Thinking Long Term: To Sell, or Not to Sell, a Masterpiece

“In the long run, we’re all dead,” John Maynard Keynes once said in defense of his brand of economics featuring an array of short-term solutions. It seems like the state legislature of Iowa feels the same way. Faced with a budgetary shortfall, the Iowa House is considering forcing the University of Iowa to sell Jackson Pollock’s Mural (detail shown above), a painting in their collection estimated to be worth $140 million USD. “That would be like selling your grandmother,” claims Sean O’Harrow, director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Lawmakers suggest that such a sale now could help pay for scholarships in the future. But are they really thinking long term in suggesting this short-term solution? Or are they selling away future generations’ enjoyment of their cultural heritage in a moment of panic? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Thinking Long Term."

Gothic Tale: A Biography of Grant Wood

“I’m the plainest kind of fellow you can find,” painter Grant Wood told an interviewer in the 1930s, the height of his fame. “There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced, that’s been even the least bit exciting.” In Grant Wood: A Life, R. Tripp Evans demonstrates just how deceitful Wood’s protestations really were. Instead of the well-worn tale of normalcy beyond compare, Evans, an art history professor from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, weaves a more gothic tale of subversion and submersion that reveals a new view of Wood as a tortured homosexual artist miscast as a purveyor of Reagan-esque Americana in works such as the iconic American Gothic (shown above). Through new readings of the works themselves as well as of Wood’s posthumous existence in the popular consciousness, Evans gives us the Grant Wood that the artist himself never could. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Gothic Tale."

Root Canal: “Prendergast in Italy” at the MFA Houston

In 1882, American novelist Henry James concluded that there was “nothing more to be said” about Venice, Italy. Artists of all stripes had trod and sloshed through the streets and canals so long that opportunities for saying something new had, he felt, dried up entirely. Yet, in 1900, Maurice Prendergast exhibited a series of watercolors painted of Venice that made a giant splash in the American art world and cleared a path for a new wave of American modernism. Prendergast in Italy, an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, brings together these watery landmarks to recreate a seminal moment in American modern art and to rescue a great artist from drowning in the depths of obscurity. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Root Canal."

[Image: Maurice Prendergast, American, 1858-1924. The Grand Canal, Venice, c. 1898-99. Watercolor and pencil on paper. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.123.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Fine Art, Houston for providing me with the image above and other press materials for Prendergast in Italy. Many thanks also to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a copy of the catalogue.]

Four Questions for… Elizabeth Kennedy

In The Eight and American Modernisms (my review here), Elizabeth Kennedy, Curator of Collection at the Terra Foundation for American Art, tries to reposition The Eight within the history of American modern art. Along with her fellow essayists, Dr. Kennedy tries to toss the terms “The Ashcan School” onto the dustbin of art history for good. Dr. Kennedy also graciously agreed to answer a few questions regarding The Eight for a new feature at Art Blog By Bob, Four Questions for…

ABBB: In The Eight and American Modernisms, you go out of your way to minimize the use of the term “Ashcan School.” I’m as guilty as anyone of using the two labels synonymously. Do you think that the “Ashcan School” label deserves a full retirement?

Dr. Kennedy: Since the catchy phrase “Ashcan School” was coined in 1934, it has caused much mischief in coming to terms with the painterly qualities of The Eight’s body of work as well as veiling the importance of them as early American modernists. The journalistic and commercial endeavors of the Philadelphia Four (Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan), however, are somewhat connected to the concept of “realistic” portraying street life. The true connection to the term is Sloan’s 1905 etchings series of New York, which depict scenes that are alternatives to American academic artists’ genteel subjects.

For me, it is the careless mixing art and politics that is implied in the term “Ashcan,” invented during the Great Depression, which does a disservice to these artists’ ambitions to be “modern painters of one kind or another.” As early as 1907 Henri touted their differences (therefore, no school), and Sloan, until his death in the 1950s, disputed any political agenda for myself, who was at one time a socialist and a cartoonist for The Masses, or the other artists. In summary, there was no “social or political” agenda attached to these artists’ works of art.

ABBB: You chose Robert Henri’s Betalo Nude (1916) for the cover of The Eight and American Modernisms, which earned me several offended (and several lingering) stares while reading it on my commute. Do you feel that The Eight’s approach to the nude positions them closer to European modernism? If so, does that make them less “American”?

Dr. Kennedy: The human form is at the center of the western art tradition. The plethora of nude females pictured in US art after the 1860s continues until today. Art historian Kenneth Clark’s celebrated The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1972) makes the distinction between the “nude” and the “naked” model, which is an important difference to make for American art in the first decades of the 20th century. If the female nude form was idealized, then it could be accepted as a work of art; a realistic portrayal was problematic. While at the turn of the century, paintings of female nudes were found in American art exhibitions, but they were not as frequent as the French salons.

20th century avant-guard European art distorted the body—in color by Fauvist artists or in shape by cubists. Henri achieved his own ideas through the use of theories and inspiration—with no need to impose a national identity. The Betalo Nude is gorgeous because of the color harmonies used to create a shape that happens to be a body. Of course, a natural fission arises from viewing nudity but there are other paintings of nude women that do not have the same impact. Henri’s created an exceptional painting because if its color and composition.

ABBB: As The Eight and American Modernisms shows, the styles and personalities of the artists falling under that banner differ greatly. Is there one artist who stands out from the rest for you personally?

Dr. Kennedy: My favorite member of The Eight is Maurice Prendergast because of his willingness to explore unconventional ideas and, yet, when he found his original style that expressed his creativity he remained focused on his mission. His story is inspiring because eventually others, the important modern art collectors and artists, realized his brilliance. Nevertheless, he is an underappreciated modernist because he did not “fit the Ashcan” label nor did he preach a “mantra of modernism” in the style of Alfred Stieglitz or Thomas Hart Benton. Prendergast arose each morning and went to his studio to work and left behind some of the most beautiful paintings ever made.

ABBB: When The Eight whittled their number down to eight, they left Jerome Myers and George Bellows most notably outside the fold. Like the legendary “Fifth Beatle,” who would you nominate for the “Ninth” Eight? Are there any women candidates for the position?

Dr. Kennedy: If there had been a 9th artist, it should have been Herni’s protégée George Bellows. Bellows was an exceptionally inventive painter, whose brightly colored palette of men at work upset the “Ashcan” label—nothing gloomy about these New York streets. Bellows’ later portraits and nudes are equally exceptional for their technique and inventiveness. His work before his untimely death was verging on the surreal.

[Many thanks to Dr. Kennedy for her gracious and thoughtful answers.]

Mythbusters

It’s a great romantic myth that great artists come out of nowhere and develop a truly “new” style that breaks all the rules and announces a brave, new world. When Clement Greenberg hailed Jackson Pollock as the next big thing that would cast off the oppressive chains of the past and lead the way to a whole new way of seeing, he bought into that myth entirely and invited the entire art world to join him. Born January 28, 1912, Pollock owed much of his art to a series of mentors and influences, like pretty much every other major artist in history. As America pulled itself out from under The Great Depression, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Without that financial assistance, Pollock would never have continued as an artist and never painted works such as Moby-Dick (above, from 1943). Moby-Dick not only shows Pollock’s interest in Herman Melville but also the influence of David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom Pollock worked with in the 1930s. Siqueiros’ unique use of the liquid properties of paint as well as his independent spirit helped shape Pollock into the individualist he later became.

Another great influence on the young Pollock was Thomas Hart Benton. It’s hard to see how Benton, the pseudo-realist regionalist, could have influenced works such as Pollock’s Blue Poles (Number 11, 1952) (above, from 1952), but if you dig deeply, you can see the connections. Like Siqueiros, Benton displayed a fierce streak of independence and passed that trait on to his students, including Pollock. But even more importantly, Benton taught Pollock how to compose a painting. Many people who look at Pollock’s paintings deny that there is any structure, but there is, if you look closely. Blue Poles may have the most obvious structure of all. In his study of Pollock’s art, Kirk Varnedoe showed how Blue Poles mimics the compositions of many of Benton’s works, with the blue poles standing in for the figures that would strike poses in Benton’s historical murals. The drip technique certainly doesn’t come from Benton, but the underlying structure does.

Perhaps the most fascinating suggested influence on Pollock for me is that of Claude Monet. Monet’s late Water Lilies paintings, thanks to his severe cataracts, approach abstraction in their color and lines. Before even that late period, Monet’s Cathedral series took the face of a cathedral and almost dissolved it in different light effects. One of Pollock’s earliest drip paintings, titled Cathedral (above, from 1947), may pay homage to Monet in some sense. In Cathedral, Pollock layers paint in a very controlled and deliberate fashion, constructing the “cathedral” of paint with absolute control in a way that denies the myth of “Jack the Dripper” aimlessly flinging paint about and eventually calling it art. Monet’s art is all about the eye taking in light and color. Pollock took that lesson and extended it further, almost obliterating the ostensible subject in the pursuit of pure color and gesture. The wild ride of Abstract Expressionism seems light years away from the serenity of Impressionism, but inquiring minds can find connections in the great web of art history. Freed from the myth of magical individuality, Pollock can finally be seen as a great student of art history who set off on his own only after following the tracks of others.