Konstantin Savitsky



To the War, 1888, Konstantin Savitsky

Portrait of the Artist Konstantin Savitsky,
1871, Ivan Kramskoy

I suppose it's only natural that, as an American, I tend to look with a biased eye at American (meaning U.S. art) as being at least a little bit superior to that of any other country. I could cite hundreds of artists to make my point, and still not prove anything inasmuch as "art appreciators" from other countries could easily do likewise. It would be a hard to make a case suggesting American creative endeavors are superior to French, Spanish, British, German, or Italian art. Those countries have such a long artistic heritage as compared to American art. And comparing American art to that of the orient, and other diverse culture would come down to comparing apples and pomegranates. Until I started writing about art a few years ago, and especially within the last year or two, I would never have even considered comparing American and Russian art, probably because I grew up during the Cold War era when all things Russian were seen somehow as being "evil." With the demise of the Soviet Union that prejudice has receded somewhat. Also, having visited Russia for a day or two helped me to level the playing field. It might be oversimplifying to say that Russians are just like us, but in comparing their art to ours, that's very much the case. I'm constantly amazed, as I search for notables about which to write, at the sheer number of excellent artists which have come from Russian stock. Just when I think I know them all, a surprising new one whom I've never heard of pops up. That was the case as I recently came upon Konstantin Savitsky.

Morning in the Pine Forest, 1886, Konstantin Savitsky,
allegedly painted on Ivan Shishkin's landscape.

Enoch (The Monk,) 1897,
Konstantin Savitsky

In being a painter of Realism, I'm naturally drawn to such art when I encounter it filtered through the culture of another country. In Savitsky's case, it wouldn't be going to far to compare him to Norman Rockwell, though Russia has never had anything to compare to the Saturday Evening Post, nor did Savitsky leave behind such an impressive body of genre works as did Rockwell. Nonetheless, in style and content, they are comparable, though Savitsky seems to lack much of Rockwell's dry sense of humor and irony. His portrait of Enoch (right), also known as The Monk, from 1897, is a telling example the two artists' similar styles. Broader in scope, Savitsky's To the War (top), from 1871, is every bit as colorful and rollicking, yet poignant as anything Rockwell ever put forth during the war years of the 1940s. And Savitsky's playful Morning in the Pine Forest (above) has Rockwell written all over it. Interestingly, Savitsky is said to have taken a painting by Ivan Shishkin and added playful bear cubs in one of the more unusual collaborations in Russian art. Savitsky later disputed the claim. Art historians seem to be in a quandary as to which man should be credited with the work. Recently, Shishkin seem to be the favorite.

Repairing the Railroad, 1874, Konstantin Savitsky

The Witch, 1869, Konstantin Savitsky

Konstantin Savitsky was born in the small coastal village of Taganrog (on the far eastern edge of the Black Sea east of Crimea). The year was 1844; his father, a doctor at the Taganrog Gymnasium (school) for Boys where the family lived during the harsh winter months. They rented a summer house in Frankovka (now in Slovenia, just north of Zagreb). As a young boy, Konstantin showed remarkable innate abilities in sketching the picturesque landscape of the area bordering the Azov Sea. However young Savitsky's life changed suddenly with the sudden death of both his parents when he was about eleven. Konstantin was taken to live with an uncle in present-day Latvia. In 1862, Savitsky graduated from a private boarding school then enrolled at the Imperial Arts Academy in St. Petersburg. There Savitsky became one of the top students, his academic work receiving both silver and gold medals. Unfortunately much of his early work has been lost. The Witch (above, left) from 1769 is probably his earliest existent painting. Repairing the Railroad (above), from 1874, is his earliest major work of that time dedicated to the life of the working class.

Suspicious People, 1882, Konstantin Savitsky

Family Quarrel, 1890,
Konstantin Savitsky

After graduating from the Academy, Savitsky spent the next twenty years of his life teaching art in various schools in St. Petersburg and Penza (central Russia). Savitsky's Suspicious People (above), from 1882, is typical of the artist's smaller scale genre pieces from this period. His Family Quarrel (right) depicting a distraught mother with her unhappy child needs only a magazine masthead to suggest work by a 19th-century Norman Rockwell. The same could be said for Savitsky's Travelers in Auvergne, (below) from 1875. Later, in 1897, Savitsky became a member of the Imperial Academy. He died in 1906 at the age of sixty-one. Though he lived and died in Penza, Savitsky's earlier home in Taganrog is seen as something of a local shrine (bottom). Two of his paintings can be found in the Taganrog Museum of Art. Several others might also be seen there today except for the fact that the museum's entire collection was looted by the Nazis during WW II and never recovered. Since that time their collection has grown to include some six-thousand items.

Travelers in Auvergne, 1875, Konstantin Savitsky.
Notice the broad segments of wealth and social standing included in the work.

House of Savitsky, ca 1890, in Taganrog.

 

Jenny Saville

Strategy (South Face, Front Face, North Face), 1993-94, Jenny Saville

The human body, when traditionally painted nude, regardless of gender, is often considered the basis of some of the most beautiful art ever created. Painting nudes dates back to figures of Adam and Eve, inasmuch as they were the first nudes and the fact that, being straight from the Bible, they were presumably married. Thus they were socially and morally acceptable to both church and state, the two most important influences as to what artists painted for nearly five hundred years. When private collectors of art began to make their likes known to painters, the erotic nude began to overtake the biblical (even erotic depictions of Adam and Eve). Still, beauty reigned supreme, as did mythology and eventually other "excuses" for nudity, from bathing to prostitution. Manet's Olympia (1865) may have been a whore, but still, she was a beautiful whore. It wasn't until Picasso and his ilk tackled the female nude that ugly nudes, such as seen in his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1909), appeared. Yet, even then, they were heavily abstracted nudes, inoffensive in that they appealed to the art-for-art's-sake crowd rather than those who had traditionally admired the naked female body.

Jenny Saville installation, Modern Art, Oxford

Then came along painters such as Lucien Freud, Philip Pearlstein, and a few others who saw the human figure more as a "thing," a shape to be manipulated and arranged much like a still-life, rather than any kind of "ultimate beauty" or erotic enticement. Even though they painted with extreme realism, their works have a rather cold, listless, lifeless quality, eschewing beauty in favor of honesty--most people are not particularly beautiful or even seductive when they're naked. Apart from Freud and Pearlstein, one of the "few others" mentioned above is the work of British painter, Jenny Saville. Saville takes nude painting one level beyond Freud and Pearlstein. While their nudes were not "particularly beautiful," hers fall into the realm of being particularly repulsive in their honesty, as in her Strategy (South Face, Front Face, North Face), (top).

Jenny Saville with her self-portrait.

Jenny Saville was born in 1970, near Cambridge (east-central) England. She obtained her degree at Glasgow School of Art in 1992, and was then awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati where she states that she saw "Lots of big women." It was the solid "physicality" of the women Saville saw while studying at the southwestern Ohio university which intrigued her and formed the basis of both her content and style since that time. Saville paints large women large as her Oxford installation (above) demonstrates (she has done very few male figures). Her work has been variously described as: “...embodying disgust,” constituting “strategic interventions [that] disturb dominant ideals of femininity,” and as “every woman's nightmare: vast mountains of obesity, flesh run riot, enormous repellent creatures who make even Rubens's chubby femmes fatales look positively gaunt.” I couldn't have said it better.

Hyphen, 1999, Jenny Saville

Red Stare Head IV, 2006-11, Jenny Saville

Around 2004-05 Saville transgressed to works depicting transsexuals and intersex subjects, one of which, Passage, from 2004-05, massively depicts a nude transsexual (too grossly disturbing to display here), a male-to-female transition. The model is shown with both a real penis and fake breasts. Saville's depiction of a lesbian couple Hyphen (above) from 1999, is barely usable under these circumstances. Her Red Stare Head IV (right), from 2006-11, underlines one of the most consisted elements in Saville's portrait images, the appearance that the figure has just been the victim of a violent encounter. The painting at right, by the way, is mild in that regard as compared to some. Saville's series of works depicting traumatized faces, can be seen in her Entry (not shown) from 2004-05, which vividly displays a scabbing wound, the vicious, red color evoking a feeling of heat and scorched skin. The glazed gaze piercing outwards from this canvas is another common feature in Saville’s work, repeated in the Stare series (above). The misty eyes, along with the painted surface, brings to life damaged skin suggesting a head injury.

The Mothers, 2010, Jenny Saville

More recently, Saville's work has had something of a change of direction. She gave birth, in quick succession, to a son and daughter. Motherhood seems to have imbued her with new confidence as she began to directly reference art history in her paintings. In addition, in an attempt to capture the movement of the wriggling and squirming infants she wanted to depict, and to speed up the process of completing a work, Saville turned to drawing rather than painting. And thus were born the works such as The Mothers (left), from 2010, which is all about movement and mark-making. The baby’s gripping fingers as he struggles to escape his pregnant mother’s grasp, set it apart from the placid portrayals of the miniature adult infant Christ throughout the early history of Madonna and Child imagery. These sketches are based on the work of Leonardo. By flouting the rules of traditional nude painting, the responses evoked by Saville’s oversized works do, indeed, engender disgust and repulsion. Yet, at the same time, there is a real sense of the myths of femininity. With them comes an inevitable and seductive allure. Her paintings will shock and appall, but they also intrigue, causing the viewer to want more. Humanness, through Saville’s eyes, might well be disturbing, but it could never become boring.

If this work has no name (it appears to be a study for
a later painting) we might call it "Ouch," as much
for what we see in it as from what we have all felt.

 

Does Your Car Smile at You?

1961 Cadillac De Ville. Tell me this car doesn't have personality.



2015 Mazda with its smiling "happy face."
No, it wasn't designed by the folks at Disney.

It's no secret animals have personalities much the same as human beings. They have emotions. They feel pain; they feel pleasure, fear, anger, joy, hunger, thirst, even sexual desires. A personality is that which causes man or beast to consistently react in a given way to a given set of circumstances. Having said that, I've long held that things such as cars, computers, and other forms of mechanical or electrical higher intelligence also have personalities. Often we become so accustomed to these various personality quirks that we're hardly aware of them until we have an occasion to work with one of their close relatives. I notice such things whenever I've switched from my desktop computer to my wife's. In large part these personalities are a reflection of the user's needs and personalities. The same goes for automobiles. I like my 2009 Prius. It likes me. Like all personal relationships those feelings are not the same one-hundred percent of the time, but far more often than not. There's a word for this, though applying it to various forms of hardware may stretch the definition. It's called anthropomorphism. One example is when we look at some object or group of objects and notice the presence of an imaginary face. Disney Studios owe virtually their entire existence to anthropomorphism--Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and on a mechanical level, a whole town full of Cars (below).

 

The gang from Disney's 2006 movie, Cars--ten different personalities.

The rather "dippy" looking amphibian.

An individual's personality and mood can often be read in their face. Cars have faces too, as even a passing glance at the art of the Disney animators reveals. Sometimes we can see a car's personality, rendered by the automotive designer in the vehicle's body language, as demonstrated by the sharply honed sheet metal of the 1961 Cadillac De Ville (top). The front of the automobile, has come to represent the vehicle's face; and automotive designers, almost as far back as Henry Ford himself, have enjoyed anthropomorphizing their creations, sometimes purposefully, sometimes inadvertently (as with Ford's Edsel), and more recently, quite blandly. Let's face it, if cars today have personality, if they seem to have faces, they're invariably a far cry from what we've seen in the past. Sometimes those faces were ambiguous, mysterious, funny, innocent, sweet, aggressive, angry, or simply strange, but they were undeniably present, nonetheless.

1950 For Crestliner

1959 Chevrolet Impala

Remember, the 1950 Fort Crestliner (above, left), or the 1959 Chevrolet Impala (above, right)? The Ford always struck me as a toddler with a pacifier in its mouth. The Chevy, my dad once referred to as looking like a "squint-eyed Japanese" (his words, not mine). Whatever you may think of cars, or the way they look, it's hard to resist assigning them human attributes. Alas, those were the days...

What are YOU grinnin' about?

Oh, I see. Yeah, she is kinda cute.
(The eyelashes are fake.)

Okay, before we drown in nostalgia, I don't think there are many who would disagree that cars from the last few decades have grown to be blander and blander. They may, like my Prius, still have personalities, but they don't tend to reveal their feelings on their "faces" or through their body language, unless you're fond of "jelly beans." Designers and engineers have, in large part, honed their arts and crafts to such a refined degree as to ordain one "best" shape and look for today's road vehicles. From that point, you'd think they were all churned out in identical factories (irony intended).

Ferrari Aliante concept car. Even for Ferrari it's pretty radical.

Despite this pragmatic sameness, there are still a few exceptions, where designers have purposefully imposed faces and "personalities" upon their progeny in an attempt to make them attractive to a certain group of buyers. The Ferrari Aliante concept car (above) is a perfect example. Still more obvious is the Darth Vader look of the Lexus LF NX concept car (below) obviously borrowed (or stolen) from Star Wars.

Lexus LF NX concept car--son of Darth Vader. You can almost hear it breathe.

Ahh, isn't that sweet...

 

Roelant Savery

Tower of Babel, 1602, Roelant Savery

Roelant Savery, 1661, Cornelis de Bie

"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" Barbara Walters was famous for asking that type of question as she interviewed the rich and famous celebrities over the course of her long career as a television journalist. I'm not sure if she ever asked a similar question regarding birds, but if not, let me be the first. "If you were a bird, what kind of bird would you be?" I'd probably be whatever kind of bird it is which leave its "artwork" all over the hood of my car. If Ms. Walters or I were to ask that question of the 17th-century Dutch painter, Roelant Savery, he'd probably cite the Dodo. I suppose most people have heard of the Dodo at one time or another, usually preceded by the word "dumb" as in "dumb Dodo" or "dumb as a Dodo." Some might even have thought the avian creature was mythological. It wasn't, though it's been extinct now for roughly four-hundred years. Roelant Savery had a love for painting birds and other animals back at a time before the Dodo became extinct. He did so several times, using it in several of his "Paradise" paintings. I'm not exactly sure why; God knows it was probably the ugliest bird that ever walked the earth. That's right, the Dodo was flightless; and according to early accounts by Dutch sailors, it came by its reputation as not-too-bright quite honestly.

The Edwards Dodo, 1626, Roelant Savery
(The title derives from the owner of the painting.)

Dodo Head, 1638, Cornelis Saftleven,
probably the last painting of a Dodo done
from life. (See what I mean by ugly?)

Roelant Savery has the misfortune to be remembered as the foremost painter of the Dodo. That is, indeed, unfortunate in that he was really pretty good at painting virtually all birds and (if somewhat stylistically) most animals. He was also quite adept at flowers. The problem with his work is that his art training was relatively limited (his only training came from a relative--his older brother). Also, his career fell during the Mannerist period, which is usually seen by art historians as something of a poor stepchild of the Renaissance. As for Savery's affinity for the Dodo, the name pretty much says it all, derived from the Dutch word, Dodaars, which means "fat-arse" (an apt description). As for Savery, one glance at his portrait (above, right) would suggest he wasn't exactly svelte. The bird was first encountered by Dutch sailors around 1600 on the small, uninhabited island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The Dodo had long before became to fat to fly from eating terrestrial creatures. Also, they had no natural enemies and no experience with a human presence. Thus they were easy prey for hungry seamen who considered them too "dumb" to take flight--hence their reputation for stupidity, and the major reason they became extinct.

The Dodo Preening Itself, 1626, Roelant Savery.
(Note the fat arse.)

Roelant Savery was born in 1576. His family lived in Kortrijk (the Flanders area of far western Belgium). They were Protestant Anabaptists. When the Spanish conquered the area in the 1580s, the family fled north to Haarlem in the Netherlands where young Roelant grew up to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, Jacob. The younger Savery's Tower of Babel (top) dates from this period in his life.

Adam and Eve in Paradise--the Fall of Man, 1618, Roelant Savery, Cornelis van Haarlem

Still life, 1624, Roelant Savery

With no more training than this sort of "family apprenticeship," Roelant Savery moved to Prague in 1604 to become a court painter for Emperors Rudolf II and his brother, Mathias. Around 1616 Savery moved back to Amsterdam, then settled in Utrecht two years later. There he spent the rest of his life, becoming by 1620 one of the most successful painters in the city. His Adam and Eve in Paradise--the Fall of Man (above) is typical of Savery's work from this period. The floral Still-life (left) from 1624, is the largest work Savery ever painting, measuring four feet tall by two feet, seven inches wide (130x80cm). It is said to contain 44 different species of animals and 63 species of flowers. That would make it a rather lively still-life. Speaking of lively, Savery's Landscape with Birds (below) presents something of an aviary compendium of virtually every bird known to man...or at least known to Savery.

Landscape with Birds, 1628, Roelant Savery.
Notice the inclusion of the Dodo in the lower right corner of the painting.

Although his work was popular and he had a number of students, Savery's downfall was alcohol. Every painter has two basic goals in life, to become good at what he or she does, and to remain solvent. Ironically, while he was a decent painter and succeeded in being popular, Savery failed miserably at the latter, declaring bankruptcy in 1638. He died less than a year later. Like the Dodo, he became extinct.

Pillage of a Village, 1626, Roeland Savery, depicting a scene from the Thirty Years' War in Europe. During this dark period of history, many were concerned by looting of the type presented in this work. The structure of this panel is inspired by the Massacre of the Innocents, ca. 1565-67, by Pieter Bruegel, the elder.

 

Martiros Saryan

Poppies, 1958, Martiros Saryan

Armenia, (light brown) lodged between
Turkey and Azerbaijan.

How do you write about an artist almost no one has ever heard of before, from a country many people have never heard of, and one which few people could find on a map, even if their life depended on it? Yet that artist is probably the most outstanding that country has ever produced. First of all the country is Armenia. Okay, it is a pretty small country as you can see on the map (right). It's lodged between Turkey and the only slightly larger former Soviet satellite of Azerbaijan. Quite mountainous and landlocked, it's roughly halfway between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea just south of Georgia, north of Iran. It's not hard to see why most people could never find it on a map. Historically, the country is most famous for the Armenian genocide during WW I. For as long as anyone alive today can remember, Armenia was under the thumb of the USSR, until that government's dissolution in 1991 when they became independent. If you're now saying, "Oh, that Armenia," don't pretend; I didn't know most of that either.

Ararat at Spring, 1945, Martiros Saryan. Can you spot Noah's ark? Probably not.

Self-portrait, 1909, Martiros Saryan

Martiros Saryan is arguably the best and most famous artist Armenia has produced in modern times. The fact that you've never heard of him simply indicates he was a big fish in a very small pond. Insofar as I can recall, I've never written about an Armenian artist; which, alone, would be reason enough to do so. Most of his career Saryan was an Expressionist, which means I'm not particularly fond of much of his art. He has his moments of brilliance, though, such as his Poppies (top) from 1958. His Ararat at Spring (above) is also quite stunning. Mostly I like quite a number of his portraits, such as his self-portrait (left). As might be noted in seeing Saryan's touching, Portrait of Mother (below, right), from 1898, his portraits vary in style considerably according to when they were painted. Saryan was less expressionistic in his early years and much less so as he grew older. Over his lifetime, Saryan painted several self-portraits. The one at left dates from 1909 when Expressionism was running rampant all over Europe and Saryan was at the height of his Expressionist period.

Village Makravank, 1902, Martiros Saryan

Portrait of Mother, 1898, Martiros Saryan

Martiros Saryan was born in 1880. I could mention where, but if you couldn't find Armenia then locating his birthplace would be rather pointless. He was born in Russia, in any case. Following the Russian equivalent of high school, at the age of fifteen, Saryan moved on to the Moscow School Arts where he was influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. His early work reflects a kind of mixture of the two. Though he's considered an Armenian artist, Saryan was twenty-one before he first visited Armenia around 1901. There he painted several rather dull landscapes such as Village Makravank (above) from 1902, which were well received back in Moscow. It's hard to see exactly why, but then, there's no accounting for Russian tastes in art. Whatever the case, Saryan's Bedouin with a Camel (below), from roughly ten years later (1911), would seem to indicate that, in adopting the prevailing style of Expressionism at the time, at least it lightened and brightened his palette.

Bedouin with a Camel, 1911,  Martiros, Saryan. You sort of have to like Expressionism to appreciate Saryan's work during this period in his career.

Saryan at work on a portrait of Ida Kar.

The years just before, during, and after WW I were turbulent years for Armenia and virtually anyone living in the area between the Black and Caspian Seas as political power and military dominance passed from first the Ottoman Turks to the Germans, and finally the Russians who eventually turned the tiny countries into minor parts of the Soviet Union. Saryan traveled around the area frequently, sometimes to escape the conflicts, sometime in helping others do the same. He traveled as far away as Egypt to help refugees fleeing from the Armenian genocide before eventually settling in Soviet Tbilisi (Georgia) where he married in 1916. There he worked to establish the Society of Armenian Artist, while also finding work designing for the Armenian State Theater. For two years, 1926 to 1928, Saryan and his wife lived in Paris, where he gained some degree of international recognition. However all during the difficult 1930s, until his death in 1972 at the age of ninety-two, Saryan lived and worked in Soviet Armenia painting landscapes and portraits (above, left). Most of the work I consider to be his best was done in the years during and following WW II, paintings such as his Grapes (below) from 1943. Today, his former home in Yerevan has been made into a museum featuring his work (bottom). Considered the founder of the Armenian national school of painting, Saryan was buried nearby, next to Komitas Vardapet, the founder of the Armenian national school of music.

Grapes, 1943, Martiros Saryan

Martiros Saryan Museum, Yerevan, Armenia.

The sculpted monument marking
the grave of Martiros Saryan,
Yerevan, Armenia.

 

The Ninth Street Exhibition--1951

The show's poster, designed and printed by the painter Franz Kline.

Forty-two years ago, 1973, toward the latter part of my first year at teaching art, I organized a community art show in Dodge Park, Beverly, Ohio (a town of about 1,500 in the southeastern part of the state). My eighth grade art students made the posters as a class project in calligraphy. My work and that of my adult students made up the majority of the entries in the show. An art teacher friend judged it and awarded prizes. First price in each category was $25; Best of Show was a check for $50 courtesy of myself and area merchants. The date was in May, the weekend before Memorial Day. It was a lot of work, mostly setting up borrowed display racks, then returning them after the two-day show. Attendance was a bit sparse the first year but improved over the ten-year life of the show. I've always had the feeling that little community art outreach was a major factor it helping me keep my job after a rough first year in the classroom.

Study for Ninth Street, 1951, Franz Kline--one of the few works certain to have been in the show.

60 East Ninth Street, New York, today.

Some twenty-two years earlier, an art gallery owner named Leo Castelli, along with some major figures in the Abstract Expressionist art movement organized a similar show. It wasn't in a park, though today nearby Washington Park annually hosts a similar event. Instead, it was held in a vacant storefront at 60 East Ninth Street in New York City. There are no photos of the exterior from that time (the building was demolished soon after the show closed), but today it's a six-story, red brick apartment co-op (left). Prices start just under half a million to purchase a studio apartment; while rentals start at $2,400 per month. In 1951, two month's rent was for the storefront and basement was $70. Castelli donated another $200 for paint and repairs to turn the place into a venue slightly resembling an art gallery. The show ran for three-weeks. Carefully study of the list of sixty-one artists at the top of Kline's poster (top) reads like a who's who of the New York School, at least a dozen of which should be instantly recognizable by anyone familiar with those hungry artists who gave birth to the controversial new movement.

The Ninth Street Exhibition, photographed by Aaron Siskind.
Yes, that's a Jackson Pollock front and center. (Notice the bare lightbulb.)

The show opened with the obligatory reception on May 21, 1951 (no record as to the wine or cheese). It was a gathering of a number of notable artists, and it was the stepping-out of the post-war New York avant-garde, collectively known as the New York School. The opening of the show was deemed a great success, though there are no records as to sales, which probably means that there weren't any. But that wasn't the point (well...it was, but a fairly minor one, actually). Mostly the show was aimed at the art critics and New York's high-end art gallery owners. As it turned out, the public was, in general, liking of what they saw. Yet, in spite of the public interest exhibited, there were few galleries that were willing to accept the works of the New York School artists who were unknown to traditional art critics. It was a start, but it was a slow start. As one sympathetic critic put it: "It appeared as though a line had been crossed, a step into a larger art world whose future was bright with possibility." That was most kind of him.

A sort of commencement ceremony for graduating seniors of the New York School.

Art historians, then and now, often compare the 1951 Ninth Street Exhibition to the much more famous (and groundbreaking) 1913 Armory Show. However no huge crowds braved the warm spring weather to look at the predominantly abstract works mounted in the downtrodden storefront on Ninth Street. No former president came around to make fun of the art (as had Teddy Roosevelt at the Armory Show). There was not the same degree of outrage or publicity the Armory show had elicited thirty-eight years before. Modern Art had become about as modern as the parents of most of the artists exhibiting, many of whom were war veterans struggling, as in the case of Pollock, to pay $35. a month rent while deciding whether to put food on the table or paint on their palettes.

She Wolf, 1942, Jackson Pollock.
It's questionable as to whether this one was in the Ninth Street Show.

New York's south of Fourteenth Street art
neighborhood during the 1940s and 50s.
The Cedar Tavern was near Eleventh Street.

At the time Pollock was sharing a nearby fourth floor walk-up with his brother, sister-in-law, and girlfriend, artist Lee Krasner. He was yet to get into his "dripping" mode and was, instead, turning out work such as She Wolf (above) from 1942. He was quite ill-fed and ill-housed, but he had no worries as to the price of beer--fifteen cents at the nearby Cedar Tavern (below). This University Place watering hole was where the New York School held its "classes." Painter Joe Steffanelli claimed, "I learned more about painting in the Cedar Bar than in any art school." In the forties and fifties, still-semi-starving artists like Pollock, de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and a few others took time from the Abstract Expressionist search for aesthetic truths, both seen and unseen, to hoist a few, get into fistfights, and hoist a few more at the Cedars. De Kooning and his wife, Elaine, used the Cedars to play out their 50-year alcoholic soap opera, while Pollock was eventually banned from the place for ripping the men’s room door off its hinges. Another member of their rowdy group was likewise tossed, for pissing in an ashtray. Raucous as it was, the long, drunken nights at the "Cedar Bar" led to the founding of "The Art Club" (or simply, "The Club") at 39 Eighth Street. And that alcoholic's no-man's-land led to the organization of the first Ninth Street Exhibition little more than a block north (see map). The show continued annually at a different location until 1963.

The moving history of New York's infamous Cedar Tavern.

Some of the lesser-known members of the
Cedar Tavern gang, artists Charlotte Brooks, left,
Jack Tworkov, Mercedes Matter, and James Brooks.