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Outros, como Doris Lessing, Prémio Nobel de Literatura 2007, acham que "umnegro na posição de presidente dos EUA não durará muito, será morto", mas adeclaração, no mínimo inoportuna, não foi levada a sério pelas autoridades eimprensa., via xatoo
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I’ve always been amazed that one of Kitaj’s closest friends was Francis Bacon. Although Bacon was much older, Kitaj found common ground with him in painting the modern psyche after the trauma of World War II. But whereas Bacon saw that world and concentrated on the horror, Kitaj saw the same horror and looked to temper it with humor and love. In Amerika (Baseball) (above, from 1983-1984), Kitaj alludes to the Franz Kafka novel of the same name yet simultaneously represents “America’s game” of baseball. By the middle of the twentieth century, baseball finally reflected all that America represented, finally allowing African-Americans to play professionally. A native American himself, Kitaj from his home in England could see the paradoxes of the American way more clearly at a distance, yet still inserted a playfulness into his social comment.
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Kitaj always walked the fine line of the specific and the universal—the same fine line of Buber’s I and Thou. His Jewish heritage ensured that the Holocaust always remained in his consciousness, yet he didn’t want to take that tragedy and turn into something exclusive or tribal. Kitaj’s Passion (1940–45): Cross and Chimney (above, from 1985) brings together the Christian cross, the symbol of Jesus’ passion and death, and a simple chimney, the garish symbol of the fires of the Holocaust in which six million Jewish lives turned to ashes. Kitaj seems to say that nobody has cornered the market on victimhood. We’re all victims in some sense. Rather than take tragedy and divide into separate circles, we should use tragedy to unite as a common whole. I confess to a love of Kitaj’s work more for its literary allusiveness and symbolic power than for his technique as a painter, but the positive power of what Kitaj says rings louder to me through his paintings than any words alone, especially in a work such as his Passion above. Late in life, Kitaj often painted himself and his late wife as angels. In his life, Kitaj always tried to show us “the better angels of our nature,” whether we wanted to look or not.
Remember when you were in school and had to ask for a hall pass like the one above to use the restroom? I went to an all-boys’ high school physically attached to an all-girls’ high school, so more adventurous souls took that hall pass to the other side of the building, where the young ladies awaited. Catching onto that scheme, the priests who ran the school designed a hall pass approximately the size of an SUV car door—the uncoolest thing you could possibly imagine holding while sweet-talking some sophomore on her way to gym class.
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Bacon’s always seemed a sort of magpie painter to me, stealing bits here and there from the masters, most notably Diego Velázquez in works such as Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). But Bacon went outside of the art world to find inspiration as well. Scanning medical textbooks full of diseased mouths and oral anomalies, Bacon took those images and inserted them into works such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X as a sort of primal scream therapy to deal with the horrors of modern living. This primal approach even included actual primates, such as in Study of a Baboon (above, from 1953). Bacon’s rough way of handling the human figure sometimes devolved it into apelike status, as if shedding all the cultural garb to reveal the naked ape beneath. Bacon once remarked that reading Nietzsche as a young man in search of himself was a pivotal experience. Like Nietzsche, Bacon tears down all the old gods and the truths holding them up, preferring new truths or no truths at all rather than truths that were no longer operative.
What will make the Bacon centennial especially interesting will be the presence of Bacon himself in film footage. Bacon cooperated with many interviewers and documentary filmmakers over the years and never shied away from self-promotion. Openly gay, Bacon revealed perhaps too much of himself, but anything less would be untrue to his art. Bacon’s Self-Portrait (above, from 1973) shows Bacon twisting and contorting even his own image, reflecting the twisted nature of his own, often self-destructive soul. Leaning against a sink, Bacon may either be simply weary or, perhaps, dipping his hidden hand into the water to allow a slashed wrist to bleed out into oblivion. Bacon painted this Self-Portrait soon after he painted Triptych, May-June 1973, his recording of the suicide of his lover, George Dyer. Perhaps Bacon wanted to record his own suicide before the fact and never completed the act itself. (Dyer died in a bathroom, the room Bacon paints himself in.) Such naked self-analysis makes Bacon one of the most fascinating and enigmatic artists of the past century and will continue to make him a name to remember in the next century.
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Lichtenstein enjoyed a relatively short period of profitable productivity, giving up the copying of comic panels after just 5 years in 1965. By then, the damage had already been done. The expectations of gallery owners and collectors was set in stone. A “Lichtenstein” equaled a comic book-style work, and nothing else. In the 1970s, Lichtenstein painted a series of works titled the Artist’s Studio. In Artist's Studio No. 1 (Look Mickey) (above, from 1973), Lichtenstein paints the work that started it all in the background of a Lichtenstein-styled studio composed entirely of those maddening Benday dots. No matter how much he wanted to escape, those dots pursued him. Even after doors of the swinging Sixties swung closed, Lichtenstein couldn’t break through into a new style. An artists such as Picasso changed styles like some people change their underwear, but Lichtenstein clung to the style that made him famous, even long after it had served its purpose.
Lichtenstein died in 1997, still painting Benday dots and still trying to escape. Lichtenstein’s Nude with Abstract Painting (above, from 1994) shows a Matisse-like nude sprawled across the canvas with an abstract painting hanging on the wall behind her. Alas, all hope of drawing closer to Matisse’s free style drowns under the ever-present sea of dots. Where Lichtenstein once sought to parody the excesses of comic book style, he now self-parodied the excesses of his own wearied style even as he nodded in the direction of another master who, like Picasso, enjoyed a chameleon-like career in painting. Lichtenstein certainly isn’t the only artist who found his niche and rode it into the ground. However, unlike those other artists, Lichtenstein’s niche was never truly his own. In the end, Lichtenstein struck a Faustian bargain in exchanging his personal creative vision and soul for the riches and fame he thought were what he really wanted from art.
After Picasso moved past the depression of his Blue Period and the romantic elation of his Rose Period, he plunged himself into the intellectualism of Cubism. Picasso’s Violin and Guitar (above, from 1913) stands as just one of the many works in which Picasso takes musical instruments and explodes them in the Cubist style. Cubism’s disassembling masked Picasso’s inability or unwillingness to accurately depict such instruments. In contrast to The Old Guitarist, Picasso’s Violin and Guitar lacks any human element, both visually and emotionally. Picasso reportedly knew next to nothing about classical music and had no desire to learn, choosing instead to stick to the Spanish folk and street music of his youth. These Cubist musical instruments might be Picasso’s violent reaction to classical music, which he may have saw as just another component of the stale, establishment art world that his new art movement challenged. Aside from that cultural clash, I never get the sense that Picasso chooses violins or guitars for any other reason than that they offer interesting shapes with interiors asking to be exteriorized by Cubism.
After World War I, however, Picasso returns to the human side of music in Synthetic Cubist works such as Three Musicians (above, from 1921, the PMA version). I’ve always loved Three Musicians for its color and humor, especially in contrast to the dour browns of earlier Analytical Cubism. Here, both the instruments and the anatomy of the musicians are all wrong, yet the sense of performance is completely right. Picasso’s art is so rich and so varied across so many styles that his accomplishment is simply too large to take in all at once. Slicing into that oeuvre and looking at one sliver allows you to see in microcosm the macrocosm of Picasso’s imagination continually evolving, sometimes forward and sometimes back. The sadness of the Blue Period and The Old Guitarist disappears in Three Musicians, yet the experimentation of Cubism remains. Such never ending reinvention and pilfering literally from himself sets Picasso apart from the rest of modern art—a movement unto himself only momentarily aligning with others, if at all. In the final analysis, “if music be the food of love,” and life, Picasso calls “play on.”
Along with Walter Pach and Arthur B. Davies, Kuhn helped organize the (in)famous 1913 Armory Show that gathered together somewhere in the vicinity of 1,250 works of art by more than 300 of the best European and American artists painting in Impressionist, Fauvist, Cubist, and other modern styles. Thanks to the Armory Show, figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse finally found a toehold on American shores and invaded the American art scene for good. Much of Kuhn’s art appears to be an attempt to respond to those artists—a reply in hopes of sneaking out of their huge shadows. In 1918, Kuhn traveled to the western part of the United States to paint a series of works he called An Imaginary History of the West. In The Longhorn Saloon (above, from 1918), Kuhn evokes the smoky atmosphere of the stereotypical Wild West barroom. You can almost hear the piano player in the background. The rough handling of the figures shows Kuhn’s debt to European modernism, but the subject matter illustrates how Kuhn sought to take those European models and make them unquestionably American.
All of Kuhn’s paintings of circus performers carry a sense of sadness you sense even if you don’t know anything about Kuhn’s mental state at the time. A work such as Roberto (above, from 1946) shows a typical clown in an atypical pose of weariness with the world. Looking at the starkness of Kuhn’s portraits of circus people, usually set against a plain backdrop, I think of German art again, not the Expressionists but instead the New Objectivity of artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Christian Schad. Like those German artists, Kuhn wanted to paint reality as he saw it—not just the surfaces of society but also the soul suffering underneath. Kuhn’s ability to render the fixed stare of his subjects into something both pleading and accusatory lends his portraits a deep psychological intensity. First mired in World War II and then caught up in the sad recognition of a world in which the Holocaust and Hiroshima are possible, Kuhn dealt with life through his art as best as he could. Like his clowns, however, Kuhn thinly disguised his inner turmoil through his art.
Five years later after Falconry in Algiers, Fromentin painted Muleteers Stopped, Algiers (above, from 1868). Showing a pack of drably dressed locals against a drab, sandy landscape besotted with ruins, Fromentin paints an Algiers totally devoid of color and excitement. Delacroix’s sumptuous color and detail disappear from this painting. While other French artists exploited the public’s taste for the spectacular in Orientalist painting, Fromentin seems as weary of that inaccuracy as the muleteers shown here resting with their animals. France took Algiers as a colony by force in 1827. Just thirty years later, Fromentin seems to be saying that the long occupation was one huge mistake—an imperialist crime against both the people of Algiers and the people of France. The War of Algeria waged between 1954 and 1962, depicted so stirringly in the film The Battle of Algiers, finally ended France’s reign over Algeria a little over a century later.
In many ways, Fromentin saw himself as the new standard bearer of French painting, much like his Algerian Standard Bearer (above, from 1860-1865). The banner once held so high by earlier artists such as Delacroix and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres seems held just a little lower by Fromentin in these Algerian paintings. In addition to being a great painter, Fromentin wrote exceptionally well. Fromentin counted the novelist George Sand among his friends and admirers of both his painting and his writing. In his art history and criticism, Fromentin expressed his admiration for the Dutch painting, especially that of Rembrandt. In his Algerian paintings, Fromentin perhaps longed to capture the same innate humanity of his subjects as Rembrandt and other Dutch artists had captured in their countrymen. Making the imaginative leap across cultures, Fromentin stepped into the shoes of his subjects and restored the dignity that colonization had stripped from them.
Within a few years of returning to England, Smith found himself drafted into the war. He suffered shrapnel wounds in combat that taxed his already frail health, but the experience of war exacted a greater toll on his mind, beginning a cycle of creativity alternating with depression that would plague the rest of his life. Smith eventually established a London studio near that of Walter Sickert, whose (in)famous “Camden Town” nudes set the standard for the nude form in English painting in the early twentieth century. In Model Turning (above, from 1924), Smith slowly turns away from Matisse’s influence and turns toward a style closer to that of Sickert’s. The red skirt and blue and purple cushions hark back to Fauvism, but the instability of the figure itself generated by the roughness of the brushwork is pure Sickert. Actually, Smith exceeds even Sickert’s penchant for molding the figure in color like a sculpture rather than through line.
Smith continued to progress in a more Sickert-esque direction. In one of his many portraits of his friend and fellow painter Augustus John (above, from 1944), Smith handles the subject roughly. John referred to his portrait as “another hemorrhage for Matthew” in acknowledgment of the bloody, gory way Smith painted flesh even in the portraits of friends. As the pace of his cyclical depression increased, Smith’s view of life and humanity seemed to darken considerably. The young Francis Bacon admired Smith’s troubled style and patterned his own work after it. In many ways, Smith is the link between Sickert and Bacon, the two most important painters of the nude in English painting in the twentieth century. Smith’s evolution from Fauvism, one kind of beastliness, to the later brand of beastliness in his final works demonstrates how the late bloomer more than made up for lost time.
Wayne Lloyd
Of all the nineteenth century artists who adapted Japonisme to their art, Paul Gauguin inspired Burliuk the most. When Burliuk took his family to a vacation on the island of Ogasawara, the Japanese equivalent of Hawaii, Burliuk recreated the pilgrimage of Gauguin to Tahiti that freed Gauguin’s artistic soul. Burliuk traveled all over Ogasawara in search of beautiful vistas to paint (above). In addition, Burliuk learned Japanese by speaking with the local fishermen and came to appreciate their simple way of life. For me, the section showing the beauty of Ogasawara was the highlight of the film. Craig and company capture all the magic of that tropical paradise visually while the narration fully connects the love triangle formed between Burliuk, Gauguin, and Ogasawara. After painting on the island for several months, Burliuk returned to mainland Japan and exhibited his landscapes, which surprised and, sometimes, disappointed audiences expecting more Futurism from the touted “Father of Russian Futurism.” However, Craig calls this period in Burliuk’s career “a summing up of where he’d been” and “a step back to step forward.” Reenergized and refocused by his island idyll, Burliuk rediscoved the social purpose of his art in Japan just before leaving for America. As the Japanese translator of Burliuk’s writings notes in the film, Burliuk’s early books written in Russia seem heavily weighted with the gloom of political events, whereas the books written during his stay in Japan shine with a sunny view of the future. Titling one of those Japanese books “What Is Futurism? An Answer,” Burliuk seemed confident that answers did indeed exist in a rational world.
Japanese artists such as Tomoyoshi Murayama (shown above with his wife) and Kinoshita Shuichiro took Burliuk’s answers and tried to translate them into a language that could address their cultural concerns. Craig succinctly yet compellingly outlines the social situation of Japan between the wars as a nation with an identity crisis, caught between an ancient insular tradition and the pressing need to join the rest of the globe. Young Japanese artists following Burliuk’s example soon came into conflict with the established Japanese art world. Like the Russian avant-garde, the Japanese avant-garde viewed art as a means of social revolution and used technology as the means of combining commerce and art. The Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 that devastated Tokyo provided these young artists with an opportunity to remake the rebuilt city in a modern way to reflect the next stage of Japanese culture and society. Using archival footage, Craig and company recreate that moment in Japanese history when old and new clashed and avant-garde art stood at the center of it all.
To Western eyes, Asian art often seems a monolithic parade of ancient styles endlessly recycled. David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde reveals how the same concerns that rocked European societies also unsettled the Asian world. Burliuk’s travels allowed him to cross-pollinate the Japanese avant-garde with the earlier example of Russia’s progressive art movement. After Burliuk sparked Japanese artists into action, they set a raging bonfire of activity, including the Sanaka Exhibition (above) as well as forays into theater and dance that modernized the ancient traditions of Kabuki and Noh. A visually amazing film as well as a whirlwind tour through early Japanese modern art and the life of David Burliuk, David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde will set you off on your own voyage of discovery to learn more about this amazing crossing of paths.
[Many thanks to Michael Craig and Copernicus Films for providing me with a review copy of David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde and for the images from the film.]
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