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/

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….

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/durerinfo.shtm

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.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/2013-02-09-exhibition-pollock-ossorio-dubuffet.aspx