John Sloan, 1891

John French Sloan didn’t make a big splash at the 1913 Armory Show, and in fact he was only marginally involved in the organization of the event. But he was a significant artist of his era and darned interesting guy. Sloan was an idealist, and he put in art in service of his ideals. He’s been criticized for rejecting modernism, and in fact he thought Cubism and other art from Europe was a waste of time. But his reasons were more complicated than you might think.

Sloan was born in 1871 and grew up Philadelphia, where he lived and studied art until he moved to New York in 1904. He was part of a circle of young, aspiring artists from Philadelphia that included William Glackens and Robert Henri. Many in this group believed American art needed to break away from the artificial and often frankly ridiculous academic art that had been imported from Europe. They despised the mythological scenes and heavy-handed morals of academic art. Instead, they wanted to paint real Americans leading real lives.

This artistic movement had parallels in wider cultural movements. Think about the muckracking journalists who investigated factories and tenements and slaughterhouses at this time. Ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle? Same time period, same impulse to document working-class life.

The result was a desire to paint scenes from ordinary life in the rougher neighborhoods of New York. Sloan lived in Greenwich Village, then the home of Bohemian New York, and he devoted many paintings to scenes of the Village or nearby immigrant neighborhoods in the Lower East Side.

John Sloan, “Sun and Wind on the Roof,” 1915. (Click to see a larger version.)

Here, for example, is a woman hanging laundry out to dry on the roof of her apartment building. Sloan painted many views of rooftops–it was the only open space most people had. Tenements were awful, dark, crowded places. Getting up on the roof gave you some light, some sun, some air. And where else would you dry your laundry? Not in a damp tenement.

This doesn’t seem like a particularly radical painting today, but Sloan’s subject matter raised eyebrows in artistic circles. Paintings of ordinary life were unheard of. Paintings of poor people were unheard of.

In fact, Sloan and his fellow artists were criticized for their “inappropriate” and “vulgar” art. They were labeled the Ashcan School, and it wasn’t a compliment. Sloan hated the term.

But back to the roof pictures. There are tons of them.

This painting, “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair,” was Sloan’s contribution to the Armory Show. Once again, it’s a slice of ordinary life. Sunday you got a bath. (Can you imagine living in a filthy big city full of gas lamps, horses, and god knows what else and only getting a bath once a week?) Most women wore their hair long, and they certainly didn’t own hairdryers. But combing out your hair in the sunshine was a chance to talk to your friends, to laugh and relax on a bright sunny day.

John Sloan, “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair,” 1912

Sloan also did lots of etchings–it was one of his favorite mediums. This is a very late work from 1941, Sunbathers on the Roof. It looks hot, the couple looks sleepy, and that cat looks like it needs a square meal.

John Sloan, “Sunbathers on the Roof,” 1941

One more roof etching–this is much earlier, from 1906. In the summer, when it was hot, people of course didn’t have air conditioners–they didn’t even have fans. There are descriptions of people hauling mattresses onto fire escapes or even into Central Park to sleep. Of course they went to the roof. And then it turned into a building-wide slumber party, with all your neighbors sprawled out all around you.

John Sloan, “Roof, Summer Night,” 1906

Sloan also painted cityscapes, many from his studio in a high building in Greenwich Village.

John Sloan, “The City from Greenwich Village,” 1922

The train is elevated, not yet a subway, and Midtown Manhattan seems far, far away, glittering like Oz on the horizon.

While many friends in Sloan’s circle of friends painted similar works of everyday life, Sloan had an added, political motive for his art. He was a committed Socialist. It’s hard to look at Socialism from a pre-World War I perspective. This was before the Russian Revolution, before Lenin and Stalin and Mao and all of the totalitarian baggage that Socialism and Communism picked up over the years. Sloan was reacting against the truly appalling behavior of Gilded Age plutocrats such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, who would seemingly stop at nothing, including shooting strikers from their own plants, to make more money.

Sloan got involved with The Masses, a radical Socialist magazine published out of offices in Greenwich Village, soon after it was founded in 1911. He contributed numerous illustrations, cartoons, and covers for the magazine over the years. Probably this is the most dramatic and memorable:

Cover for the June 1914 Issue of The Masses by John Sloan

The cover commemorates the Ludlow Massacre, when Colorado National Guard troops and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards attacked striking miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado in April 1914. Two women and eleven children were among the up to twenty-five people killed when troops and guards fired on strikers with machine guns and set fire to tents. It was an appalling incident, and Sloan milks it for all its worth.

The Masses and Sloan were naturally opposed to World War I, which they saw as a fight between imperalist capitalists fought with the lives of workingmen. Sloan contributed editorial cartoons in opposition to the war:

John Sloan, “After the war a medal and maybe a job.” 1914 (Click for a larger version.)

That’s a fat capitalist offering a dying soldier “maybe a job” after the war.” It’s kind of over the top, but the anger is clear. And considering the carnage of WWI and the shameful treatment of veterans after, it’s not too far off the mark.

Sloan was a member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors that organized the Armory Show and took some part in running it, but not much. He devoted more time to running The Masses than at the Armory. And when the show took off and became the most popular subject of the press, he contributed a cartoon to his magazine on the subject of Cubism:

Some people have criticized Sloan for not embracing Cubism and other modern art movements with more enthusiasm. In fact, he had a thoughtful response to modern European art. He thought it was self-involved.

In modern art, the subject is less important than the style. Often the subject has very little inherent meaning–when Picasso painted a Cubist still life with a mandolin, the mandolin didn’t have any meaning or message–it was just an object of an interesting shape that Picasso could manipulate. Discarding meanings and messages was a critical part of most modern art. Modernists wanted to move art away from the ham-handed morals that were required of academic art.

But Sloan believed art should have a message. He rejected the false morality of academic art, but he wanted art to serve a social purpose. His rejection of modernism wasn’t knee-jerk conservatism–it was carefully reasoned and based on deeply held beliefs.

So what do you think–was Sloan right or wrong? And what do you think of his art? Personally, I think his political work is clumsy but his paintings and etching are insightful and all the more valuable today since they give a glimpse into a lost world.

It’s been a long few months, friends, with much fretting and editing and muttering to myself. I have drunk innumerable cups of chai tea at various coffee shops. I have  developed a new-found passion for 3×5 cards and have scribbled upon and sorted and tossed out and rearranged them at length on the tables of the various coffee shops. I have done very little laundry, and what laundry was done was neither folded nor put away.

I had great plans to keep up the blog while working on the book, but that turned out to be as hopeless as keeping up with healthy eating while working on the book, or exercising, or dusting. But now it has been turned in, it is officially my editor’s problem, and I can pick up the pieces of my life. (Of course, there will still be copyedits and galleys and whatnot, but all that seems eminently manageable right now.)

So far, so good. I got the trash and recycling bins to the curb (you have no idea how many times I’ve missed trash day in the last six months), ate a healthy breakfast,  went to yoga, cleaned my desk, and now am updating the blog. I feel so productive I may have to lie down.

The good news is that even after all this time, I still find the 1913 Armory Show a fascinating topic. One of the strongest feelings I’ve developed over these months is that it’s really a shame that so many artists associated with the show aren’t better known. Of course Marcel Duchamp is known–and Picasso and Matisse. But most of the American artists have been forgotten. And that’s unfortunate. So I will do all I can in my wee little way to make up for it.

Arthur B. Davies, American artist and organizer of the Armory Show

We’re going to start today with one of the most important artists for the Armory Show, the president of the association that organized the show, Arthur B. Davies.

Not a bad looking guy. Kind of distinguished.

He was born September 26, 1863 and died October 24, 1928. Prior to the Armory Show, he built a reputation as a well-known avant-garde artist. He exhibited with The Eight, a group of Americans headed up by Robert Henri, who would become his nemesis during the show.

This designation of Davies as “avant-garde” seems weird today, because his art doesn’t seem the least bit progressive or modern or radical. It looks, in fact, incredibly old fashioned–far more dated that the work of Cubists or Fauves produced at the exact same time in Europe.

I think this has to do with the way modern European art “won” in art history. If you think of art history as a river (stick with me here), at the time there were all these streams and rivulets existing at the same time and receiving  equal attention. However, in the middle of the last century, historians decided the modernist stream was the most important–the stream that included Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, etc. Instead of a bunch of equally valid waterways, from our perspective it looks there was a single dominant river with several little, unimportant streams running alongside and eventually dying out.

From that POV, Davies’s art is unimportant. But I disagree with this notion that holds art is only important if it led to other, even more important art. Davies was significant in his time, and he still has something to offer today.

Does that mean I’m a big fan? Well. No.

“Unicorns (Legend—Sea Calm),” ca. 1906

He painted unicorns, for crying out loud. Without a hint of irony. And I’m sorry, but his earnestness kind of makes me want to giggle.

He really liked nude women. Really liked them. Liked them wandering through landscapes–you know, as you do. With your other nude friends.

“Rhythms,” ca. 1910 (For a larger version, click on the photo.)

It’s supposed to be about the beauty of the female form. I get that. But to me, many of Davies’s nudes seem awkward. Stiff. Posed.

I think I’m just too much a creature of my own time to really get Davies. I understand on an intellectual level. He’s of the same general strain as the Pre-Raphaelites–not in terms of artistic style, but in that mode of painting mystical, ethereal, beautiful women, the more the better. It’s got an element of objectification that I find disturbing. These aren’t real women with internal lives. They’re figures, types.

“Sleep Lies Perfect in Them,” ca. 1908

Davies was himself not always the most stand-up guy with respect to women, either. I’m going to save the full story for the book, and WOW, it’s a kicker. (You can find it online, of course, or you could wait until October and read it in my book!) He could be incredibly selfish. I think he had trouble with real women. His relationships always faltered when women became more than models and objects and started wanting their own lives.

However, I think when he painted real women, his work is much stronger than his artificial types.

“Woman Reading,” 1911

This is my favorite Davies’s drawing. It’s of a real person, his model and lover Edna Potter, and I think it’s charming. Look at that pert little nose. And you’ll notice she’s nude from the waist down. Racy. But she’s a real person, not “Woman.”

Immediately after the Armory Show and his encounter with Cubism, Davies experimented with Cubist-like art, with mixed success. What I like the most is that he was eager to try new things in his 50s as an established artist. Not many people have the confidence to take on something entirely new at that point in their career.

“Dances,” 1914/15

Still nudes in improbable poses, but here the emphasis on movement and rhythm is less icky because they’re so obviously, completely not real people.

Davies’s work is held in major museums around the world–the unicorn painting is at the Metropolitan in New York. But you won’t see it there because it’s not on display. This is the fate of many Davies’s paintings. You would probably have to go to a regional museum with a more limited collection to see Davies’s art in person.

So there you are: an artist you’ve probably never heard of. I’ve got dozens of ‘em–and I can’t wait to share. I’m glad to be back to blogging.

But I saw the most fascinating thing last night that I wanted to share.

Check out this little gem:

Helgo Buddha, 6th century A.D.

It’s a tiny–10 centimeter tall–bronze Buddha dating from the 700s. And it was found in Sweden.

Here’s the background: I was watching Nova on PBS (while paying bills–no time for leisure TV right now)–a show on Viking swords. I wasn’t honestly that interested, never having a particular interest in swords, Viking or otherwise. It seemed like perfect bill-paying background TV.

But these swords—known as Ulfberht—were made from remarkable steel that, as best anyone can tell, no one in Western Europe knew how to make. Europeans wouldn’t have this technology for nearly a thousand years. The high-grade steel made these blades particularly strong and sharp and far less prone to shattering in battle. The blades were so prized that they were, in effect, trademarked with the name Ulfberht, although today no one knows if Ulfberht was a family, a place or something else entirely. Of course, trademarking has its own risks, and numerous fake Ulfberhts have been discovered, usually broken to bits. Medieval blacksmiths could probably get a lot of money selling counterfeit swords, although I wouldn’t like to be the guy who fooled a Viking.

The question, of course, is where did the steel come from, if not Europe. The answer is surprising: Central Asia, possibly what is today Afghanistan. Which, you’ll note, is a long way from Sweden. Particularly if the only way you can get there doesn’t involve jet engines.

We tend to think about the Vikings heading out to rampage and pillage to the south and west. I associate the Vikings with the British Isles–with Lindisfarne and Dublin. With France and Belgium. With Iceland, Greenland and the far edge of North America.

But the Vikings traveled East as well as West. They conquered the hell out of Russia–the “Rus’,” likely meaning “men who row,” were Vikings. They sailed down rivers all the way to the Black Sea and then out to the Mediterranean. They made it all the way to Baghdad and brought back silver coins that have turned up from Gdansk to Greenland.

They also brought back this Buddha. Somehow it made it from Northwestern Indian to Helgo, Sweden, where it was excavated in the 1950s along with a Christian crozier from Ireland and an baptismal basin from Egypt.

So many questions! Did the owner know who the Buddha was? What he taught? It’s hard to image a way of life more at odds with the teachings of Buddhism than that of the Vikings. Was it just a pretty statue, valuable for its rarity? Or was it sacred? What was the story? Because you know there was a story. The story was essential to its worth.

Today I sit surrounded by objects made all around the world. I picked up a few things more or less at random and saw China, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, U.S.A. (huh!), China again, Japan, Mexico. We give it little thought.

But here is an object that traveled far fewer miles that most of the stuff in my office and yet was so rare and unique we still marvel at it 1400 years later. Amazing.

Oh, and just so you know, I didn’t finish the bill-paying. I’ll have to find something more boring to watch tonight.

(Curious about this story? You can read more at the PBS website and even—for now—watch the entire Nova episode online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html.)

A favorite of mine popped up yesterday, and I decided it would make a good story today: Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent:

John Singer Sargent, “Portrait of Madame X,” 1884

It’s a famous work, one that caused a scandal when it was first shown at the Paris Salon of 1884. The figure’s bold beauty and plunging decolletage shocked Paris society. The model was a well-known social figure named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, but Sargent departed from traditional society portrait painting by depicting a highly sexualized, if sophisticated, figure. The whole “Madame X” business was a futile attempt at keeping Geautreau anonymous.

One detail was particularly scandalous: the gold chain straps of her satin gown. In the original painting, the right strap had slipped down to reveal a bare shoulder. Proper French matrons had palpitations–a bare shoulder? Sacre bleu! Sargent eventually repainted the strap at the request of Gautreau and her family.

Notice the elegant turn of the neck and elevated chin. The pose reminds me of a ballet dancer’s–all elongated and heightened. The expression of haughty elegance is marvelous. If you search Google for this painting, you’ll find it’s a favorite of art students, who attempt to recreate it. The biggest challenge most have is with the facial expression. They make Gautreau look disdainful or remote; in the worst, she seems to be smelling something horrendous. Gautreau’s effortless sophistication is hard to pull off and even harder to paint.

The gold glint at the top of her head is hard to make out–it’s a tiny tiara with a gold crescent moon. The imagery alludes to the goddess Diana the Huntress, another powerful, beautiful woman.

The tilt of Gautreau’s nose is marvelous. Look at that determined chin and thin but elegant lips. Today’s beauties all pump their lips up so they look like they’ve been attacked by bees. Gautreau is more refined.

I love how Sargent used little swirls and strokes of paint to capture the fine curls of hair at her neck. And notice how the red of her ear stands out against the ivory of her skin. I also love how the coral red of the ear contrasts with the ruby of the lips. One is natural, the other artificial.

Sargent positioned Gautreau leaning against a table with her weight on one arm but turning away to the opposite side. This gives tension to her hand and  arm, which is braced with the elbow turned out. This is an old painting trick known as contrapposto when you have a figure with weight off-balance and their body turning. (Leonardo did it with the Mona Lisa.) The pose gives the figure a sense of potential movement, of dynanism.

Look at that tiny waist–oh, what a corset could do! And how uncomfortable she must have been.

Sargent depicted Gautreau without any jewelry except her tiara and her wedding ring, which gleams gold against the black and ivory. The lack of jewelry was shocking to audiences, since the fashion was to be absolutely dripping with it. The implication is that Gautreau has returned home from an evening out and taken off her jewels. That makes this not a public moment but a private one. Add the slipped strap, and the implication is that Gautreau’s getting ready for some hanky-panky after a night of parties.

You may now clutch your pearls in horror.

Notice how Sargent created the draping of the dress with criss-crossing sweeps of the brush. It’s not easy to give depth and substance to a black dress–it would be easy for it to be a black blob. The careful gray highlights add three-dimensionality.

The floor may not seem that interesting, but there’s some fun art references going on here. Look behind Gauteau and the table at the background. Can you see the point where the floor ends and the wall begins?

You can’t, not clearly. It’s hinted by the shadow behind and to the right, but if that were the wall the space would be relatively shallow, and if you look at the entire painting we don’t sense Gautreau is standing with her back at a wall.

Sargent likely borrowed this technique of the floor-bleeding-into-the-wall from Diego Velazquez, the Baroque Spanish artist. In many of Velazquez’s portraits, the wall is indistinguishable from the floor except by shadows. (Check out this example.) The result is a sort of indeterminacy about the space. It’s not the sort of thing you notice until it’s pointed out, and then you realize Velazquez did it all the time.

Edouard Manet, a huge fan of Velazquez, picked up the trick in the 1860s, and here’s Sargent doing it in 1880s.

I’ve seen this painting at the Met, and it’s marvelous in person. The black is rich and luscious. Gautreau is stunning. It’s an amazing painting. If you find yourself in New York, don’t miss it. I suspect you’ll be more amazed than horrified.

Yes. It’s really that exciting.

I’ve been working on this for MONTHS. I don’t know how many times I thought the whole thing was dead in the water.

It’s OK. Don’t be so apprehensive. Everything has worked out fantastically.

So you know how I wrote those books, right? And it was amazing and wonderful and I loved it?

Quit looking at me like that. OK, yes, I complained about it A LOT, but the end result was AWESOME.

So . . .

I get to do it again. I’m under contract to write another book.

WHEEEEEE!

And the super-amazing part of this is that while the Secret Lives books were fun and cool, this book is my own idea, dreamed up in my own head, pitched via my own agent. The other two books were assignments—fabulous assignments, yes, but the product of someone else’s vision. This book? This is mine. 

Hang on, I’m going to squeal again. WHEEEEEEE!

Sorry about that. I’ve been doing it randomly around the house all weekend. I had a cold and spent most of the last few days in bed, so sometimes it was a pathetic whee, muttered into a pillow, but still.

So what, you ask, is this alleged book?

The title right now—and this could totally change—is The Modern Invasion: Picasso, Duchamp and the Art Show that Scandalized America.

It’s about the famous Armory Show of 1913 that brought modern art to America and shocked everyone with Cubism and Fauvism and fractured nudes descending staircases. It was a turning point in American art, the start of the rise of New York as a cultural capital and a shift in how people thought about creativity.

The good news is that it will be published in the fall of 2013, in time for anniversary celebrations of the Armory show. The, er, stressful news is that my manuscript is due IN MAY. May is like, tomorrow.

So I will probably lose my mind a bit in the next few months. Posting may be even more erratic than before. But I want to share what I’m learning–the art, the stories, the fun details.

I couldn’t be saying this without the hard work of my agent, Russell Galen, or my new (!!!!) editor Jon Sternfeld at Lyons Press. Jon totally gets this project. I’m so psyched to be working with him.

So! There’s the big news. What do you think?

My thoughts exactly.

_________________________________

(The art from today’s post is drawn from the vast assortment of self-portraits by Rembrandt, who practiced painting facial expressions with a mirror.)

Sorry?

But hey! I’m back, and I’m finally finishing a post I started ages ago.

You see, part of my disappearing act involved a trip to the New Mexico and Colorado mountains. I’m from North Texas, and a summer trip to New Mexico and/or Colorado is practically required. We live in a very flat, very hot land, and there comes a point every summer where if you don’t get away you will have a meltdown in the driveway, by which I mean you will literally melt in your own driveway. The only cool locations within driving distance are Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado, so everyone packs up the car, has breakfast in Wichita Falls and lunch in Amarillo, and fetches up in Santa Fe about dinner time.

View from Wolf Creek Pass near Pagosa Springs, Eric Voss. Members of my family have been taking variations of this photo for more than 60 years. I found this one online, thus proving other people also find this view irresistible.

This tradition is generations old. In lucky families, an earlier generation invested in a cabin. (No one in my family apparently had that sort of forethought, or perhaps capital.) The result is that Texas families have “their” mountains. Families have “always” gone to Red River, or Eagle’s Nest, or Raton. They go back every year or every few years and develop traditions. It becomes essential that they eat at certain restaurants, visit certain national parks, shop at certain gift shops.

In my family, our mountains are those surrounding Pagosa Springs in southern Colorado. My mom went there as a kid, and my husband and I took our honeymoon there. And this year, for the first time in ages, we got to go back.

It was fantastic. Our first day in Pagosa Springs, we drove out to the National Park and found “our” stream, a rushing mountain rivulet with an island in the middle. As long as I can remember, the mission has been to cross the stream and get on the island. The difficulty of the task changes every time based on the locations of rocks and fallen trees–this time it was a snap, but other years it’s been hair-raising. The first year I took my husband there, he asked “Now why are we crossing this stream?” and I honestly didn’t have a good answer other than that that’s what you do. It was proof that I married the right guy that he accepted this without question and entered into the stream-crossing enterprise with vigor.

My husband in the middle of "our" stream. Yes, he did in fact have a heck of time getting back to dry land.

Once we got onto the mystical island, there’s a spot you can sit with a waterfall in the foreground and towering mountains in the background and rushing water on either side. It’s magnificent. Everything’s pounding and roaring and soaring and it all leaves you breathless.

What does this have to do with art or culture? Well, the sense that I got sitting on that stream is surprisingly historical. It’s not universal but rather cultural.

Prior to the mid-18th century, most people had no appreciation for mountains at all. English writers and artists in particular found mountains nothing more than annoyances, hindrances to agriculture and a barriers to travel. Mountains were described in English literature as barren protuberances, insolent and inhospitable; as blisters, tumors or warts.

To some degree, these attitudes were borrowed by English writers from Roman writings; the Romans seemed to see mountains as inconveniences. For other English writers–particularly earlier ones–the negative view of mountains was largely based on ignorance. Shakespeare, for example, almost never mentions mountains, but then he probably never saw one. England is hilly but not mountainous, and he never ventured to more rugged portions of Wales and Scotland.

By the 17th century, however, many English writers had traveled and seen mountains. And they weren’t impressed. Andrew Marvell called mountains hook-shouldered and unjust, excrescences (love that word) that deform the earth and frighten the heavens.

This attitude started to shift in the 18th century, and by the 19th mountains were a favorite subject for poets and artists alike. So what changed?

What changed was Romanticism, which was more than a poetic movement. Romanticism was a whole worldview that, among other things, saw nature (Romantics would say Nature) as a source of inspiration and wisdom. Critical to all this was the concept of “the sublime,” which describes something vast, mysterious, awesome, terrifying yet wonderful. In other words, mountains.

In a space of a hundred or so years, people went from being annoyed by mountains to near worshipping them. Instead of being inconvenienced by the Alps, which made travel from France to Italy so difficult, people came and marveled at them. Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron spent a summer near Geneva and went around appreciating the mountains like mad (when they weren’t telling each other ghost stories.) These were the same mountains that Voltaire lived amongst for 20 years and hardly noticed at all. (In his Philosophical Dictionary, the best thing Voltaire could say about mountains is that they were the source of streams and rivers that nourished life in the valleys.)

Wordsworth could hardly see a hill without swooning. Even the sober Jane Austen caught the fever, or at least conveyed it to her heroine Elizabeth Bennet. When Lizzy is invited to tour the Lake District with her aunt and uncle, it evokes a reaction twenty times more effusive even Mr. Darcy’s proposal of marriage:

“Oh, my dear, dear aunt,” she rapturously cried, “what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are young men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We will know where we have gone—we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarreling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers.”

Notice that Lizzy is at pains to explain they will properly appreciate the landscape,unlike the “generality of travellers.” It was felt that most poor souls lacked the refinement to truly grasp the sublime.

Philosophers dwelt at length on the sublime, particularly German philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer and Hegel. And artists started painting mountains in new ways.

Mountains had appeared in art all along, although usually in the background. Leonardo da Vinci created marvelously mysterious mountains:

Leonardo da Vinci, Detail from "The Virgin of the Rocks" (London version), 1498-1508

But with Romanticism, landscapes became increasingly important–and increasingly dramatic. Previous artists painted domestic scenes of land tamed by agriculture; Romantic artists painted wild, wondrous landscapes of mountains soaring–even erupting:

J.M.W. Turner, "The Eruption of the Soufriere Mountains in the Island of St. Vincent, 30th April 1812," 1812

Gerhard von Kügelgen, "Portrait of Caspar David Friedrich," ca. 1810–20

The ultimate Romantic artist was undoubtedly Caspar David Friedrich. (It’s not clear if he really had such a piercing gaze or simply liked to think he did.) Friedrich is all about the subline. He routinely paints dramatic landscapes of mountains, oceans or barren hillsides. Sometimes ancient ruins haunt the scene–the Romantics adored ruins, particularly Gothic ones. (The contemporary idea of being Goth–that is, dark, emo, moody–can be traced directly to the Romantic love of all things Gothic–or Gothick, as the novelists spelled it. Jane Austen would have understood Gothic to mean old, creepy, mysterious, emotional, and dark.)

Against the landscape, one or two human figures stand in contemplation, dwarfed by the scene before them. They are caught in appreciation of the sublime.

Caspar David Friedrich, "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," 1817

This is a vast subject, and I’ve only touched on it. American artists, for example, deserve their own discussion of how they painted the landscape of the West. If you’re curious, there’s a classic text on the  Romantic discovery of mountains called Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory by Marjorie Hope Nicolson from back in 1959; you can read a large portion of the text online.

The temperatures are falling to reasonable levels here in Texas, and we won’t go back to the mountains until next year. It’s lovely to see traditions continue; my son now has “his” mountains outside of Jemez Springs in Northern New Mexico, where we’ve stayed the last several years with family.

But remember the next time a landscape makes you catch your breath and you stand still in wonder: Voltaire would have walked on by. Thank you, Romantics, for giving us the mountains.

The trepidation is mostly related to what I know is going to happen: the doctor is going to tell me that I need a new kind of glasses, the kind that begin with “bi” and end with “focals.” Now, it is simply not possible that I am old enough to need bifocals. Yes, technically, I’m over 40, but only in the sense that my birth was more than 40 years ago. I’m not actually in my 40s. That’s simply not possible.

There’s another tiny bit of trepidation to which I have to admit–a wee bit, a frisson if you will, of angst that my eyes might be troubled more than simply by myopia, astigmatism and that whole over-40 business. I come from a family with eye problems, both macular degeneration, which can be treated, and a weird genetic condition that can’t. We don’t know if I have the weird eye thing, it could never trouble me my entire life, but it’s scary enough that I go to an MD for my eye exams, not the optometrist at the mall.

Because, my friends, seeing is cool. I am pro-sight. I like looking at things. I kinda do it for a living, even. It’s hard to imagine writing about art if you couldn’t look at it.

Which leads me to Monet. Because if you think it’s hard being an arts writer with eye problems, imagine being an artist.

Let’s dispel some myths first. No, Monet did not paint the way he did his entire life because he had bad eyesight. When he was a young man, his eyes were perfectly fine. Check out this early painting of Monet’s future wife, which is clear and sharp and not blurry at all.

Claude Monet, Detail from “Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress),” 1866

The “fuzziness” of Monet’s style was deliberate and conscious. Monet was interested in atmosphere, light, space, air. He studied the way light revealed different colors under different atmospheric conditions, and the “blurriness” of his works was his way of representing that light and color.

Claude Monet, “Impression, Sunrise,” 1872 (Click for larger image.)

This painting from 1872 (which, incidentally, gave the Impressionist movement its name) isn’t intended to be a detailed, sharp-edge depiction of boating in a harbor. It’s an impression of the effect of a sunrise on a foggy, cloudy setting.

Monet’s eyesight only became a problem late in his life, when, in his 70s, he began to develop cataracts. Today this wouldn’t be an issue. Cataract surgery is a quick out-patient procedure that you recover from in a day. Not so in the early 20th century. While surgery was available, it was painful, required a long recovery, and posed substantial risk.

Monet was first diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes in 1912, at the age of 72, but the condition had begun affecting his vision for at nearly a decade. Art historians and eye experts have traced a steady change in his color palette starting around 1905. He moved away from blues and greens. His canvases became dominated by reds and yellows, often pure pigments. This is consistent with the visual effects of cataracts, which desaturate colors and give all objects a yellow cast.

At his prime, Monet was a brilliant colorist—sensitive, subtle, delicate. Look at the incredibly blending and tone of this work:

Claude Monet, “Water lilies,” 1908

Compare it to this:

Claude Monet, “Water lilies,” 1923

It’s . . . horrifying. Red smudges with egg yolks. And terribly, terribly sad.

Another comparison—here’s Monet’s famous painting of the Japanese bridge over the lily pond at his house in Giverny:

Claude Monet, “Water Lily Pond,” 1897

And the same scene a few years later:

Claude Monet, “Water Lily Pond,” 1923

Monet realized what was happening. He considered giving up painting altogether and destroyed some of his canvases. Friends urged surgery, but he feared the results. Mary Cassatt, a long-time friend and colleague, had had cataract surgery on both eyes and been left essentially blind. Finally in 1923 he agreed to surgery on his right eye.

The results were mixed. Monet no longer saw the world as yellow but as blue—everything had a bluish cast. He realized this himself when he found he was going through blue paint faster than any other color. Here’s another version of the bridge from this last period:

Claude Monet, “The Japanese Bridge,” 1924

Monet never consented to surgery on his left eye–it was simply too risky.

Monet wasn’t the only artist with vision troubles. Cassatt I’ve already mentioned. Degas’ vision began to decline even earlier than Monet’s, and from his 40s on he struggled with his sight. He died in near blindness.

I’m really not worried about my sight—I’m visiting the MD out of an excess of caution. It’s the kind of thing I might fret about at three o’clock in the morning, but generally I’m confident I have years of fantastic art-viewing ahead of me. Albeit in—oh, I can hardly bear to say it—bifocals.

As for Monet, I have to admire his persistence. He didn’t give up. He was an artist, and even in his literally darkest days, he made art. It would have been easy to throw away his brushes, go to bed and pull the covers over his head. I admire his commitment to the act of creation. Cezanne said of Monet that he was “only an eye—but what an eye!” How tragic that those eyes failed him in the end.

Is that not what it looked like?

We tried to get all low-tech astronomical at our house. The pin-hole camera thing was a bust. My husband rigged up a lens and some cardboard, and we saw a dark smudge that we declared to be Venus but which might have been a spot on the lens. We then retired to the house to watch astronomical phenomena the way God intended, on television. The NASA channel, which I did not know until yesterday even existed, had the cutest groups of astronomers standing on top of Mauna Kea freezing their butts off but so excited they could hardly speak in complete sentences.

But of course all this talk about Venus opens up such art historical possibilities that I can’t simply let them go. There are few more popular subjects in the history of art than the Goddess of Love.

So who was Venus, anyway?

So-called “Ludovisi Throne”: main panel, Aphrodite attended by two handmaidens as she rises ouf the surf. Thasos marble, Greek artwork, ca. 460 BC (authenticity disputed).

To begin with, she was Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of Love. The Greeks considered her an old god, older than most, and this probably reflects historical fact, that the worship of a love and fertility goddess was incredibly ancient.

The stories of Aphrodite’s birth reflect both her great age and her exoticism. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, an ancient poem about the origins of the gods, the god Kronos battled with his father Uranus for control of the heavens; Kronos cut off Uranus’s genitals and threw them into the sea. (Greek myths are not for sissies.) From the sea foam from where the, er, bits landed, Aphrodite arose.

Fresco from Pompei, Casa di Venus, 1st century AD. Excavated in 1960.

For those keeping up at home, that makes Aphrodite older than Zeus, who was the son of Kronos. The family tree isn’t important: what is important is that the idea of worshipping the female force of sex, passion, and fertility is incredibly old.

The Romans appropriated all of the Greek gods, Aphrodite included. Her name in the Roman pantheon became Venus, a noun in Latin that means “sexual desire.”

Several  motifs became associated with Venus, one, of course, the motif of her rising from the sea. She is also frequently depicted bathing, simply because this gave artists an opportunity to get her clothes off:

“Venus de Milo” (Aphrodite from Melos). Parian marble, ca. 130-100 BC? Found in Melos in 1820.

The Venus de Milo, for example, is believed to have been a standard depiction of Venus emerging from her bath. It’s likely this statue was originally positioned in a Roman bath house, which were central hubs of the community that combined the functions of basic hygiene, workout and worship. Hoards of tourists surrounded this statue, which is, no joke, incredibly beautiful.

What I find interesting is that this was not a work by a great master–it was a knock-off of a far more famous work called the Aphrodite of Cnidos by the great Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Praxiteles was the first to show Venus nude, and the statue was so hugely popular that people came from all over the Greek world to Cnidos (a city in what is now Turkey) to see it. The citizens of Cnidos constructed a special temple just to house the work, a circular temple that allowed people to gaze on the beauty of the goddess from a full 360 degrees. Rumor had it Praxiteles used the famous Athenian courtesan Phryne as his model, which gave the statue an added touch of scandal. In any case, the Aphrodite of Cnidos was lost centuries ago and all we have are the knock-offs. They’re pretty darn marvelous, which makes you wonder what the original looked like.

Depictions of Venus became scarce in the Middle Ages, but with the Renaissance artists threw themselves into painting her with gusto. Botticelli, of course, made her a favorite subject:

Sandro Botticelli, "The Birth of Venus," ca. 1485-86

This famous painting shows Venus emerging from the sea on her clamshell. Two wind gods, the fierce Zypherus and mild Aura, blow her ashore. Horae, goddess of the seasons, rushes foreward with a gown to clothe her. Botticelli also depicted Venus in his work Primavera, which I’ve talked about before. Renaissance Florence in the time of Botticelli was obsessed with myth, and Venus was an obvious subject.

Once Botticelli paved the way, Italian artists went to town with portrayals of Venus.

Titian, "Venus of Urbino," 1538.

This unapologetically erotic work was hugely influential and began a motif of its own, the reclining Venus. (I talked a little about it here.) It was duplicated all over the place by all kinds of people–but that’s a subject for another day.

Northern European artists were less likely to paint Venus, with the prominent exception of Lucas Cranach the Elder, who seems to have painted Venus every chance he got:

Lucas Cranach the Elder, "Cupid Complaining to Venus," 1525.

Notice that Venus is naked as the day she was born, except for that marvelous hat. Cranach did this a lot, for some reason. You’ll see Venus, nude, but in a hat. It was kind of his thing.

Anyhoo, the young Cupid is holding a honeycomb, from which he presumably stole sweet, sweet honey, but now he is being stung by bees. He is complaining to his be-hatted mother, who doesn’t seem to be the least concerned. Cranach’s work can be taken as an allegory that pleasure in life always comes with pain. Notice as well that Venus is holding on to an apple tree, which reminds us of Eve and the ultimate cost of temptation. (You can find a great discussion of this work here from the Khan Academy.)

Artists over the ages returned to the image of Venus, with each era giving her the attributes and aura of the age.

Francois Boucher, "Venus and Cupid," 1769

Boucher’s Venus is all Rococo elegance, with a hairstyle that would have been entirely appropriate for the court of Marie Antoinette.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Venus Verticordia," 1868

Rossetti’s Venus is all flowing hair and soulful eyes, a typical Pre-Raphaelite heroine.

Alexandre Cabanel, "The Birth of Venus," 1863.

Cabanel’s Venus is luscious and erotic verging on soft-core porn. Cabanel was a hugely popular French Academic artist–he was said to be Napoleon II’s favorite painter. This was the sort of sticky-sweet art that the French Academy was churning out in the 1860s, so you can imagine with the Realists and Impressionists started showing up what a shock it must have been.

Edouard Manet, "Olympia," 1863

Yeah. Different. This isn’t technically a Venus, but scroll back up to Titian’s Venus of Urbino and you’ll see the connection immediately. Manet painting Olympia the same year Cabanel did his Venus. The two men were not friends.

The modernists took Venus in all sorts of different directions.

Odilon Redon, "The Birth of Venus," 1912

Redon’s Venus is all softness, color and vague shapes.

Amadeo Modigliani, "Venus (Standing Nude)," 1917

Modigliani takes the traditional pose of Venus (look back at Botticelli) and transforms it into the simple lines and volumes inspired by Cezanne.

Salvador Dali, "Venus de Milo with Drawers," 1936

And then there’s Dali.

What can you say except, yep, that’s Dali.

By now, Venus has lost most of her meaning as a powerful goddess of passion. At this point, Venus is a blank slate on which artists can sketch their own notions of beauty and/or explore connections and responses to Western artistic heritage.

This is only a fraction of the Venuses out there–did I forget your favorite? Let me know in the comments. And I hope you got a chance to see the Transit, even if it really was just a smudge on the lense.

I’ve been meaning to study up on Gonchorova since I got back, and today is the perfect opportunity to do so since it’s her birthday. So here’s a quick overview of this fascinating woman who made significant contributions to modernism and yet is now almost forgotten.

Gonchorova was born in 1881 and studied in Moscow. She seems to have been born into the Russian artistic class–she was the great-neice of the wife of poet Alexander Pushkin. She and her partner, artist Mikhail Larionov, were at the forefront of the Russian avant-garde. They helped organize avant-garde exhibitions in Russia and exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) German expressionism group.

Gonchorov’s early work takes inspiration from two sources: Cezanne and Russian folk culture. From Cezanne, Gonchorov developed an interest in strong, pure colors and concrete geometric construction. From folk culture she borrowed themes and motifs.

Natalia Gonchorova, "Khovorod," 1910 (Click for larger image)

Notice the strong sense of volume in the dresses of the women, combined with the simplicity of a peasant dance.

Gonchorova also used images from the Orthodox religious tradition and was inspired by motifs from religious icons.

Natalia Gonchorova, "Nativity," 1910

The Medieval simplicity here is deliberate. I like the detail of the red halos around the heads of the Virgin and the Christ Child–typical touches from icons.

The interest in traditional Russian folk culture was in the air at the time. Russia had looked to the  West for culture for centuries–Peter the Great tried to “civilize” Russia by creating new cultural traditions based on those of France. Around the turn of the century, many Russia artists rejected this attitude looked East to peasant culture, dress, art and stories for inspiration. In the same period, Stravinsky drew on the same vein of cultural heritage to write The Rite of Spring.

Around 1912, Gonchorova and Larionov attended a series of lectures by the Italian Futurist artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. They were greatly inspired by Futurism’s emphasis on modernity, motion and mechanical forces. Gonchorova’s work took on a definite Futurist style for a time:

Natalia Gonchorova, "The Cyclist," 1913

The sense of movement in the wheels and the repeating lines of the body all contribute to the sense of forward momentum. It’s classic Futurism. The letters and images in the background are passing signs and advertisements glimpsed by the rider on his way.

However, Gonchorova and Larionov weren’t satisified to simply adapt Italian Futurism. They took the movement in another direction, into greater abstraction, with what they called “Rayonism.”

Natalia Gonchorova, "Green Forest," 1913

In typical modernist fashion, they wrote a manifesto for their movement, which they unveiled at the Rayonist exhibition of 1913.

The style of Rayonnist painting that we advance signifies spatial forms which are obtained arising from the intersection of the reflected rays of various objects, and forms chosen by the artist’s will. The ray is depicted provisionally on the surface by a colored line. That which is valuable for the lover of painting finds its maximum expression in a rayonnist picture. The objects that we see in life play no role here, but that which is the essence of painting itself can be shown here best of all–the combination of color, its saturation, the relation of colored masses, depth, texture.

Got that?

Basically, they were trying to depict rays of color reflecting off of objects and therefore to depict the essence of an object rather than its surface appearance.

(Incidentally, “Green Forest” is the work that I saw at MoMA and got me started down this path to begin with.)

Natalia Gonchorova, "Cats (Rayonist perception in rose, black and yellow)," 1913

So the point isn’t to depict a cat itself but the essence of a cat via reflected light. It’s a dynamic form of composition.

Rayonism made Gonchorova famous in Russia, as did her outrageous behavior. She and Larionov openly lived together, shocking traditional Russian society. Larionov was fascinated by tattoos and body art, and he often painted Gonchorov and himself all over; the two would then go parading, Gonchorova invariably topless, down busy streets.

The couple didn’t limit themselves to art. They briefly operated cabarets that were less spots for entertainment than live-action, interactive art installations heavy on Symbolism and interactive dance.

They also got involved in the Ballets Russe, the dance company run by Sergei Diaghilev. In 1914, before the war, the couple went to Paris with Diaghilev to design the sets for a production of “Le Coq d’Or.” Gonchorov also designed costumes for other Diaghilev ballets.

Natalia Gonchorova, Russian Woman's Costume for "Le Coq d'Or," 1914

When the war broke in August of 1914, the pair returned to Russia for Larionov to do his military service, but they made it back to Paris in 1917. They continued to work for Diaghilev, with Gonchorov painting sets for “The Firebird.”

Natalia Gonchorova, Backdrop for "The Firebird," 1926

Gonchorova also taught art classes and met numerous members of the avant-garde in Paris after the war. Among her students were Gerald and Sara Murphy, the American couple who were the center of the Lost Generation artistic community and the model for the lead character’s in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Gonchorova introduced the Murphys to Diaghlilev and Stravinsky.

After Diaghilev’s death, Gonchorova and Larionov struggled financially. They fought to get their art back from Russia, where they had left it in 1917. They finally married toward the end of her life to ensure that they could inherit one another’s work.

Gonchorova died in Paris in 1962. She’s remained relatively unknown in the West, in part because most of her art is still in Russia and becomes available at auction only rarely. One recent sale met with unexpected success–in 2007 her painting Picking Apples was auctioned at Christie’s for $9.8 million, setting a record for any female artist.

So here’s to Natalia Gonchorova, pioneer of the avant-garde. She must have stared down endless disparaging looks. She held her own in the high pressure world of the artistic elite. It must not have been easy, but she did it with style.

The approach works, but it has its limitations. Namely, what do you do with the artists who don’t lead anywhere? What if an artist is a stylistic dead end, wandering off in his or her own direction while the main highway of art history moves forward at a right angle?

Art history doesn’t know what to do with these anomalies, so it mostly ignores them on the grounds that they aren’t “significant.” As if all that mattered was how much influence you had on the future.

That’s a shame, because some really weird and fascinating art isn’t “significant,” but wow, is it interesting.

Take, for example, this esteemed gentleman. He looks mild-mannered enough. His name was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and he had possibly the weirdest imagination this side of Salvador Dali.

You wouldn’t have expected it. Archimboldo was born in 1526 in Milan, and his father was an artist. He followed a predictable Renaissance path, apprenticing, training, design cathedral windows and painting portraits. He landed a job with Maximilian II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in Vienna in the early 1560s.

He completed standard portraits and religious  scenes, but his taste tended toward the capricciosa–“whimsical.”

And so it was on New Year’s Day 1569 that Archimboldo presented to Maximilian a series of paintings on the theme The Four Seasons.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Spring," 1569

It’s a guy’s head, made of flowers.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Summer," 1569

Or fruit.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Winter," 1569

Or a battered tree.

That is some seriously weird art. There’s nothing else like it in Italian art. There’s nothing like it anywhere.

And they were an immediate hit. The Hapsburg court loved them. At a 1571, Maximilian and other members of the court actually dressed up as the paintings in a festival designed by Arcimboldo. The emperor himself played Winter.

Historians note that works were more than just amusing. They also held potent symbolism about the power of the ruling family over everything, even nature. Under the Hapsburgs, the paintings hint, nature itself overflows with bounty.

Similarly, in a series on the Four Elements, the royal family exerts its influence over the fundamental forces of nature.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Water," ca. 1566

Look at those details–how the oyster shell becomes an ear. If I look at this one too long, it gives me the heebie-jeebies, imagining all those fish and turtles and squid moving around. Gah.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Fire," ca. 1566

The symbolism of “Fire” is particularly pronounced. The nose and ear are fire strikers, one of the symbols of the Habsburg family. The muskets and cannons of the body are bold representations of power. On the chest is the double-eagle seal of the Holy Roman Empire.

So Arcimboldo was a sophisticated court painter, currying to the whims and egos of his patrons. I see him in the same vein as the English playwrights such as Ben Jonson who wrote silly yet sophisticated masques that both stimulated smart courtiers and stroked their egos. Wealthy courts in time of peace have always tended toward the lavishly ridiculous. Think of the clothing of the court of Marie Antoinette.

The Hapsburg court ate it up. Maximilian’s successor, Rudolf II, even had Archimboldo paint his portrait in his unique style:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Rudolf II as Vertumnus" (Roman god of the seasons), ca. 1590-91

There’s a lot of sly humor here–notice that the ears are actually ears of corn. The flowers and fruits are all recognizable varieties, and the interesting thing about the corn is that it was newly imported from the Americas.

Once he mastered his unique gimmick, he kept at it, his works becoming more and more detailed and clever. He did another series on the seasons:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Autumn," 1573

Notice that the Adam’s apple is actually an apple.

He played around:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "The Greengrocer," ca. 1590

Like this work, which has more than one way of looking at it:

He did several works of types of individuals or professions, created out of their working materials:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "The Librarian," ca. 1570

(I wish I knew if Picasso was familiar with this work. It’s very Cubist, don’t you think?)

Arcimboldo eventually retired from court service and returned to his hometown Milan. He died there in 1593. And his works were quickly forgotten. After all, it’s not like an entire school of art grew up around the gimmick of make faces out of other objects.

And forgotten he remained until the 1930s and his rediscovery by the Surrealists. The French Surrealist magazine Minotaure reproduced his work and Alfred Barr featured him in an Museum of Modern Art exhibition titled “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.” Man Ray, Rene Magritte and Dali all claimed Arcimboldo as inspiration, and Dali declared him the Father of Surrealism, 300 years earlier.

Arcimboldo has a secure spot in museums, where his works hang uneasily next to super-serious Mannerist portraits and religious scenes. That we know about him at all is due to the Surrealists, who established a link with the artist and turned his dead end into a by-way.

Link or not, Arcimboldo’s work is worth a look–if for no other reason that it’s seriously weird. He’s funny, yes, but also unsettling. I think it has to do with the sense of “the uncanny”–that feeling that something is familiar and yet completely strange. I get the joke when I look at his work, but I don’t want to linger on it. Spenting too much time looking at his paintings gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies.

What do you think about Arcimboldo? Worth a serious look? Or too frivolous to bother? And what about the creepy factor? Does he weird you out, or is that just me?