Political Art: Fire and Furor (reprinted from VisualArtSource.com, May 2017)




In case you have been on a media fast for the past week, the big news in the little art world has been the heated controversy over the painting by Dana Schutz, shown in the current Whitney Biennial, called “Open Casket.” (If you are already heartily sick of this subject, after wave upon wave of angry rhetoric crashing over your screen, please surf on.) The painting is a semi-abstract depiction of the black teenager Emmett Till, savagely murdered and mutilated in 1955 by bigots enraged by his alleged whistling at a white woman — a fabrication, the supposed victim has now admitted. Till’s mother demanded that his coffin be open so that viewers could “see what I have seen,” in all its graphic glory. Schutz used the photo as a starting point for managing, in paint, her own emotions of fear and insecurity as a mother, she pointed out, in these nasty times of snapping and snarling.

 

What could be more important than to educate complacent, ignorant Americans about this stain on our national history and honor? Alas, nothing is ever simple in the art world. The painting aroused fierce opposition from the left, nicely described by Roberta Smith in her New York Times article, “Should Art That Angers Remain on View?” [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/arts/design/emmett-till-whitney-biennial-schutz.html] (March 27, 2017). Two black artists took extreme umbrage at what Smith wittily characterized as Schuz’s possibly “inappropriate appropriation.” Parker Bright stood in front of the painting, blocking the view to other museum goers, while wearing a T-shirt imprinted “Black Death Spectacle.” Hannah Black denounced Schuz’s exploitation of “black subject matter ... for profit and fun.” Many in my social media feed denounced the work as typical white hubris that, however sympathetic a veneer, perpetuates the idea of black victimhood. Also raised has been that in spite of its opting for abstraction rather than realism, the work somehow whitewashes the realities of black history through aesthetic distancing.

 

Race relations in the U.S. are a mess. The interlude of liberal rationality that Obama hoped to inaugurate clearly failed, a victim to white working class economic rage exacerbated by eight years of right-wing animus, sensationalism and alternate facts. If no Alex Jones and Bill O’Reilly types failed to fan the flames of Schutzgate, it’s only because they were distracted by quips about a James Brown wig and the premature announcement of the end of Obamacare.

 

But let us return to the artwork, which is successful on its own terms. Not as a political statement — an interpretation which the artist never claimed, yet one which its detractors opted to emphasize. Smith adduces, in defense of creative freedom of speech, several powerful art-historical precedents: Ben Shahn’s moving tribute to the unjustly executed Sacco and Vanzetti (despite the artist being Jewish and the victims Italian); Abel Meeropol’s song about race lynchings in the South, “Strange Fruit” (again by a Jewish person, and not just any, but one who adopted the orphaned sons of the executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg); and the white William Styron’s brilliantly complex 1967 novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner," the less-than-exemplary or heroic leader of the 1831 black slave revolt in rural Virginia. 

 

One could cite many other examples of the depiction of inflicted suffering as noted by sympathetic cultural or racial outsiders: Delacroix’s "Massacre at Chios," about Turkish atrocities; Dorothea Lange’s "Migrant Mother," about the Depression tribulations of displaced Okies; or Matthias Grunewald’s "Isenheim Altarpiece," still shocking today, five centuries after its creation, with its painfully mortal King of the Jews. Any crucifixion painting, in fact, rebuts the racial exclusivity idea. 

 

Kara Walker, who explores the horrors of slavery culture in her silhouette drawings, concurs in opposing the censorship and destruction of the painting sought by some. Smith: “[Walker] concluded that an artwork can be generative regardless of how it offends or falls short, giving ‘rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.’” Another artist, Clifford Owens, similarly declared his opposition to what is in effect a politically correct iconoclasm: “I don’t know anything about Hannah Black, or the artists who’ve co-signed her breezy and bitter letter, but I’m not down with artists who censor artists.”

 

Why so much furor from the art world left then? The painting is unobjectionable in itself — but for its provocative title. The black artist Henry Taylor, in the same Whitney show, depicted, with a greater degree of realism than Schutz employs, the police murder of Philando Castile, and aroused no animosity. It is my belief that certain ideas that were almost universally taught in universities in the 1980s and 90s — identity art, postmodern relativism —  have hardened into dogma, and can become exaggerated and counter-productive. Making, seeing and ‘using’ art primarily or solely as tendenzkunst, as propaganda, as the hypostatization or reification of sacred truths, is bad for the country and bad for art. Let creative people make their work, and let a thousand exegetical flowers bloom.; but let’s not become cultural commissars. Artists and citizens should be truth-seekers, not avoiders of trigger issues. We have serious challenges; one painting in one biennial — and it’s not as if all blacks are furious about it, as some imply — is a molehill, if that. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, not minor distractions.


Stanley Tucci's peculiar paean to Giacometti in "Final Portrait"


Piece below was written for VisualArtSource.com, April 14, 2018. It is not online yet.
The longer, unedited version follows.

Editors' Roundtable
by DeWitt Cheng

"Why does one paint or sculpt? Nobody knows the reason … One does it out of madness, out of obsession, out of a more automatic than conscious need... I have always failed. — If only I could draw! — I can't. That's why I keep on drawing…"  — Alberto Giacometti 

Traditional biopics of artists tend to be both entertaining and pompous, allowing middle-class audiences the vicarious pleasures of Bohemian excess; of shaking our heads at the benighted art audience of the past; and of ascending with the art-martyr (Vincent, Frida, Jackson) into cultural immortality. I like them, in general, and think they help build the case for an artist's serious work. 

The new film "Final Portrait," written and directed by Stanley Tucci, wisely takes the path of simplification and compression. This was aided by its source material, "A Giacometti Portrait," the 68-page memoir (written for a magazine, but published in book form in 1980), by James Lord. Lord was a then young American writer who became friends with the Swiss-Italian sculptor and painter in Paris and consented to pose for him. Fortunately for us, what was intended to have been a simple oil sketch that would require, in Lord's words, "but an hour or two, an afternoon at most" grew into a project that consumed the eccentric genius artist, ultimately requiring eighteen sessions from September 12, 1964, to September 29, before Lord's deadline date, his return to New York having been postponed several times. 

His reward was not just a valuable painting and token of his friendship with the famous artist, but also, through his covert note-taking, a day-by-day journal of the vicissitudes of the creative process. Alternating between Giacometti's ferocious drive to work and the creative destructions which he felt powerless to control, the artist's mood was marked by interludes of despair and self-doubt. He at times "exuded gloom." Having just reread the book, I now see what an ideal collaborator Lord was for Giacometti: both curious and extraordinarily patient, especially for a "youngish" (his term) man. Others might not have endured the dramatics: in 1935, when Giacometti despaired of being able to paint or sculpt a head, André Breton said, with the exasperation one would not have expected from the Pope of Surrealism, "Everybody knows perfectly well what a head is." 

Well, not everybody. Matti Megged, in "Dialogue in the Void: Beckett & Giacometti," summarizes a story that the young Giacometti wrote about the feelings of dislocation and panic that sometimes afflicted him. Objects appeared to him to have lost their normal roles in the universe, and become infused with mystery; in Giacometti's words, "both living and dead at the same time," and "suspended in a dreadful silence." 

Art historian Peter Selz verified that this sense of alienation persisted: "Everyone before him in the whole history of art had always represented the figure as it is; his task now was to break down tradition and come to grips with the optical phenomenon of reality. What is the relationship of the figure to the enveloping space, of man to the void, even of being to nothingness?" 

In "A Giacometti Portrait" Lord describes with admirable composure what might have driven many to despair, the heroic but foredoomed grasp for the unattainable. Giacometti paints (in black and white with fine pointed sable brushes) and unpaints (in gray, which, for him, contained all colors, with a medium-sized round brush) Lord's portrait innumerable times over the eighteen-day process. Giacometti's wife and sometimes model, Annette stoically advised: "You'll get used to it." 

As Lord's last day of modeling approaches, he devises a stratagem to forestall yet another collapse of his portrait into entropy: 

"…after a time he began to use the large brush with white, painting the area around the head and shoulders and finally part of the face, too. This led me to infer that little by little he was painting out what he had previously done, undoing it, as he said. Presently he took one of the fine brushes again and began to paint with black, concentrating on the head. He was constructing it all over again from nothing, … when the moment I had foreseen came, I said, "I'm very tired. Do you mind if I have a little rest?… I stood up, went behind him, and looked at the painting. It was superb. The awkward vagueness of 45 minutes before had completely disappeared. I said, "It looks fine. Why not leave it as it is now?"… He's sighed… "Well," he said, "we've gone far. We could have gone further still, but we have gone far. It's only the beginning of what it could be. But that's something, anyway."

I have gone on in some detail about the Giacometti-Lord collaboration because Tucci's movie adheres so faithfully to the book, and therefore evinces both its virtues and faults. The acting, lead by Geoffrey Rush as Giacometti and Armie Hammer at Lord is superlative, even if the characters are not given much to do, plot-wise. Tucci's command of tone and pacing are all that could be desired with what is essentially a two-man play. James Merifield's set, which replicates Giacometti's famous, much-photographed studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, becomes itself another character: dusty and disheveled, black, gray and earthen colored, it's an exudation of its chain-smoking, muttering tenant from 1928 to 1965, a nest shaped by its odd bird. The music, by Evan Lurie, is sprightly, insouciant, and French, comme il faut. 

When Giacometti asks on Day 6 if the process was "getting on your nerves," Lord protests that "the entire experience was an exhilarating one." By day 15, as the project wound down, Lord "tried to tell him what a wonderful experience posing for him had been and how much I had appreciated his letting me do it." Replies the artist, "Are you completely nuts?" For the knowledgable viewer "Final Portrait" is light-hearted and drily humorous, but deeply respectful, emotionally moving and exhilarating. If you are instead a casual artster you may, echoing Giacometti, come away feeling that the film was just nuts.




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Final Portrait: Lord by Giacometti and vice versa, by Tucci

Why does one paint or sculpt? Nobody knows the reason. Nobody decides: now I am going to make sculptures, or now I am going to paint. One just does it. One does it out of madness, out of obsession, out of a more automatic than conscious need... I have always failed.—If only I could draw!—I can’t. That’s why I keep on drawing...

 
Anyway, this is what I deserve for 35 years of dishonesty. ... All these years I’ve exhibited things that weren’t finished and never even should have been started. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t exhibited at all, it would have seemed cowardly, as though I didn’t dare to show what l’d done, which was not true. So I was caught between the frying pan and the fire.

 Traditional biopics of artists are both entertaining and pompous, allowing middle-class audiences the vicarious pleasures of Bohemian excess; of shaking our heads at the benighted art audiences of the past; and of ascending with the art-martyr (Vincent, Frida, Jackson) into cultural immortality. I like them, in general, and think they help build the case for an artist’s serious work, but sometimes they verge on the formulaic in attempting to reach a mass audience. Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life and Ed Harris’s Pollock, both very good movies present the creative life as a kind of holy melodrama, hitting the marks of the various Stations of the Creative Cross. For my taste, Peter Watkin’s Edvard Munch, concentrating on the painter’s youth in the sexually liberated but fraught artistic circles of 1880s Christiania/Oslo, immerses us in the culture and engages our sympathy without falling into aesthetic hagiography. (Julie Taymor’s Frida was also relatively free of sentimental gravy, despite the melodramatic life of the artist, perhaps because of its fantasy interludes with puppets — its Brechtian distance from illusionism.) The carefully selected episode of an artistic life can serve as a microcosm or metonym that informs and illuminates the whole life and career. Less is more.

The new film Final Portrait, by the actor-director Stanley Tucci, wisely takes the path of simplification and compression, aided by its source material, A Giacometti Portrait, the 68-page memoir (written for a magazine, but published in book form in 1980), by James Lord, a young American who became friends with the Swiss-Italian sculptor and painter in Paris and consented to pose for him. Fortunately for us, what was intended to have been a simple oil sketch that would require, in Lord’s words, “but an hour or two, an afternoon at most” grew into a project that consumed the eccentric and stably unstable (or unstably stable) genius artist, requiring eighteen session, from September 12, 1964, to September 29, before Lord’s deadline date, his return to New York having been postponed several times.

His reward was not just a valuable painting and token of his friendship with the famous artist, but also, through his covert note-taking, a day-by-day journal of the vicissitudes of the creative process, alternating between Giacometti’s ferocious drive to work and the creative destructions which he felt powerless to control, marked by interludes of despair and self-doubt. (Lord writes that “Giacometti sometimes “exuded gloom.”) Having just reread the book, I now see what an ideal collaborator Lord was for Giacometti: both curious and almost inhumanly patient, especially for a “youngish” (his term) man. Others might not have endured the dramatics: in 1935, when Giacometti despaired of being able to paint or sculpt a head (as he did repeatedly in the book), André Breton said, with the exasperation one would not have expected from the pope of Surrealism, “Everybody knows perfectly well what a head is.”

 Well, not everybody. Matti Megged, in Dialogue in the Void: Beckett & Giacometti1, summarizes a story that the young Giacometti wrote, about the feelings of dislocation and panic that sometimes afflicted him, with objects appearing to have lost their normal roles in the universe, and infused with mystery; in Giacometti’s words, “both living and dead at the same time,” and “suspended in a dreadful silence”:

...the story is that of a painter or sculptor or who has to get hold of reality through its essentials. Objects and memories flee, change, disappear, lose their relation to time and space, both the artist may catch them, give them proper space and shape. And the way to do that this is “not to take a hold of the outline, but of the center. All that is there is a hard core closed with a suggestion of mass dissolving into space.

 The art historian Peter Selz, who curated the 1965 Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Giacometti’s work, verified that this sense of alienation persisted forty-five years later:

“To render what the eye really sees is impossible,” Giacometti repeated one evening as we were seated at dinner in the inn at Stampa [Switzerland, Giacometti’s birthplace]. He explained that he could not really see me as I sat next to him—I was a conglomeration of vague and disconnected details —but that each member of the family sitting across the room from him was clearly visible though diminutive, thin, surrounded by enormous slices of space. Everyone before him in the whole history of heart, he continued, had always represented the figure as it is; his task now was to break down tradition and come to grips with the optical phenomenon of reality. What is the relationship of the figure to the enveloping space, of man to the void, even of being to nothingness?

 
Lord describes with admirable grace and sang-froid what might have driven many of us to imprecations and theatrical gestures of despair and despondency like the artist’s, as in his heroic but foredoomed grasp for the unattainable, he paints (in black and white with fine pointed sable brushes) and unpaints (in gray, which, for him, contained all colors, with a medium-sized round brush) Lord’s portrait innumerable times over the eighteen-day process. (Giacometti’s wife, Annette, and brother, Diego, were sympathetic, but as experienced models, themselves, phlegmatic in the Galliuc mode. Annette: “You’ll get used to it.”) It should be noted that Giacometti admired Cézanne’s perception-based method, his commitment to interpreting reality, and his lack of finish, without reservation: “He was the greatest of the nineteenth century. He was one of the greatest of all time.” For his part Cézanne had a similar existentialist (avant la lettre) role model, identifying himself, according to Rilke, with Frenhofer, a fictional artist invented by Balzac, who works in secret on a mysterious masterpiece, but kills himself, leaving behind an immense canvas of inchoate paint, a pictorial mist from which only a woman’s foot emerges. As Lord’s last day of modeling approaches, he devises a stratagem to forestall yet another collapse of his portrait into entropy2:

 ...after a time he began to use the large brush with white, painting the area around the head and shoulders and finally part of the face, too. This led me to infer that little by little he was painting out what he had previously done, undoing it, as he said. Presently he took one of the fine brushes again and began to paint with black, concentrating on the head. He was constructing it all over again from nothing, And for the hundredth time at least..... I meant to try to stop him.... I observed him with painstaking attention, and when the moment I had foreseen came, I said, ”I’m very tired. Do you mind if I have a little rest?.... I stood up, went behind him, and looked at the painting. It was superb. The awkward vagueness of 45 minutes before had completely disappeared. Never before had the picture looked just as it did then, and it has never looked better. I said, “It looks fine. Why not leave it as it is now?”.... He’s sighed.... “Well,” he said, “we’ve gone far. We could have gone further still, but we have gone far. It’s only the beginning of what it could be. But that’s something, anyway.” “I think it’s admirable,” I said. “That’s another matter,” he replied.

I have gone on in some detail about the Giacometti-Lord collaboration because Tucci’s movie, which has received criticism from some film critics for its apparent lack of plot and lack of character development—for being, as one wrote, tantamount to watching paint dry—adheres so faithfully to the book, and therefore evinces both its virtues and faults. Tucci is a fine actor and director, and in my opinion, the creator of the best Woody Allen comedy in the early, funny style (appreciated by the aliens of Stardust Memories) ever made by a non-Allen director (though Allen performs a small role as a small-fry stage director), The Impostors, with Tucci and Oliver Platt as a pair of picaresque actors on the lam. I was therefore thrilled to hear that Tucci was taking on this project with a fabulous cast including Geoffrey Rush as Giacometti; Armie Hammer as James Lord; Tony Shalhoub as Diego, the artist’s brother, and an artist himself; Sylvie Testud, as Giacometti’s Swiss wife, Annette; and Clémence Poesy as Giacometti’s young model and mistress, Caroline. The acting is superlative, even if the ‘characters’ are not given much to do, plotwise, and Tucci’s command of tone and pacing are all that could be desired with what is essentially a two-man play (with the painting as the MacGuffin). James Merifield’s set, which replicates Giacometti’s famous, much-photographed studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, becomes almost another character: dusty and disheveled, black, gray and earthen colored, it’s an exudation of its chain-smoking, muttering tenant from 1928 to 1965, a nest shaped by its odd bird. The music, by Evan Lurie, is sprightly, insouciant, and French, comme il faut.

 Since I have just seen the movie and reread the book, I can’t help but mention some of the slight differences, none of them substantive: Caroline and her BMW do not appear in the book; the comical money-hiding and pimp-paying scenes are transposed from Lord’s later biography (I think, not having read it recently); Yanaihara, implicitly depicted as Annette's lover, is barely mentioned in the book except as a sympathetic friend and model; Alberto comments on the beauty of the trees not from his studio, while convalescing, but while walking down Rue d'Alesia afterward; and his criticism of Picasso is also taken from the biography in all probabiity; and it was Alberto who read LeCarré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and who thoughtfully analyzed its plot and characters, not Shalhoub’s drolly laconic Diego; finally, there’s a hint in the movie at Lord’s homosexuality which is not in the book. Noteworthy on the other side of the balance sheet is its accurate depiction of Giacometti’s habitual lunch at the rue Didot cafe-tabac: ham, hard-boiled eggs, two glasses of wine, and two cups of espresso.

 When Giacometti asked on Day 6 if the process was “getting on your nerves,” Lord protested that “the entire experience was an exhilarating one.” On day 15, as the project wound down. Lord “tried to tell him what a wonderful experience posing for him had been and how much I had appreciated is letting me do it. “Are you completely nuts?” he said. If you are a Giacometti fan, you will feel that the filmed book on seeing and depicting, Lord by Giacometti and vice versa, by Tucci, was light-hearted and drily humorous but deeply respectful—strangely moving and exhilarating. (If you are instead a casual artster, you may mutter, stamping your foot, that the film was nuts.)

Giacometti died a year later, of cancer, in 1965, before Lord could make a return visit. Lord, who wrote Giacometti: A Portrait, in 1985, died in Paris of a heart attack in 2009. In 2015, Portrait of James Lord, 1964, oil on canvas, 45-5/8”x31-3/4”, was valued at twenty to thirty million dollars—about what Jeff Koon’s Play-Doh sculpture is expected to fetch.

I have always been sensitive to the fragility of the living beings, as if it took an incredible amount of energy just for them to stay on their feet ... I shall never succeed in showing in a portrait all of the force there is in a head. Just staying alive demands so much will power, so much energy.

 1 I was fortunate enough to have taken a seminar class from the figurative sculptor Stephen deStaebler (whose work bears some resemblance to Giacometti’s) in the late 1980s. Megged was a scheduled guest, so I looked up his book, which compares the existentialist/absurdist sculptor and playwright.

 2 Giacometti, who cared more about process than product, as exemplified by his destruction of some twenty-five or thirty drawings made on defective litho transfer paper, depicted in the film. He showed no work between 1937 and 1945, as he transitioned from Surrealist sculptures depicting juxtapositions of real objects to his mature style, based on observation of the model and his interior vision. The figures that he made kept shrinking, almost to nothingness. Charles Juliet recounts, in Giacometti (1986):

 On the eve of Giacometti’s return to Paris, Albert [Skira, the art-book publisher] asked him what arrangements he had made for shipping his sculptures. “But I’m bringing them with me,” he replied. “They were packed,” ... Skira was surprised to note, “in a matchbox a little bit bigger than the ordinary ones.”

 

 

 

 

 

Northern Light Caught in Finnish Landscape Photos (reprinted from East Bay Monthly, April 2018)

 

    



Northern Light Caught in Finnish Landscape Photos

The landscape tradition in painting now seems dated to many of us, too classical and aristocratic in the 17th and 18th century (Claude Lorrain), and too capitalistic/imperialistic in the 19th (Albert Bierstadt). That attitude may be attributable to the speed of contemporary life; we simply can no longer absorb such works; the world (and too many worldly diversions) beckons, and we dutifully hike on after—according to one study—a median time of 27.2 seconds, with 17 seconds the minimum, and 3:48 the maximum. Before us, and after, the deluge of images!

The New York-based (but San Francisco-educated) photographer and writer Amanda Marchand presents in True North, her third show at Traywick, nineteen medium-format color photographs of the stark boreal landscape of subarctic Finland, taken during a residency there in January 2015, when temperatures are generally subzero. The bare expanses of snow-covered fields and cloudless skies are captured in images of minimal, even iconic compositions—two stacked rectangles (à la Rothko), occasionally revealing tiny distant buildings and other structures—and desaturated boreal palettes. These are hushed, meditative images (which Californians can enjoy in cozy comfort) that demand slow looking and offer a respite from the cultural gerbil wheel of getting and spending.

The works are evenly divided between single square-format images and multi-image sets, primarily diptychs and triptychs. Some of the single-image photos, like “Axis,” with its central power-pole spire, “Untitled (Blue),” with its tiny fence pole, and “Near to the Wild,” with its triangular aura or aurora, are symmetrical, and suggest frozen time; others, like “Island” and “Divining Rod,” with their intricately detailed trees and foliage, set against blank skies, suggest scientific typologies of the Bernd and Hilla Becher school. The multi-panel works, like “Double Helix” and “Roots,” invite comparison, and suggest narrative and change—and the attentive but divided gaze of the avid observer. The show also includes a site-specific installation linking the abstracted landscape, with its slow fluctuations, with language. Baudelaire: “Nature is a temple in which living pillars sometimes give voice to confused words; Man passes there through forests of symbols.” True North runs through May 19, Th-Sat 10-4 or by appointment, Traywick Gallery, 895 Colusa Avenue, Berkeley 510-527-1214; http://www.traywick.com. —DeWitt Cheng



The Obama portraits (reprinted from VisualArtSource.com)_



Hail to the Chief

The unveiling of the portraits of the Obamas for the National Portrait Gallery—Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley and Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald—elicited the expected reactions from various sectors of the electorate. Unstinting praise from liberals, in general, swayed by affection for our exemplary First Couple, with art-world approbation for the deviation from the old-fashioned stodginess that we associate with presidential portraits. While I share that afffection for the Obama,s and appreciate their interest in supporting young black artists, I can’t help but feel that the paintings do not commemorate this historic administration. The styles are inappropriate. (In my opinion, more realistic artists would have been a better choice. To name two: Philipe Previl is a young black artist painting in contemporary mode based on Cèzannian ‘patch’ close observation; Margaret Bowland, a white woman, explores issues of power and race in her realistic works.)

Wiley’s Schiele-like magnification of head and hands may please those who make fun of 45’s small hands, but it seems to be slightly disprespectful to ‘fix’ 44’s hands, and the hedge of symbolic flowers (which suggested to various commentators both Homer SImpson and Sean Spicer) seems to me a rationale for the artist’s love of what resemble wallpaper patterns. Sherald’s likeness of FLOTUS is not great, with the drawing of her famous arms particularly boneless (the precedent of Ingres’s “Odalisque” does not really apply here), and whatever political convictions may be implicitly read into the dress, modway between quilting and Carnaby Street Pop, the subject gets rather lost in it. The intelligence, charm, dignity and humor of the Obamas is swallowed up in artist signature styles and retroactively applied political symbolism, i.e. allegory.

That said, I thought it might be interesting to look at and critique other works in the National Portrait Gallery (follow along at http://npg.si.edu/portraits/collection-highlights/presidential-portraits). Contrary to popular belief and the current fashionable rejection of dead-white-male art and culture, there are many quite good works in the collection; lots of mediocre ones; and a few that are downright bad.

By good, I mean fundamentally realistic, with just enough idealization and theater for the intended audience of voters in a democratic republic: POTUS as primus inter pares, as was said of Washington, first among equals. Note that I do not evaluate the portraits based on my politics: a good painter can make a bad president look great (George Peter Alexander Healy’s James Buchanan), and vice versa (Robert Edge Pine’s George Washington). Evaluating artworks based on politics or morality is a bad habit inculcated by postmodernist education—vide the inflated scandals over Dana Schutz, Balthus, etc.—that we in the art community need to outgrow. Ask the bad boys—Caravaggio, Bernini, Picasso, and Freud—or any premodern artist who used his gifts to serve ideology and power not to our liking. (For that matter, the notion that realist painting is tainted by its servitude to imperialism and colonialism and that it is superseded by photography are additional fashionable absurdities long past their use-by dates.) Among the good to great NPG portraits I would list these fifteen, in chronological order:



1.     John Trumbull’s 1793 John Adams
2.     Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished 1796 George Washington
3.     Gilbert Stuart’s almost Impressionist 1805/21 Thomas Jefferson
4.     John Vanderlyn’s 1816 James Monroe
5.     Albert Gallatin Hoit’s 1840 William Henry Harrison
6.     James Reid Lambdin’s 1848 Zachary Taylor
7.     George Caleb Bingham’s 1850 John Quincy Adams
8.     George Peter Alexander Healy’s 1853 Franklin Pierce
9.     George Peter Alexander Healy’s 1859 James Buchanan
10.   Matthew Wilson’s 1883 Chester Arthur
11.   Thomas Le Clear’s 1880 Ulysses S. Grant
12.   Ole Peter Hansen Balling’s 1906 James Garfield
13.   Bernard Safran’s 1960 Richard Nixon
14.   Ronald N Sherr’s 1994-5 George Bush
15.   Robert A. Anderson’s 2008 George W. Bush


By mediocre, I mean works that fail, for a variety of reasons: incompetent painting or drawing; too much realism for comfort’s sake; kowtowing to fashion; and egregious falsification, i.e. propaganda of the lowest sort. Probably the worst executed of the portrait paintings is  Robert Edge Pine’s 1790 George Washington, an embarrassment; the most tasteless is Michael O’Brien’s 1989 magazine-cover-style photo of Donald Trump tossing an apple. The most banal are the blandly generic, overgeneralized waxwork figures depicting McKinley, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Ford and Reagan, the epitome of which is Robert Clark Templeton’s 1980 Jimmy Carter, a stick figure lost in space. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those paintings that are too warts-and-all realistic, Too Much Information, including Rembrandt Peale’s unsparing 1795 look at a tired George Washington; August Benziger’s gangsterish 1897 WIlliam McKinley; William Valentine Schevill’s 1910 William Howard Taft and Anders Zorn’s 1899 Grover Cleveland, depicting those two worthies as—at least by current standards— uncomfortably stout; and Peter Hurd’s 1967 Lyndon Johnson, no oil painting himself, despite his civil-rights record, which we of a certain age remember as, in his words, “The ugliest thing I ever saw.” Competently painted, but either too stylishly rendered or false in their representations—the Chinese selfie app Meitu, loosely translated as Beauty Face (wang hong lian, Internet-celebrity face), comes to mind— are: Charles Bird King’s 1836 copy of a Gilbert Stuart 1826 profile of Thomas Jefferson in Roman-medallion style; Margaret Lindsay Williams’ 1923 Warren G. Harding, the handsome Chief Executive as fashion plate; and Norman Rockwell’s 1968 Richard Nixon, pensive and benigh, with a rubber arm four feet long, all the better to bring us together after the sibversive tumult of the Chicago Democrats’ convention, to peace with honor. Oops, there I go again, brainwashed by George Soros.

 

 

 

Three Powerful Solo Shows at Fresno Art Museum

STRENGTH IN DIVERSITY
Three Powerhouse Solo Exhibits at Fresno Art Museum
January 27- June 10, 2018

Photos by Randy Vaughn-Dotta for FAM and by the writer

During the postmodernist era, art came under criticism for its support of the political and economic status quo—including capitalism and colonialism. It is certainly a valid argument: art has served historically to dignify and legitimize power (and undoubtedly always will); but the theory went too far, as theories always do, conflating the modernist cultural rebels of the 19th and 20th centuries (in a broad-brush polemical sweep) with the academic artists who crafted beautiful but mediocre art in tune with bourgeois tastes. The great American realist Winslow Homer, for example, once declared that he would not cross the street to look at a Bouguereau painting, slickly painted and sentimentally contrived.

Today, now that the cultural ideas of postmodernism have gained ascendancy, for better or worse, and we are deluged by the contradictions of a political regime without any mooring in ideology, or even reality, i.e., open-ended and up for subjective interpretations, it’s time to stop seeing art reflexively as complicit with the establishment; to beware of the distorting lenses of political correctness and aesthetic fashion. Respect for the artistic impulse is the basis of three solo shows at the Fresno Art Museum—by David Tomb, Marcus Dorado and Holly Lane — that explore contemporary issues without falling into the trap of choosing content over style, or vice versa. The best art combines the two polarities into memorable objects that serve the eye, head and—be seated, sophisticates—soul.
 



DAVID TOMB: Rockfowl and Other Wonders
The abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman once derided theoretically-minded artists (despite his own predilection for dogmatism) in a famous aphorism: “Aesthetics is for painting as Ornithology is for the birds.” It’s the biological-imperative theory of culture: artists just do mating calls and dances; no need to overthink our programming! The Bay area painter David Tomb, who has combined his birder interest with his painter’s skills and an environmentalist’s concern in preserving habitat, is surely familiar with Newman’s joke, but he doesn’t underthink it. Tomb’s paintings balance the aesthetic and the ornithological; the striking beauty carries an urgent underlying agenda. Tomb: "Making artwork of birds is a way to connect and personalize my experience of seeing birds. The ultimate goal is to have people think: That animal is incredible... we need to save them!" Tomb’s three mixed-media/collage installations in “Rockfowl and Other Wonders,” accompanied by medium-sized paintings as well as sketches of “bird skins,” feathered-mummy museum-collection specimens, make a forceful case for our avian kin, the metaphorical canaries in the planet’s coal mine. The show’s curator, Michelle Ellis Pracy, who has known Tomb for thirty years, writes:

Tomb’s immense compositions are constructed so that we are placed in various habitats where rare and endangered birds reside. For instance, we are up in the canopy of trees with the Philippine Eagle; and in Rock and Rockfowl, we stand in knee-high jungle foliage with a deep forest stretching before us with the Picathertes perched on a vine before our very eyes.
Rock and Rockfowl (2013-16): The African picathertes (pica for magpie; thertes for vulture) or yellow-headed rockfowl, with its distinctive ‘naked’ unfeathered head and black and white plumage, is a striking bird, “something like a cross between a road runner and a crow,” in Tomb’s description.  As viewers confront the huge watercolor and mixed-media collage painting, eleven feet high by twenty-seven feet wide, they may feel as overwhelmed as the artist did while seeking a glimpse of the elusive birds in Ghana; fortunately one rockfowl popped up right in front of the artist, so we are spared his hours of humid rainforest vigil. 


Great Philippine Eagle (2012): The national bird of the Philippines, Pithecophaga jefferyi, is also known as the monkey-eating eagle (pithecus, money; phagus, eater), although it also eats snakes, civets, hornbills (two of which are shown in the painting) and even monitor lizards and flying lemurs.  Now endangered by deforestation, it is, with its 3-foot length and 6- to 7-foot wingspan, the largest of eagles, and, with a lifespan of 30 to 60 years, one of the longest-lived. Blake Matheson, a friend of the artist, recalls sighting one, memorably:  “...the Philippine Eagle glided past, at eye level, perhaps 50 yards out over the valley. We were close enough to see  ... the creature’s expression with our naked eyes. The gray-blue bill cere seemed almost electric, and its long tawny and cocoa crest lay on its back in repose like an archer’s hood.... It glowed white like a window into the infinite. I have never been so inspired by such a vision of tremendous power, mass and martial strength... I will always be grateful.”


King Tides and Elusive Rails (2016): The third of Tomb’s installations depicts, rather than a specific endangered bird, the effect of king tides in California in December and January each year. The extremely low and high tides expose normally hidden mice and small birds like rails to predation by hawks, falcons, herons and foxes. Tomb’s painted wooden cutouts, mounted on bases, seem to have left two-dimensional space in order to forage through the gallery, enveloping the viewer in nature’s struggle for survival in the marshlands.


Also shown are wall-mounted paintings and sketches of museum specimens that supplement Tomb’s field studies from life, revealing the artist’s ability to fuse scientific accuracy and vivid aesthetic form.






MARCOS DORADO: Immigrant Me
If David Tomb seeks to preserve natural life from human indifference and exploitation, the Fresno artist Marcos Dorado, a Mexican immigrant seeks to preserve the cultural life of America’s new immigrants and to show them the respect he missed as a child, mocked by other Mexican-American schoolmates for his handmade clothes and his ethnic lunches of burritos and tacos. "My goal,” he writes, “is to convey their struggle, which is my own. I want to put the spotlight on the positive contributions of immigrants that are here." While the recently unveiled Barack and Michelle Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald drew praise for their stylish departures from a tradition associated with racist/sexist domination, Dorado has chosen the most painstaking realism for his graphite drawings, which require poses of up to thirty hours. Each of the twenty drawings comprising the show is thus a major commitment in time and energy in a consumerist culture that prizes the slick, the quick and the disposable. The dramatically lighted, sculptural depictions of the artist’s friends and colleagues, e.g., Martin Nuñez, Calixte Aholu, Scott Kiche, Ani Chamichian, Bill Wolffmann, Gloria Dorado, Octavio and others—not limited to Latinos, by the way—are accompanied by the subjects’ responses to Dorado’s questions about how immigration and Americanization have affected their lives.






HOLLY LANE: Indwelling Nature
While Tomb and Dorado champion nature and culture, the San Jose artist Holly Lane explores in Indwelling Nature how culture may present nature in the artwork or artifact, e.g., in eclectic versions of old-school ornately carved pictures frames and pedestals. Executed in dark wood, they are reminiscent of Biedermeier furniture and Victorian gingerbread architecture; when gilded, they suggest the exuberance of Baroque decorative excess. It’s hard to tell whether these frames,or altarpieces, armored bulwarks protecting sacred images, and closed most of the year, are parodies or homages—or both. The exhibition curator Sarah Vargas writes, about Lane’s merger of picture and frame, inspired by illuminated (i.e., illustrated) manuscripts:

 Lane views pictorial space as an extension of mind space; to experience the painting we project our mind into the image. The spatial qualities of sculpture exist in our own physical space; we walk around it and proportion our bodies to it.
 
In addition to subverting the idea of art as an autonomous object of contemplation for disembodied viewers of the Clement Greenberg persuasion, Lane embraces historical modes of aesthetic discourse—namely myth and allegory, though given a contemporary, environmental twist. She envisions the canopy and tassels of The Leafy Earth Rests as healing, and carves plant motifs connected with ancient medicinal containers; the apothecary jars appear again in Gentle Muse, an homage to medicinal botany, accompanied by udder-like forms symbolizing “the milk of kindness—the nurture of trees.” Lane writes:

 “We indwell nature and nature indwells us.... if we look at photos of the earth from space, we can see that our cities are nestled within nature. Furthermore, our bodies are subject to natural forces—sometimes delightfully so and sometimes not so delightfully. In my work, architecture is a metaphor for human consciousness and human achievement. In this piece [Indwelling] nature [as depicted in a small landscape painting of a deer seen at dusk before a dark forest] can be seen through the architectural frame, showing nature is behind human achievement, or it can be viewed as nature being held within the frame, protected.
 
In days of yore, it was thought that the king and the land are one. These days, we need to realize that  we are linked with the planet and with each other, and time is running out.