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The Beauty/Truth Problem

In Thomas Mann’s final, unfinished novel, The Confessions of Felix Krull, the young confidence-man protagonist—antihero is too strong a word—recounts that his father, an elderly roué, took great pleasure in merely reciting the words, les jolies femmes. I was repeatedly reminded of this deplorable but comical figure as I perused the glittering, splendidly painted depictions of haute bourgeois leisure in the San Francisco Legion of Honor’s current exhibition, James Tissot: Fashion & Faith.

Tissot (1836-1902), né Jacques Joseph Tissot, in the port city of Nantes, was the son of a wealthy drapery merchant, but decided as a teenager to forsake the family business, to his father’s chagrin. This defiance of paternal expectations, however, turned out well, as Tissot’s career took off immediately. His blending of classical Ingrist realism and Romantic literary subject matter in The Meeting of Faust and Marguerite (1860), possibly influenced by the antimodernist English Pre-Raphaelites, garnered the twenty-four year old artist a 5000-franc purchase from the French government.

In the early 1860s Tissot abandoned historicizing imagery to focus on the depiction of his contemporaries—Baudelaire’s “heroism of modern life”— although his subject matter in portraits and semi-narrative paintings remained the wealthy upper classes with which he was socially connected. In 1871, he inexplicably (considering his conservative Catholic background) fought on the side of the Paris Commune; and when the rebels were exterminated by the government, he sensibly relocated to London (as some other leftist artists did), where his virtuosic paintings of exquisitely turned out jolies femmes, both French and English, found favor with British industrialists. In 1872, the thirty-something painter earned nearly 100,000 francs—the wages of a merchant prince of the day. Tissot knew the Impressionists—Degas painted his portrait—but kept his distance from them professionally, and stylistically, for the most part. He shared their interest in Japanese culture, however, filling his large manorial home in London (in bohemian St. John’s Wood) with exotic collectibles that found their way into his paintings, as did his lordly home and its grounds.

The exhibition is well organized, presenting a clear picture of the artist’s development (though it’s curiously lacking in his voice), and beautifully presented— a visual delight, but not an emotional one, despite the drama of Tissot losing his youthful muse, La Mystérieuse, Kathleen Newton, to tuberculosis (‘consumption’) and his subsequent embrace of séances and spiritualism, and painting, in his sixties, with mostly undistinguished results, Christianity’s Greatest Story Ever Told. If Robert Hughes once opined that Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross were no match for Titian’s, it’s fair to note that Tissot’s spooky illustrations of the Passion are no competition for Michelangelo or Piero della Francesca. A few other qualifications are in order: Tissot’s drawing is sometimes off the mark, with disconnected body parts emerging from the extravagant costumery without evoking the body underneath, and it sometimes even verges on the caricatural (“Painters and Their Wives,”); his restrained but knowing satires of the lower orders now look dated and elitist (“Provincial Woman,” “Too Early,” “London Visitors”): and the scenarios that he depicts are sometimes lacking in realistic space or lighting; they look assembled from various parts, without the rhythmic unity and grouping of the Renaissance painters like Carpaccio, an early influence (“Departure of the Prodigal Son” and “Return of the Prodigal Son” from 1862-3; “Rue Royale”).

That said, Tissot’s apotheoses of young, attractive, wealthy women—continental Gibson Girls— record Belle Époque Europe with the discerning eye of a tailor or seamstress (due to his family background) and a master showman’s delight in painted spectacle, with Tissot’s extraordinary attention to detail undoubtedly a compelling selling point for patrons used to hard-headed cost analysis. (Four of the paintings, all of high quality, now belong to San Francisco grandees.) “Safe to Win,” “The Fan,” “Young Women Looking at the Chinese Temple,”  “Young Women Looking at Japanese Objects,” “Portrait of Mlle L.L.” and “Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon” are stunning works of indisputable, irresistible charm and verve. Tissot’s more poetic, spiritualized, gauzy, stagy images, tending toward kitsch, are less successful, at least to contemporary taste.

The problem for a contemporary MeToo audience, naturally, lies not in the aesthetic realm but the sociopolitical one, depicting, as they do, women as delicate, decorative beings, however gloriously painted. It’s unfair to judge the past too harshly by present standards, which seems to be a popular blood sport among irate Procrustean virtue-signalers these days, but the nineteenth-century status of women has to be considered in the case of Tissot—who was one of many artists engaged in what could called the Male Gaze market. (See Peter Schjeldahl’s recent take in The New Yorker on Renoir.) Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, postulates that bourgeois women of that time, uneducated, confined and cosseted, were seen as the repositories of Christian virtue and innocence in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalist competition; and that when they fell short of that unrealistic Hedda Gabler baby-woman pedestal, they were misogynistically transformed into the harpies, vampires and succubi of Symbolist art: ancestresses of America’s castrating woman politicians running pedophile rings from pizza parlors. The truth is not always beautiful, nor is beauty always truthful: teachable moments for an audience addicted to glamor (etymologically, a magic spell), sensationalist drama, and low-rent entertainment.  —DeWitt Cheng

http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&pcID=22&aID=5414

Amid the malarkey and malevolence emanating from Washington, and spreading across the country—Trump a better president than Lincoln, Republicans?!?—and the seemingly endless chain of climate change disasters around the world, it’s difficult to focus on matters of less urgency. Artists, who generally require a modicum of security and calm, may be having a rough go of it—although many artists have accepted the challenge of Trumpism instead of bewailing it, and re-engaged with society, defying the intellectual solipsism of recent years when, as the Beatles put it fifty years ago, nothing was real, and there was nothing to get hung about. (Tell the Iraqis.)

Peter Schjeldahl, in his review in The New Yorker of a current show about war, disparages Jean Baudrillard’s essays which seem to assert that the Iraq War never happened; the philosopher was making a point about media spectacle and fake news, but the fact is that many on the academic left were distracted by the glittering baubles of terminology and jargon from the harsher realities nominally in question.

I recently read I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates (1979), which rebuts the notion (proffered by generations of Platonists, abetted by Jacques-Louis David’s nobly iconic painting), that Socrates was the noblest of the Greeks, a kind of humanist prefiguration of Christ; and that he was crucified (in effect) in 299BC by the demos (people, republic) of Athens—for being too virtuous, too much of a gadfly? Stone was a leftist muckraker of some renown in the 60s and 70s, the publisher of an influential weekly newsletter, and his opinions are consequently not those of today’s self-righteous, ignorant firebrands of the left and right, lost in the cloud-cuckooland of cool new ideas (Nietzsche’s eternal return, again?) or sunk in the mire of unquestioned dogma about messiah, manichaeist FInal Battles, and the Republican utopia of invisible hands (at the public till, or, God Helps Those Who Help Themselves). The GOP shibboleth of plucky independence is nicely illustrated in the painting, “Teach a Man to Fish,” by the conservative Christian artist John McNaughton; in it, the blue-suited Trump instructs a young student who has abandoned his Socialism textbook: no more miracles required—if only you believe in the fish or Fish (an early secret symbol for the subversive martyr), or the 1%er fishers of men.

In a New York Times interview. Stone summarized his argument, based on extensive research with original sources, for which he learned Greek. The accounts that survive, by Socrates and Xenophon, two of Socrates’ disciples, are partial and biased. Today we believe that the charges of not respecting the gods and corrupting the youth are fundamentally conservative-lifestyle attacks on a liberal philosopher and precursor of our wonderful selves; in fact, they are political charges made by the Athenian polity against a teacher who had taught his students to mock and oppose, even to the point of violence, the very idea of democracy.  Two of the wealthy students whom he had instructed in the arts of rhetoric and persuasion were among tyrants who, a decade before Socrates’ trial, had seized power from the rising mercantile ‘middle classes.’

The Thirty Tyrants ruled only about eight months, but it was a time of terror. In that period they executed 1,500 Athenians and banished 5,000, one‐tenth or more of the total population of men, women, children and slaves ... all who were of the democratic party. A few months later, the moderates who had originally supported the Thirty Tyrants began to flee, especially after Critias murdered their leader, Theramenes. He, who had been one of the original Thirty Tyrants, was executed without a trial when he began to criticize the Thirty Tyrants for their brutality... Socrates was neither exiled with the democrats nor forced to flee with the moderate oppositionists. He did not suffer at the hands of the Thirty Tyrants unlike his chief accuser, Anytus, who lost much of his property when he fled and joined the fight to free the city. Socrates, in Plato's “Apology,” calls himself “the gadfly” of Athens, but it seems his sting was not much in evidence when Athens needed it.

Western Civ students may remember that Plato’s Republic with its men of various metals, its Guardians, and its philosopher kings, is not egalitarian, and Greek culture was already strongly predisposed toward Homer’s warrior aristocracy. Odyseeus, chastising the ignoble, deformed, antiwar commoner Thersites, in Iliad: “It is not good for the many to rule. Let one man rule, one man be king.” It is understandable, then, that Socrates was considered a traitor in such dangerous times. In addition, he feared old age, and at age seventy may have been committing suicide memorably by public trial. It is also understandable that the aristos of later times should exalt the virtues of their philosopher kings against claims of the dark and dirty (and dangerous) peasantry.

Plus ça change, you say? The cycle of anarchy-democracy-dictatorship was well known by the Founding Fathers, of course, hence their fear of factional partisanship, unprincipled demagogues and foreign entanglements. It’s a democratic republic... if we can keep it. The President’s desk is not named Resolution casually. Happy new year, neo-Spartans!

KATE KRETZ

Jen Tough Gallery, Popup show, 1599 Tennessee Street, San Francisco, August 2-4, 2019

“It can’t happen here” used to be Americans’ complacent response when confronted by reports of political upheaval and revolution in Third-World countries. It was a comforting thought, but an illusion, that we were somehow able to sustain despite many warnings in books, movies and popular culture. Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, portrayed the rise of a fascist demagogue. Jack London’s 1908 novel, The Iron Heel, had treated the theme two generations earlier.  1984 and Brave New World were universally read by high-school students, and cited as bywords. In addition, repressive inhuman states have been a staple of realistic films like The Black Legion (1937) and A Face in the Crowd (1957) as well as the various dystopian iterations of Star Wars, The Matrix, and the hyperactive Marvel Universe. Were we not entertained? The increasingly corrupt, bullying, incompetent and destructive acts of the Trump administration teach us that history is not to be mocked or ignored; nor, considering the weather reports, Sharpie-enhanced or not, is it nice to fool Mother Nature, either

Artists are making a stand against humanity’s slide into catastrophe. The Maryland-based artist Kate Kretz employs a mixed-media, conceptualist approach to examining the burning issues of the day, and Jen Tough Gallery scheduled a solo show at its location in Benicia CA, an hour’s drive north and east of San Francisco, liberal Ground Zero. Unfortunately, some of the good people on the extreme nationalist side found out about Kretz’s creation of “Hate Hat,” a Ku Klux Klan hood fashioned from red MAGA caps, and began harassing her online. Their complaints about her ostensible violations of “community standards” resulted to Facebook’s temporary suspension of her account; and  phoned-in threat to the gallery was taken seriously in this era of random partisan violence.

Jen Tough found an unused gallery location in San Francisco and kept its location secret until just before the weekend of August 2-4, when interested parties who had signed up online were informed via e-mail. As it turned out, the location, near the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco’s gentrifying Dogpatch area, was inspired, and the exhibition, monitored by a trio of young security guards, was well attended and proved to be incident-free. San Francisco liberals could take pride in having stood up to the numskulls and yahoos who were in reality, like the Proud Boys in April, less than formidable, despite their bluster.

Kretz’s work takes such diverse forms that it is quote possible to attribute them to several artists.  Her themes are, besides the racist terrorism of the extreme nationalists, which dates back four centuries, American society’s current wave of sexism, misogyny, religious fundamentalism and its de-facto guns and rape cultures pervading not just the rural south, but, shamefully and cynically, the corridors of power and prestige.

The artist deconstructs the symbols of fear and hatred by combining them with real-world objects, and humble, homemade fabrication methods.  She creates a red Nazi armband from unsewn MAGA caps in “Only the Terrorized Own the Right to Name Symbols of Terror” (2019), and embroiders a swastika inscribed, “Make America Great Again,” a phrase used by both Reagan-Bush in 1980 and by the insurgent Republican Pat Buchanan in his infamous red-meat fascist-rally speech to the GOP convention in 1992. Likewise, “Eminent Domain for Unwilling Vessels” (2019) transforms the inner parts of MAGA caps into the white bonnets worn by the breeder-stock class of women, the offered Offreds, in The Handmaid’s Tale.

White-male privilege and power in all its brutal stupidity comes under attack in both deconstructed works, like those just cited, and in traditional paintings on canvas or board and drawings on paper. “Readymade: Brass, with Lock” (2014) recasts one of those commercially available bumper scrotums (TruckNutz—I am not kidding), made of silicone, in brass, with its connotations of shameless ostentation, and outfits it with a lock and chain: a chauvinist male chastity belt for the immature-ejaculation community. “V.I.P (Very Important Penis)” (2018) is a gold-plated erect member‑—‘ithyphallic’ is the art-historical term—bearing a “VIP All Access” dogtag. Continuing the theme of threatened-male ultra-violence is “Rupture” (2018), a simulated but embroidered bullethole in glass with an aureole of radiating cracks fashioned from the gray hair of people (crowd-sourced) who have suffered devastating loss.

Kretz’s representational skills are evident in several drawings and paintings satirizing the misogyny and cruelty of gun/phallus culture.  “Appetites of Oligarchs” (2018) is a large, dramatic painting on canvas depicting a man, dressed only in an unbuttoned white shirt, faceless and pot-bellied, boldly masturbating in front of a nocturnal industrial landscape. “Gunlicker I” through “Gunlicker IV” (all 2015) are 16”x20” oval-format paintings depicting engrossed young men passionately fellating firearms. “Testosterone,” Kretz’s portrait of a snarling bulldog with the word inscribed in cursive text beneath, reminiscent of Magritte’s word paintings, and a glittering frame worthy of a pop icon, mock-extols the current notion of manhood as aggressive dominance in our capitalist-winner-take-all society.  “Democracy Detox” (2019) is a colored pencil rendering of a limousine in up in flames, with JUSTICE 4 ALL spray painted on the door. Finally, “Futile Fantasy:  A Glimmer of Self-Awareness, & The Subsequent Remorse”  (2017) is a portrait of our self0styled favorite president, ‘woke’ at last to his wasted life: tearful, despondent, and repentant, like a baroque sinner finally turning saintly: wishful thinking for those of us who are totting up the damage costs of this disastrous and depraved regime which Kretz has depicted with saeva indignatio, ferocity and rage. — DeWitt Cheng