Albrecht Dürer

Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, ca. 1496, oil on wood, 23.1 x 17.4cm, National Gallery, London

Albrecht Dürer is the artist da Vinci would have been, had da Vinci not been so lazy. His accomplishments simply beggar description. He is primarily known to the modern world for his engravings, and they are certainly magnificent creations, but he was much more than a simple draftsman and etcher. His use of color and composition were far ahead of his time. He wrote books on measurement, proportion, perspective. He drew constantly, everywhere. Many of these drawings survive today, but the drawings on which his engravings were based are lost in the process of creation.

Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon, Engraving, ca. 1497, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany

Like da Vinci, Durer liked puzzles, and he included many games and codes in his work. There is a two volume work (two!) written by an art historian and critic just to try and explain the symbols found in his engraving Melencolia 1. The boy was hard at it, pretty much all the time, and we are blessed with a staggering collection of his work to study and marvel at. He is well worth a day of surfing through.

Melencolia 1, Engraving, 1514, 24 x 18.8cm, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany

Sometimes I am entranced, not just by the masterful talent of the artist, but by the dutiful, selfless, and painstaking efforts of all who came after him to preserve his work for posterity. Think of it, small watercolors and bits of paper sheets lovingly maintained for four hundred years. To put that in perspective, pull out some personal folder, say of old receipts or letters from four or five years ago. Look at how they’ve aged and faded in your modern, climate controlled environment. Now imagine trying to prevent any further deterioration for the next four hundred years. Good luck with that.

Dead Bluebird, 1512, watercolor, Albertina Vienna, Austria

For every Durer, El Greco, and da Vinci there were thousands of simple, responsible heroes who faithfully cared for and tended the work of their genius. We treasure the art of Van Gogh but without the persistence and faith of his sister in law, it might all be forgotten, long since passed along in yard sales or lost in fires.

Young Hare, 1502, Gouache and watercolor, 251 x 226mm, Albertina Vienna, Austria

Artists, too, preserve, but they are preserving on a grander, more metaphorical level. They imagine themselves to be keepers of the moment, the guardians of the now. They alone are unafraid to take the whole of eternity and mark notches on it like a proud mother charting the growth of her child. Everything is important to Durer: the metaphysical and the physical, the consternation of the angels and the sadness of the son of god, the alert peace of the wild hare and the fragile, broken promise in a dead bluebird.

When we undertake to pay attention to these artists, to study what they’ve left for us and puzzle over the things they thought to see, we too are contributing to their preservation. They live through our shared experience of their work. They teach us that everything is worth our attention if only we take the time to look at it, and that all of it is worth keeping safe.

Ecce Homo, oil

Nostalgia

Today I am a little fed up with quality. I’m a little bit tired of superhuman perfection, whether in the hands of the old masters or a modern super-computer. I want to see some wires in my special effects. I’m looking for a little velvet on my Elvis. How about a little fun? Does everything have to be about something? Hell no. As Deborah Kerr was heard to say over and over, “Let’s stop everything and have sex right here!” Good idea, Debbie.

Taste, schmaste! I want to see schmaltz. I want lurid yellows and reds on my postcards. Hell, let’s have postcards, at all. Give me vibrant colors that bleed into my days, that call from spinner racks mounted to every surface in every highway stop or drug store. Bring me sexual jokes of doubtful taste, exaggerated claims and wild accusations, double entendres of singular power.

I want to look at an image every now and then and know there is a standard, no bullshit, struggling human being behind it working with old style tools.

Perfection and sophistication are plenty swell, but they sure do get boring. You can pretend to culture all you want, but even Shakespeare knew that nothing sells tickets like ass jokes.

Loudon Wainwright III once sang, “Sometimes I feel ugly and old, excuse me baby if I’m acting bold, my head gets hot but my feet are cold, oh excuse me…” and maybe it is partly that notion of being old and judgmental that brings this disquiet. There’s a lot of brattiness, but damned little boldness for all we pretend otherwise. Maybe I’m dissatisfied because I feel overwhelmed by a world I barely understand anymore, a world so precise that someone, somewhere might be indexing my molecules because, well, you never know when you’re going to need that. “I’m tired and thirsty and I’m looking for my youth. I’m a little uncool, and I’m a little uncouth.” If that’s the case, then write me off. Presume the feeling will pass. But don’t bet on it.

I’m pretty sure I will never look at the professionally marketed business, the branded-and-sanded-to-a-perfect-non-threatening-finish enterprise with anything but boredom and contempt, or the wistful wish that we could somehow muss it up a little, improve it the way a fresh pie would improve the face of Daniel Day Lewis. But it is not to be. We may never see the like of this sort of place again, the snarkless innocence of the totally clueless. But we can dream.

Pierre Bonnard

Girl With Parrot, 1910, oil on canvas, 104 x 122 cm, Private Collection

One of the most wonderful things about Bonnard is his lack of affectation. He freely admitted to pursuing art, not because of some great drive to create and discover, but because he thought more conventional pursuits were boring. His greatest fear was enduring a life of mediocrity and routine. Luckily for him, he had a talent for painting. That gift, combined with a felicitous knack for deep and enduring friendships, served him throughout his life.

Carafe, Marthe Bonnard with Her Dog, 1912, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Bonnard, one of the original Nabis and generally thought of as an impressionist or post-impressionist, tended to be less intellectual about his work than others. He considered himself a kind of romantic realist, and while not fully in any particular school, it is true that there is a quality of romance to most of his work, particularly his paintings of Marthe, his beloved wife. Where more scholarly painters like Cezanne approached light and subject with scientific precision, Bonnard had an almost Eastern approach, addressing the impact of form on form, the relationship of a living creature to a mirror, a dresser, a window, a lamp.

Young Woman Before the Window, 1898, oil on canvas, Private Collection

His content seems more emotional than many. His aversion to boredom is apparent in the varieties of style he pursued over a long career. He was not afraid to experiment, yet over time, we begin to see that always there is this blending of subject with surrounding, an unspoken belief that the one arises from the other, that the human heart defines the context that creates it.

Model in Backlight, 1908, oil on canvas, 125 x 109 cm

He was a much admired and beloved man in his life. His friendships with Vuillard and Lautrec lasted all their adult lives, and Lautrec considered him a mentor. His favorite model was the wife he adored, and he painted her (and her dogs) over and over again. She died in 1942 some fifty years after she and Bonnard had met. It was a turbulent and terrible time in Europe, and now the old artist had to ride out the war alone. Perhaps it was better that she be spared the worst of the war years, but I am of those who think it is never better to be away from those you love, and I suspect Bonnard felt much the same.  We shall never know. We only know that when she died, he closed the door to the room in which they’d slept and did not open it again the rest of his life.

The Vase of Flowers, 1945, oil on canvas, 39 x 32 cm, Private Collection

 

Cecil Beaton

 

I sometimes doubt that Americans understand issues of class at all. Our society is so pugnaciously egalitarian that we imagine tangible assets are what distinguish one set of people from another. But as the English understand class, it has little to do with one’s funds and everything to do with one’s upbringing. Cecil Beaton, despite his father’s timber merchant background, was the very picture of high class, the kind of person who, at the age of eleven, could stage a somewhat fuzzy photograph of his sisters among trees and title it “Babes in a Corot Wood” yet have no one think him precocious. (Two years later he shot a photo of his sister Nancy which he titled “A Norfolk Bacchante” which was probably a bit much, even for his crowd.) I think that folk of Beaton’s station in life (at least at the beginning of the twentieth century) simply assumed everyone knew who Corot was, that everyone appreciated and understood great art and music, but some were simply limited by their purse for opportunities to experience it.

Beaton began quietly, attending university only long enough to acquire the contacts he needed to get himself started in the world of publishing. Before long he was on the staff of London Vogue and building a real reputation for his style. While his photographs weren’t thought of as technically innovative, his compositions were, even to the point that some lumped him together with the surrealists, a thing which neither Beaton nor the surrealists cared for at all. But it was Beaton’s unique gift, that in the middle of his extravagant design for a still, he could yet manage to snap at the precise instant to capture the elusive character and emotion that is bread and butter to the image makers. Small wonder people wanted to be photographed by Beaton.

Beaton did not make his way to Hollywood until 1931. He had a great romp through the stables of stars, taking pictures pretty much as he pleased. But the star he most wanted to photograph, Garbo, refused him altogether. She wanted nothing to do with him. “He talks to newspapers,” was her only comment. In his book, Beaton, James Danziger reports of Beaton’s first glimpse of Garbo taken from his diary.  From the diary: “If a unicorn had suddenly appeared in the late afternoon light of this ugly, ordinary garden, I could have been neither more surprised nor more amazed by the beauty of this exotic creature.” Yeah, I imagine he probably talked like that, too. Per Danziger, “as it came time for Garbo to leave Beaton asked, ‘Can I lunch with you tomorrow?’
‘No,’ was her reply.
‘Shall we meet again?’
‘No.’
In desperation Beaton grabbed hold of a feather duster that lay on the sofa next to where she sat. ‘Can I keep this as a memento?’
‘No.’
‘Then this is good-bye.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. C’est la vie!’ ”
(Beaton, edited and with text by James Danziger, 1980, Viking)

Beaton’s life is fascinating and far too complex to even outline here. Suffice it to say there was public shame and bleak failure, followed by a rebuilding of his reputation. He ended up in the films he loved so much, both as an actor (rarely) but more successfully as a designer.  He won Academy Awards for costume design for Gigi and for My Fair Lady. He worked on Broadway as a lighting designer, costume designer and set designer. He did okay. Four Tony Awards.

He knew almost everybody and worked with most of them, both in politics and entertainment. He was in on almost every cool cultural twist in modern, western, artistic life, from carrying Anita Loos piggy-back around San Simeon to hanging out with Keith Richards. And yes, lest you were worried, in the mid 40s he finally got his way and even the goddess Garbo finally said, “Yes.”

C’est la vie!

Oskar Kokoschka

Alma Mahler, 1912, oil on canvas, 62 x 56cm, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Oskar Kokoschka is one of the great lions of the expressionism movement, though his style arose out of his own artistic idiosyncrasies more than from his exposure to other artists of the period. His formal training was slap-dash and so his style flourished largely free of the “help” provided by the academics. Just as Kandinsky inspired the Blue Rider Group, so did Kokoschka inspire the “Oskar Kokoschka Bund.”  For his part, Oskar wasn’t really interested in being saddled with any group as he was too absorbed with lusting after, over, and on top of Alma Mahler.

Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel must have been something special. She managed to marry a top composer, architect, and novelist in succession while dangling affairs with a number of other great men in the meantime, poor Oskar among them. Apparently, almost no one blamed her for her behavior, seemingly accepting her promiscuity as her due. Her appeal was so broad that, should a time machine become available, I fully expect Kanye West to travel back to pre World War I Germany to take a shot.

Bride of the Wind, 1914, oil on wood, 181 x 220cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel

Bride of the Wind is Kokoschka’s tribute to Alma, and might mark the beginning of her discomfort with their relationship. After several torrid years she dumped him over his obsessiveness.  She returned to the arms of architect Walter Gropius with whom she had enjoyed an affair earlier while married to Mahler, but before Oskar. (Following?) Oskar took all this very well, coming to terms with her desertion by enlisting in the army, getting shot in the head, being declared mentally ill by the army doctors, and paying someone to craft a life size doll of Alma Mahler for his personal use. (Following?)

Self Portrait with Doll, 1922, oil on canvas, 80 x 120cm, Staatliche MuseenPresussischer Kulturebesitz, Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Despite these unpromising beginnings, Oskar somehow managed to get his sick shit together. He finagled a way to survive and flee the Nazis, be declared a degenerate artist under that regime (always a boost to prestige), make his way to England, marry, and enjoy a pretty comfortable professional career before snuffing it at the ripe old age of 94. Not bad for a crazy man with a bullet in his head.

Anyway, I like him.

Young Girl with Doll, 1921-22, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 81.2cm, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

George Caleb Bingham

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, ca. 1845, oil on canvas, 74 x 92cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY

I was born a few years too late to be swept up in the full scale, coon-skin cap frenzy, but the caps hung around long enough for me to want one, and the frontiersman image, the explorer vibe, was thick in the air of my youth. I and my friends often pretended to be Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone or even the Indian, Mingo from the television series. We held incredible battles in the woods throwing dirt clods at each other hard enough to risk serious injury and driving our mothers nuts. The average boy and girl of the late fifties and early sixties knew who all these explorers were, knew names like Mike Fink of the flatboats, and Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. Our country’s rough and rowdy past ate up a huge percentage of television, movies, literature, and music. It was a very different time; indeed, I am only now realizing how truly different it was. How likely is it that many under the age of forty can readily sing a song about a frontiersman? I’ll bet if they can, that the only song that comes to them is the Disney Davy Crockett song. I remember sitting in grade school learning to sing Sweet Betsy from Pike and being tickled to death to do so. Does that happen now?

Shooting for the Beef, 1850, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum

George Caleb Bingham was a great chronicler of America, particularly the America of the mid-nineteenth century. He was self-taught as an artist. He built his career primarily doing portraits for the important or wealthy families of Missouri, but it is his genre art that is most admired today. All of these examples are taken from his most creative period, from 1845 to 1855. After that, his prosperity ruined him by enabling him to go to Europe and study “proper” technique. Oh, well.

The Jolly Flatboatmen, 1846, oil on canvas, 96.8 x 123.2cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

If someone were shooting a modern movie of these scenes, they would probably design things to look dull, brown, and gray. (I often wonder if modern directors and cinematographers were attacked by crayons when they were young, they seem so scared of color.) But look at the splashes of color and style on these people. They were poor for the most part, but by gum they could indulge in luxe color here and there to set themselves a style. Look how rakishly some of these fellows wear their hats. Bingham new what so-called realists and naturalists have forgotten, that at heart we are all birds and we like to display. When you have very little it becomes much easier to keep your few things bright.

Country Politician, 1849, oil on canvas, 51.8 x 61cm, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Bingham was also unique in that he was one of the very few great artists who were also politicians. He was elected to office several times and appointed several more. I can easily imagine this scene of pleading for support in some county town so small they had to borrow from elsewhere to come up with three important men in one room. Notice the seating of the three men in chairs. This kind of thing is important with Bingham for he often failed to sign or record his work in ledgers. He did however, repeat himself which sometimes helps in validating his work. A second picture with a similar theme called Canvassing for a Vote uses almost the same posings, but stages it outside on a sidewalk and with a few more characters.

He was not an emotional artist; he has no great message for humanity. But he gives us a glimpse into the people we were, the people many of us still are. It is a fascinating look back at a period of our history that is well worth visiting again and again, if only to float the Missouri with the lowriders.

Boatmen on the Missouri, 1846, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2cm, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Interlude 9: I Am A Nighthawk

I been slingin’ this hash and flippin’ these burgers long enough to know that the world ain’t comin’ to no end tomorrow ’cause God is havin’ too much of a laugh at my misery, you dig? But hey, if you believe it, that’s cool with me. Just remember to tip big, ’cause, what do you care?

For the rest of youse, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hannukah and a Kwazy Kwanzaa and try to love everybody as much as you can, ’cause don’t we all need it now. The ole Automat will catch you in the next unlucky year, and we’ll talk some more about things I don’t understand.

Odilon Redon

 

The end of the nineteenth century kicked up a lot of dust in the art world as artists struggled with new ways to share the world of their peculiar and intimate senses. Redon was among the group of artists who seemed to have arisen from practically nowhere. He first gained wide attention as an aside in a successful novel wherein the main character was a collector of his drawings. Of such strange side tracks mighty trails are blazed.

Early on Redon worked primarily in charcoal and shades of gray, but it is his work in pastels and oils that are my favorite. He had many images to which he continually returned: boats and sailors, winged horses, angels, the heads of women, studies of the Buddha. They are all of them striking in that none of them seem to consciously strive for any particular style or harmony. Redon seems to delight in simply following his tools wherever they take him.

For this reason, I think of him as a strange philosophical painter who seems to live fixed in each separate moment of his work without reference to what has gone before or where he might be going next. It inspires a freshness and a spirit of surprise, even when looking at something as ordinary as a boat in the moonlight.

He died in 1916, well short of the post-modern age, but there is little doubt that were he to appear today for the first time with these exact works he would find himself welcomed and marveled over. You can’t ask for much more than that.

Thomas Nast

Christmas season has arrived at last, although no one has told the weather here in north Texas yet. Never mind. My granddaughter makes it Christmas for me all by herself as she imagines Santa Claus and helps with all the decorations around her house. Her idea of what Christmas means and how it feels is likely very different from my own expectations at her age. But we have pretty much the same idea of what Santa looks like and that is because of Thomas Nast.

Nast was a cartoonist at Harper’s Weekly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His portrayals of Saint Nick were so popular that soon everyone in the U.S. took his jolly old elf as the standard. Today you can see Nast’s influence even in the robust, and much safer, Coca-Cola version.

Nast’s power as a caricaturist and the voice of a nation’s conscience was without parallel. He went to war against the most powerful and corrupt political machine in American history: Boss Tweed’s gang at Tammany Hall. Tweed’s people used bribery, beatings, and booze to keep things at a constant boil. They controlled the city’s entire political apparatus and most of the politicos at the state level. Thousands of thugs and bankers and bureaucrats sat poised and ready to spring into action at Tweed’s command.

Nast had a pencil, a pen, and a courageous editor. That’s it. Other publishers, like Horace Greeley of “Go West, young man” fame, were snug in the pockets of Tweed.

According to Paine‘s biography of the cartoonist, at one point, supporters of Tweed came to Nast with a straight proposal to fund his further schooling and study in Europe for a cool hundred thousand dollars. Nast negotiated with them and got them as high as half a million bucks before he told them he’d have to pass. That would be approximately $8,770,000 in today’s money. That isn’t like bribing Anderson Cooper to back off a news story. Cooper makes too much money compared to what Nast made. It is more like offering $8,770,000 to the guy at the 7-11 to forget that he saw you. Who today has that kind of integrity?

Nast was an abolitionist, and a fierce opponent to the abuses of the Reconstruction era. He is the man who first used the elephant to represent the GOP.

For those who are appalled at the Tea Party and GOP response to the reelection of Obama, here is the “Tilden or Blood” cartoon. Democrats of the time were so dismayed at the Electoral College and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes they refused to accept it and kept trying to engineer a reversal. Their slogan was “Tilden or Blood,” implying a return to civil war. Nice. Face it, we Americans have a gift for over-reacting.

Nast did much to inspire the style of American political cartooning and consequently our advertising and illustration. Art historians discuss at length his influence on both Edgar Degas, who was an enormous fan, and Van Gogh. It was not until Nast that Americans began to understand the real power of an image, its ability to move a person or a whole nation to tears or to laughter.

Or to action.

 

Thank goodness we don’t have these kinds of problems now.

Otto Dix

Metropolis

I return again to Germany between her wars. World War I may have had more influence on art than any other war in modern history, both in terms of artists whose careers were snuffed out long before their flame could reach its brilliant peak, and in terms of artists whose work was informed and forever changed by the incredible havoc they had lived through. Dix was a survivor. He survived the trenches of World War I and he survived the destruction of much of his life’s work by the Nazis in World War II. Like so many of his artist brethren, he was officially declared depraved and decadent.

Hugo Erfurth with Dog

His friendships were deep and interesting. Here is a picture of the German photographer Hugo Erfurth. The two men were each a great influence on the other. Over time, Dix made many pictures of the photographer and his family as well as the dog.

Portrait of Fritz Perls

This portrait of the psychiatrist Fritz Perls is also an indicator of Dix’s status. Perls was one of the originators of Gestalt therapy, and an important man in his day. You may (or may not) be interested to know that Perls is the originator of the therapeutic technique known as “the Empty Chair” used by Clint Eastwood in his speech at the Republican Convention. Really. Look it up.

Three Prostitutes on the Street

Dix was not happy with the trend of life in the Weimar Republic. He would not have been Liza Minelli’s friend.  This was a terrible time in Germany financially and many people turned to what we would now think of as the Cabaret life to drown their troubles in drink and debauchery. Dix created pictures meant to stress the dehumanizing aspects of his society, waggling his paint brushes at the trafficking in human flesh and the terrible, bizarre, Weimar phenomenon known as the “lust murder.”

Self-portrait as Mars

His strongest work arose from his struggle to come to terms with the war he’d been foolish enough to live through. His whole life was plagued with dreams of that war, of crawling through houses terrified that someone was after him, that the structures would bury him in rubble. He came to see himself in some ways as a creature formed entirely by the forces of war. His Self Portrait as Mars reflects this struggle. (It is one of the five reproductions that actually hangs in my office.)

Trench

His painting Trench is powerful and amazing. It was so disturbing, in fact, that the museum that featured it felt it had to hide the painting behind a curtain. The city of Cologne actually cancelled the purchase of the painting and the director of the museum that had sought to acquire the work was forced to resign. Like Picasso’s Guernica, this is a painting that either hits you or it doesn’t. For me it is revelatory.

Dix managed to survive the Nazis by quite a few years, dying in Germany in 1969. He spent most of his years after World War II painting religious allegory and anti-war pictures. He lived through one of the most tumultuous and difficult times in history yet managed somehow to spend almost all of it doing exactly what he wanted.

On the other hand, the bad dreams never really went away.

Self-portrait