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Category: art history

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Voiceless, almost

This 5-gallon stoneware storage jar, incised “March 4 1857 Dave” on shoulder, sold at auction for $39,550.
Yesterday I mentioned in passing that the banjo is credited to American slave laborers, who made themselves skin-and-gourd stringed instruments of a type similar to those left behind in Africa. That image of singing in the depths of slavery stayed with me all day. The urge to create is our common humanity made visible. Creativity itself is what separates us from all other orders of creation.
The ceramic disk that is the pendant in this Chokwe wood-and-raffia necklace could be considered the currency in which slave lives were valued. It was made in Europe specifically for the slave trade. It resembles the cross section of a white snail’s shell, a symbol of spirituality and leadership in 16th-18th century Central African cultures. 
Sadly, the Negro Spiritual (and its influence through almost 200 years of music) is the major part of what is left of the American slave’s artistic heritage. There were slave artisans working in the Americas, of course, but their work is generally either anonymous or missing.
Early American Powder Horn, dated 1777, used during the American Revolution by a former slave named Prince Simbo.
Among them was one “Dave the Slave,” or David Drake, as he styled himself after the Emancipation.  Born around 1801 on a plantation in South Carolina, he made large jugs, which he often adorned with short poems. At the time it was generally forbidden for African-Americans to read and write, making his occasionally-seditious poetry a peculiarity.
For example, “Follow the Drinking Gourd / For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom,” is an instruction telling his users that the Big Dipper points north.
He has no biography other than his work; we don’t know the date of his death any more accurately than the date of his birth. But from his own hand, we do know that “Dave belongs to Mr. Miles / Wher the oven bakes & the pot biles.”
Face jug by an anonymous Edgefield, SC slave potter.  Many of the slaves in Edgefield have been identified as belonging to an 1858 shipment of people from Kongo. These people used spirit containers called nkisi in divination. It’s possible that the face jug derived from that tradition.
Dave the Slave was unusual because we have a name to attach to a body of work. He worked in Edgefield, South Carolina, a pottery center due to its clay soil. Slave owners like Benjamin Franklin Landrum and Thomas J. Davies hired out their slaves as workers at the kilns. Unsigned pottery from Edgefield is identified by the name of the kiln owners; the artisans are for the most part undocumented.
Portuguese trader figure from Benin. Dahomey (Benin) sold their war captives into transatlantic slavery. By 1750, the king was earning an estimated ÂŁ250,000 per year selling slaves to European traders. This little figurine was originally part of a larger set.
But to add insult to injury, Dave’s jugs are now valuable collectibles, selling at up to $40,000 each. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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Decentralization

No museum keeps its whole collection on display. Meeting between Emperor Wen and Fisherman LĂź Shang, 16th century, attributed to Kano Takanobu, is only available via the internet or if the Metropolitan will opens their vaults to us.
Yesterday I wrote about an articulated doll found in an ancient sarcophagus in 1964. This story recently made the rounds of the blogosphere, even though it is 40-year-old news. Some unknown blogger—an aficionado rather than an intellectual—recognized the spark of genius in that ivory doll and shared it with the world, where it caught the imagination.
In the 20th century, museums and galleries were able to tightly control their collections. Distribution of their slides was limited to ‘serious’ students: other museums, colleges, and professionals. If you were outside academic life, you learned about art and history through books and museum visits.
If the Roman occupation of Britain is your passion, you can browse the British Museum’s Mildenhall Treasure from your living room. You probably don’t need a lecturer to tell you that’s a spoon.
In 2000, sisters-in-law Olga and Helen Mataev started an online gallery of paintings by great artists. It was the first comprehensive online gallery and has since grown to 15,000 images. Nothing like it had been available before.
Wikipedia, launched in 2001, was a major engine for decentralizing art images. Today Wikiart(75,000 images) and online collections of major museums like the Metropolitan (400,000 images), are following suit.
Interested in the Great Chicago Fire? You can browse the Chicago History Museum’s collection of ephemera and find things like this leather fire marshal’s helmet, circa 1870.
This decentralization of information is the most important movement of our time. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here. 
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Celebrity intellectuals

The Heart of the Andes, 1858, Frederic Edwin Church. It is useless to imagine this painting from a photo; it has to be seen. You can do that at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
There’s a Humboldt Street in Rochester, a Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, and various fixtures named Humboldt across our country.  I had the vague idea that he was a famous explorer, but last week it clicked that he was the fellow whose work inspired Frederic Church’s The Heart of the Andes.
Alexander von Humboldt was the last of that breed of brilliant scientific generalists, largely self-taught, who contributed so much to the world’s knowledge of botany and geography. Between 1799 and 1804, he traveled throughout South America, exploring and describing it in scientific terms.
Humboldt is the first person to have realized that the coasts of South America and Africa dovetail, and he proposed the idea that they might have once been joined. He noted that volcanoes fall in linear chains and demonstrated the fallacy of the idea that rocks were formed from the world’s oceans. He laid the foundations of modern geography and meteorology. In his spare time, he surveyed Cuba and stopped to visit President Thomas Jefferson at the White House.
Self-portrait, 1815, Alexander von Humboldt. Gentlemen-scientists once knew how to draw.
Humboldt saw the physical world as a unified system and the physical sciences as interlinked. He understood that botany was dependent on biology, meteorology, and geology. To prove that required the time-consuming analysis of the data he’d collected in South America.  This took him 21 years and he never felt it was complete, but it changed the way we see the world.
He expected artists to play a part in the collection of natural data, by accurately portraying the landscape. Humboldt recognized landscape painting—then in its own infancy—as among the highest expressions of love of nature.
Enter the brilliant American painter and entrepreneur, Frederic Edwin Church. In 1853 and 1859, Church traveled to South America to replicate Humboldt’s journeys. While Humboldt had used family money to finance his explorations, Church enlisted an American financier, Cyrus West Field, who wanted to encourage investment in his South American ventures.
Isothermal chart of the world, cartographer William Channing Woodbridge, made using Humboldt’s data.
The Heart of the Andes is a composite of South American topography and botany. Its monumental scale and detail can’t be appreciated through photographs; you really need to go to New York to see it in person.
But that was pre-Civil War America, where there wasn’t even a decent railroad system. The painting went on tour, visiting seven American cities and London. At its opening in New York (April 29 to May 23, 1859) 12,000 people paid a quarter apiece to see it. People swooned. It was the talk of the town.
Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1805, Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland.
At the end of its tour, Church sold the painting for $10,000—at the time, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist.
Both Humboldt and Church were famous in their day. A world that reveres science and art is a world that is well-read, disciplined, and thoughtful. Compare that to our current fascination with the Kardashians, and you might get the idea that we’re in trouble.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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Je suis France

The ‘controversial’ street art that earned Combo a beating.
On Monday I wrote about the responsibility of artists to tell the truth. In the United States, we are reasonably safe from persecution, but that isn’t the case in France. Last month 17 people were assassinated and 22 wounded in a series of terroristic attacks that were putatively in response to cartoons critical of the prophet Muhammad.  
Compared to the staff of Charlie Hebdo, the street artist known as Combo got off easy. Le Monde reports that four young toughs asked the artist to remove an offensive piece of art last weekend. He refused and they beat him up.  Combo is a big fellow who learned boxing essentials from a younger brother, but he suffered a dislocated shoulder and other injuries sufficient to put his right arm in a sling—in essence, they were trying to silence his drawing hand.

On the other hand, the ‘offensive art’ he posted on a Paris street is, by our lights, soothing and safe. It is a riff on that ubiquitous Coexist bumper sticker that is plastered on Priuses all over America. His art consisted of a picture of himself dressed in a djellaba on a wall alongside the Coexist image.

Part of Combo’s installation in Chernobyl.
Born in Amiens to a Lebanese Christian father and a Muslim Moroccan mother, Combo is the eldest in a family of four boys, of whom the younger have become more religious. “At first I thought I was French, but then I quickly realized that I was Arab. Now, I am told that I am a Muslim. This is the French disintegration,” he added.
Part of Combo’s installation for the 2014 French election.
When Combo decided to leave for Beirut, his friends said, “You are a fool! What are you going to do, jihad?”

“I’m going to make jihad-art on the walls of Beirut,” he answered. “Less of Hamas, more of hummus.”

Combo refuses to speculate on the identity of those who assaulted him. “That would only add fuel to the fire. Of course I’m scared. But I said I was Charlie, and I still am.” And then he smiled. “Too bad for them that I am left-handed.”


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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The other faces of Madame X

Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast, John Singer Sargent, 1882-83. This small, intimate painting was done a year before the infamous Madame X, and was given by Sargent to Madame Gautreau’s mother.
Madame X—Madame Pierre Gautreau—is remembered because of John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait. Like him, she was an American expatriate and arriviste, which perhaps explains why she sat for him when so many artists were clamoring to paint her.
She was born Virginie Amélie Avegno in New Orleans in 1859. Her parents were Creoles: her father claimed he was Italian, and her mother was French. Her father—an officer—was killed in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.
Figure study of Madame Pierre Gautreau by Sargent in watercolor and graphite, c. 1883. The difficulties of painting a socialite’s portrait included getting her to settle down to posing.
The South being suddenly inhospitable to planter society, Virginie’s mother moved the two of them to Paris, where the girl was educated for her role as a parisienne. This was the 19th century equivalent of a Sloane Ranger or BCBG—a young, polished woman whose primary raison d’ĂŞtre was to exist beautifully. These women were sometimes called “professional beauties.”
Just as Virginie herself was being reengineered for a European career, Paris in 1867 was in the midst of reinventing itself. The ancient city had been largely redesigned and rebuilt by Baron Haussmann. A brash new city required brash new people, people like Virginie Avegno, now married to Pierre Gautreau, banker. They might not have had pedigrees, but they had money and youth and beauty.
The painting now known as Portrait of Madame X, by John Singer Sargent, 1884. The only one that mattered, and the one that scandalized Paris society.
Virginie was a very pale brunette with an arresting face and an hourglass figure. She was a fardĂŠe, or an openly painted lady. Her hennaed hair and lavender powder (to enhance her pallor) enhanced, rather than detracted from, her reputation. She was very much a new woman in the Parisian style. And because she was a stunner, and an American, people gossiped. Did she use arsenic to achieve that pallor? With whom was she sleeping?
Madame Pierre Gautreau, Antonio de La Gandara,1898. Mme. Gautreau went on to be painted by many other society artists, but never as memorably as by Sargent.
Her reputation and exotic looks also made her a magnet for artists. Among them was Sargent. “I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. If you are bien avec elle and will see her in Paris, you might tell her I am a man of prodigious talent,” he wrote a friend.
Madame X was shown in the Paris Salon of 1884 under the title Portrait de Mme –, as if that could protect the sitter’s anonymity. Although Mme. Gautreau and Sargent both thought it was a masterpiece, the public reception was one of shock.  Mme. Gautreau’s mother asked him to withdraw the painting, which the artist refused.
Portrait de Madame Gautreau,1891,Gustave-Claude-Étienne Courtois. This was painted seven years after Sargent’s portrait, and the falling strap and dĂŠcolletage raised nary an eyebrow.
Mme. Gautreau quickly recovered from her humiliation, and was painted again by other artists. Sargent moved on to greener pastures in London. And the painting is remembered as an iconic masterpiece.


I will be teaching in Acadia National Park next August. Read all about it here, or download a brochure here. 
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On my bucket list

The superheated pyroclastic material from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD preserved Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabiae, and Oplontis intact (including food, human bodies, and wooden superstructures). The historian Pliny the Younger wrote about the eruption to the historian Tacitus, so we even have an eyewitness description of the volcano. And they’re in the Campania, which is a fantastic tourist destination in its own right. No wonder so many students opt to learn about them.

One of three new mosaics unearthed this year at Muzalar House in the ancient city of Zeugma, in modern Turkey.
While they are famous and well-studied, they are by no means the only Roman mosaics in Europe, Asia Minor or the Middle East. Last week a Turkish news bureau announcedthat this year’s digs have unearthed three new Roman mosaics in the ancient city of Zeugma.

“Gypsy Girl,” a fragment of mosaic found in the ancient city of Zeugma, in modern Turkey.
Zeugma was formally settled around 300 BC by Alexander the Great’s infantry general, Seleucus I Nicator. It was named for the bridge of boats (zeugma) which crossed the Euphrates River there. Its location was unknown until a few years ago, when signs of archaeological looting combined with plans to dam the Euphrates led to its investigation. Only a small number of its mosaics have been located and preserved to date.

Detail from a mosaic from the ancient city of Zeugma, in modern Turkey.
In its heyday as a Roman city, Zeugma was home to more than 70,000 people. The get-rich-quick hangers-on of the Empire built their usual sumptuous villas, distinguished by mosaics. But Zeugma was also one of those “crossroads of the Ancient World” places where civilizations cross-pollinated. The site includes pre-Hellenistic, Greek and Roman ruins and artifacts.

One of three new mosaics unearthed this year at Muzalar House in the ancient city of Zeugma, in modern Turkey.
Pompeii and its environs have been explored since the end of the 16th century. There is nothing new we could possible say about them. In comparison, Zeugma has been studied for 25 years. Since the mosaics are being removed to the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, future students will never examine them in situ as they do at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Still, Zeugma’s mosaics are sophisticated, naturalistic, and well-preserved. They should attract any student of ancient art.

I will be teaching in Acadia National Park next August. Message me if you want information about the coming year’s classes or this workshop.
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Will your neighborhood art historian be replaced by a robot?

The most expensive painting on record is currently Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players, which sold for an estimated $259 million in 2011. (The exact price is unknown.)
In a paper entitled Toward Automated Discovery Of Artistic Influence, Babak Saleh and his Rutgers team claim to have used imaging software and ‘classification systems’ to automate the process of identifying artistic influences.
Last week, Apollo Magazine askedwhether robots can indeed replace art historians. They reached the same conclusions as did I—nope—but for different reasons.
The second most expensive painting on record is currently Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948, which sold for $140 million in 2006.
The international art market moved $66 billion last year, so the experts in authenticating and analyzing paintings are valuable. And when they work at museums and galleries, art history majors are not badly paid. In 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, museum curators and archivists made slightly more than $45,000 a year.
But the rub is when art historians enter the academic stream. While post-secondary teaching jobs are expected to growin the next decade, even the BLS admits that many of these jobs will be for adjuncts, or part-timers. In fact, more than ¾ of college professors are adjuncts, and their wages are abysmal: between $1000 and $5000 per course. As Salon pointed out this month, that leads to professors with PhDs earning the same amount as the average full-time barista—who’s not expected to do curriculum development or grade papers on his own time.
The third most expensive painting on record is currently Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, which sold for $137.5 million in 2006.
Why does the United States tolerate a system where university educations are obscenely expensive at the same time as they’re being provided by slave labor? Beats me. But there is no reason to automate intellectual disciplines when we pay them atrociously. Your art history degree is safe for now.


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Why are art babies so ugly?

The Haller Madonna, Albrecht DĂźrer, 1498
We interrupt this regularly-scheduled programming to address the age-old question of why babies in paintings are often deformed, distorted, and generally ugly. (And, BTW, this phenom isn’t limited to Renaissance babies, no matter what the current meme says.) It isn’t because the artists can’t draw; I’ve included examples by superb draftsmen.
There are a lot of theories about this, covering context to symbolism to the possibility that earlier babies just were not that good looking in the first place.
The Baby Marcelle Roulin, Vincent van Gogh, 1888
Having had several babies myself, and having done a lot of figure painting, I think the answer is much simpler: babies make lousy models. They squirm and howl when they’re uncomfortable, and they won’t hold a pose. They have no muscle tone and very little neck, and they wobble. Pre-photography, the best the artist could do was limb in a few lines and return the pathetic little creature to its mother’s arms.
The Three Ages of Man, Titian, 1511
On the other hand, I’ve always wondered why so many Renaissance infants are pictured wearing jewelry. Didn’t they get the memo about choking hazards?
Newborn Baby in a Crib, Lavinia Fontana, c. 1583
Enough of this. I have a new little grandson to go visit. He arrived squalling into the world last night, and I haven’t yet begun to paint his portrait.

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Color and meaning (color temperature, part 2)

Composition VII, 1913, by Wassily Kandinsky.

Three artists arrived at the idea of pure abstraction at roughly the same time: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. This was not coincidence; all three believed in the spiritual properties of abstraction, an idea they got from the rich stew of spiritualism swirling around turn-of-the-century Europe.

One of the chief promoters of the Fourth Dimension was Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, a follower of G. I. Gurdjieff. Ouspenskii believed our consciousness was evolving, which would ultimately lead us to perceive the fourth dimension, and that art and music were the path to this evolution.  In the fourth dimension, reality and unreality were reversed, and time and motion were revealed as illusions.
Theosophy was Madame Blavatsky’s occult movement. She described it as “the archaic Wisdom-Religion, the esoteric doctrine once known in every ancient country having claims to civilization.” Madame Blavatsky taught that color had spiritual vibrations which would awaken the dormant spirituality within a person, and that art should begin in nature, a nature that would be found in a world-birthing apocalypse.

A fully realized theory must include the proper colors for shapes. The passive and dull circle deserves a correspondingly dull blue. The energetic triangle ought to be rendered in a dangeresqueyellow.
Rudolph Steiner’s spin on theosophy was called Anthroposophy.  This postulated the existence of an objective spiritual world accessible through inner development of the clairvoyance and intuition that modern man had lost as he developed rational thought. Steiner focused on the symbolic and synesthetic properties of color.

And then there are angles, which should be matched in aggression with their colors.
Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) is both turgid and broad-ranging. Let me just hit his major points about color:
  • Colors evoke both a purely physical effect on the eye and a vibration of the soul or an “inner resonance.”
  • The elements of color are warmth or coolness, and clarity or obscurity. 
  • Warmth means yellow, and coolness means blue, so yellow and blue form the first great contrast. Yellow has an eccentric movement and blue a concentric movement; a yellow surface seems to move closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. Yellow is a terrestrial color: mad, disturbed and violent. Blue is a celestial color, deeply calm but sinking toward the mourning of black. The combination of blue and yellow (green) yields total immobility.
  • Clarity is a tendency towards white, and obscurity is a tendency towards black. White and black form the second great contrast, which is static. White is a deep, absolute silence, full of possibility. Black is nothingness, an eternal silence without hope (death). 
  • The mixing of white with black gives gray, which possesses no active force and is similar in tonality to green. Gray is frozen immobility; dark grays tend toward despair, but even lightening gray yields very little hope.
  • Red is a warm color, forceful, lively and agitated. Mixed with black it becomes brown, which is a dull, hard, inhibited color. Mixed with yellow, red gains in warmth and becomes orange, which irradiates and energizes its surroundings. When red is mixed with blue it moves away from man to become morbid and mourning purple. Red and green form the third great contrast, and orange and purple the fourth.
In short, Kandinsky’s color theory is a magnificent exercise in hooey. Still, it has had a long-reaching influence, with overtones in fashion, industrial design, and every other area that touches our lives.

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Color Temperature, part one

The idea of “warm” and “cool” colors was first posited by the English miniaturist and teacher Charles Hayter. The illustration is from his treatise, Perspective, published in 1813.
The way we perceive color is greatly influenced by our experience. We all know that fire is hot and ice is cold, so we perceive reddish orange as a “hot” color and blue as a “cold” color. This association is so strong that painters, photographers, interior designers and fashion designers can all use it color temperature as emotional shorthand.
This association actually flies in the face of physics. While we call colors over 5000K cool, and colors below 3000K warm, the actual physics of the matter are exactly opposite—the shorter the wavelength, the higher the temperature.
Goethe’s color wheel, 1809.
That “warm” and “cool” are subjective is demonstrated by the fact that different painters learn the hottest and coolest points differently. I understand blue-violet as the coolest color, while one of my painting students—an art teacher herself—learned blue to be the coolest tone. And look at this attemptto quantify color temperature by a Chinese-American painter; he seems to be putting aqua at the coldest point.
The first color wheel we know of was created by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the first of a long line of philosophers to concern themselves with the meaning of color. He wrote: “The chromatic circle… [is] arranged in a general way according to the natural order… for the colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands violet; orange [demands] blue; purple [demands] green; and vice versa: thus… all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other; the simpler colour demanding the compound, and vice versa…”
The “rose of temperaments” (1798-99) by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, matched human occupations and character traits to colors. I don’t read German, but I swear my red couch qualifies me to be a tyrant.
So far, so awesome. Unfortunately, Goethe also included aesthetic values in his color wheel, titling them the “allegorical, symbolic, mystic use of colour.” That was an idea that developed a life of its own.

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