Santambrogio's house near Milan, Italy, is a concept house (being duplicated in Paris), so presumably it probably won't actually be lived in. Not that one couldn't live in it. The glass walls can be heated, it's structurally sound, spacious, three "floors" (well, levels anyway), and contains all the usual amenities. However, it's hard to imagine where they "stow the throne."

I suppose one could get used to it (buying Windex by the barrel I mean).

 

Child Prodigies

 

la Picador, 1890, Pablo Picasso,
age eight or nine.



la Picador, 1961, Pablo Picasso

 

It took me twenty years to learn to paint like an adult, and the rest of my life to learn to paint like a child.

                                                      --Pablo Picasso



Young people are naturally creative and the history of art is peppered with children who exhibited outstanding talent at an early age--Picasso among them. He was around eight or nine when he did his first painting, titled la Picador (left) in 1890. He returned to the subject in la Picador II (below, left) seventy-one years later (1961), underlining the validity of his words above. A silverpoint self-portrait of a thirteen-year-old Albrecht Durer (below, right) survives to stake his claim to the designation, child prodigy. The English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais became a member of the Royal Academy at the tender age of eleven. Today, thanks to social media, we're well aware of such precocious output in all the arts.

Albrecht Durer Self-Portrait,
age 13, 1484



In discussing the child prodigy phenomena of today, I'm not talking about four-year-olds who can paint like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. Such brush-wielding kids may, in fact, be prodigies, but the artists to whom they're compared may have taken Picasso's words to heart to such a degree that any comparison of the work of juvenile artist to theirs is largely meaningless. Although the Internet is rife with the work of teen and pre-teen painters following in Picasso's footsteps in learning to paint like adults at a young age, I'm particularly fascinated by the work of just two such talents--Akiane Kramarik, and Kieron Williamson.

 

Akiane Kramarik, at age eight, with her Prince of Peace, 2002




Kieron Williamson, age eight.

Both Akiane and Kieron have painted virtually all their young lives. At the age of eight, Akiane was painting large, religious and fantasy works with a style and skill many adult artists would envy. Kieron, a young British lad (now eleven) started with watercolors, as a preschooler. By the age of eight, his second exhibition of sixteen paintings sold out in just fourteen minutes for almost $28,000. Kieron's father is an art dealer and professionally promotes his son's work, enabling their family to move from a two-bedroom flat in Norfolk to a proper British house. Akiane donates a portion of the income from the sale of her work to charity. She is nineteen now. Both started out largely on their own, self-taught, though they've since taken painting classes. Akiane's work is smooth, highly finished, quite realistic and purposefully overwhelming in its scale, often featuring faces five to ten times life-size. Kieron's watercolors, tend toward kid-size, mostly around nine by twelve inches, though recently he has taken up oils on a larger scale. Nearly all of his work involves loose, somewhat impressionistic landscapes of his native coastal England. Both artists take their gifts seriously, working as much as four to five hours a day at their art. Neither seem much disposed toward now learning to paint like a child.

Kieron Williamson, now eleven, is sometimes referred to as the "Mini-Monet."

 

 

Thomas Baines

Baobab Tree, 1861, South Africa, Thomas Baines

Thomas Baines Self-portrait, 1858

Very few artists can claim the honor of having a river named for them. In the case of British artist, Thomas Baines, he has both a river and a mountain in northern Australia. If Thomas Baines were a working artist today he'd be employed by National Geographic, camera strapped to his torso, probing the jungles of Africa or the Australian outback. Oh, right, that's already been done. Thomas Baines has already been there, done that, way back in the 1860s. And though the camera had, in fact, been invented in that era, it was cumbersome at best and inadequate at worst. Thomas Baines eyes were like camera lenses; his easel and watercolors, clumsy as they may have been, were far more vivid and colorful than any film then known. Moreover he was the right man in the right place at the right time, adventurous, skilled, single, and without the added baggage of a shaving kit.

 

The Great Peak of the Amatola-British Kaffraria, 1851, Thomas Baines

Baines was born in 1820 in the Norfolk area of England (along the sea coast about 100 miles north of London). He apprenticed as a carriage painter, but by the age of 22 he was ready to strike out for parts unknown with an expedition leaving London for southern Africa. He worked in Cape Town painting portraits and landscapes, sharpening his skills, maturing, and learning the languages. His Baobab Tree (top) illustrates his considerable skill with watercolor. He also worked as a combat artist (though the term hadn't been invented at the time) in recording a prolonged, nasty little colonial conflict between England and the "restless natives" know at the Eighth Frontier War (above, there were nine, all total).


Emus on the Trap Plain, 1856, Thomas Baines

Then in 1855, Baines jumped at the chance to no longer get shot at while painting and joined a Royal Geographical Society expedition to explore northern Australia to and the Victoria River area. He was in charge of the ship's stores and painting what he saw. What he saw was pretty wild and spectacular. He was the first artist to paint the sparsely populate "outback" as seen in his Emus on the Trap Plain (above). So impressive were the depth and breadth of his depictions it was during this time he joined the queen of England in having important geological features named for him. This venture is considered the high point of his life as well as his art.


Victoria Falls, 1857, Thomas Baines

Matebele Warrior in Dancing Dress,
1870, Thomas Baines

By 1858 Baines was back in southern Africa but heading north to the Zambesi River with none other than the colorful British missionary/explorer, David Livingston (of "Dr. Livingston, I presume.") He was one of the first Europeans to view (and undoubtedly the first to paint) what the expedition called Victoria Falls (above). During this little hike into the wilderness, Baines was badly bitten by the gold bug. It was a feverish ailment he was to pursue off and on for the rest of his life. Artistically, his work became more anthropological, not to mention dramatic, as seen in his Elephants Charging over Quartos Country (bottom) from 1867. His Matebele Warrior in Dancing Dress, (left) from 1870, suggests his interests in African natives. Baines died in Durban, South Africa, in 1875.

Elephants Charging over Quartos Country, 1870, Thomas Baines,
presumably painted from memory.



 

 

Pavement Art.

Bert, the screever, from Mary Poppins--magical pictures you can jump right into.

Are you familiar with the term "screever?" It refers to an artist who paints, usually with colored chalk, on a pavement. Until recently the most famous screever was Bert (Dick Van Dyke) in the 1964 movie, Mary Poppins (above). However, starting about eight years ago, two young artists have made quite an international name for themselves doing Bert's shtick (sort of). Actually, despite the Mary Poppins storyline in which Mary, Bert, and the two kids jump into one of Bert's pavement pictures for a romp in an animated fantasy land with dancing penguins and the like, British artists, Joe Hill and Max Lowry, created 3-D pavement images so real (or surreal) jumping into them seems like a real possibility. Moreover, they don't need Disney magic to do so.

 

The artist, Joe Hill, strolls by one of his holes
--art that requires the camera to have its full impact.

They billed themselves as 3-D Joe and Max. Max Lowry died suddenly in 2010 at the age of 34. Joe Hill carries on alone. In November of 2011, he and his team created the world’s largest and longest 3D anamorphic street painting in the Canary Wharf district of London. The 12,490 square foot painting was sponsored by Reebok CrossFit and took seven days to create. For video of 3-D Joe's massive creation, click here. Unlike Mary Poppins' Bert, Joe Hill does not work in chalk. His illusions are as humorous as they are breathtaking, usually about 150 to 200 square feet each. And like Bert's, most have a fantasy element, borrowing generously from 20th century Surrealism reminiscent of Rene Magritte.

 

The board, the bike, the boy and the pavement are real. All else is illusion.
Such 3-D pavement art is at its best when it involves bystanders.

Sometimes creatures from Hill's holes
emerge to challenge our perceptions
of the real and the unreal.

The images are designed to be photographic backdrops. That is, they work best from a single, predetermined point of view along three axes, at which a camera is placed to record the interaction of the artist and/or viewers of the work. Very often such art features jagged illusionary holes in the pavement through which the viewer sees a alternative, humorous or horrifying world. Hill's work is very much in demand around the world as show-stoppers for conventions or trade gatherings. Although Joe also does portraits and other canvas paintings, his major efforts fall flat (on the pavement, that is) but invite the imagination to look beneath it. Don't step on the crack...



Pressing a point, painting potent potholes.

 

Nail Art

Nail art, by the old definition, in this case a work based on a self-portrait
by Leonardo da Vinci, hammered by Albanian artist, Saimir Strati.
They call this type of thing "nail mosaic" now.



Nail art today

As a freshman in college, I was once a student in a basic introductory studio class designed to broaden young would-be artists' understanding and definition of art. Assignments were broad; limitations were few. A fellow student brought in a slab of wood in which he'd pounded hundreds of nails of various types and sizes to various depths to create an abstract design both eye-catching and expressive. That was my first introduction to nail art (above). Of course, such an application of the term today would be laughable, but for decades after those days, that's how I would have defined the two-word term. Of course girls polished their nails way back then (the 1970s), but no one, even those who did so, would have thought to consider it art. Actually sources on the history of this sort of thing say it's a practice some five-thousand years old. I wouldn't know about that, but insofar as I can recall, it's only been within the past five to ten years that we've come to consider nail polish an art form.

 

Nail art designs by Vixen

For the benefit of men as ignorant of this type of art as I've been, it basically breaks down into three types (1) designs actually painted on the nails, (2) designs painted on artificial "nails" which are then glued to the real thing (above), and (3) more recently, computer designs printed on a thin film which is then applied to the nail and painted over with a clear top coat. As you can well imagine, these three methods open up a tremendous new frontier for those with a creative bent and a steady hand (not to mention excellent eyesight). It gives a whole new definition to wearable art, which, until recently, had been limited to shoes, jewelry, and various other types of fashion apparel. Suddenly, women have an entire art gallery at their fingertips, perhaps leading them to wish they had more than ten fingers (of course there's always the gallery annex topping the toes).

 

Andy Warhol would have been flattered.
He might possibly have even worn them.

Mondrian nails

At the high end of the genre are nails with gemstones, feathers, and even miniature tributes to artists such as Andy Warhol and Piet Mondrian (above). Most designs, however, are highly non-representational decorations rather than having any pretense to what we might call "high art." They range from the exquisitely elegant to the outrageously ridiculous, not to mention impractical (bottom). Nails may be filed into virtually any elongated shape, though sometimes they're also flattened into near rectangles. And, for the most part, such art is not for those inclined toward DIY, unless they have way too much time on their hands (fingers?). Thus we have evolved yet another type of professional artist--the nail designer. Thus far it seems to be a "girl thing." Except for some "goth" types, nail art seems not to have crossed the gender gap. That's fine with me. No matter how creative this new type of painting may be, I simply don't have the time to do my nails.

Tetris nails--clever but impractical, how would you ever play the game