Monday, September 23, 2013

D.W. Griffith in Cuddebackville.

D.W. Griffith in Cuddebackville.



As the crow flies Port Jervis New York is 75 miles northwest of New York City, at the very end of the commuter rail line and on the far edge of exurbia. Ten miles north of Port one passes through Cuddebackville, New York. It is decidedly …in the country. For the most part it is a collection of derelict buildings although here and there one can find a convenience store, an auto repair shop, an old church, a new modern school, and a country auction gallery. Less a very few exceptions there are no houses and it is rather odd to see signs posted for a village where there are so few indications of human habitation.



Behind the schoolhouse is a lovely park along the old D. & H., Delaware and Hudson, Canal, made obsolete by the railroads, and in addition to picnic facilities there is the Neversink Valley Museum. Seth Goldman is the director as well as the chairman of the Early Films Committee. Seth is a weekender living full time in New York City and at present very much engaged in building what he plans will be a very fine restaurant.



His interest of many years has made him an authority on the silent films made here. Clearly this is a passion. Thus during this program he was able to tell us that when the railroad supplanted the canal as the navigation of choice some of the old water ways, water sources and aqueducts were converted to hydro electric plants by John Roebling, builder of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the workmen on that renovation later made his way to New York and found work with the Biograph Company. In 1908, knowing that they were looking for film locations, he suggested that they visit Cuddebackville as it had farm lands, mountains, the river, the canal and the tow path, as well as all the manifestations of community life …a school, a church, a cemetery and large and small homes. All of this, I suspect, was so generic that it could be read as Anywhere USA and thus perfect for a hopefully wide market. It was also served by a railroad spur north out of Port Jervis and was merely five hours away from the city.



The area also provided the large Cuddeback Hotel which could accommodate actors and crew. Today the registers of the hotel are in the museum and given the date of film productions it is possible to find the cast and crew members who worked on those particular films through this source. One can also verify that these locations were used by the Thanhauser and Pathe Film Companies.



For this program the four recently acquired films, Willful Peggy, The Little Darling, The Life Cycle, and Muggsy Becomes a Hero, this one directed by Frank Powell, were presented to the members of the Historic Society in order to ascertain the specific locations used in the films. There was an audience of about twenty five local enthusiasts …no one that I could see was less than sixty. Without exception there was unanimous agreement that the sites named were indeed the sites as seen.



The films came to the Society from the Library of Congress. Somewhere along the way Seth had crossed paths with Ben Model. Ben is a well known composer and piano accompanist for silent films affiliated for over twenty five years with the Museum of Modern Art and for many years with the Library of Congress. Knowing of Seth’s interests he found films in the Library collection that had Cuddebackville as their location. He was able to get digitalized copies made. At the moment not everyone can do this with every film in their collection…but that will be possible sometime in the future. They were shown via a digital projection machine.



One of these films, The Little Darling, was made from a nitrate negative, which, despite the common belief, can be successfully preserved if stored correctly. The other three films were made from paper prints. In the early days of film making the Library did not have the facilities to copyright films …they could copyright scripts and archival materials…and so paper prints were sometimes made of the films frame by frame. The Library has over 3000 motion pictures in this format. The prints were contact prints made on strips of paper the width of the film. The present copies are digitalized versions of those prints. The quality is excellent …very sharp and with good distinction in the tonal values.



The films are typical of the escapist nature of the genre, what Debbie Reynolds in Singing in the Rain called “…just a lot of dumb show”. And while some of the actors later had fame and following, i.e.: Mary Pickford, for the most part the characters all read as dramatic stereotypes. There is also the sense of a passel of New York actors up in the country having a lot of fun.



What stands out in these films is the cinematic technique. Where the action cuts from one location to another, whenever the story returns to an earlier setting the camera is always in the same position as previously seen. Thus I would understand that all of the scenes in each location were shot from one position at one time, out of sequence with the storyline. This accomplished two goals: it reduced the time required to make the films …as ever time was likely money. But for the audience the return to a setting seen from the same earlier camera position established a sense of familiarity and reduced the opportunity for visual confusion; after all, these narratives were only two to twelve minutes long.



It was also interesting that while the cinematic approach was so “head on”, presentational, in all of the interiors, shot in the 14th Street New York studio, there is always a wall to the left or to the right making a corner with the back wall that indicates the depth from the picture plane. Showing only the one corner reduces the sense of our looking into a box; thus that “open” side creates a sense of air as well. This sense of depth is enhanced by having a table or chair in the center of the space around which the actors work. The exterior scenes with buildings always show those buildings obliquely, suggesting that their parallel lines meet at a distant vanishing point.



Many authorities on the development of cubism mention the influence movies had on the imaginations of Picasso and Braque, both of whom were avid movie buffs. It is often stated that they were impressed by the ability of film to make rapid cuts, change points of view and to see an object, or person, from many sides. Seeing these films, all of which were contemporary to the development of cubism, I think I would disagree with that. These films are too static to have had an influence that only later films would have had. (Birth of a Nation was made after the Cubist years.) But what these films do have is that pronounced sense of the flatness of the two dimensional formant and the perception of depth specifically created on the picture plane…which was exactly the pictorial challenge that interested those two artists. Being in black and white they also have a pronounced sense of having been designed from tonal values, another element of cubism.



As to who was responsible for the cinematic technique, Griffith or Billy Bitzer, the cinematographer, requires further research. Film is often spoken of as a collaborative enterprise but it also has the potential to have its contentious power struggles. We are most commonly aware of the power of the star to have his/her way or of a director with callous disregard for the producer’s money. What we rarely hear about is the struggle for dominance between the director and the cinematographer. With thirty years experience in the industry I am well aware that this aspect of film making is extremely common. I have known Directors of Photography, DP’s, who are interested only in furthering their careers and who do as they damn well please, others who are truly collaborative, and those who are simply journeymen photographers making a day’s pay. I also know that most DP’s whatever their level of achievement merely repeat the acclaimed techniques they have known others to use …while they might successfully create a look or a style, very few of them are really very innovative. Perhaps this further justifies our speaking of film as a director’s medium.



But to give credit where credit is due it behooves us to ascertain the exact contribution each participant made to a film. John Ford is reputed to have told the twelve year old Steven Spielberg that when you know where to put the horizon you will know how to direct films. What all the great film makers have in common …Eisenstein, Ozu, Fellini, Ford, Almodovar…is their understanding that fine art photography is the basis of motion picture ….moving picture …art. Did Griffith bring this photographic awareness to his filmmaking career or did Bitzer introduce the concept to him? Did G. make the cinematic innovations or did B.? Will there come a day when these will be seen as the early films of Billy Bitzer? Is he the unsung railroad to Griffith’s canal?



The other aspect of silent movies is the silence, or as we sometimes experience it, the musical accompaniment. At the commencement of the films I was initially startled that the tinny sound of the old upright piano was so loud …and more Scott Joplin than Erik Satie. But I remembered that early movie theatres were often only converted storefronts, likely the size of the room in which we were sitting, and I realized that this initially overbearing piano was probably very right for recapturing a sense of a rowdy past. (Ben Model did confess that piano accompaniment only came to films many years later.) In any event it was right on “in sync” with the action on the screen and I soon shifted my focus to the fluidity and ease with which Mr. Model played his part melding the two into a single event.



After each film was shown there was a brief discussion to ascertain the locations and then and later during the general discussion Ben Model quietly and respectfully displayed his confident and graceful character and the depth of his knowledge on the history of musical accompaniment of early films and the making of those films …all of which knowledge is so readily at hand for him: this is his niche, his world. He knows it inside and out and is so pleased that you have asked him to share it. It is very rare, despite the egocentricity of so many of our fellows, to realize that one is in the company of a very interesting and important person; so rare I will say as to be a privilege.



On this link there are three entries regarding the early films made in the area:

http://www.neversinkmuseum.org/



Here is the link to the Library of Congress Motion Picture Reading Room:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/



This link is Ben Model’s web site. The “Videos” link will take you to his You

Tube postings for his Preserved by Accident series:

http://www.silentfilmmusic.com/

Monday, April 22, 2013

Zane Grey and Tom Mix at the Port Jervis Free Library



Inspired by a recent internet B Western Movieland Mystery Photo Contest I responded to a flyer posted on a community bulletin board and went to the Port Jervis NY Free Library this past Saturday, April 20th, for a showing of the 1925 silent Riders of the Purple Sage starring Tom Mix and his Wonder Horse Tony. The library has a weekly film program in which movies are shown free to the public. Most of these I believe are the old silent films although I think there have been more recent films as well. This particular program was co-sponsored by the Zane Grey’s West Society. Robert Lenz was their spokesperson.

Mr. Lentz explained the mission of the society …I have enclosed a link to their web site and so I will not duplicate that information here. He displayed a copy of the most recent edition of The Riders which the society painstakingly edited to be an accurate facsimile of the original edition, replete with embossed cover art and dust jacket. It includes five essays on Grey’s love of the west, a map showing where the story took place, and program notes of the five filmed versions of the novel. Printed in an edition of 300 it sells for $70.00. A paperback edition has been under consideration.

One of the interesting facts presented by Mr. Lentz was that Mrs. Grey served as her husband’s business manager. It was she who suggested that they move to California so that he could sell the movie rights to his work and thereby multiply his income from each. It was her idea as well that the sale of the rights would be limited to only seven years. Thus the rights could be resold any number of times and this explains why this title has been remade five times, most of the versions are seven years apart.

Setting the record straight Mr. Lentz also let it be known that Zane Grey and Tom Mix, at one time neighbors on Catalina Island, Were Not Friends.

The screening was held in the recently renovated community room in the basement of the library. This is divided into two rooms with a large opening between them, each room about the size of the average family living room. The renovation includes new sheet rock, dropped ceiling, and new carpeting. The reception room’s muted gray walls were lined with six foot folding tables on which were displayed 26 reproduction one sheets in various sizes from many of the Zane Grey Movies …a surprisingly large number of them produced by Herbert Yates and starring Scott Brady. Another table displayed the books written by Bob Lentz; biographies of Lee Marvin, Gloria Graham, a history of Korean War themed films, etc. I purchased a copy of the last of Lentz’s printed newsletters dated 2009. Since then it has been an internet web site under the name of Filmbobbery.com. At the door to the screening room a table offered popcorn and potato chips in large paper cups, a one-fold Playbill with the art work, cast list, and a synopsis of the film, and a two-fold informational brochure of the ZGWS.

Films are screened in the adjoining room on a wide format LG digital screen. This particular film was on VHS cassette. (There was much consternation getting the film to play until it was realized that the cassette merely needed to be rewound.) The audience included three members of the Society, the library representative, and seven members of the movie going public, none of whom I believe were under seventy. On Sunday, April 21, the Society presented a free screening of The Riders, the 1996 Ed Harris version, in the basement meeting room of the Pike County Historical Society in Milford, Pennsylvania. Milford is about 8 miles below Port Jervis on the Delaware River.

To explain my proximity; I live across the river from Port Jervis in Matamoras, Pennsylvania. It is a twenty minute walk from my door across the bridge to Port. Matamoras is on the eastern border of the state at exactly that point where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet. That point is marked by a surveyor’s plaque on a rock at the edge of the river. This, as you might guess, is known as The Tri State Rock.

Being shown the facsimile copy of the novel I was intrigued as to how so much information would be distilled into a one hour film. In fact I was intrigued that Grey had written such a lengthy tome. My first experience with his works was seeing my father read them back in the late forties and early fifties. My father was an iron worker in the construction industry and so this should answer the questions as to what people did before there was TV. TV came to our Kansas town in 1954. As I remember them those editions were the cheap five cent paperbacks. And of course I have seen thousands of hardcover editions at yard sales over the years. In fact they are about the most ubiquitous items at a yard sale and prove without a doubt Grey’s one time immense popularity. Despite this constant exposure, I have never read a Zane Grey novel.

This was not the first Tom Mix movie I have ever seen: as a kid I remember going to see a rerun at a local movie theater some sixty years ago. My father was born in 1914 and my grandmother once told me that it had been his boyhood ambition to go to Hollywood and become the new Tom Mix. I took a look/see back then because I was curious as to the look and character of his heroes. During this screening I observed Mr. Mix with care, finally deciding that my father was likely odder than even I remember him.

In the film, which flirts with the bizarre as most silent films seem to me to do, there is a key plot development and new characters introduced in every scene. It is an understatement to say that the film is a rapid fire condensation of the book. Tom Mix plays a man who spends many years searching for his sister and niece. In the end he abandons his quest for revenge in the name of love. (The parallel to The Searchers was astounding: it hints of plagiarism.) During all these many years Tom Mix always wears the same black costume that is never less than immaculate. Occasionally he breaks the narrative to perform a few rodeo tricks with his lasso, induces his horse to be deceptive, and fashions for himself a device with the rope and the horse in which he literally rides the sage. When challenged he is always the fastest draw in the west, although this is implied but never shown until after the smoke has cleared.

What makes the film so very odd is that this stout middle aged man wore what appeared to be black painted sideburns from the Groucho Marx School of make up as well as lipstick that was perhaps a shade too dark. (This bizarre make up caused me to questions my father’s boyhood aspirations. Prior to this I had not had any suspicions…)

About twenty minutes into the film I longed for it to be over. Then, suddenly, an element of movie magic was introduced: finding himself trapped by his pursuers the young juvenile lead discovers climbing aides carved into the rock walls of a high mountain and climbs up to the top not knowing where he is going and disregarding the obvious that he has become an ideal target for the gun totting varmints hot on his tail. At the top he finds the ruins of ancient Indians’ abandoned cliff dwellings with a beautiful view of Yosemite Park that looked to me to be an inserted Carlton Watkin photograph, herein proclaimed the Lost Canyon. This episode had the dreamlike visual quality of a Murnau film.

Somehow the handsome young man was able to get back down off the mountain top. He returned with plentiful supplies, telling the ingénue that they now had enough provisions to live there the rest of their lives, ( I interpreted this as late adolescent bravura), and later still he climbed up again followed by the ingénue, Tom Mix, the damsel in distress, and all nine members of the Riders of the Purple Sage. As we had been lead to suspect, Tom saves the day by tipping over the balanced rock the Indians had placed there for protection many years ago and which, literally, in one fell swoop wipes out the band of evil men on the cliff face.

I have to confess that I was greatly impressed by the magnitude of that shot. It did not appear to have been done with models or other special effects. I was impressed by the evidence of such disregard for the environment …the destruction was extensive …in the name of commerce. Surely this was the first of the disaster movies. I could only assuage my consternation by wondering if that shot too might not have been stock footage, like the Watkin photograph, and from some more commendable topographical alteration.

Although the ZGWS arranges programs in various other parts of the country the reason for doing so here is that Zane Gray and his wife Dolly lived 26 miles further up the Delaware River in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. And despite their subsequent lifelong wanderlust …the Grey’s owned a number of homes in points west, as well as a yacht, shades of John Ford …their ashes are interred in the Lutheran Church cemetery right next door to this former home. When I first moved here in 1980 the house was an inn, The Zane Grey Inn, and in the late 80’s it was sold to The National Park Service and has since become a maintained tourist attraction. Late in his life when my father paid me his only visit after I had left home, and my not knowing what to do with him, I drove him and his wife to the Zane Grey House. He was surprised that I had remembered his earlier interests and was visibly and awkwardly pleased.

I explained to my father that Grey had moved here because of the opportunity to fish at his doorstep. Grey was a renowned fisherman. I wonder now if Grey might not have been the source of my father’s love of fishing. Living in Kansas, which is dry as a bone and where the rivers when they run run about twelve inches deep, I had always been curious what had inspired my father to take up the rod.

The equivalent of two blocks to the south of the Grey house in Lackawaxen the Roebling Bridge crosses the Delaware from Pennsylvania to New York. This is one of about eight suspension bridges Roebling designed and built in the area and it is the only one of them extant. All of them were maquettes, trial runs, for his larger construction, The Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City. This structure, still in use, is protected as a National Landmark. My father was equally pleased to have been given a walking tour of the bridge, a sort of bus man’s tour as it was. Two days earlier, after a whirlwind tour of New York City, we had driven under the Brooklyn Bridge and over the George Washington.

For about seventy miles, from the Delaware Water Gap in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania north to Narrowsburg, New York, the Delaware is a protected waterway. From Stroudsburg to Milford, about 30 some miles, and for one mile inland on both sides it is a National Recreation Area. Over two million people a year take advantage of this natural environment. This parkland, begun in 1980 after the cancellation of the Tock’s Island dam project, a project that had resulted in the removal of the population of several villages and many private farms, all of which were later razed, has exempted this area from over-development. From just above Milford to Narrowsburg it is classified as a National Scenic River. All development in the river and along the sides here is prohibited. By contrast from below Stroudsburg to its estuary into the Atlantic below Philadelphia the riverbanks resemble a revolving diorama of Camden, New Jersey.

During the 1980’s and 90’s Pike County, the area of Pennsylvania that includes all of these mentioned Pennsylvania towns above Stroudsburg, was the fastest growing county in the eastern United States; when I moved here in 1980 as a summer resident the population was 5,000 with a summer population of 10,000, and during those years of unprecedented growth increased to a year round population of 55,000. That this long, beautiful riverscape with crystal clear waters has been preserved just as it was when the Greys lived here convinces me that big government is the solution not the problem.

The notable literary distinction in Port Jervis is that it was here that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage. As for Milford it was the home of the retired New York City school teacher Frank Mc Court while he wrote Angela’s Ashes; in the 1970’s Milford was the home of The Science Fiction Writers of America.

When the early Biograph Studios were still on the east coast the area in and around Milford often served as film locations. A number of films…seven or eight…were shot here entirely. D.W Griffith worked here along with his star Lillian Gish and others whose names I can not recall off hand. I remember Lillian because at one time in the 80’s she was invited to a function at the Historical Society but, alas, her speaker’s fee was beyond our means. John Barrymore filmed and vacationed here and is reputed to have patronized the local bars. Local resident Farley Granger recently died at his home here. The Pike County Historical Society has a good archive of those early film days including many photographs. For the past ten years or so Milford has presented an annual film festival that maintains the tradition and with aspirations of similar greatness.

The only literary distinction of Matamoras is that it is the present home of the author of these long blog entries, Gary Martin.

A tip of the hat to The Zane Grey’s West Society for their efforts in keeping alive the name of a culturally significant literary and film personality, a man who, whatever his level of genius might have been, engaged in two forms of public art that spurred many a private fantasy and no doubt several worthwhile causes such as a love of and respect for the native land.

Thanks as well to the Port Jervis Library and the Pike County Historical Society for promoting film as a significant cultural experience.

For other film programs at the Port Jervis Library:

http://www.portjervislibrary.org/portjervis/


For other film programs at the Pike County Historical Society:

http://pikecountyhistoricalsociety.org/news.html


The Zane Grey’s West Society:

http://www.zgws.org/index.php


The Bob Lentz website:

http://www.filmbobbery.com/


The Zane Grey House in Lackawaxen:

http://www.nps.gov/upde/historyculture/zanegrey.htm


The Movieland Mystery Photo website:

http://ladailymirror.com/


The Black Bear Film Festival

http://blackbearfilm.com/


Thursday, April 11, 2013

Albrecht Durer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina.

At The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Eight years after the thirteen year old Durer made his 1484 self portrait in silver point, Columbus set sail for and discovered the new world. Durer died in 1528 and so we should understand that the whole history of the western hemisphere since Columbus has happened after Durer’s lifetime. Furthermore: other than art works these drawings and prints should be seen as objects from another time and place, these still fresh sheets of paper, a relatively new medium at that time, were worked on in rooms amongst persons who spoke a language that no one alive today likely could understand. In fact, when these drawing were 100 years old William Shakespeare invented the English language and wrote a play entitled “Hamlet”. These works were three hundred years old when George Washington took the oath of office as President of the United States. It is a testament to the esteem in which they have been held and the care they have been given that they are as fresh as the day they were made. They have survived floods and fires, famine and plague, war, war, war and still more war.

This is a very rare exhibition: there are only 49 Durer drawings outside of Europe; there are 91 in this exhibition. It should also be noted that every one of the works has been beautifully framed and presented to the public using illumination in which there are no reflections or glare from overhead lighting fixtures. This is one of the best museum installations I’ve seen in quite a while….why they all can’t be this thoughtfully presented is a mystery to me.

Albrecht Durer grew up as the son of a successful goldsmith and we can assume that he had a comfortable early life and an early and constant exposure to the fine arts and an ease with and understanding of the society in which he lived. Thus when he told his father that he wanted to be an artist/draftsman rather than a smith, the father could sufficiently assay his achievement in order to acquiesce to his son’s wishes. And so off he went to study with a local painter Michael Wolgemut and later to Colmar to study painting with Martin Schongauer who unfortunately, died before his arrival. But while there the surviving members of that man’s workshop allowed young Durer to study his work. It is clear that Durer had a high regard for the work of these men and wanted to emulate their achievements. And this raises a first question: Durer wanted to conform, to master the prevailing style. Why? Why didn’t he want to draw like Durer? Or, like most young men, to do something “new”?

Sometime thereafter he was able to go off to Italy and he was able to study with and among the well known Italian renaissance artists of the day. And soon his work took on the character of theirs incorporating the latest styles of figure drawing and linear perspective. At no time in the early years of his career, as presented in this exhibition, was there any indication that Durer wanted to master the art of drawing …in order to express himself. To be the best or an equal among a very talented few seems to have been his greatest ambition, that and the desire to be commercially successful…I sense in these catalogue notes that young Durer was as self centered and as ambitious as the young Ruiz Picasso of a later Barcelona. (In his striving for perfection one might suspect that he was somewhat insecure as well.) And in order to be successful he had to make drawings that catered to the prevailing wisdom. There was no daring do in this early career.

Now there is a remarkable parallel here to the life of Picasso. In his youth Picasso realized that the academic tradition was decadent and exhausted and that it was up to him and his generation to reinvigorate it. Once he and Braque had set off on the voyage of Cubism, all of the other ambitious young artist of his day fell into step behind them. In Durer’s day it was the rise of the new in the Italian renaissance that summoned the followers, of whom he was one. So we have good examples here of Gombrich’s matching and making and perhaps an insight into the psychology of representation…one masters craft not for self expression but as the means to personal and professional success: the life of an artist, often more bourgeois than one might suspect, is rarely without its for-profit motivations.

While he did work successfully as a painter Durer is usually thought of as a master draftsman; it is his drawings that resonate and lodge in the mind of the viewer. And although many might stare blankly at the mention of his name, when shown his works almost everyone will admit that his drawings are among their favorites. He is known for having done figure drawings and portraits, nature studies, landscapes, and designs for decorative objects. He worked in pen and ink, pen and brush, watercolor, charcoal, woodcuts and engravings. Examples of all of these are included in the exhibition.

His pen and ink drawings are lovely and spontaneous although not quite as spontaneous as the later Rembrandt’s. And his brush and ink, in which the tip of the brush is used as a pen, requires more explanation than the exhibition curators have given us. American museums are teaching museums and too often we are fed, as we are here, an over abundance of provenance as well as anecdotal back story. As the pen and ink and brush and ink look so much alike in the final presentation, it would be satisfying to know why he chose one over the other for the various works. (I believe his diary entries are extensive and I suspect they probably contain the answer.) It would also be nice to know what is meant by “pen”. I assume it was a goose quill, third from the wing tip was always the preferred feather, but it might also have been reed or metal. And as for the ink, was it a cake of ink such as Chinese or India ink? It would certainly be nice to know which brand has this kind of permanence.

There are questions raised about the various printing media as well. Both woodcut and engraving were new to the 1400’s, they were the photo shop and digital printing of their day, and apparently Durer was one of those artists who raised the process to its highest level of achievement. But I’m curious why he sometimes chose one over the other. In the catalogue it is mentioned that after he had drawn the picture on the wood it was sent to the woodcutter to be prepared for printing. So I think we can assume that there was a printing industry in Nuremburg that was much like that in Japan about which we know so much. Do we not know so much about the industry in Nuremburg or is it considered not important? I think it is important. Did the different printing media have to do with the price of the finished prints: were those prints that were the process of an industrial establishment cheaper than the engravings which were carved by the artist himself?

Engraving is a completely different way of drawing from pen and ink and I wonder if Durer did engrave the plates himself or if they too were sent to the “cutter”. I know that both methods are used and accepted and that some artists achieve their best work through the making of engravings themselves.

The woodcuts are charming and are steps above rustic, but the engravings enter into a whole different realm with their beautiful range of tonal values. Generally that is achieved by incising lines that are sometimes deeper here and there and sometimes lighter. And it is for that reason that I wonder who cut the plates. I would think that the artist would want to control the process: however, in the field of photography I know that both Richard Avedon and Yosef Karsh sat down with a work print and a pencil and described to the printer how they wanted every square inch of the final print to look. I have seen these work prints in exhibitions. Is there any written documentation or other evidence that Durer did the same in these engravings?

In his lectures, The Nude, Sir Kenneth Clark tells us that of all the subject matter of art it is the nude that elicits the most critical response and that this is because each of us has in his mind an ideal image of the human form. In the book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the beginning artist is encouraged to stop using language i.e.: foot, hand, back, leg, etc …and encouraged to see lines that are edges of contours giving each line the proportions that can be seen and that all the subsequent lines should be related in like manner to one another. Drawing is simply a process of coordinating our hand to record what our eyes see. When we use language …hand, foot, elbow…we tend to draw not what we see but what lies buried in our mind.

The dominant subject of Durer’s work is the human figure. As a young man he was convinced that there was a mathematical formula for creating the ideal human figure in art and he spent many years trying to discover it. Perhaps the closest he got was the Adam and Eve of 1510. Other than that his nudes are very obviously problematic…Clark places him squarely in the Alternate Tradition …the Gothic. And so we might assume that in his youth he had been so imbued with the conventions of Gothic art that it was almost impossible for him to cleanse it from his mind… he draws what he knows. For us it doesn’t require more than just a little study to realize that his problem was that he did not understand human anatomy. There are highlights and shadows that he has copied from the Italians to give interest to the interiors of the outlined forms but it is readily apparent that he does not understand for a moment that those geographical bumps and hollows and ridges and valleys are bones or muscles or ligaments.

And there are two areas where he has absolutely horrendous problems: the buttocks and the chin. Consistently over the years he evidenced his confusion as to how the chin was constructed and settled eventually on creating a generic mound that looks very much like a small pubescent breast. I cannot understand why that did not bother him.

I have never known an artist who has had more trouble drawing the buttocks than Durer does. In drawing after drawing he seems to get further and further away from any resemblance to the human figure and what is so amazing is that when he transfers the pen and ink preliminary drawing to the wood or copper plate, i.e. Adam and Eve, Plates 70 and 72, he does not see or correct his mistakes!

Now I have seen this before in works by other German artists, as recently as December when I saw the exhibition Durer to de Kooning, One Hundred Master Drawings from Munich at the Morgan Library. In German works that are beautifully executed with flawlessly depicted surrounds, details and ornamentation, you see in work after work the most grotesque distortions of the human anatomy. Why is that so persistently so? Is it a convention? Or do the German artists not see it or not care if they do see it? Is finish everything?

To give credit where credit is due, in the catalogue pages 102-103 we see the Durer buttocks at their worst, The Four Witches, and then on the facing page in the pen and ink Female Nude Praying, in the National Gallery Collection, a back view that was likely a three to five minute drawing from the model, we see an almost perfectly depicted female form …almost perfect but not quite …her right leg is too short. But other than that he has captured the form and the energy of someone who could easily be mistaken for a contemporary American working class housewife. Both of these are dated 1504.

And it is in drawings like these that we realize Durer main fault, especially in his prints: his human form is never presented as expressive form. His subject/figure is always an actor in a well known tableau and in its serenity it is statuesque, statuesque in that it is rock like. Most of these woodcuts and engravings are religious illustrations with a few Greco-Roman mythological scenes thrown in to acknowledge the southern Renaissance.…there’s really very little here that is other than a commercial product made for a target audience (he is preaching to the converted.) …which partially explains why I do not like prints. (They’re contrived.) The expressiveness and the symbolic  experience of these works come from our previous understanding of the moral of the tale depicted, our ability to translate the meanings of the symbols surrounding the subject, and our predisposal to continue to support religious iconography…to conform to the status quo. As I am not religious, as I am not a Christian, I am not inclined to be so tolerant especially as I am aware that it was the target audience for Durer’s work that within one hundred years turned neighbor against neighbor, Christian against Christian, who clashed in violent civil war and devastated the countryside and decimated the population.

When Durer gives up the pursuit of the ideal and just draws what he sees, one line after the other, he creates beautiful drawings of hands, including the well known Praying Hands, feet, and portraits of old men …his portraits of old women are less successful. Of the old men the portrait of the 93 year old man from the Netherlands, Plate 105. is one of his great masterpieces…better even than the painting which followed.

But at all times throughout his career he was most at ease and at his best in recording nature …landscapes, rugged mountains, and the flora and fauna of home and the lands he visited. And among his masterpieces are The Young Hare, The Oxen’s muzzle, (neither of which are included in this exhibition), and The Great Piece of Turf, which is shown. Aside from being a tour de force of brush mastery the Great Turf is likely one of the few great works which blend water color and gouache. And having it at eye level, one is able to analyze the composition, deconstruct it, and study how the two media, which can often be a problematic combination, are so beautifully blended that neither the one nor the other is obvious, are used to create a sense of deep picture space.

All considered this exhibition is a virtuosic display of draftsmanship. If I had any misgivings they began to surface when I studied a work such as the etching, 1514, The Desperate Man. (here one of only two, I believe, works in the new etching process at that time). This is one of the few works lacking a clear cut religious or Mythic reference, (Knight, Death, and Devil is almost as ambiguous but is ultimately merely Medieval.) In fact, we are uncertain what is depicted and what is meant…it almost seems to be the image of a dream world. (It might simply be a series of exercises in the new medium combined on the same plate.) But it is also readily apparent that in its technique, its composition, its finish and its ambiguity it bears a great similarity to Picasso’s Minotauromachie.

Why are there not more works like this one in this exhibition? Did Durer not make them? Did he only concern himself with the straight forward here and now? If we ask ourselves about his contemporaries or what had come before this we are reminded of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch. Then suddenly a whole world teaming with life and animation rouses itself in our memories…I remember seeing last January a Peter Bruegel pen and ink drawing at the Frick Museum, Kermis at Hoboken, 1559, from the Courtauld Collection, in which almost one hundred figures in every imaginable human involvement fill a page to overflowing with their exuberance. Looking back at the Great Piece of Turf I tried to imagine what Bruegel would have done with it …the flies and bees and frogs and toads and snails and snakes and worms that would have found a paradise in this moist square of sod. Imagine the fun in its death and decay that Bosch would have shown us. And I wondered why Durer …left them out? For all its virtuosity, suddenly I missed them.

Because he died young, at 58, there are none of those late works in which a well seasoned older artist slashes paint across a canvas in a shorthand gesture that conveys a world of meaning…there are no late Rembrandt self portraits, no Capriccios or Dreams of Life.

In the end this exhibition raises a question the answer to which would seem to be obvious but is not, especially as this is shown in the East Building, the National Gallery’s home for modern art: What is the value of an exhibition such as this? The obvious answer is that it is of interest to art historians, collectors, connoisseurs and the general public. It might also be of interest to artists although I am not sure in what respect that would be true. It was Picasso who said I don’t draw what I see I draw what I know. And since the day when Agnes Martin took a ruler and a pencil and made of straight line from the top to the bottom of a well prepared canvas and said “this is it, this is all there is left to do” …where does an artist go from there, from here…from anywhere…what is the future of drawing? Does this exhibition give us a clue? No, it does not. Downstairs we see some colored squares by Ellsworth Kelly and the papiers colles of Matisse and while that might give us a suggestion it also tells us that that too has been done and that unlike Durer, we no longer have the freedom to draw like others or to use the ready subject matter of others or even to reference others. Arthur Dove saw this as a liberating moment wherein one was free to draw from his imagination. But how many artists really have interesting minds?

I enjoyed this exhibition tremendously. I attended the Sunday lecture; I had lunch and then saw the exhibition. I returned Monday morning at ten and saw it a second time for several uncrowded hours. On Tuesday evening when I returned home from the trip to Washington my preordered copy of the catalogue was at my door. I read it cover to cover. I continue to be of the opinion that the desire to draw and to paint is as inherently human as is the desire to sing and to dance, and I have come to the conclusion that this exhibition is not heuristic. Now I am even more emboldened to repeat my question: despite the fact that I enjoyed all of this, what is the value of an exhibition like this? It doesn’t suggest the way forward and, if we like to draw….

Angels,Demons, and Savages. Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet



At the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Those who read these blog posts with any regularity have known me to write on several occasions about my dismay with the conformity of American museums and their universal policy of presenting only the same 37 modern artists and only the iconic image for which each of those artists is “famous”. It is as if the 50,000 annual MFA graduates of Institutions of higher learning do not exist. Rarely in fact do they even give space to local artists of some renown: The Philadelphia Museum does have a nice Thomas Eakins collection on view, as does the Boston Museum with John Singleton Copley, and Kansas City’s Nelson Atkins’s has  the nice Thomas Hart Benton galleries. But as a rule one American art museum is much like any of the others and it can truly be said that if you‘ve seen one you’ve seen them all. So when I read that an exhibition relating the works of Dubuffet, Ossorio and Pollack was to be presented it can safely be assumed that I would make an effort to see it.

My primary interest was in discovering why someone whose name I do not know, Ossorio’s, is being featured alongside two better known names. My questions being: how does his work compare to what is usually shown, how similar or dissimilar is it, and is there anything about the work that makes me think it is a good solution to the problems of contemporary painting that should be better known or is it justifiably better left unseen.

My secondary interest was in seeing more work by Jackson Pollock that is other than his “famous” drip paintings, which I know he made only during a brief period and then moved on, but which the American art establishment would be happy to have us think is all he ever did. There’s a sort of snobbery exhibited by some museums; those who have examples of the drip paintings are, of course, museums of the first rank, and those who have only his earlier of later works are merely confessing that they are second tier institutions.

Finally, I would not have been motivated in seeing an exhibition of Dubuffet’s work alone: the Hirschhorn has a large gallery, perhaps two, of his works and for the most part I find them to be without interest. When I see one or two of his representative iconic works in other museums they all seem to me to be only more of the same. (If he is not in company with the standard 37 modern artist always shown, he is at least in the standard expanded list of 43.)

The focus of this exhibition is the four year period between 1948 and 1952 when, or so we are asked to believe, the work of these three artists shared a common ground. As he is the seminal player, it helps to know who this Mr. Ossorio was. Born into a wealthy Philippine family he was educated from a young age in American schools. Settled in New York and having an interest in art he took up painting and having disposable income he took up art collecting; we might think of him as a latter day Caillabotte. With these interests and living in New York City and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, he made himself known to the members of the New York School of painters and became friendly with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. In discussion with his friends the Pollock’s regarding the work of Dubuffet Jackson suggested that Ossorio go to Paris to meet him. And so he did.

Now Dubuffet was apparently delighted to meet Ossorio and eventually came to New York to meet the New York School and when a meeting between he and Pollock was set up on Long Island, Pollack was being famously difficult and failed to show up. As little direct exchange of ideas resulted during this period one might think that this is a tenuous thread on which to base an exhibition. Perhaps so, but there were intellectual concerns that have some bearing on the episode.

Of the inspirations for modern art two of them are presented here. One has to do with the influence of non-traditional art, as in the case of Picasso and Matisse with their interest in African art and, for Picasso, early Iberian art. From that influence both of those artists made the shift from perceptual art to conceptual art using the human figure as expressive form. From that influence there later occurred an interest in Jung’s collective unconscious which included Joseph Campbell’s work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This latter influence was especially important amongst members of the New York School …Jackson Pollock’s work Keepers of the Secret being a manifestation. In his Mellon Lectures, Paths to the Absolute, Phillip Golding expounded on this line of thinking. (Scroll down to see my review of his book, this blog 2012.)

By 1948, when Pollock had begun to make the drip paintings, but was still committed to figurative art, and likely impressed with deKooning’s new series, Woman, in which he combined figuration with abstraction, but which Pollock might not have wanted to emulate, Ossorio’s introduction of Dubuffet’s work, influenced as it was by art brut or outsider art rather than primitive art, might have seemed to Pollock a possible solution to this temporary crises/stasis.

Thus while there seems to have been a common dilemma (figuration vs. abstraction) there appears to me to have been little cross fertilization. Pollock’s solution was to create the sense of the human figure through poured compositions, black on white. Ossorio drew child like figures lost in a swirl of all over color abstraction, and Dubuffet created hard line expressive forms each shape within the format having a distinct non representational painterly surface.

The second common consideration was the presentation: how does one create an all over abstract composition that has the sense of a spontaneously made painting without making something that looks like the floor of one of the painting studios at the Art Student League. Alfred Barnes has written that all great paintings have in common a sense of “something”. What is that something and how does one achieve it without copying what has gone before?

One of the problems to be resolved in the making of a painting is the question of the decorative: because they hang on walls in well cared for spaces every painting has the inherent character of being a decorative object. Likely the origin of this was the requirement that a commissioned work be compatible with the home of the collector or patron, a person whose quarters were generally highly decorated spaces. Thus, in creating a harmony of expressive form, how far can one go without lapsing into the merely decorative? When Picasso and Braque first worked in analytical cubism one of the considerations for making a new art was the question of finish: it was mutually determined that the works would not be varnished. And indeed that eliminated a sense of fussiness and this further set them apart from what had gone before. For many years the art they created did in fact seem new and compelling. But now that we are many years beyond their creation much of it looks to us now as “decoration” and especially the work of Braque. But this might also have to do with the fact that Braque was first trained as a decorative painter and only later studied the academic tradition. On the other hand Picasso, who had been trained in the academic tradition, more successfully avoided the merely decorative and as a result created far more complex and interesting works than did Braque: little that Braque created has the depth and intrigue of The Three Musicians.

As to why I object to the decorative I see it as defined by Corbusier, and you have read this here before as well; decoration is the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. If we like to think of modern art as a new way of seeing, seeing the old in a pleasant new arrangement is hardly new and hardly “art”.

E.H. Gombrich described the impetus in painting as being of two states of mind: matching and making. For many with a desire to paint an academic training and working within that discipline is an acceptable process: one has the certainty that what he was doing was sanctioned by others of a like mind, and that in order to produce good work one had only to observe the conventions. Work of this kind progresses with the stately pomp of religion. Other artists have stood back from the work, they have seen that what they are doing has been done before, and they have asked: “What else can I do, where can I go with this …in order to make what I want to express more readily felt and apparent.” Often the clues to that progression are found in the work of the immediately preceding generation: Cezanne was the inspiration for cubism …The dominance of cubism as the gateway to modernism was the inspiration for Jackson Pollock to find another opening.

Overall Dubuffet’s work reads as the exercise of a technique. As one example in a museum gallery of modern art works, it is fine, but in larger installations, such as at the Hirschhorn Museum it fails to sustain the interest. Dubuffet searched for his technique, his “style” outside the confines of the western tradition, but in attempting to emulate art brut, outsider art, the non-academic, he conformed nonetheless to a different aesthetic. In the end it is still matching but to a different tune. Lacking a heartfelt passion, expressive form, ultimately it became the repetition of a decorative technique. This is augmented by his wonderful color sense, his unique palette, and his ability to create harmonies of tonal balances. In addition his work has real charm.

As a rule I am unimpressed by art that references a foreign, to the artist, culture without, as Picasso did, making it one’s own. In Tacoma I once saw the work of a glass maker who had made tromp l’oeil objects that looked just like the objects from a northwestern Indian tribe. Some people seem not to understand the difference between the tribal collective unconscious and the archetype. Images from the tribal collective unconscious relate specifically to that particular tribe, to which none of the others of us can relate except as to foreign cultural objects whereas archetypes subsume the cultural.

I don’t see much in the Pollock works here that would indicate that had he lived longer he might have experienced another break through. This all looks to me like a person who was suffering writer’s block and who was biding his time hoping to be surprised by the joy of a communication from his unconscious, something with the magnanimity of Autumn Rhythm rather than the also ran character of Lavender Mist. And each of the works presented here have a strong sense of “finish”. I have the sense that his end of life unhappiness was in part because he wanted to make something other than that.

In every clutch of modern painters there are legions of followers whose work is ultimately nondescript. The problem with Ossorio’s work is that I feel that I have seen it in many other venues under the name of many other artists. This is not to say that his work does not display intelligence, commitment, and a high degree of professionalism. If I have any criticism of it it would be that it is too intellectual. This is one of my common complaints about modern art and because of that I find that modern art is too often exclusionary, it is only a dialogue among the initiates. This continues my recent insights which are contained in my post on the Menil Collection, see below. Then there are several examples of his shaped canvases…which always read to me as a too self conscious attempt at modernism, despite my belief that a contemporary artist is entitled to rebel against the tyranny of the rectangle.

And whereas Dubuffet’s color is always so pleasant Ossorio’s is too acrid …too primitive, as if the palette had been borrowed from ritual preparations in a tribal village. Several years ago I became aware that in the art of primitive people the color palette is always high chroma with a strong liking for orange and black, yellow, red and green, white, red, and black. I don’t know from this exhibition, and there is no discussion of color in the catalogue, whether Ossorio used the colors he did in reference to Dubuffet’s philosophy or whether that color choice was inherently his because of his early exposure to ethnic Philippine art.

All three of the artists show a concern for the dual perception created by a painting: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. But that concern and the work it required feels unrelated to the primary interest in figuration; the figure is either fore or aft but rarely, if ever, dancing on the surface, rarely if ever the actual subject …whereas with Picasso one is never in doubt as to where his interest lies…the beautiful Marie Therese sleeping is always the beautiful Marie Therese sleeping regardless of the artist’s style of the day.

It’s a nice exhibition and much larger than I would have imagined it would be. I like exhibitions like this that are other than blockbuster money makers of the big names. But in the end it all seemed so long ago and far away. Later that same day I passed in front of a late Dubuffet at the National Gallery, wherein a number of colorful, primary colors colorful, drawings on paper had been pasted to a large canvas. Like Ossorio’s self consciously shaped canvases it looked as if many years after this meeting of the minds he was still looking for somewhere to go, something to do. I prefer that to the work of those who have given up and just repeat a commercially successful formula. But it emphasized why I was not more favorably impressed by this exhibition …it is an interesting little byway but it was not the beginning of something big.

I saw as well at the NGA an early Marsden Hartley painting, Maine Woods, 1908, in which he captured the chaos of a wooded landscape with a masterful all-over surface from which after some contemplation one begins to sort out the elements of the natural order. (Sorry, there is no photograph of this painting on their web site.) Immediately I understood it to be a statement of his comprehension of the late Cezanne works. Further, it seemed to me that he had achieved what Pollack, Dubuffet and Ossorio had attempted to do here. Shortly after having made that painting and a number of others similar to it, Hartley went to Germany and devoted his time to understanding the modern painting he saw there. It was as if he had admitted that the all-over technique had a limited shelf life. I agree with that and that too might have something to do with my response to this same kind of painting that I recognize as having come along fifty years after the fact.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

James Turrell, Houston, Texas: Two Site Specific Installations

In 2005 I had my first encounter with the work of James Turrell at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. There he has two permanent installations, one a room without light in which he asks the visitor to sit in the darkness until the eyes are adjusted to the lack of light and then try to determine what they see or what they think they might be seeing. In the other, also a dark room, a large luminous blue rectangle faces the visitor. Upon investigation the rectangle is discovered not to exist: it is merely blue light …framed. I was very favorably impressed by these two art works and I can still recall them vividly.

Later that same year, I visited his installation at the Gray Art Museum on the campus of The University of Washington in Seattle. There one sits in a white room and looks up through a round opening at the blue sky overhead. I found this less interesting than the Pittsburgh work. While it was a calm and meditative experience, I was uncertain exactly what Mr.Turrell wanted me to experience there: because I have been something of a Buddhist in the past that blue circle of sky was always just a blue circle of sky.

James Turrell has been making these installations and art works since the 1970’s and although I lived and worked in New York City during all these years, until going to Pittsburgh I had never heard of him or his work or remembered his name if I had heard it.

In preparation for my recent trip to Houston I discovered that there are three James Turrell works in Houston and I made plans to see two of them. The third, an installation at the Friends Meeting house suggested to me something very similar to the room at the Grey Art Museum in Seattle. I didn’t care to repeat that experience and so I did not schedule it for this trip. If one has not been to Seattle, I would recommend seeing this one in Houston for whatever its value might be.

Sunset Epiphany.

This is an installation on the lawn at Rice University which has seating for 120 guests. It is free but reservations are required. The viewers sit beneath a large flat white ceiling in which there is a square opening through which we see the sky. The forty minute program occurs every evening timed to coincide with the sunset…as the earth turns toward the darker east, the blue of the sky overhead appears to grow correspondingly deeper blue.

In a video interview, see the link below, Turrell states that he wants us to be aware of the light in which we live, not as something …“out there”…but as something in which we are immersed. Not too long after this program of colored lights projected on this white ceiling begins, we do in fact become aware that the blue square is not just air but that in reality it is a viscous substance with physical properties…it is, after all, that part of the light spectrum that we see reflected off the water molecules in the atmosphere that surrounds the planet.

Knowing that the program is to run for forty minutes and having understood the concept so soon, one begins to wonder if there might not be something else the artist wants us to see. There is. But I think this part of it is not addressed so much to the layman as to those who make their livings chit chatting in the art world. Just as the attention begins to wander, just as one is about to look at his watch to see how much longer he is expected to sit there, one notices that the sky is turning pale gray. Has it suddenly grown cloudy or is this a mirage? That square of sky then progresses through a nine point gray scale to black and before one can begin to try to figure that out that black square turns brown. And I was absolutely confidant that if those lights on the white ceiling were to be turned off, that square of sky would still be blue. So what was happening?

Well, I’m not certain that I know, but I was reminded of the work of Josef Albers and his Homage to the Square, in which he shows us that the perception of a color is altered by the colors that surround it. But whereas Albers worked with pigments, which have red, yellow, and blue as the primaries, Turrell is working with light wherein the primaries are magenta, cyan and green. All the pigments mixed together produce black, all the light mixed together produces white, no color in pigment is white and no color in light is black…or darkness… or lack of light and color.

The control of the perception of the color of light has to do with major and minor …the white ceiling, the major, is many times larger than the square opening, the minor, and so the color projected on the larger would greatly influence the perception of the color of the smaller. The color we think we see is mixed in the brain according to the recipe we have been given in agreement with the laws of physics…just as it is in divisionalism, or pointillism, or impressionism.

Despite this description the experience is rather exciting…although after about thirty minutes the attention begins to lag and falter. Many of the guests left long before the end. One feels that he has seen something momentous, that he has been pleasantly hoodwinked, and that a good time was had by all, or at least among those who stayed to the end. I was certainly happy to have seen it but I think there was not much more to it than what I have described …nor was I inspired to delve deeper into a study of the physics of light.

The Light Inside.
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts is situated in two large buildings joined by a passageway under the city street. James Turrell’s The Light Inside is an art installation through which one walks from building to building.

From either direction one approaches a dimly lit corridor with a facing wall, passes around the wall and finds himself confronting a brightly lit space as seen in the photograph, see the link below. Initially there is a perception of a very strict one point linear perspective making the floor below and the ceiling above black trapezoids. The bright colored light gives the impression of being a palpable substance through which one is expected to walk, as if to swim were it water.

Unfortunately, as soon as you begin to move through the passageway, you realize that the floor is raised, that the black ceiling is dropped and that those hide the lights which are being reflected off the white ceiling and floor and the walls about four feet away. And because this is a public passageway as well as an art installation there is a lot of foot traffic here …especially groups of school children. So I suspect that during normal museum hours this is less engrossing than it had been hoped it would be.

Sometimes the lights here are red and sometimes they are blue and my friend and I stood to one side to see if we could ascertain the tempo of the light change but it appeared to be so slow and the foot traffic so high that we gave up the effort. Thus this is an attraction that gets very limited attention and as such I suspect that it appeals to and seems quite normal to those who watch a lot of big screen HD TV moreso than to those who believe that easel painting is not dead and for whom the admiration of local color is not an embarrassment.

The Museum owns seven other works by James Turrell which will be shown opening in June of this year as part of a three museum retrospective of his work, the other two museums being the Guggenheim in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles.

Sunset Epiphany:
http://skyspace.rice.edu/about-skyspace/


The Light Inside:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjRMs0izHSE

James Turrell video:
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/james-turrell



Portrait Of Spain: Paintings from the Prado, Houston Museum Of Fine Arts

Those who know me are familiar with my ongoing musings about trips I would like to take to one exotic locale or the other …Mexico, Morocco, Kazakhstan…although those trips never even make it into the planning stages. For the past several years now I have been heard to mutter that I’d like to go to Spain and see the Prado before I die. Of course thus far I have made no plans.

I have successfully avoided Spain and the Prado all my life. Fifty years ago, when just new to New York, I had a friend from Colombia who was eager for me to learn all about Spanish culture and who never tired of extolling the virtues of Spanish Painting. Well, of course I knew even then that the great paintings were the Italian Renaissance paintings and so I assumed that he was merely chauvinistic. Yet, slowly, over the years I have come to discern a very great difference between Spanish and Italian painting and I have been surprised to realize that when it comes down to the wire, I think I actually do prefer the Spanish.

The minute I read that the Prado exhibition would be travelling to Houston, where friends had been inviting me to visit for almost twenty five years, I determined to go at once! Having seen this exhibition I can now report that the proposed trip to Spain is entering the planning stage.

My objection to Spanish Painting was almost always because Spanish painting was religious painting. That seemed understandable to me what with Spain being such a completely Catholic country. My opposition stemmed from the fact that I was not catholic, not a Christian, and not at all religious. Because commissioned by the crown, it was also royalist and if I have any politics they are extremely to the left of the lowest duke. Since then and absent my friend’s company I have discovered on my own that there is a great deal more to Spanish painting. And then there is Goya, who has given us some of the most profoundly moving paintings in the cannon of western art …Cinco de Mayo being a favorite, and three sets of etching that not even Picasso could better …and if you scroll through these commentaries you will discover how greatly I love Picasso.

As to why I have come to love Spanish painting and to prefer it over the Italian is, I believe, because of the palette …the color. Spanish painting is earthy, it is human, it is local color in which its earthiness is emphasized and it can be very warm when warm and very cold when cold. The color of Italian painting is wonderful …the crystal clear blues and the warm rose and the delicious flesh tones …but after fifty years I have become sated and it has begun to seem sometimes contrived …brilliance for the sake of brilliance. (For the same reason I have tired of the high chroma palette of modern art and have started giving preference to modern artists who work in local color.) Above everything I love color and in particular that which I can see in nature with my own eyes.

If I had any reticence about seeing this exhibition it was in thinking that with so many paintings in their storerooms it was possible the Prado would send over many of their not best works …perhaps really good works but not the best. I am happy to say that fear was laid to rest the moment we walked into the galleries. Greeting us at the first wall was the beautiful portrait of Isabel Clara Eugenia by Alonso Sanchez Coello rich in color and with carefully executed details of pattern on pattern all creating one of the most exquisite examples of the richness that is possible in the making of an oil painting.

I was especially pleased to see two of the early paintings made by Goya as patterns for tapestries…he conveys all the color and dynamic of the life of Spain. Every great painter creates in his works a sense of his own presence and of them all no one is more charismatic and so delightful to know as Goya.

Velasquez is always a presence as well and of his many superb paintings there is probably none that I would rather face than his portrait here of Mars, the tired, exhausted, naked warrior who has given his all and who is so world weary he can hardly raise his arm to support his head.

And, yes, there are the saints and the martyrs and the kings and dukes and ladies of the court. (I have included a link which lists all the works in their various categories.) There are many paintings by painters whose names are unknown to me. And there is still life and among the still lifes there are two by one of my very favorite painters, Luis Melendez. I am a direct descendent of Charles Wilson Peale and I have always had an affinity to the still life of his sons Rembrandt and Raphael Peale, or the uncles, as I call them. As good as they are Melendez is even better…in 1650 he created photorealism long before anyone had ever thought of inventing a camera, tromp l’oeil with a capitol T. Three years ago I went up to Boston just to see an exhibition of his work. It was magnificent. (See this blog March, 2010.)

All of these paintings whatever their category are absolutely engrossing…one’s attention never wavers or tires. This was so engrossing, in fact that I could not possibly describe to you the galleries in which these works are presented…the paintings command your attention, they dominate the rooms. I attended the exhibition with two friends who rarely go to museums: they were spellbound.

The exhibition is a history of two hundred years of Spanish painting. It closes with a portrait laid out but not completed by Sorolla, whose work I know well from the Hispanic Society in New York. As a rule I dislike his work but this one has a great freedom and energy. But just prior to his painting we see The Dementia of Juana of Castile, by Valles, an academic/historical painting of 1866 that was the kind of painting the fourteen year old Pablo Picasso produced in 1894 and with which he won prizes in the annual competitions. It is also the kind of painting against which he rebelled. So in addition to this being a history of Spanish painting, for those of us who love Picasso, it is also a survey of the influences upon young Pablo …. he was always a Spanish painter and these are his antecedents, these are his uncles. Not one of these paintings is his; but he is very much present.

Those who know me well also know that of the arts I like architecture, painting and drawing …drawings, not prints. I dislike prints. Here we are treated to twenty some etchings by Goya from the last three series he made. They are superb. I am always delighted when my prejudices are so easily converted!

This is one of those exhibitions which require timed tickets. We were there at one thirty and there were only about twenty five others in the many galleries. That is wonderful as far as I am concerned; there is nothing I like better than a private showing. But I would like to believe that this will become a hot ticket exhibition. This is a rare opportunity to see really great paintings. It truly deserves a large audience.

This exhibition came to be in Houston through the contacts Gary Tinterow had made during his twenty five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he learned that this was being sent to Queensland in Australia, apparently he got on the phones and shepherded it here where he is now the Museum Director. (See the link below.) This will be followed by Picasso Black and White which I saw a few months ago at the Guggenheim …scroll down for my comments. In the coming years the people of Houston are in for some great experiences in the arts through the efforts of Mr. Tinterow. I hope he will be supported and appreciated.

The video produced by the Houston Museum:



The list of the works in the exhibition. Click on the titles to see the works. Not all of them are shown:



Saturday, February 16, 2013

The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.



The Building.
The architect, Renzo Piano, is the man of the hour insofar as designing museums is concerned. His resume includes the renovated Morgan Library in New York, the recently expanded Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago expansion, and the Broad Museum at LACMA in Los Angeles. All of these recent projects have a more or less sameness of character, a steel frame generally painted white or gray.  His present work includes the new Whitney Museum in New York, and expansions at the Kimball in Fort Worth and the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Of the completed work I know only the Morgan Library (I am not favorably impressed, see this blog 2009.) and his very earliest museum work, The Pompidou Center in Paris, designed in partnership with Richard Rodgers, which is excellent.

He is also the architect of London’s recently completed Shard, and the New York Times Building also in New York.

This past autumn I spent some time belatedly studying the architecture of Louis Kahn. I highly recommend the Robert McCarter monograph for its thorough analysis of his philosophy. Louis Kahn is well known as the designer of the original Kimball Museum, as well as two museums at Yale University and was originally asked to design the Menil in the early 1970’s. (Both he and Mr. de Menil died before that could happen.) In the early 1980’s Mrs. de Menil asked Renzo Piano to take the assignment. During my Louis Kahn studies I discovered that Renzo Piano had studied and worked with him, as did Richard Rodgers and Norman Foster two other busy contemporary architects.

As a result of those studies, when I first looked upon this long, typically Renzo Piano building I could not repress a smile at the number of obvious Louis Kahn references. In turn I cannot repress a smile at the number of Frank Lloyd Wright influences in the work of Louis Kahn who greatly admired Wright. All of these references are fine with me.

Mrs. de Menil asked for a structure that would feel larger on the inside than on the outside, so that it was compatible with the surrounding Montrose residential streets which contain one story pattern book quasi craftsman style cottages…or similar bungalows. She wanted a plan that would avoid museum fatigue.

While it is unusual for a museum to be set down in the midst of a residential neighborhood, it is not unheard of: the Kansas City Nelson Adkins Art Museum has facing urban residential neighbors as does the Minneapolis Museum of Art. The Menil Collection abuts St. Thomas University to the east and so the admixture is not all that disruptive here. In addition the de Menil’s seems to have purchased more than just one city block and have painted all of the facing houses an 80’s housewife/decorator mushroom gray with white trim. In the block front facing the museum the house opposite the entry has been razed and a wide path there leads to the parking lot on the next street over. To accommodate the parking lot about five houses on that street have been razed and it is only there that the disruptive eyesore of that lot expresses any sense of noblese oblige. This is enhanced by the number of houses across the street that have also been razed, by whom and for what reason I do not know.

From that path one has a full view of the museum front. Steel columns painted white divide it into ten bays, four on either side and two in the center. The structure is outlined in steel framing and additional steel I beams are set out about eight feet from the building. The louvered roof extends off the building to those beams and creates an arcade all around the building. While this arcade might be read as an indicator of Renzo Piano’s Mediterranean background, it reads as well as a statement of Louis Kahn’s philosophy that architecture has a function as a place for socializing and for the exchange of ideas.

The infill between the steel members is cypress painted a light neutral gray. The siding stops about one inch from the surrounding steel. It is this gap that Louis Kahn defined as the beginning of ornamentation. So we see clearly articulated here the steel structure, the infill, and the roof trusses each with its distinctive material and each with its distinctive character following Kahn’s dictum that the finished building should reveal the order in which it had been built.

Each of the bays between the steel beams is forty feet wide by twenty feet high, the height of the peaks of the neighboring one storey houses. (Yes, this makes the building four hundred feet long.) However, from the Kahn perspective this rectangle is not the building module, as the catalogue suggests, rather it is a double square. (For Frank Lloyd Wright the square was the symbol of integrity; the red square is his personal sign.) This is restated in the side elevations which are eight squares. Of the two center sections on the front that to the left is stepped back one rectangular unit and on the right the entry is stepped back another two, creating a square in front of the entrance. The roof extending over this and the glass front is a Frank Lloyd Wright concept: you are in the building before you are in the building.

Inside the lobby the plan is also square and it faces a double square wall with openings at either side. That wall states very definitely that the building does not continue in that direction, it goes to the left and right. And indeed two long corridors, together running the length of the building, come to our attention because of glass walls at the far ends and the bright light that beckons there. (Louis Kahn was all about light and shadow.)Elsewhere in the building various areas are given over to interior gardens, another Louis Kahn concept.

The south side of the building houses the offices and store rooms and conservation studios and that front is two stories high, an elevation mitigated by the dominant arcade roof. On the interior there is a strict Kahnian division of these two sections, divided by the long corridor, into served and serving spaces.

Referring again to the plan in the Guide it can be seen that almost all of the interior spaces are squares with some rectangular spaces as variation. Well and good. This agrees with Frank Lloyd Wright’s observation that nature repeats itself: when the honey bee makes its comb each of the cells is the same shape. The obvious problem with this plan is the traffic flow. Once in the lobby there is no indication as to where you should go. I fault the Morgan Library expansion for the same architectural indifference. Frank Lloyd Wright would not have left you in doubt for a moment; so much was he the master of footstep manipulation.

On my first visit, (I saw the collection twice in one week), we opted to go to the right, to the galleries of the Surrealist paintings and the two special exhibition galleries. Each of the three galleries there is square in plan. To my surprise all of those galleries had hard ceilings …there was no natural light whatsoever, contrary to what the exterior had promised. In fact, the few windows there were blocked with window shades as well. Once we had seen these rooms we then had to traipse back to the entry lobby and continue to the galleries on the other side. Fortunately I walk three miles every morning and so I avoided museum fatigue, but with no thanks to the design of this building.

The galleries on the east side of the lobby seem larger than on the other side, there are two square and one a smaller rectangle, and there is a pleasant open meander in the arrangement of the artifacts within those plans. All of the galleries have natural light from the overhead louvers. However, once you have seen one gallery you must return to the central hallway and progress further east to the next. Then having seen them all, you must traipse back to the lobby in order to exit the building.

I found this traffic pattern tedious, although it is certainly a welcome relief to the Metropolitan Museum where every gallery is now but a passage way to other galleries. I suppose I should not complain about a little weaving in and out here. But it is too exclusively straight forward; this is too rigidly a place to be seen in a specific order, there is little sense of a gracious welcome for casual wandering. And when you realize that not much of the collection is actually being shown, apparently it is changed often, or else it is smaller than I expected, you begin to suspect that the galleries seem larger on the inside than on the outside because of all the walking you are required to do…and especially in the same space over and over again.

I was much taken with the floor: what looked to be yellow pine painted black and which has been allowed to wear down to the raw wood here and there in a rather spontaneous and random patterning. I assumed that was a design by accident conceit but as there was noticeable atmospheric mold on the white columns on the exterior, it might be just poor maintenance.

Now, contrary to what it might seem, this analysis is not intended to suggest that Renzo Piano is without ideas of his own; the philosophy of this design very much echoes the philosophy of the collection: the architectural references, whether intentional or not, and far more often than not references are unintentional, create a sense of the continuum of valid architectural principles. And in the end this building reads as nothing so much as a Renzo Piano Museum, in large part, I suspect, because he has so often repeated himself. It is almost as if he has consciously set out to create an architectural syntax like his predecessors during the City Beautiful movement who in every museum of that era presented a classic revival façade to the street. Well, the king is dead: long live the king!

As a place this building is a lovely thing, elegant, lofty, white, and with lovely light …on the one side. However, I would not call it one of the best or most successful museum plants. In its overall effect it reads as too rigid and too one sided, unlike the collection it houses, although the collection does have a specific philosophy. But it does maintain the human scale and it is a pleasant communal space in which to share a common experience.


The Collection.

For the past year I have been making another stab at trying to understand mid twentieth century modern art, or what is referred to as The New York School. Let me digress with a few remarks to clarify this.

On my first visit to the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 I was perplexed when I went from the top floor to the second floor. On the top floor there was the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse …the School of Paris, if you please. And I found all of it exciting and wonderful and tremendously inspirational. I still do. Then going down to the next floor, The New York School, mid century modern art, I was shocked by the sudden severely downward drop to work that inspired little other than mute indifference. This is not to say that I am a rube and that I do not like “modern” art. I do like some of it.

As many times as I have been to MOMA, and they are many, I have never been able to overcome that first impression. This despite the ballyhoo that accompanies every opening. And now that I am fifty years familiar with it, I have come to see the New York School as a really minor and regional development in the larger scheme of things.

Earlier this past year when I was reading and listening to the Kirk Varnedoe Mellon lectures, Pictures of Nothing, see this blog, 2012, I was jolted by his remark that the art of the New York School was proved important because it was collected not only by wealthy Americans but by wealthy Europeans as well …he singled out the de Menil’s as proof positive. That statement smacked of nothing so much as a nineteenth century robber baron’s boast of his legitimacy…and it cemented for me my suspicion that modern art collecting was an activity limited to the 1% who pursued it not for its aesthetic value but as a tradable commodity …now that we are such an egalitarian society, the rich have retreated into the fine arts saying: If we create an artificial market value sufficiently high money will keep the riff raff out! Modern art: the gated community of the world of culture.

One of my complaints about American museums is that each of them is such a typically American conformist. Each of them shows the same 37 artists and the same iconic images for which each of those artists is famous and all of them hung in the same typical MOMA one painting per each vertical space on housewifely soft off white walls. It is sad to me that few of them have the courage to show artists beyond those 37, few of them give space to local artists despite the fact that American Universities and art schools churn out about fifty thousand MFA’s a year. Where do those people show their work and why don’t local museums support them? Why this mad race to conformity?

I am also tired of those collections museums are so proud of having secured that are nothing but an accumulation of these same name brand artists. I have seen several of these in recent years that were bequeathed to one museum or another and they are everyone one of them so politically correct as to be utterly dull. They read as collections assembled by Anonymous.

All of this is a way of saying that finding myself in Houston and with every intention of seeing the Menil Collection, I approached it with trepidation…fearful that I was about to see more of the same that had not inspired me elsewhere.

Instead, I experienced an epiphany. Well, if not an epiphany, an insight.

One of my fascinations with museums is the character of the collectors that is revealed in the various collections. And what one soon begins to understand in this collection is that the de Menil’s had a preference not for “Art” but for work that expresses a deep inexplicable yearning common to the human experience. From the earliest archaic figures to mid twentieth century surrealism it is work that is not simply figurative but that in which the human figure stands as expressive form…be it ancient Aegean, African, Pacific Oceana, or twentieth century surrealism. (Each of these areas of the collection contains excellent examples of the genre.) There is a void in the collection of those middle years of European art, such as can be seen in the Prado Collection currently at the Houston Museum of Fine Art, not to imply that that work is not expressive form in its own way, but that the Menil works are those that express something beyond verbal utterance. One of the common characteristic of European painting from the 1400’s to 1900 is that it can engender tomes of discourse regarding the anecdotal content of the artworks. I have never believed that the anecdotal is the raison d’être of art.

Of the paintings in the New York School I have always felt that Cy Twombley was all about the desire of that something that wanted to be said. His one painting on view reinforced that opinion. But not all of those other paintings or sculptures here relate to the overarching character of the collection. I can see in the Jasper Johns Gray Alphabet that the work is a tour de force of craftsmanship, that it bears a direct relationship to the Mayan Carved Lintel, as seen in the catalogue, Figure 61. But as for expressing something I believe that it does not …Johns insists that his work is about nothing …it is only about craft. And because this work is so readily identifiable as an appropriation, an object very much like something else, it lacks any sense of original insight, it expresses no yearning. Hanging next to this in the gallery is another Johns, Voice, 1964-67, a larger, gray work and as presented it is such a second rate concept and inept piece of workmanship that I was shocked to see it here.

The same can be said for the Robert Rauschenberg Crucifixion and Reflection, a completely sophomoric and second rate entity. In fact too many works from this school with this character create exactly the same schism that I experience at MOMA: the original unique and inspiring collection is weighed down by a large load of dead freight.

Others of the New York school read as too Politically Correct, the thing one Ought to Collect. And I wondered if the de Menil’s might not have been advised, perhaps against their will, to include the New York School in the collection so that their other, and superior but less famous, works did not suffer by being considered “minor”. God forbid one should have a muscular philosophy but create a “minor” collection. Specifically I refer to the Morris Louis work in the corridor near copies of which I have seen in every politically correct collection making the rounds. Works like these raise the question: is this a collection with a personal philosophy or is this a Whitman’s Sampler of the work of a specific time and place?

And so this was my epiphany, my insight: I like work that uses the human figure as expressive form. I believe I share this preference with Picasso and Matisse et al.; whether we understand the particulars of it or not, the art world blather, we respond to what we are seeing. I am disinterested in the New York School because the human presence has been minimized, omitted. It is only about painting and only that aspect of painting that is of interest to that particular artist. As described by Varnedoe it is a small, closed band with a parochial interest. I suppose a case could be made that the work focuses on the mental experience, the intellectual side of the beast, or that it has a verified literary/spiritual heritage, see the Phillip Golding Mellon lectures, this blog 2012. But somehow that doesn’t quite make it. In a country full of stupid people, ours, this will never inspire a populist assembly. And while I have no admiration whatsoever for the man in the street, he is an ass, without his inclusion art becomes a we and they enterprise…us and them. And I understand now that exclusion was never the impetus behind the desire for community: an artwork is a sign of and call to community and it is the sense of inclusion, the tribal, that makes an art work significant. And it must be a visual experience that is comprehended at once, whether one can verbalize that response or not. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. de Menil for that lovely insight.

Lovely. With exceptions. Well worth a visit.

I did not see the Dan Flavin installation in an old nearby neighborhood grocery store. There were four works there. I like Dan Flavin’s work but I have a rule about Dan Flavin: he should never be seen in units of fewer than twelve or twenty. Individually his things look silly.

The web site has good text regarding the building and the collection but it has very few photographs of the art works and no list that I can find of the artists in the collection. Neither is there any indication that the museum participates in Google Arts. Clearly this organization needs to get into the cyber age: it looks like a very old style organization…I think the word I’m looking for here is …dated. Modern art? Dated? Is that possible? (Yes.)