Western Sculpture

Matt, Miss Kitty, Doc, and Chester

Most of us guys, and probably a lot of the feminine gender as well, can recall the thrill, anticipation, and excitement we use to know in watching our favorite western TV shows. It even spilled over into our play time. I can remember all the kids in our neighborhood spending entire evenings in the summer playing cowboys and Indians. There might be twenty kids involved, half cowboys of course, and half Indians. We were armed with toy six-shooters and sometimes a few unloaded BB rifles, and maybe even some bows with suction cup arrows. We didn't ride horses of course, it was all done on foot, and our range was sometimes two or three square blocks. Although in our case, our games was spawned by our favorite TV shows, The Lone Ranger, The Rifleman, Cochise, Gunsmoke (right), and Wagon Train, this fascination with the "old west" was nothing new. TV had picked up many of these shows from radio which had garnered them from the movies which in turn had been inspired by dime novels and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. These last two presumably drew their inspiration from the real thing, albeit from a "white man's" point of view of course.

Bronco Buster, 1909, Frederic Remington

The old West also inspired artists. One of the earliest, Frederic Remington, not only painted the legendary West, but supplied some of the illustrations that no doubt made the dime novels so popular. About 1895, he turned his considerable talents to a new medium, bronze sculpture. By now, so familiar was he with Western riders, their garb, and horses in action, that he was able to instinctively model his figures in wax, in vigorous, authentic action. His first, Bronco Buster (left), was so popular it was cast some 200 times. Remington always portrayed his figures on typical Western bred horses, not Arabian thoroughbreds while his riders were rugged, wiry, leather-skinned frontiersmen, not Greek Adonises. Once the "Indian threat" had passed and Native Americans were defeated, or relegated to out-of-the-way reservations, the popularity of these romantic sculpture groups grew ever greater into the early decades of the 20th century.  Remington continued to create them right up until his death in 1909.

Medicine Man, 1899, Cyrus Dallin

On the other side of the nickel were sculptures by several artists inspired by the "noble savage" element of various Native American tribes and legends. Many of these sculptors, such as Cyrus Dallin, Solon Hannibal Borglum, and Herman Atkins MacNeil, unlike Remington, were trained abroad. Their work, such as Dallin's Medicine Man (right), a life-size equestrian bronze from 1899 (Fairmount Park, Philadelphia), were marvels of stoic naturalism and insight into the Native American psyche. Solon Borglum, older brother of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore, created a Sioux sculpture group depicting the Buffalo Dance ritual as one of four similar pieces for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. (Unfortunately, only this one survives.) There is a restless energy in this work on a par with anything Remington might have done. Hermon MacNeil, on the other hand, was inspired by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, causing him to live and work amongst the Zuni and Moquis tribes for nearly ten years, during which time he completed numerous life-size bronze groupings such as Sun Vow (below), from 1898, in which he blends his classic European aesthetic ideals with  a vigorous naturalism and authenticity in depicting an older man instructing a young, nude adolescent in the ceremonial rite of passage from youth to manhood. Together, these artists captured a view of the West not seen in the movies, nor on TV, and not even imagined by neighborhood kids playing cowboys and Indians in the "wild West" of Southeastern Ohio.

The Sun Vow, 1898, Hermon MacNeil

Water Sculpture

Mark Fuller's WET Design

Some of us paint with it. A few artists freeze it and carve it.  We swim in it, we wash in it, most of us even stoop to drinking it from time to time when there's nothing better on the menu.  Some, such as my wife, are even H20 addicts. But seldom is it thought of as an art medium standing alone, in its natural state.  Maybe we need to take a look at the work of Mark Fuller.  Mark Fuller is the CEO of WET Design.  Speaking as an artist, he knows more about water than just about anyone.  There isn't much he can't do with it. He can make it jet to the top of tall buildings, turn it into marbles, set it on fire, make it climb steps, even make it so people can walk on it. For centuries water was an integral part of the sculpture we call fountains, except that it was the bronze and marble delivery system that was carved, not so much the water itself.

Fuller got his start 28 years ago startling crowds at Walt Disney World with his aquatic magic. He presented it as the prelude to a stage show; but the curtain (of water) in front of the stage was more interesting than the show. Lasers and lights, music and hydraulics merged to leave the audience breathless. It became a show in itself when the performers balked at following such an act. It was performance art minus the performers, just...water. The warm-up act took center stage while the area below stage became a plumber's nightmare. From there, Fuller took the show on the road, leaving behind hundreds of major fountains all around the world. The company owns the patents to more than 50 different high-tech valves, nozzles, and robots; leaving the line between engineering, art, and entertainment in a misty blur.

Today, you can find Niagara Falls in Budapest. In Singapore, one of his aquatic sculptures is a mile and a half long--billowing mists climaxing in a dazzling water monument. Disney has several of his works in which children (and adults so inclined) can play among his rhythmic bursts. Epcot has an installation that leaves one in awe, and sometimes, if the wind is right, a little damp (from personal experience). Las Vegas' Bellagio has a Fuller fountain that covers most of a nine-acre lake. San Diego has another Fuller liquid masterpiece. So does the mega-rich Sultan of Brunei, and Coca-Cola. In the Middle-East, one of his fountains will perform its aquabatics to dominate a 40-story hotel atrium.  While we only paint art with it, WET Designs' sculpted water earns several million dollars a year.  That's cash with a splash.

Inasmuch as still photos are in no way adequate in displaying his work, visit Mark Fuller's designs  at his impressive Website: www.wetdesigns.com

Vincent and Paul

Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear (detail),
1889, Vincent van Gogh

Self-portrait with Pallete (detail),
 1894, Paul Gauguin

A few months ago I wrote regarding Paul Gauguin's unstable (to put it mildly) home life and his incredible wanderlust during the last twenty years of his life. I touch briefly upon the turbulent friendship between he and Vincent van Gogh. An online reader wrote expressing interest in just what kind of relationship these two creative dynamos may have had. She questioned the traditional cover story regarding van Gogh's severed ear implicating a woman's involvement, probably a prostitute, and that there was a very unfriendly rivalry between the two artists for her affections. It's a neat, compact little story and I, too, have my doubts whether there is much truth in it. It's likely both men were friends with one or more prostitutes hanging out at the local bistro (below left) and that Vincent, at least, may have had some emotional attachment to one in particular. The other side of this coin is that there may have been some kind of emotional attachment between the two men themselves.

Night Cafe, 1888, Vincent van Gogh, perhaps
the scene of any conflict between Paul and
Vincent

I rather doubt anyone besides the two principals knows exactly what happened. There has been lots of conjecture. In general, you have two very troubled, maladjusted, assertive, creative individuals, both full of tremendous self-doubt, one at least, diagnosed with a mental illness, the other full of justifiable guilt over having left his family. They were unable to sustain a long-term relationship with one another or anyone else for that matter.  Alcohol was a factor, as were personalities which were basically incompatible.  Van Gogh was highly emotional, a very instinctive, high-strung, hyperactive painter.  Gauguin was much more cerebral in his approach to art, little concerned with outside influences in his work (unlike van Gogh) but instead could be considered the first true Expressionist painter, even more so than van Gogh. Gauguin came to Arles at the invitation, indeed pleading, on the part of Van Gogh, who hoped, quite unrealistically, to set up some sort of artists' commune there.

Self-portrait for Vincent, 1888,
Paul Gauguin, a new style,
departing from reality, well
beyond the work of van
Gogh at the time.

That much we know. We know also they both had money problems and for that reason alone probably hung on together far longer than they might have otherwise. Now, as to a century of conjecture, usually centering upon sex, we can assume, having been married and fathered five children (and from other accounts) that Gauguin was not gay. The issue here is less clear with regard to Vincent, whom researchers speculate may have had homosexual tendencies, perhaps even repressed sexual feeling for Gauguin. We do know that Vincent's life-long religious beliefs would have been very much at odds with any overt sexual expression toward Gauguin, which in any case Gauguin would likely have rejected. There can be little doubt that Vincent had a strong attachment for his friend, an unbounded need to love and be love that many feel he had difficulty expressing in any mutually acceptable manner. This is quite likely the root cause of their break-up. Gauguin would not, or could not accommodate Vincent's debilitating need for a close, personal bond between them. He may well have fled his wife and children for the same reason.  In any case, Gauguin was quite likely astute enough to realize that a continued close association between the two of them would do neither of them any good. At any rate, we can say with some certainty that the fiery, tormented relationship between them was not sexual, was not a love affair, and is not one easily analyzed more than one-hundred years after the fact.

Using Art

The Warhol roots sprouted from this
bland duplex in a working-class
neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

Whether we stop to think about it or not, most of us, as artists, do more than just create art. Even if we're, at best, only modestly successful in what we do, we're also guilty of using art. We use it for our own self-gratification, to make money, to try to obtain some degree of prestige, and to insure some form of lasting commemoration after we're gone. As art has evolved over the centuries the rich and powerful have used artists and their art for much the same reasons. However, it has only been in the last hundred years or so that artists themselves have gotten very good at it. In 1928, in Pittsburgh, there was born an artist who, we might say, very nearly wrote the book (or rewrote it) on how artists could use art. He was the third son of Czechoslovakian immigrants who, at fourteen, got his first taste of art from a free workshop in art appreciation at what was then the Carnegie Institute of Technology. It was from there he later graduated, having learned how to use art to lift himself from the drab existence of his lower class ethnic background into the bright and shiny world of New York's most chic fashion magazines and hottest nightclubs, hobnobbing with the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Truman Capote, Liza Minelli, Mick, and Bianca Jagger.

Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol, 1986

Andrew Warhola was no instant success on the art scene. Shortening his name to Warhol, his first paying job was teaching art while still in college. Then he worked for a dozen years through the fifties as a commercial artist for slick New York publications such as The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue. With this background, when Pop Art came along in the early sixties, he was in a position to not only hop on the bandwagon, but to drive it. He used every slick, production technique he'd ever seen in business, advertising, and marketing to impose his world of commercial hype upon a tired art scene wrestling with the gradual realization that the much-touted New York School and its Abstract Expressionism was sowing the seeds of its own destruction as it nonetheless rocketed down what he saw as a dead end road. He, along with fellow Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns saw themselves as the next generation waiting to use art to obtain fame and fortune. But no one (except possibly Salvador Dali) in any generation, before or since, used art the way Warhol did.

Pop Goes the Warhol, 1968, the artist's studio,
"the factory," became the hottest art spot in
New York: an entourage can be dangerous.

It wasn't so much that he knew how to use art, but that he also knew how to use the entire art scene, the media, the gallery system, the economic system, the social scene, everything that went into making Art with a capital "A". It wasn't just the aluminum foil coated parties he held in his factory-studio, or the boring, day-long, underground movies he produced as backdrops for his alcohol soaked soirees, or the carefully nurtured cult standing he developed. In 1968 he was shot and nearly killed by a member of the Society for Cutting up Men, or S.C.U.M. It mattered not that the would-be assassin, Valerie Solanis, was not only the founder, but the sole member of her group. He used the incident as the basis for cementing his place in the celebrity world far beyond the meager brilliance the art world had to offer. It was, indeed, ironic that, in 1987, this eccentric media giant was brought down, not by a bullet, but by the routine medical procedure of gall bladder surgery. In 1996, by the way, the shooting incident was the basis of an independent film, I Shot Andy Warhol (below).  Andy would have regretted not having come up with the idea himself.



I Shot Andy Warhol (poster), 1996,
Solanis using both art and artist.



Travel Painting



The Effects of Bad Government on the Countryside, 1338-40, Ambrogio Lorenzetti

People today love to travel. As you read this, I am, myself, traveling--cruising the Baltic between Amsterdam and Copenhagen on my way to spending two days in St. Petersburg, Russia. As Americans, we drive clear across the country on dual ribbons of concrete in motor homes at speeds in excess of 70 mph.; and we think nothing of hopping only slightly larger winged craft to do the same at speeds nearly ten times that. We travel for business, for pleasure, or sometimes for no good reason at all. And if we worry about our safety and well-being in doing so, we hide it with jokes about the pilot napping while a flight attendant flies the plane. A thousand years ago, for the most part, only two types of people traveled--merchants, and pilgrims. Most walked. Only those going "first class" had horses, while those traveling in wagons would have been the equivalent of owning a private jet today. And it was dangerous. They traveled in groups to ward off robbers and cope with natural difficulties. Artists, being merchants of beauty, were among those quite likely to travel from time to time (just as we do today). And if you were a prominent artist such as Giotto, Verrocchio, or Leonardo, there was no need to recruit like-minded travelers in forming a caravan, your own workshop of apprentices and assistants were enough of a retinue to insure a safe passage.

St. Frances Giving his Cloak to a Poor Man,
1290-95, Giotto

Travel is said to be a broadening experience and it may well have served to inspire artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth century to a new type of painting, that being the landscape. Though it would be several hundred years before any serious efforts were made by the Dutch to paint landscapes for their own sake, it was during this pre-Renaissance period that an attention to the passing countryside began to creep into the backgrounds of master painters in their renderings of religious, architectural, or portrait subjects. The Sienese artist, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, was one of the first to incorporate the many sights he encountered in his frequent travels into his paintings. They range from cultivated hills and meadows, to farmhouses, to small towns, to large, medieval, walled cities. The works were somewhat idealized, the proportions slightly suspect, and the perspective often tortured, but his efforts, and those of other Sienese artists he inspired, leave us with some feeling for what the land and traveling over it must have been like.

Noli Me Tangere, 1302, giotto

Lorenzetti's landscape efforts can be seen in his painting, The effects of Bad Government on the Countryside (top). Painted around 1338, some might even call it the world's first landscape painting though in fact, it was more allegory than landscape, and only one of several in a larger work. And even before that, Giotto often incorporated landscape backgrounds into his frescoes when he felt the need, such as his 1290-95 St. Francis Giving his Cloak to a Poor Man (above, left). In 1302 Giotto traveled to Padua, Italy, and the Scrovegni Chapel to paint his fresco Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, right). His garden in which Mary Magdalene first encounters the risen Christ, while not depicted in anything approaching a realistic manner, does manage to convey an amazing amount of detail including recognizable renderings of celery, parsley, and fennel. One has to wonder if the gradual increase in ease and frequency of travel, and the gradual emergence of landscape painting during the same period, were merely coincidental or if there may have been a cause and effect relationship instead. I wonder if landscape painters today travel more than other artists? I probably do.

Trains

Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, Claude Monet

We are all aware of how great inventions have revolutionize our lives. The same, to a lesser extent, applies to their effect upon art. Of course, not as many inventions affect art. The invention of oil painting, of course, had a profound, direct effect, as did photography, paint in tubes, electricity, the computer and trains. Trains? How could trains effect art? Well, initially at least, artists used trains the way everyone else did, to get from one place to another quickly, cheaply and comfortably. But their effect upon art was probably first noticed in France. They allowed city born and bred artist the opportunity to travel to the countryside to paint. The Barbizon School artists of Fountainbleu Forrest were some of the first to make use of the modern miracle of steam locomotion. They could leave Paris' Gare Saint-Lazare in the early morning, get to the countryside before midday, paint while the light was good, and still be home by dinner. It practically made the work of a painter a nine-to-five job.

Third Class, 1856, Honore Daumier

One has to wonder how much "en plein air" painting would have been done had the locomotive and its entourage not made the whole effort so convenient. Gradually, as impressionist artist adjusted to this convenience, they began to take it for granted, and turned to painting the trains themselves...or more accurately, the train stations (above). Monet especially, was fascinated by the great glass car sheds and the way they captured and held the light amidst the smoke and steam belching from the mechanical behemoths housed below. Artists such as Daumier and Renoir even began to paint and draw the commuters (above, right).

The 19th century Orsay train station in Paris sought to integrate glass and Beaux Arts
architecture to serve a new mode of transportation.  Today it serves even better as
an art museum.

Beyond painting, these train stations also forced architects to take a look at the product of their creative efforts as well. The problem was, the activities these building had to be designed to contain didn't fit neatly into the old, Beaux-arts, Gothic, or Classical styles (as seen above). First of all they were too big. Second, they were too expensive to build out of stone, and wood wasn't fireproof. They demanded metal--cast iron. But, despite architects' best efforts, cast iron didn't lend itself easily to any of the traditional styles either. The solution came from a most unlikely source--greenhouses. Glass! Framed in wood, supported by stark, naked, utilitarian iron and steel, this new "art medium" could span vast spaces with far fewer support columns and a far lower cost than anything else available. But it looked...well...ugly, to nineteenth century eyes at least. In borrowing from greenhouses they tended to look like greenhouses. It took a century of international exhibitions with their Crystal Palaces and other magnificent exhibition halls to acclimate architects and the public to a new architectural aesthetic--one of light, seemingly delicate, soaring grace--buildings that no longer had windows but were windows (as below).

Gare do Oriente, (Lisbon, Portugal) displays the today's evolutionary melding
of glass, trains, and the architecture to accomodate them.

The Thoroughly Modern Manet

The Absinthe Drinker, 1859,
Edouard Manet

The life's blood of any historian is dates, and I don't mean those that grow on palm trees in the Middle-east. History is written around the "first this" or the "last that," and dates are critical to the chronology upon which historians hang their hats. In a broader sense, historians like periods as well, and I don't mean the little round dots ending sentences. They provide the structure within which historians live and work. Periods derive from double dates--starting dates and ending dates. I spoke recently of the somewhat arbitrary nature of these dates in placing the beginning of the Post Modern period in art around 1970. If this date is difficult to pin down, it's nothing compared to the difficulty encountered in deciding when the period known as Modern Art began. Art historians will argue till they are cobalt blue in the face in favoring the work of Cezanne as the first "Modern Artist", or Picasso, or Monet, or Manet, or Courbet, or some such other Frenchman whose chief attribute seems to be a name ending with a long "a" sound.

The Spanish Singer, 1860, Edouard Manet

I'm not about to enter that fray, besides I don't look good in blue. I would, however, like to stake a claim as to the first modern (small "m") artist to ever wield a brush. His work may or may not have been the first Modern Art (big "m", big "A"), but his attitude, style, and subject matter easily puts him at the head of the line in the first category if not the second. I'm talking about the thoroughly modern Manet. In 1859, at the age of 27, Edouard Manet submitted to the Paris Salon The Absinthe Drinker (above, left). It was a bold, full length, identifiable depiction, a portrait really, of a Paris drunk by the name of Collardet who hung around the Louvre, only too willing to serve as Manet's model in return for a few glasses of the greenish concoction sitting on the low wall behind him. By today's standards, the painting is a mild comment on the evils of alcoholism, the man's garb, an amusing look at the fashion sense of Parisian lowlifes (ratty brown blanket draped stylishly over the shoulders, accented by an elegant top hat). His pose borders on the comical as he delicately places one toe forward in the manner of a ballerina.

A Spanish Dancer, 1861,
Edouard Manet

The Salon jury summarily rejected the painting. The colors were a garish yellow and dull green. The face, though somewhat blurred, would seem fairly conventional to us today. To the 1859 Salon jury it simply denoted incompetence. Determined to get into the show, the next year Manet submitted a rather lackluster painting titled The Spanish Singer (above, left). All things Spanish being quite chic at the time, he made it. He got his foot in the door. Thinking he'd found the formula for success, the next year (1861), he submitted to the jury an even better painting of A Spanish Dancer (left, who, incidentally, mimics the pose of his 1859 entry). But this time, the jury was onto him. It was rejected. So was his crowd scene (some would say mob scene), Music in the Tuileries (below), in 1862, and his scandalous Luncheon on the Grass, the following year.  Each painting had its own reasons for being barred from the exhibition, but in essence, they all boiled down to the fact that they were too "modern" for the tastes of the pompous, Parisian, pip-squeaks of painting who policed the presentations.

Music in the Tuileries, 1862, Edouard Manet