Of the Blues: Carolina Shout (1974), collage, mixed media. Collection Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Purchase: NEA & Charlotte Debutante Club Fund. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

If visual art could have a soundtrack— and a rhythm—it would likely be found in the work of Romare Bearden. The groove of Duke Ellington’s jazz beat and the syncope of Louis Armstrong’s improvised trumpet riffs are captured, but barely tamed, in the multi-layered, often surreal imagery of Bearden’s Harlem street scenes. Today, the foundation representing the life and work of Romare Bearden, and the city’s Studio Museum in Harlem, with a growing collection of his paintings, prints and collages on permanent display, sit just blocks away from the famed Apollo Theater, in the heart of New York’s Harlem neighborhoods. On a sun-lit January day, I navigated the broad, busy streets of the city at the intersection of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard (Seventh Ave.)—once the epicenter of an unfolding drama for African-Americans pursuing the American dream—to meet with the team at the Romare Bearden Foundation and learn more about this towering figure of 20th century art. artes fine arts magazine

Romare Bearden in studio, 1980. Background: photo of great grandparents (also Duke Ellington's grandparents). Photo: Frank Stewart

The Harlem Renaissance would not have been the same without the inclusion of the Bearden family. Son of a well-educated and economically successful black family from the South, prevailing Jim Crow laws made life increasingly difficult in their home state of North Carolina. As a result, Bearden, at age three, became part of the Great Migration north, settling in New York City in 1914. There, his mother, Bessye was a social and political activist and New York correspondent for the African-American newspaper, Chicago Defender; while his father, Howard, worked as a city sanitation inspector, played the piano in his off-hours, and, according to Bearden’s close friend, author Ralph Ellison, was “a teller of tales.” Their lives were centered in the intellectual, artistic, and political mainstream of the burgeoning Harlem intellectual community of the time: among their friends were writer Countee Cullen; musician and cousin, Duke Ellington; actor, activist, and athlete Paul Robeson; the founder-president of the National Council of Negro Women, Mary McLeod Bethune; and the first African-American surgical intern at Harlem Hospital, Dr. Aubré de L. Maynard.

Bearden’s early interest in art and, specifically cartooning, was sparked by experiences during a year of studies in science and mathematics at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Bearden went on to study art and art education, including two years at Boston University, and took courses with German-born artist George Grosz at the Art Students League, finally graduating with a degree in education from New York University. There he had been a lead cartoonist and then art editor for the college’s monthly journal The Medley. The first of his many journal covers was published during his university years as well as the first of numerous texts he would write on social and artistic issues. Between 1935 and 1937 he was a weekly editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American.

The Visitation (1941),mixed media on brown paper. Courtesy: Romare Bearden Foundation and VAGA, NY

Decades later, author (Invisible Man [1947-52]) and activist, Ralph Ellison—a life-long friend—wrote of Bearden’s earlier work in an introduction to a 1968 exhibition of paintings and Projections in Albany, NY. There he described Bearden rendering scenes from the Depression in a style influenced by the Mexican muralists (e.g. social activist and Marxist-leaning, Diego Rivera). “This work was powerful, the scenes grim and brooding, and through his depiction of unemployed workingmen in Harlem he was able, while evoking the Southern past, to move beyond the usual protest painting of that period to reveal something of the universal elements of an abiding human condition. By striving to depict the times, by reducing scene, character and atmosphere to a style, he caught both the universality of Harlem life and the harlemness of the national human predicament” [Ellison:676].

Employed by the New York City Department of Social Services, Bearden worked as an artist in his studio on weekends and evenings. He had his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940 and his first solo show in a major mainstream gallery (in Washington, D.C.) in 1944. Additionally, his work was exhibited in Paris before the end of the decade. Bearden enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, was assigned to the all-black 372nd Infantry Division until war’s end. During the late 1940s, his work was shown at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in Manhattan, which also represented prominent artists, like Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, and Robert Motherwell.

Untitled (verso image), ca. 1947-48, watercolor, mixed media. Courtesy Swann Auction Galleries, Bearden Foundation and VAGA, NY.

In 1950, Bearden used the G.I. Bill to travel to Paris, France, for several months. There he studied literature, philosophy, Buddhism, and spent many hours in museums, not only in France but in Italy and Spain, as well. Back in New York, he returned to his job at the Department of Social Services where he worked through 1969.

In that same 1968 essay, Ellison recalls Bearden’s growth as an artist during this period as he had, “…become interested in myth and ritual as potent forms for ordering human experience, and … by stepping back from the immediacy of the Harlem experience—which he knew both from his boyhood and as a social worker—he was freed to give expression to the essentially poetic side of his vision. The products of this period were […] brightly sensual. And despite their having been consciously influenced by the compositional patterns of the Italian primitives and the Dutch masters, these works were also resolutely abstract” [Ellison:676]. It was at this stage in his career that he expanded on his new artistic vocabulary, with its own organizational rules, but with a unifying philosophy incorporating the union of rituals and myths binding cultures and generations. Bearden named this philosophy the ‘Prevalence of Ritual’ and it served as the unifying force in his art for the remainder of his career—serving as a bridge between Black culture and universal truth.

In the Garden (1974), serigraph. Courtesy: Wiggin & Dana Collection, Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Placing artist, Romare Bearden and author, Ralph Ellison in the same narrative framework speaks volumes of their shared concerns for the representation of the image of African-Americans on the ‘canvas’ of history. In Invisible Man, Ellison explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black male in the New York City of the 1930s. Through his protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is “invisible” in a figurative sense, in that “people refuse to see” him, and also experiences a series of alienating encounters. Ellison, like Bearden drew from a creative source that was passionate, well-educated, articulate and self-aware. And like Ellison, his artistic ‘voice’ expanded in range and thematic focus in the 1940s and beyond refining and expanding his working style, becoming more confident as an artist with something important to say. But, while prepared to give Bearden his due as a skilled member of the New York artistic community, critics and gallerists of the day saw little reason to distinguish his idiosyncratic paintings from the host of other artists caught up in the Abstract Expressionist movement, followed later by Minimalism and the Pop Art style, dominating the New York gallery scene in the two decades following the war.

It was only in 1964, at the age of 53, that Bearden abruptly abandoned his non-objective oil painting and began to produce collages. Mary Schmidt Campbell, Commissioner for Cultural Affairs, New York City, would write for a Bearden retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1991), “[They were] works filled with cryptic figures and a dense symbolism that looked like nothing else in American art. Having lived with a number of different ideas of art, he had come back to the subject matter he had stated out with—Black American life as he remembered it in the South on his childhood in North Carolina, and in the North of his coming of age in Pittsburgh and Harlem and, later in life, the Caribbean island of St. Martin. Bearden’s use of collage made everything in his career up to then, seem to have been a restless search culminating in his discovery of collage and rediscovery of the value of his own life and culture. It was like an aging explorer who finally had stumbled upon the shores of a new, long-sought territory, and, for the next twenty-five years until his death in 1988, Bearden set out to explore this new world and in his words to ‘establish a world through art in which the validity of my negro experience would live and make its own logic’” [Campbell:8].

Prevalence pf Ritual: Conjur Woman (1964), collage, mixed media. Courtesy: Romare Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

In parallel fashion, Ellison had sought verbal constructs and fictional encounters (highly symbolized, but bearing oblique similarities with contemporaneous events and people in 1940s Harlem) and for his nameless protagonist in Invisible Man. The author, assured over decades of the artist’s kindred spirit, would describe Bearden’s images as, “abiding rituals and ceremonies of affirmation.” And like Ellison’s writings from the same period, according to Conwill, “Bearden’s own phrase, the ‘Prevalence of Ritual,’ underscored the continuity of a culture’s ceremonies, marking the traditions and values that connect one generation to another, ceremonies that are universal, archetypal in their forms. Instead of painting mere genre scenes—the exterior landscape of events and people—Bearden chose to penetrate the interior of the lives he portrayed and, having pierced the skin of those day-to-day lives, connect his people and events to larger, more universal themes”[Campbell:9].

Also like Ellison’s writings, Bearden found in the medium of collage a methodology that allowed him to assimilate much of his life experience. His social conscience ran deep and he sought in his work a way to make pictures that transcended social propaganda. From rural landscapes capturing the images of utter poverty and his memories of tenant farmers and conjure women to crowded Harlem street scenes where an undertow of tension and pent-up violence seems palpable and omnipresent; to smoke-filled and ebullient jazz sessions, where music becomes the salve for lives lived in the shadow of despair, Bearden seems to possess the visual lexicon for it all. Black popular culture theoretician, Stuart Hall, describes the environment that Bearden captures through his art as, “a contradictory space. It is a site of strategic contestation. But it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are habitually used to map it out: High and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization”[Hall:28].

Pittsburgh Memory (1964), collage. Courtesy: Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Critic, Thelma Golden claims that Bearden’s art “is situated within the space created by these binaries. By revealing the tension between these opposites, he opens the dialogue for further understanding of black culture. Bearden’s work can only be fully understood as the product of the formal, structural, thematic, and historical motivations” [Golden:40]. Art historian and critic, Gail Gelburd, lends credence to this view by pointing out that Bearden eschewed the concerns of his contemporaries, as they sought to promulgate social change through their creative efforts, by adopting a decidedly apolitical role. “Bearden, who spent his early career making political cartoons and who studied the politically-oriented work of his one-time teach, George Grosz…went on to develop his Projections and Photomontages as the articulation of his attitudes as an artist toward political and social upheaval” [Gelburd:20].

Returning to the Ellison essay accompanying Bearden’s 1968 exhibit, this life-long friend of the artist spoke eloquently to his purpose by underscoring his decision to interpret the world artistically, and not confront it through propaganda or sentimentality. Ellison claimed that Western values regarding the significance of art and those artists producing it was largely defined by mainstream culture, rendering the techniques and history behind Negro artistic endeavors irrelevant. In other words, racial separatism was , until that time, defining the place of black artists and writers in the Pantheon of history by largely dismissing them. Ellison reported that Bearden would observe, “’Turn Picasso into a Negro and then let me see how far he can go,’ because he feels an irremediable conflict between his identity as a member of an embattled social minority and his freedom as an artist” [Ellison:675].

Patchwork Quilt (1970), mixed media. Collection MoMA; Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

While not overlooking the complexity of the challenge facing Bearden during the formidable years of the 1960s and beyond, he was confronted by the perplexing question of how to bring his art to bear in the context of largely-abstracted, post-modernist trends and a Eurocentric cultural playing field? On the task of defining Negro-American identity—pressing his claim for recognition from the inside, as it were—while still remaining true to his heritage, Bearden ‘s work evolved in very personal ways by remaking the visual representation of the black face. By personifying and particularizing the form and figure of Negro men and women through his collage work, he was able to synthesize an identity steeped in heritage and hardship, but elevated by his subtle visual cues of composition and motif, honed by years of classical arts study and training. According to art historian, Robert O’Meally, (addressing the ‘flatness’ found in Bearden’s collages as evidence, in part, of African and Asian influences) “looked backward to ancient as well as to early 20th century cubist and non-objective painting, as he created a unique body of art in his own idiomatic style”[O’Meally:21]. While Ellison’s Invisible Man went unnamed throughout the novel, and for whom the act of being seen, or revealed, was both an ongoing struggle and an act of defiance, Bearden’s multi-layered and often surreal figures offer a reconfigured visual representation of the Black America he knew and invited all viewers, irrespective of race, to integrate into their pre-conceived notions.

Spring Way (1964), collage. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Bearden’s photomontages represent a juxtaposition of image fragments and textures, literally torn from the publications of the day, combined with handmade papers and surface treatments employed by the artist for dramatic effect. By destabilizing preconceptions of ‘blackness’ and re-assembling them in ways that alter the message, Bearden succeeds in transforming and redefining Hall’s ‘polarities’ into a powerful alloy—one that offers unexpected strength and resilience to black identity. While his images ultimately reside outside the realm of the traditional, familiar fragmented compositional elements and thematic motifs allow the viewer to connect to the work and consider this new ‘language’ without having to fictionalize or romanticize the messaging or the messenger (viz. Ellison, “…destroying the accepted world by way of revealing the unseen). According to Kimberly Lamm, who compared and contrasted the work of Ellison and Bearden in the context of black male identity, Images of different individuals are spliced together to make a representation of one person, calling attention to the restless and continual construction of cultural perception, image, and subjectivity. Indeed, Bearden’s figures are never completely revealed—never completely visible or invisible—but suggest instead the inter-subjective, inter-collective, and continual process of identity construction” [Lamm:822-23]. She adds, “It is Bearden’s attention to individual acts of looking that links [his] disparate figures into a loose-knot cultural cohesion. […] What Bearden divulges is a restless drama of construction and deconstruction that continually complicates [Ellison’s] binaries of visibility and invisibility, continually rejects and redefines visual forms that ‘document’ the complexity of black culture into fixed perpetual forms” [Lamm:824]. In Ellison’s essay on Bearden, he refers to this as, “[Bearden’s] agonizing fixation upon the racial mysteries and social realities dramatized by color, facial structure and the texture of negro skin and hair” [Ellison:677].

This critique began by drawing parallels between Bearden’s creative output and the jazz music that was so much a part of his life and times. With a clearer understand of the nature of his creative output, it is instructional to consider the influence that music played in the artist’s life. Here too, a strong bond existed between Bearden and Ralph Ellison on the significance of the black musical idiom in an evolving cultural identity. Ellison called it “the poetry of the blues…projected through synthetic forms,’’ many of which regularly found their way into Bearden’s work. Not merely a tragic-comic narrative style that could act as a source of entertainment or group identification, music for Bearden was an integral part of how he viewed the creative process. For him, his collages were jazz performances frozen in time.

A Portrait of Max: In Sounds, Rhythms, Colors and Silences (1985). Courtesy Swann Auction Galleries, Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

According to Diedre Harris-Kelly—‘Uncle Romie’ to her—“Bearden himself insisted that he structured his paintings and collages as if they were jazz compositions.” She explains that Bearden had a life-long interest in music and, in fact, took up songwriting because he thought it might allow his to earn enough money to return to Paris to continue studying art. “He did publish about twenty songs, even managing to get a hit, Seabreeze, a romantic ballad recorded by Billie Eckstine in 1954” [Harris-Kelly:250].

But when we think of Bearden, we think of jazz. Harris-Kelly tells me that he structured his art like the music he listened to. Like jazz, his collage work was layered and fractured like the music, but always made into a unified whole. “This layering was both literal and metaphorical—becoming a powerful commentary on black culture. In her article, Revisiting Romare Bearden’s Art of Improvisation, she notes that, “Given his broad knowledge of American culture, it seems logical to me that he was thinking of the fundamentals of this very radical, very modern American music and how it could be applied to his work. In an article by Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker , he said, ‘I take a sheet of paper and just make lines while I listen to records…a kind of shorthand to pick up the rhythm and intervals. He said that American cubist painter Stuart Davis listened to jazz musician Earl Hines for the intervals. Hines made the pauses between notes into something important. The silences were as expressive as the sounds’” [Harris-Kelly:250-1].

The Block (1971), collage, mixed media. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Of Uncle Romie’s creative process, Harris-Kelly says, “I doubt Bearden was only thinking about rhythm and silences between the notes.” In a piece like The Block, “…I think of the buildings in tonal terms—I see the pink building on the left sounding a chord in the high register; it moves to the gray, deeper tone; then the lighter gray; to the dynamic phrase in the middle—all as one instrument. So I think Bearden was talking about intervals moving through different pitches. […] I think he put those brilliant colors down because he knew he was going to chop them up. He knew that he would lay other things down on top and was performing improvisation more like a conductor than a single instrumentalist. When I think of him listening to Earl Hines and talking about the spaces, I think he’s the piano player playing this phrase, and then he leaves a space, plays another set of notes, followed by another section…he is the leader of a big band, pulling some instruments in and easing others back” [Harris-Kelly:253].

The Piano Lesson (1983), mixed media. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Harris-Kelly recalls Bearden’s describing his process to create Piano Lesson: “I’ve seen some of Goya’s paintings where the underneath ground predominated over half the painting, and then he would, say, weave a certain blue color here and develop those things that he wanted to highlight. So I would let the ground play through and then what I put there, the thing I lay down, I try to put in proportion to the overall size- in the same ratio. And then in this, I did something that I don’t usually do. You see I tipped it to lay the piano in a kind of perspective going this way, and to compensate for that, I had to bring things back onto the frontal plane”[Harris-Kelly:254].

In a 1983 essay (five years before Bearden’s death), Michelle Wallace asks, Why Are There No Great Black Artists? Playing to Ellison’s disquisition regarding the propensity for society to conceal the black man “by time, by custom, and by our trained incapacity to perceive the truth,” she cautions that while, “images of blackness are ubiquitous in American culture, African-American visual artists are, for the most part, critically and institutionally ignored, resulting in a mostly invisible black visuality” and as Lamm notes in her comments on Wallace’s essay, “an imprecise, undertheorized account of the way images of race transform so swiftly into well-known rhetorics and myths. Surprisingly Wallace argues that visual artists have been occluded by the cultural emphasis on African-American music, which she describes as the ‘the founding discourse of African-American experience’” [Wallace:344].

Wallace states, “I am at war with music, to the extent that it completely defines the parameters of intellectual discourse in the African-American community.” Serving as a metaphor for African-American artistic production, “[it] stifles and represses most of the potential for understanding the visual in African-American culture” [Wallace:345]. Lamm notes that, “Wallace’s claim acquires even more significance when we consider that one of the most prevalent visual representations of the black male is the image of the musician” [Lamm:818].

Sound of Jazz (ca. 1985), monotype. Courtesy Swann Auction Galleries; Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Yet Ellison, who was such an admirer of Bearden, frequently relied on music as a metaphor in Invisible Man to underscore the improvisational, dynamic compositional features of black identity, linked to the search for visibility and cultural authenticity in a hostile, manipulative world. While hidden in a coal cellar, Ellison’s unnamed protagonist claims, in the novel’s prologue, “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue’ all at the same time. One recording won’t do. When I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body.” This musical theme becomes the leitmotif for the entire novel as he variously appropriates, attempts to transform, subverts, or succumbs to—slowly recognizing that it is an established order from which there can be no real escape. But Ellison, like Bearden, recognized that jazz also had redemptive value—a malleable apparatus that served as a springboard for enhanced self-awareness and symbolic cultural cohesion; its curative powers inchoate in the very nature of its fluidity and re-inventiveness.

Diedre Harris-Kelly issues a cautionary note regarding what she refers to as “the easy analogy between playing jazz and making visual art. While I do think there are profound links between Bearden’s approach to collage and jazz improvisation, I also think the analogy doesn’t account for differences in genre and technique. By not accounting for these differences, we risk obscuring more about Bearden’s process than we might reveal. We might even miss what is most ‘jazzlike’ about his work”[Harris-Kelly:249].

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

*All Bearden Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

__________________________________

Works Cited:

Campbell , Mary Schmidt. “History and the Art of Romare Bearden,” in Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden 1940-1987. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem; Oxford University Press (1991).

Ellison, Ralph, “The Art of Romare Bearden,” Massachusetts Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, (Winter 1977), pgs 673-680.

Gelburd, Gail and Thelma Golden. Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections 1964. New York” Whitney Museum of American Art & Harry N. Abrams, Inc, New York (1997).

Harris-Kelly, Diedra. “Revisiting Romare Bearden’s Art of Improvisation,” in Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards & Farah Jasmine Griffin, Ed. New York: Columbia University Press (2004).

Lamm, Kimberly. “Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Romare Bearden’s Photomontages,” Calaloo, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2003), pgs 813-835.

O’Meally, Robert G. Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. New York: D C Moore Gallery (2007).

Works Referenced:

Anderson-Spivy, Alexandra. Romare Bearden: A Modern Classic. New York: ACA Galleries (1991).

Fine, Ruth and Jacqueline Francis, Ed. Romare Bearden: American Modernist. Washington: National Gallery of Art & Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (2011)

Fine, Ruth, et.al. The Art of Romare Bearden. Washington: National Gallery of Art & Harry N. Abrams, Inc, New York (2003).

D

Left: Tattered battle flag of the 4^th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops- part of the ‘Divided Voices’ exhibition. artes fine arts magazine

A Prelude

On September 17, 1862, the armies of Lee and McClellan collided along the Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland. In the brutal fight that followed, 25,000 soldiers were killed or wounded—the largest number of casualties in a single day in the history of American arms. The day after the battle ended, Mathew Brady ushered in a new era in photojournalism, sending two of his photographers, Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson, to document the battlefield strewn with the bodies of the dead “so covered with dust, torn, crushed and trampled that they resembled clods of earth and you were obliged to look twice before recognizing them as human beings.”

Portable photo field studio, complete with darkroom and head-braced chair (see detail in Figure #1, below.).

That October, Brady opened an exhibition titled “The Dead of Antietam” at his New York gallery. Before descending to sentimental platitudes (“that crown which only heroes and martyrs are permitted to wear”), The New-York Times reported that “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryard, and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” [FIGURE 1 HERE]

As visitors approach the Divided Voices exhibition, they encounter a display of period photography and photographic practice that foreshadows key themes of the exhibition: the critical position of border-state Maryland; the divisiveness that pitted neighbor against neighbor; the transformation of war’s romance and glory into horror and revulsion. Photography also establishes the exhibition’s design ethos and ambience: large photomurals in grainy grays, set off with vivid red, inflect the exhibition, evoking the war’s fog and fire, smoke and blood.

An Overview

'Divided Voices' floor plan. Fig.#2, below. Click to enlarge

Divided Voices occupies a large (4,000 s.f.) gallery. The exhibition is shaped like a large doughnut (see the accompanying floor plan), with an enormous glass case at its center, photomurals on the peripheral wall, and pylons, vitrines, and reader rails animating the landscape between the glassed-in core and the periphery. Visitors follow a linear, counter-clockwise path, returning at the conclusion to their starting point. [FLOORPLAN HERE]

Lincoln’s 1860 election generated fears for “the safety of the Union” Fig. #3, below.

The exhibition opens with a sweeping statement by Stephen A. Douglas (1854): “We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.” The first section of the exhibition, “A Long Road to War,” exemplifies white people’s ambivalence about slavery in Maryland. Slavery persisted in some areas, but Maryland also had the largest free African American population in any slaveholding state. In fact, African American Marylanders were almost equally divided between slaves and freedmen, and Baltimore had the largest number of free blacks of any American city. The complexities of race in 1860 Maryland are briefly noted in a single large panel at the start of the exhibition: “Slavery and African American life in Maryland was as diverse as the state’s landscapes and cultures.” [FIGURE 3 HERE]

An April 1861 Baltimore riot caused first casualties of war. Fig.#4, below.

 The presidential race of 1860 and the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party candidate, precipitated the secession of southern states. Maryland, like the other border states of Kentucky and Missouri, adhered shakily to the Union, but conflict among Marylanders intensified. The second major section of the exhibition, Divided Loyalties, shows how deeply these divisions ran, leading to riots in Baltimore in April 1861 and disruption of a critical railroad junction just 50 miles from the Federal capital. Imposition of martial law by Federal forces followed promptly (and in Baltimore lasted for the duration of the war). Here, too, contradictions abound: Baltimore Mayor George William Brown, a Southern sympathizer, vainly tried to prevent attacks on Union volunteers passing through the city, while Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks, a staunch Unionist, was himself a slaveholder. [FIGURE 4 HERE]

Zouave jackets, popular in pre-war women’s costume and related military uniform. Fig. #5, below.

In the months after Lincoln’s inauguration, thousands of Maryland men flocked to the Union and Confederate colors, anticipating a brief, heroic conflict. The romance of war faded in the face of its brutal reality. The third major section of the exhibition, “Spontaneous Combustion,” traces the process of disillusionment and describes the actual conditions of war. An exhibit on camp life stresses war’s tedium (“then drill, then drill again”), while displays on battlefield tactics, medical care, imprisonment, and mourning underscore its horrors. A torn jacket worn by Major Richard Snowden Andrews, a Maryland volunteer in the Confederate Army, exemplifies the violence of battle: the lower portion of the jacket was ripped open by an explosion; its bent buttons show the impact on Andrews’ body. Astonishingly, Andrews survived his gruesome wound, though he wore a metal plate over his abdomen for the rest of his life. As Anne Schaeffer of Frederick, Maryland, observed, “So much trouble, expense and suffering to maim and murder each other.” [FIGURE 5 HERE]

African Americans at war: USCT battle flag and a Medal of Honor winner. Fig.#6, below.

The exhibition also presents the wartime experiences of sympathizers and supporters on both sides of the conflict, especially those of women. As one Maryland woman remarked, “Never again during our lives can such opportunities for noble deeds present themselves for women.” In addition to supporting their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers, women served as spies and nurses, raised funds for relief, sewed banners and flags. One of the many striking objects on display is a magnificent, hand-painted battle flag presented to the “4th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops by the Colored Ladies of Baltimore.” Clara Barton and Harriet Tubman were among the Maryland women whose wartime efforts are well known, but many less-famous others, like Maria C. Hall, could look back at their wartime service with satisfaction: “I mark my Hospital days as my happiest ones.”[FIGURE 13 HERE]

The concluding area of the exhibition, The Long Reunion, recalls the aftermath of the war. Veterans’ organizations, reunions, and encampments perpetuated wartime camaraderie. Maryland Confederates far outpaced their Union counterparts in creating memorials and monuments and in publishing memoirs and histories. In effect, having lost the war, the Confederate veterans “won the peace.” As a result, the Lost Cause and the role of Marylanders in service to the Confederacy were greatly embellished. Moreover, the disaffection of Union and Confederate veterans persisted for generations after the war. Despite the overarching quote in this area (“War does not determine who is right—only who is left.”) and despite a few exceptional friendships among former enemies, the veterans “have never mixed in any manner with the other side—have no joint reunions, no joint banquets, no decoration or memorial days in common,” according to William H. Pope, Superintendent of the Maryland Line Confederate Soldiers home (1893).

Some Highlights

Divided Voices is notably successful in major ways. First, the exhibition considers a broad range of topics. The recruitment and performance of African Americans in the U.S. Colored Troops is a subject that is too little known; in this project, black soldiers are given legitimate recognition. The home front, and the roles of women in particular, are moved into the foreground, rather than being treated as an afterthought. It was unexpected in this context to find glass breast shields used by nursing women paired with a chemise with nursing slits to allow for breast feeding. Technology is given its due, both in relation to the significance of railroads and evolving weaponry, especially the remarkably destructive Minié ball. The sheer terror of battle and the horrors of maimed and slaughtered men are treated here in a compelling way.

Embedded in the exhibition are profiles of more than 30 Marylanders—black and white, notorious and unknown. Their “voices” help to personalize the issues, while providing a variety of perspectives on key events and movements. The narrative is also dramatized for visitors by two costumed living history actors representing a sergeant in the U.S. Colored Troops and the actor-assassin John Wilkes Booth; the two alternate in providing in-gallery monologues, followed by Q&A and gallery tours. Though the living history presentations are offered on a limited schedule, they are engrossing, informative, and, judging from observation of four groups of visitors, highly effective.

The “vacant chair,” abiding symbol of wartime loss. Fig.#7, below.

The real stars of Divided Voices, however, are the extraordinary array of Civil War memorabilia, much of it from the Society’s own outstanding collections. The rarity, richness, and significance of these collections are astonishing. Notable objects range from a pike used in John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, to a single home-made sock worn by an ordinary Confederate soldier, to a “Vacant Chair” used in veterans’ ceremonies to honor those killed in the war. [FIGURE 6 HERE]

The exhibition narrative is substantiated, indeed driven, by its array of objects. In addition to the above exemplary items, Divided Voices displays a 34-star U.S. flag hung by a Lincoln supporter to celebrate his election in 1860; an apron made to resemble a Confederate flag created by a Rebel sympathizer; linen and leather haversacks and a bottle of Walnut Catsup; a mourning dress from Baltimore; a naval officer’s frock coat worn by Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan; and a Civil War surgeon’s kit of gleaming knives and saws, frightening in this context. The concluding section of the exhibition features two imposing and unusual objects–a large wooden cabinet that housed the “Records of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States in the State of Maryland,” displayed side-by-side with an analogous chest-on-stand from the Union Club of Baltimore (1863-1872).

Bucolic painting of Harper’s Ferry with memorabilia of John Brown’s raid. Fig.#8, below.

The objects and images are artfully displayed. At the opening of the exhibition, for example, visitors are confronted with a large, idyllic painting of Harper’s Ferry by Augustus C. Weidenbach (1863). The peaceful scene is powerfully juxtaposed with objects, images, and interpretive text that present John Brown’s violent attack on Harper’s Ferry and his subsequent execution. Brown’s abortive raid was launched from a Maryland farm and, as it happens, a Maryland militia unit were the first responders. Another artful juxtaposition is found in the exhibit on prisoners of war. A photo mural depicting a skeletal prisoner serves as backdrop for a wooden rosary, charms, bracelets, and rings carved by Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout Prison. The contrast in tone, scale, and materials is striking—and memorable. [FIGURE 2 HERE]

Other objects of folk art embellish the exhibition. The final object encountered by visitors is a shadow-box titled “Antietam National Cemetery Memorial” which was created in 1886 by John Philemon Smith, who, as a seventeen-year old, had witnessed the Battle of Antietam. This assemblage includes a list of Union soldiers who died in the battle, together with hundreds of souvenirs gathered on the battlefield. The centerpiece is a miniature replica of the Private Soldier Monument, placed at the cemetery in 1880. The effect is touching.

Quotes, photomurals, objects, and casework create a powerful effect. Fig.#9, below.

The exhibition’s clean layout and design are effective in showcasing the artifacts and in conveying the overall narrative. The enormous, room-size glass case in the center displays costume and related objects representative of the battlefield and the home front. Surrounding the central glass case are large photomurals, oversize quotes in first-person voice, free-standing reader rails, and casework displaying a wide range of military memorabilia. The graphics and quotes are well-chosen and well-executed, and the lighting and casework show off the objects and texts to great advantage. The exhibition and graphic design encourage close attention and somber reflection.[FIGURE 11 HERE]

The exhibition does have minor flaws, of course. The small size of some captions and tertiary texts makes them hard to read. The interpretive copy—main and secondary panel texts—are generally short and to the point, but some texts are choppy, assemblies of simple declarative sentences presumably written that way for accessibility. These could—and should–have been crafted as cohesive paragraphs. Here is one instance where a sharp editorial eye was needed:

“To Care for Him who shall have borne the battle”

Civil War medicine is often viewed as primitive. The source of infectious diseases had not yet been discovered and antibiotics did not exist. The truth is thousands of compassionate civilians and military men stepped up to make a terrible situation better. Anesthesia was commonly used and amputations were the best way to save lives. . . .

Here, meaning and clarity fall victim to compression, omission of contextual information and rigid sentence structure. Were amputations the “best way to save lives” from infectious diseases because “antibiotics did not exist?” Alternative phrasing such as, “Anesthesia was commonly used to provide relief, while amputation of shattered limbs saved thousands of lives,” might have resolved the mystery.

Interpretive Issues

But these minor defects in execution are not the primary concern: larger and more substantial issues color and distort Divided Voices. The first of these is the exaggeration of Marylanders’ role in Confederate service. The main text panel introducing the area devoted to battlefield combat baldly states that “Maryland sent 20,000 young men south and 60,000 more to Union regiments,” clearly signaling that three Marylanders served on the Union side for every man who served with the Confederacy. Although recent scholarship puts estimates of Maryland enlistments on both sides at a much lower level, they do agree that the ratio of Union to Confederate enlistments was three-to-one. In short, among Maryland men who served, a preponderance supported the Union cause, not the cause of secession and slavery.

However, the composition of exhibition elements would suggest exactly the opposite. Among white soldiers from Maryland profiled in the array of brief biographies, only one was a Union soldier, while seven are Maryland men who fought for the Confederacy, an imbalance only slightly offset by profiles of three African American soldiers in Union service. Similarly, Confederate sympathizers who are profiled outnumber those who were Union sympathizers.

Haversacks, tinware, and other ordinary objects of everyday life in the army. Fig#10. below.

The disparity is even more pronounced in terms of visitors’ experience of the exhibition and understanding of the story in the objects selected for display. Here large-scale Confederate items overwhelm their Union counterparts. From an experiential point of view, the objects far outweigh the interpretive texts. Any unwary visitor or, for that matter, any visitor who failed to read or remember the opening line of that one text panel would leave Divided Voices believing that Marylanders, certainly white Marylanders, mostly fought on the Rebel side. Southern sentiment was strong in Maryland (which had voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the presidential election of 1860), and especially in Baltimore and Southern Maryland. But it was nonetheless outweighed by sympathy, support, and service for the Union, among both white and black Marylanders. [FIGURE 10 HERE]

How did this misleading interpretation come about? For one thing, Confederate veterans and sympathizers were assiduous in preserving the memory of “the Lost Cause.” In their version of history, heroic Southerners led by dashing cavaliers and doughty sea dogs were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and industrial strength of the North, hell-bent on destroying an idyllic agrarian culture which sought only to maintain its traditional institutions and ancient liberties. Invested in the past, those on the losing side glorified their efforts in an unequal struggle, relegating their Union opponents to roles as ciphers in mass formations led by blood-thirsty mediocrities. This mythic re-telling of “the War between the States”—the name itself a key element of the myth–was embodied and sanctified in monuments, memorials, and a vast literature that far outweighed those of the Unionists. The exhibition text is rife with ‘Lost Cause’ language:

“An isolated, rural South was strangled and overwhelmed by an industrial North. Manufacturing and manpower won the war.”

“Maryland raider Harry Gilmore epitomized the danger and romance of . . . hit and run cavalry tactics.”

“The embodiment of the Southern cavalier . ..”

And so on.

More fundamentally, Divided Voices, despite welcome attention to the role of African Americans in the Union forces, has mostly passed over the core issues of slavery and racism. In fairness, two large panels near the exhibition opening do touch briefly on slavery in Maryland and the efforts of Maryland slaves to secure their liberty by service in the Union cause. These, however, are compromised. The concluding sentence of the main text dealing with slavery reads: “Collectively, most slave owners viewed abolitionism and the Republican Party as a [sic] threat to their wealth, culture and political influence.”

This critical interpretive text fails to represent the views of the slaves; instead, the view of slavery presented here is that of the white masters. As if to underscore this problem, the caption of an image on the same panel (in much smaller point size than the main text) reads in part: “Free African Americans and slaves . . . saw the war as an opportunity to strike a blow against the institution of slavery. Resistance increased significantly during the war, and Maryland slaves took advantage of the turmoil by fleeing to the Union Army, to the North, or free black communities in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.” In 1860, Maryland blacks were not divided on the abolition of slavery, and blacks constituted 100% of those enslaved. Surely their “voices” should be the ones we hear first on the subject, rather than those of the minority of slave owners.

Notwithstanding other texts that evoke black Marylanders’ yearning for freedom—most notably the text panel titled “He Will Fight” and a second panel devoted to an African American celebration of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870)—there is a conspicuous silence in this exhibition on what would seem to be an important theme: the impact of the war on black Marylanders, slave and free alike. The emancipation of Maryland slaves through ratification of a state constitutional amendment in November 1864, the first such emancipation among the loyal, slave-owning Border States and arguably the most consequential “impact” of the Civil War on the State, is noted flatly in a single sentence at the end of the text panel “He Will Fight’: “Maryland abolished slavery in November 1864.” (A second, elliptical reference to the abolition of slavery in Maryland is found in the panel on the Fifteenth Amendment—“Six years after Maryland freed its slaves . . .”)

It might be argued that the long and complicated story of Maryland emancipation is unsuited to interpretation in an exhibition and that the exhibition focuses primarily on the military conflict and its repercussions, but the primal issue of slavery is invoked from the exhibition’s opening panel (and in the first sentences of the Society’s exhibition publicity). And rightly so, since the abolition of slavery in Maryland is as direct a consequence of the Civil War as the casualties of its many battles.

Of course, the struggle for emancipation preceded the war. But over the four years of brutal, bloody war, the conviction grew that Union victory must bring with it the death of slavery. This feeling established itself not only in President Lincoln, his cabinet, and Congressional leaders, but also among the hearts and minds of the rank-and-file of the Union army. The ratification of the constitutional amendment emancipating Maryland’s slaves in November 1864 was due to the votes cast by the state’s white Union soldiers. In his magisterial study, The Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson notes that “the men in blue also decided the outcome in several congressional districts, and the votes of Maryland soldiers for a state constitutional amendment abolishing slavery more than offset the slight majority of the home vote against it.” So, if the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 is worthy of note, how much more so the destruction of Maryland slavery. Yet the voices of slaves and freedmen on this decisive issue are muted.

The silence echoes, most obviously because of the Maryland Historical Society’s sponsorship of Fred Wilson’s landmark exhibition, Mining the Museum, in 1993. As Judith E. Stein reflects in Sins of Omission (Art in America, October 1993), Mining the Museum used the Society’s artifacts “to raise our awareness of institutionalized racism, making visible the subtle and insidious ways these attitudes affect the decisions museums make about what to collect and how to display it.” But Wilson had another, more positive point to make as well: African American history is American history (and all Americans should know and understand that history).

After nearly two decades of progress in acknowledging the centrality of the African American experience in Maryland, the Society seems to have taken a pause in Divided Voices, and this has skewed its curatorial emphasis and the interpretive focus of the exhibition. If the Society had, perfectly legitimately, chosen to restrict its narrative to the experiences of those who fought and died, I would raise no objection. But instead, the Society has chosen to open up the subject—the Civil War in Maryland–and then not followed through as effectively as it could.

Neither the 1864 Maryland Constitution nor the Civil War itself brought an end to racism. Neither transformed the ingrained attitudes of the white majority or the awareness of those attitudes by the black minority. Decades of segregation, discrimination, and injustice followed the war and remain among the state’s legacies of slavery and racism. But the Civil War did have a profound and lasting impact in Maryland: it freed nearly 90,000 enslaved people and put an end to efforts to legally re-enslave 90,000 free blacks.

In Adam Goodheart’s new book, 1861. The Civil War Awakening, he quotes a July 1861 colloquy between the Unionist author Nathaniel Parker Willis and an elderly black slave at Arlington House, newly evacuated by Robert E. Lee and his family and now occupied by Federal troops.

Willis: “Well, uncle, what do you think of the war?”

Slave: “Well, massa, it’s all about things we’ve been so long a putting up with.”

One hundred and fifty years of “putting up” still stand between us and the Civil War, but we can see that, here in Maryland, the Civil War was a milestone on the long, challenging road to a more just and equal society. With some modest revisions, Divided Voices can provide an even more insightful, meaningful narrative for contemporary visitors, white and black alike, for the duration of the Sesquicentennial.

By Avi Y. Decter, Contributing Writer

Avi Decter is executive director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, in Baltimore

Exhibit now at the Maryland Historical Society www.mdhs.org

April 2011 through Spring 2015 (with annual updates)

Main Gallery: 4,000 s.f.; Introduction Area: 950 s.f.

Curators: Burton Kumerow, Alexandra Deutsch, Heather Haggstrom, and Iris America Bierlein

Exhibition Design: Charles Mack Design

Graphic Design: PJ Bogert Graphic Design

_______________________________________

Figure Notes:

 Figure 1. A display of photography equipment and photographic practice, c. 1860-65, introduces visitors to the first war in which photojournalism played a major role—bringing in the carnage of battle home to the public.

 Figure 2. Floor Plan. As this floor plan indicates, Divided Voices is laid out in a linear fashion with a room-size glass case at its center. Visitors follow a counter-clockwise path through the narrative, concluding their journey back at the entrance to the exhibition gallery.

 Figure 3.Lincoln won less than 3% of theMaryland vote in the 1860 presidential elections.Lincoln’s victory precipitated a secession movement across the Lower South, raising fears for “the safety of theUnion” among border state residents.

 Figure 4. The Pratt Street Riot in April 1861, in which Southern sympathizers attacked troops traveling to Washington in support of the Lincoln administration, led to the imposition of martial law in Baltimore for nearly four years.

Figure 5. The exotic Zouave jackets worn by several regiments of Union soldiers (right) had come into women’s fashion even before the war began as seen in the woman’s dress with Zouave jacket to the left.  A remarkable display of Civil War-era costume is presented in this central glass case. The mannequin on the left reveals the underpinnings of fashionable costume, including the use of “pockets” that were worn under the wearer’s skirt

 Figure 6. One of the most compelling objects on view is this tattered battle flag of the 4^th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops, juxtaposed with a portrait of Medal of Honor winner Christian Fleetwood.

 Figure 7. The “vacant chair” became an abiding symbol of loss. BothUnion and Confederate veterans set out empty chairs at gatherings in remembrance of lost comrades.

 Figure 8. A large, bucolic oil painting of Harper’s Ferry by Augustus C. Weidenbach (1863) dominates the opening of Divided Voices. The painting serves as backdrop for weapons and other memorabilia associated with John Brown’s polarizing raid.

 Figure 9. The interplay of quotes, photomurals, objects, and casework in Divided Voices create a powerful effect. Note the canvas litter used to carry the wounded from the field of battle.

 Figure 10. The accoutrements of everyday life in the army are effectively set off against the photo mural in the background. Note the haversacks at center right and a bottle of walnut catsup at the far left.

Alfred Wertheimer, Going Home (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

From December 24th to March 8th, 2012, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will host Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, a collaborative exhibition developed by the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and Govinda Gallery, and made possible through the support of the History channel. The idea of images of a pop culture icon displayed in such hallowed halls may raise the eyebrows of those whose sense of the Portrait Gallery is of a museum dedicated to the “art of portraiture,” or as an august arena for the presentation of such notable figures as the presidents. But–just as he did when he electrified the nation in 1956—Elvis at 21 will inevitably alter the beat of everyday Gallery life.

In photographs taken by Alfred Wertheimer in 1956, Elvis at 21 documents the explosive rise of a 21-year-old singer named Elvis Presley. A young freelance photographer, Wertheimer was hired to take publicity shots of Presley, but then “tagged along” and was able to capture Elvis’s transit to superstardom. For this exhibition, Wertheimer took his negatives to pioneer printmaker David Adamson, and the resulting 56 large format pigment prints provide a stunning storyboard of fame. fine arts magazine

Alfred Wertheimer, Starburst (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

The collection of Elvis images originally began its national tour at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery. Elvis at the National Portrait Gallery, you might ask?! Indeed! The Gallery is primarily a museum devoted to the personality of history, with a focus on those “who have had a significant impact on American life and culture” through “the art of portraiture.” Amidst this bipolar identity, the Gallery has managed to establish a reputable pop culture repertory with such major exhibitions as Champions of American Sport (1981), On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting (1987), and Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical (1996). Located in the heart of the sports and entertainment district of the nation’s capital, the Gallery is working to spotlight its sports and entertainment collections: the recent Americans Now exhibition of contemporary popular culture stars has proved to be a magnet for visitors.

Alfred Wertheimer, Jump (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

Focusing on a pop culture icon also allows us to consider the idea of ‘portrait’ from a different perspective—that of “the image.” Elvis’s image fits well with the postwar intellectual framework established by Marshall McLuhan, in which ‘the image’ becomes a cultural medium with a specifically-crafted “message.” As these photographs of Elvis illustrate, the idea of ‘the image’ was a defining element in the rise of media-generated celebrity culture. In the late nineteenth century, the graphic revolution created a technology able to disseminate stories and illustrations of famous people in an ever-widening arc. The emergence of such mass media as recordings, motion pictures, magazines, radio, and ultimately television vastly expanded the audience for fame and celebrity. With the rise of modern celebrity, the selection of ‘the famous’ became an election, only instead of a ballot box there was a box office, a corner newsstand, a recording industry, and a pop culture media that made celebrities part of everyday life.

In the mid-1950s, television was the new celebrity-generating medium, and Elvis—through several live performances in 1956 that launched him to stardom—broadcast a message of cultural transformation. The photographs in Elvis at 21 depict an image of youth and newness, but also document the face of a personality who jangled the calm of ‘peace and prosperity. To a culture of conformity, conspicuous consumption, and cars with fins, Elvis represented an intrusion as shocking as Sputnik would be a year later: he energized the emerging youth culture and helped create a new consumer market fueled by radio, recordings, and movies. His popularity also helped catalyze a revolution in the entertainment industry, paving the way for rhythm and blues, gospel, and rock into mainstream culture.

Alfred Wertheimer, Entering the Warwick (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

When the keepers-of-tradition began to understand the message of the Elvis image, red flags of warning sprouted across the landscape. Elvis was lumped with such other threatening new pop culture figures as James Dean—clearly, the image of leather-and-denim-clad ‘juvenile delinquents’ clashed harshly with the gray-flannel suit generation. One cultural steward, popular television host Steve Allen, invited Elvis to appear on his variety show, but forced him to wear white-tie-and-tails and sing “Hound Dog” with…a hound dog.

Elvis’s rise to stardom happened in a single year—from January 1956 to January 1957—and reflected television’s emergence as a cultural denominator. These were years of enormous social change, a feeling well-captured by the photographs of Elvis’s 27-hour train ride from New York to Memphis. These images evoke a different America altogether in a journey that rolled through cities, small towns, and farmlands with ‘all deliberate speed.’ Elvis is shown still remarkably alone, mixing unnoticed with everyone else on board, family and strangers, black and white.

With a cinematic luminosity, the photographs document a time when Elvis could sit alone at a drugstore lunch counter or wander unnoticed in mid-town Manhattan. But then things change, and he walks through the door to the rest of his life. What is remarkable is that Wertheimer was there. The exhibition’s final image is a brilliant moment of culmination: Elvis is onstage, saturated by a light that Wertheimer describes as a ‘starburst.’ It is an epochal image—the literal flashpoint of fame.

By Amy Henderson, Co-curator, Elvis at 21

Historian, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

See more of what Richmond’s VMFA is exhibiting at: www.vmfa.state.va.us

Visit the Smithithsonian National Portrait Gallery at www.npg.si.edu

Lehmann-Made Tut-Tut, No 490 (1913). Coll. of L. J. Buehler, 1999. Gifted to Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle, PA

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ~Charles Baudelaire

“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!” ~Charles Dickens

We may be shopping for the children in our lives, reminiscing about the holidays of our youth, or analyzing our portfolios, hoping that the decision to invest in Barbie instead of G.I. Joe this season turns out to have been the right one; whatever the case may be, whether or not they are a part of our daily lives, the December holiday season is upon us. This is the time of year when toys find themselves at center stage. artes fine arts magazine

Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle, PA

Amid parties featuring our finest china and specially prepared meals, adults understand the inherent significance of a holiday, religious or otherwise, knowing that the music, dishes, and décor are not the reasons for the celebration in and of themselves, but the expression of an historical tradition based on an event like the miracle of the oil or the birth of Jesus Christ. However, while children can be told the significance of a date on the calendar, they often cannot grasp its full meaning without something tangible to bridge the gap between mature comprehension and youthful naivety. Often, that something is a new or special toy, which stamps the occasion with the kind of wonder and delight that children then continue to associate with holidays throughout much, if not all, of their lives. In short, toys have always made the holidays special for children, and that simple fact is being recognized this season by The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, Pennsylvania, as it warmly invites children and parents to come and enjoy a unique collection of antique toys which have been brought from their usual home in the Period House, Hoyt West, to the second floor of the Greek Revival style mansion known as Hoyt East, with plans to remain on display through the end of January.

Gifted by third generation furniture manufacturer, Louis J. Buehler, in 1999, just one year before he died, the Hoyt’s toy collection dates from the early 1900’s. Buehler’s grandfather, Gottlieb, had been born in Germany in 1857 where he trained as a carpenter. He emigrated to the US in 1881, bringing his woodworking skills with him, eventually settling in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he built a prosperous career making furniture. Louis succeeded him in the family business.

Left: Loius Buehler (c), with father (l) and grandfather, Gottlieb (r). c. 1920

While Louis never married or had any children of his own, he obviously cherished his possessions because, while he was still alive, he gifted a few important pieces to his nieces and nephews only to have them sell the items, which disappointed Buehler enough that he decided to give his estate to museums. Having been involved with museums throughout his life, he understood their continuous need for money, so along with his childhood treasures, furniture and art, he included The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in a trust providing annual support for display of the collections.

Steiff bears, early 20th c.

Some of the most noteworthy items include at least 1000 small lead figures. Some of the figures are animals and many are people, some British, German, Japanese, and American. There is a variety of turn of the century wind ups, most of which are still in working order, and a collection of at least a dozen board games that are among the few items which are not often shown.

Regularly on display in the Period House is a collection of Little Folks magazines, an educational board, a homemade doll house, built by his father, and a model of Buehler’s own house, which he built himself as a child. There is a tin tea set, a viewfinder with several slides, loads of Matchbox cars, many still in the original boxes, and a number of Steiff pieces. The Steiff bears are protected by a glass case, and the smaller of the two is most unique, with a removable head that reveals a glass vile within the cavity of the bear’s body, meant to hold candy.

Lehmann Halloh Motorcycle (1908). A 'Gyro Action' tin toy.

The toys themselves speak volumes about the material culture of childhood, a trending theme in today’s fine art galleries. They also remind us of what was happening in the areas of art, industry, science, and social progress during a previous age. Significant changes were occurring in the world of art and design during Buehler’s childhood, including a reconsideration of who sets artistic standards, and how art should be shared with the public. He would have witnessed the industrialization of America, which provided much of the subject matter for the realist movement. It was a new era, one of mass production, and popular culture grew to be a profitable national product. Tickets for a twelve-day cruise could be purchased for roughly $60, and the Ziegfeld girls earned $75 per week (Whitley 2008).

It seems fitting for Buehler’s collection, which includes such a charming group of tin toys, to have made its home in New Castle, Pennsylvania, which was known as the tin plate capital of the world in the early 1900’s, boasting the largest tin plate mill in America at that time.

Production of tin toys began in the mid 1800’s as an inexpensive alternative to wooden toys. Initially they were hand painted, until a process known as “offset lithography” began being used to print designs on flat tinplate, which was then shaped using dies and assembled with tabs. Leading tin toy manufacturer Ernst Paul Lehmann, of Germany, produced original, high quality designs, but eventually their proliferation tapered off in the U.S., when American manufacturers like Louis Marx and Company, amid post-World War I anti-German sentiment, tapped into a newly discovered supply of tin ore in Illinois.

'My Friend' celluloid & metal swimming figure, Japan, 1930s.

Again, war had an impact on tin toys, when the need for raw materials during World War II, halted production altogether; afterwards, under the Marshall Plan, Japan took over “all of the low profit, high labor manufacturing and the U.S. companies could sell the imported tin toy product. It worked better than expected, and Japan became a tin toy manufacturing force until the end of the 1950’s…In the 1960’s, cheaper plastic and new government safety regulations ended the reign of tin toys” (Konter 2010).

Perhaps the most remarkable piece on display at the Hoyt is a 1908 Lehmann Halloh Motorcycle, a ‘Gyro-Action’ mechanical tin toy, featuring rubber-coated wheels and a young male rider, clad with tall red socks, white skull cap, and blue jacket. The piece is in excellent condition, valued at roughly $2,900.00, with working gears and minimal wear. Another notable tin toy, a 1913 Lehmann Tut Tut No. 490, wind-up automobile in very good condition, features a red German eagle on the side and a driver blowing a horn (see above). This piece would likely sell for about $700 at auction. Comparatively, a red Louis Marx & Co. No. 7 Coo Coo Car tin wind up in somewhat better condition is worth slightly less.

Jolly Jocko and Hiking Bear (c. 1930).

While some certainly do it for the money, according to toy expert Robert Skingle, of Skingle Antiques, many collectors enjoy antique toys for a combination of two other reasons–the nostalgic sentiment that they convey, and the artistic quality of the toys’ design, all the way down to the graphics on the original packaging. From Japan in the 1930’s, a blond-haired, blue-eyed My Friend clockwork celluloid-and-metal girl swimmer wears a red bathing suit, and rotates her arms in a freestyle swim stroke. Its original box, decorated with red seagulls flying above the ocean upon which a sailboat can be seen in the distance, and a swimmer who appears to be soaring with them, features the Kuramochi trademark, CK. The Hoyt takes great pride in having this rare childhood plaything, complete with the original box, among those on display.

Wind-up tin alligator with skirted rider, 1930s.

Among the most charismatic toys in the Hoyt’s collection is a 1930’s wind up tin toy tribal figure riding atop an alligator, complete with original string reins, putting its value at approximately $250. A variety of wind ups are covered with soft fur, including an endearing monkey called Jolly Jacko who gazes into a pink hand mirror while combing his hair. He is joined by Stinky the Skunk, who hops when wound, wearing around his neck the original red ribbon with comical tag that reads ‘Caution,’ and Hiking Bear, who carries a red walking stick and, naturally, hikes.

Home-made motor yacht, made by Buehler father & son, 1930s.

Three large and lovely painted wooden boats, despite being safely perched on wooden stands, appear as if they are ready to set sail down a small and winding creek in a young child’s back yard. A popular pastime, Buehler and his grandfather built their own working sailboats, some of which were motorized. The open deck of one boat in particular features exquisite detail, including eight portholes, a life buoy, three fabric flags, a red and white striped canopy with a blue party light suspended beneath it, movable search light and throttle, spinning metal propeller, and an anchor whose tiny chain slinks gracefully in and out of a hole in the bow. The boat is wired so that, at one time, the spot light and a light inside the cabin would illuminate.

Of all the toys in the collection, the board games suggest, most clearly, the daily thoughts, actions, and expectations of young children during the first half of the twentieth century.  Perhaps this is because they implicitly require the participation of more than one child, and therefore one can imagine the interaction–including bits of conversation and mannerisms–that certainly played out among the living, breathing members of an older generation when it was young. It could be that the games inspire an adult viewer’s imagination more so than the individual toys, which primarily elicit nostalgic sensations; this, presumably, would not be the case for young visitors of the Hoyt, who would, hypothetically, reach for the wind ups or boats first.

Gilbert Co., Electric Eye (1935), 'an electric marvel'

The selection of games includes The Standard Radio Game, King Kong Oriental Checkers by Sam Gabriel & Sons Co., NY, and All Star Comics Playing Card Game by King Features Syndicate, 1934. Two exceptionally interesting games in the collection are the 1935 Gilbert Electric Eye, and the Playbox. Best known, perhaps, for its Erector Sets, The Gilbert Company produced a variety of scientific toys that tell of the technology of the day. Called ‘an electric marvel,’ this photoelectric device was surely a thing of wonder for the few affluent young boys whose families could afford such a cutting-edge plaything. The detailed instruction manual accompanying the Electric Eye proclaims its ability to turn on lights and radios, operate a burglar alarm, start and stop electric trains, and ring the door bell—all from a distance.

Parents Assoc., Pleasant Hill, OH, The Playbox, early 1900s, taught manners and skills

The set requires batteries, including a 22 volt dry cell, and two ‘C’ cells in the Power Pack to operate the low voltage relay. The switch linking the low voltage (sensitive) relay and the operating (power) relay is a primitive form of amplification. The Electric Eye is just one of the Gilbert company’s many products that targeted, through focused advertising campaigns, young boys who dreamed of adult achievement (“My Experience…”). To today’s children, this game would still appear to be scientifically challenging, but to an adult, it is the equivalent of, perhaps, a rotary telephone.

The Playbox, an educational toy from the early 1900’s produced by the Parents Association in Pleasant Hill, Ohio, claims to teach and drill children on a long list of skills, both academic and social, including Arithmetic, Astronomy, Botany, Geography, Ambition, Good Manners, Self-Control, and Tidiness. The sturdy metal box houses nearly 80 individual game pieces, including dominoes, checkers, ten-pins, marbles, a jointed ruler, and four brightly colored metal Versatilla Men, above which is written, ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ The most endearing feature of the Playbox is the black-and-white photo on the inside of the lid wherein several children, wearing tall white socks and Mary Janes, play a game together with pieces set atop a chair on the rug in front of a fireplace.

That photo, while not related to the Buehler household, appears as if it could have been taken just down the hall from where these items are displayed; The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts boasts a unique setting in which the period opulence and grandeur subtly blend with a sense of intimacy and comfort. This atmosphere somehow transcends the years which have passed since the mansion was occupied as a residence. So while the vintage toy collection displayed there may be received in different ways by children and adults, the glimpse into the past, through the lens of childhood trifles, is sure to engender pleasant feelings for all.

Above: The Buehler homestead (l) and a model of the house, built by Louis Buehler as a child (r), in the collection of the museum.

Certainly, those with an interest in vintage toys should plan to visit the Hoyt, where an impressive permanent art collection and variety of seasonal exhibits, as well as the beauty of the facility itself, make for a satisfying museum experience.

By Autumn Miller, Contributing Writer

Visit the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts collection at www.hoytartcenter.org

___________________________________________

Works Cited:

Konter, Stanley. Tin Toy History. Retrieved Nov. 13, 2011 from VirtualBargains.com.

My Experience with Gilbert Science Sets. Lindy Week Review. Retrieved Nov. 13, 2011 from Jitterbuzz.com

Skingle, Robert. Telephone interview. 15 Nov. 2011.

Whitley, Peggy. ‘1910-1919.’ American Cultural History. Lone Star College-Kingwood Library, 1999. Web. 7 Feb. 2011.

Above: Louis Marx & Co. No.7 Coo Coo Car (c. 1920) 

“Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.” ~Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

The sixteenth century marked the dawn of a new age of inquiry, understood by many as the earliest beginnings of the modern age. Religious fervor, superstition and broadly-held, ancient views of the structure of the Universe, planet Earth and the natural order of all life forms were slowly giving way to rational examination and the application of objective observation to everyday phenomena. Scientific study, a novel and often theologically dangerous pursuit, had finally begun to attract the attention of a select few. With the help of the newly-invented moveable print, paper production (a concept brought west from China, via the Silk Road), the application of mass-produced texts and illustrations spawned a widening community of intellectuals; and with them, a body of knowledge that would soon comprise a Northern European Renaissance in the arts and sciences. These analytical trends would form a systematic model for understanding the mysteries of nature that persists to the present day.

Above: Hendrick Goltzius, The Great Hercules, 1589. See End Note #1, below. artes fine arts magazine

Arthur M. Sackler Museum, one of Harvard University Museums, Cambridge, MA

Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum has mounted an extraordinary collection of original sixteenth century images, in a show entitled, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. According to Susan Dackerman, Curator of Prints for the museum, artists did not simply work as illustrators in the service of the scientific community. “The prints, drawings, books, maps and scientific instruments of the period suggest that artists played a more active role in facilitating the understanding of new concepts in astronomy, geography, natural history and anatomy, by using their representational skills to give them visual form.” She points out that the production of scientific images and objects was often ”a collaborative enterprise among artists, astronomers, cartographers, botanists, medical practitioners and instrument makers.”

The flexibility and economy of multiple-copy, paper printmaking meant that images could be widely and inexpensively circulated, folded, cut, hand-colored and assembled into various functional objects. Curator Dackerman notes that the exhibition contains several examples of sundials, globes, astrolabes and anatomical models and employs facsimiles of many of these objects “installed throughout the galleries to give visitors a unique, hands-on opportunity to manipulate and appreciate the functions of the early modern devices.”

Categories of knowledge in the 16th century were organized very differently than by contemporary standards. Professional occupations based on empirical investigation were just coming into their own and, as a result, many realms of scientific inquiry which, today, would be worthy of study and life-time devotion, were grouped together. As such, the Sackler exhibition skillfully promotes visitor understanding of these groupings—room-by-room— by carefully combining objects and images into relational paradigms, as if seen through 16th century eyes!

One important category, touching on topics as far reaching as the Solar System and immediate as human physiognomy, was natural philosophy. Not to be viewed in the current sense of the philosopher’s role, they set aside superstition and dogma to examine the physical universe as it was perceptible to the senses—seeking to understand and explain natural events through the application of knowledge and reason. This new field included natural history, which described particular properties of objects in the natural world, and because it included the study of plants, animals and minerals, it was closely associated with the study of medicine. There was also the field of mathematics, which included arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and astrology. Because the mechanical arts (engineering, architecture) were so closely akin to applied mathematics, it also included an examination of issues associated with navigation—a field in need of practical and immediate solutions, given the nascent efforts at global exploration and discovery.

Stradanus (Jan van der Straet), From Nova reperta (New inventions and discoveries of modern times), c. 1599-1603. See End Note #2.

Dackerman observes that, ”during this period, methods of inquiry changed from relying solely on ancient texts to incorporating observation and hands-on experience [with] nature. Cosmographers, medical practitioners, and natural historians, as well as artists, used these new methods in the pursuit of knowledge.” As an example, documentarian Stadamus (Jan van der Straet) produced a catalogue, Nova reperta, illustrating nineteen new inventions, including a plate by an unknown engraver showing the various stages of copper plate engraving and printing. Far from being illustrative, careful observers of the illustration could become acquainted with the printing process for their own purposes Printmaking was truly revolutionary because of the power of mass-produced information to distribute and educate a broader swath of an increasingly literate population.

In fact, Stradanus’s Nova reperta: New inventions and discoveries of modern times (c.1599-1603) features the printing press as the central design element on the title page of his publication. Positioned on either side of the press are two medallions celebrating exploration—the discovery of the Americas on the left, and a star symbolizing the discovery of true north on the right. The exhibition catalogue calls attention to the “string of prints draped above the printing press, emphasizing the mediums capacity for multiples and its key role in disseminating new knowledge.

As noted, paper’s ease of manipulation and the fecundity of prints contributed to their efficacy in producing and spreading knowledge. An excellent example of this in the exhibit is Peter Apian’s The emperor’s astronomy (1540). The lavishly-colored dials, with multiple moving parts, allowed the user to show the movement of the planets, calculate lunar eclipses, and tell time. In this text, which features both northern and southern celestial hemispheres—reflecting an expanded view of a Eurocentric world and the influence of Albrecht Durer’s celestial charts (also appearing in this exhibition)—highlights the ways in which printed material served as a medium of exchange for scientific information among artists and cosmographers in Nuremberg, a dynamic center for the production of scientific instruments and prints in northern Europe, at the time.

Right: Heinrich Vogtherr the elder, Anatomy, or, a Faithful Reproduction of the Body of a Female, Strasbourg: Jacob Fröhlich (1544). (near: viewing flap raised; far: flap lowered). End Note #3.

As a fascinating example of manipulated content (what, today would be called a `pop-up’ book), the exhibit offers Heinrich Vogtherr, the elder’s Anatomy, or, a faithful reproduction of the torso of a female (and male). Both the original and a hands-on facsimile of the illustrations are available for examination by museum-goers. Curatorial notes explain that, ‘Vogtherr exploited the adaptability of paper to illustrate an understanding of human anatomy gained by methods of direct observation, surgery and dissection; the latter being considered controversial in the 16th century.’ Confounding the age-old museum admonition: Do Not Touch, this and other displays produce a curious, secret delight in manipulating the pieces of the illustrated text, in full view of museum personnel; delving deeper into the layers of skin, organs and bone, in much the same way that fascinated Renaissance readers must have done. The power of intellectual discovery remains undiminished as a fact of human nature, then as now.

Unknown woodcutter, Anatomy of the Bones of the Human Body (1493). End Note #4.

In a move from sophisticated to quaintly naïve, is the anonymously-produced woodcut with hand-coloring, Anatomy of the Bones of the Human Body (1493). The earliest known example of a printed representation of the human skeleton; curling banners, inscribed in Latin, float like well-ordered Pringles beside articulated bones. A grinning skull—a Renaissance version of an amiable Freddy Kruger—seems eager to reveal all to his audience of curious viewers, proffering a half-hearted wave from the crest of a grassy, green knoll. A text box tells us that the print was “made in Paris by the very learned man, Master Richard Helian, doctor of arts and medicine.” It also notes that the image was “successfully multiplied through the art of printing.” This version of ‘outsider art’ may be viewed as mildly humorous by today’s standards. But, it would be a mistake to underestimate the significant value of such illustrations as edifying for a 16thcentury population, for whom even the most basic features of the human body would have been shrouded in mystery and meritriciousness. Simplified versions of this very image appeared in a number of subsequent instructional medical treatises.

Andreas Vesalius, Title page, Seven books on the fabric of the human body (1543). End Note #5.

Instructional manuals and guide books (vade mecum) of all kinds were being generated during this period. Publications, like Leonhart Fuchs’s encyclopedia (1542) extolled the virtues of direct observation of plant species for purposes of identification. Another, a how-to manual, entitled Intrument book (1533), by Peter Apian, captures the passion-of-the-day for learning about the natural world and conveys the importance of measurement. Underscoring the use of standardized instruments was key to the creation of a uniform and consistent body of knowledge about natural phenomena, making it available to a broader audience. Instrument book contained images of devices that could be cut out and assembled, with directions for their use. Around the same time, Andreas Vesalius published, Seven books on the fabric of the human body, a ground-breaking atlas of anatomy for physicians and scholars. Sackler Museum exhibition organizers point out that, “Its title page makes a powerful statement in favor of observation and experiential learning [in the progression of knowledge]. At the center of the image, Vesalius, the teacher performs a dissection, holding back the flesh of a cadaver to give excited onlookers a better view of the internal organs.” They also note that the classical architectural backdrop, in which the scene occurs, visually reinforces the spirit of ancient Greco-Roman revivalism that so colored Renaissance thinking.

Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I (1514). End Note #6.

Symbolism and allegory, two other features of classical thought, frequently found their way into Northern Renaissance prints. Cornelius Cort combined allegory and anatomical information to represent the five senses, thus conveying the importance of direct experience in our understanding of the natural world. His print series contains multiple symbolic references to objects and animals associated with the senses. A spider web evokes the sense of touch, rays of sun suggest sight. Accompanying texts then assign each sense to corresponding organs, both internal and external. Albrecht Durer, a master printer and intellectual giant in his time, sought to capture various emotions through the same clever use of signs and symbols appearing in his work. In his, Melancholia I (1514), the gloomy, angelic figure of Genius, head canted against her idle hand, is surrounded by the tools-of-the-trade of geometry and architect. Symbols too numerous to detail abound in this image, but the interface between the human psyche and natural (and metaphysical) forces, for Durer, identifies these two essential elements, as requisite in an evolving understanding of the human condition and intellectual pursuits.

Visual metaphors, too, are also artistically employed to convey national power and prestige. Jan Saenredam’s Map of Northern Netherlands (1589), even accounting for its marginal embellishments, is technically accurate. For historian, maps such as these, clearly revealing artistic influences in its production, yields a wealth of information about the land and coastline of 16th century Netherlands. Exhibition organizers note that, “The inclusion of a compass rose, as well as dividers and a distance/measurement key in the lower left corner, suggests the print’s use in navigation. However, the map also functions as an allegorical image of a nation on the rise. Nationalistic overtones are apparent in the crest with the lion, a symbol of the Netherlands. The ships in the harbor likely referred not only to the explorations being undertaken, but also to the nation’s [maritime] might; the vessel on the left is firing a cannon.”

Hans Baldung, called Grien, Dissection of the Scalp (l.) and Brain (r.), 1541. End Note #7.

One outgrowth of this period of scientific investigation and observation was to begin to move away from the ancient belief in the causal connection between human personality and the presence of absence of enigmatic humours coursing through the body. While not wholly abandoned for another two hundred years, the exhibition contains early examples of anatomical dissections of the brain, postulating relationships between human behavior and neurological structures. Hans Baldung created woodcut images of the human brain. Designed as instructional sheets, anatomical detailing is sparse and supporting descriptive material lacking. But, as an historical marker for the creation of prepared material for use in later instruction and training, the exhibition’s, Baldung: Study of the Mouth and Tongue and Study of the Head, from Walter Ryff’s carefully-named, On the most sublime, elevated and noble creature of all creature (1541), stands out as a cautious, yet brazen foray into the realm of objective observation—and a tenuous challenge of old-world, Biblical views of human sanctity.

Georg Glockendon the elder, after Hans Burgkmair the elder, People of Africa and India (detail),1511. End Note #8.

As if by extension, other investigators, working in conjunction with artists, began to explore the influence of physical environment on cultural characteristics. Continental exploration of Africa and the Americas was open far-flung doors previously unknown or little-understood, exotic cultures. In a print by Hans Burgkmair, a series of frieze-style images detail a trading journey from West Africa to India made by Tyrolean merchant Balthasar Springer in 1505 (People of Africa and India, 1511). Exhibition material points out that, “…notes and sketches in Springer’s journal provided the source material for [the] image, which ‘maps’ the people, plants and animals from foreign land forms. Before the 16th century, peoples, plants and animals of foreign lands were relegated to the margins of maps. Here, they are the primary subjects. The [image] offers impressions of family life, social hierarchy, and material culture, as well as information about plants and animals. These images might have been among the first representations of human beings in Africa and India that sixteenth-century Europeans saw.”

Jacques de Gheyn II, Great Lion, c. 1590. See End Note #9.

Observation of life on earth was not confined to humans and plant life. Many fascinating and dramatic images of the animal kingdom were rendered, as well. Probably drawn and or engraved for first-hand observation, Jacques de Gheyn’s Great Lion (c. 1590), was one of the most popular prints of its time. The natural posture of the creature, the eye for realistic detail (paws, skin folds) and the sense of power of the creature (long a symbol of power, the engraving bears the inscription, ‘fearless, but alert’), this image may owe its popularity to the perception by the viewer that one was standing before the animal. But, its most important contribution to the lexicon of images being produced during this critical period in nascent scientific observation was the apparent transition from the antediluvian notion of a superordinated representation of species, to the specific: this image is about one particular lion and its observable traits, not a class or species.

Jan Saenredam, Beached Whale near Beverwijk, 1602. End Note #10.

In the realm of the specific, an incident on the waterfront of Beverwijk, Netherlands, in 1602, provided residents there with the opportunity to observe a rare phenomenon in nature—the beaching of a full-sized Sperm whale. As curious members of the community are pictured gathering around the leviathan, in an engraving by Jan Saenredam, naturalists are also represented, as they can be seen gathering numeric data from the creature. Measurements of length and girth—even blowhole size—are recorded in an effort to understand this particular mystery of the deep. The artist, too, is pictured in the lower left corner of the image, recording both the excitement of the event and the work of investigators for later use in preparing the engraving. For ‘Pursuit of Knowledge’ exhibition organizers, the scene portrayed epitomizes the melding of scientific investigation and artistic collaboration at a defining moment in early modern history.

Surely to be counted as one of the geniuses of the Northern European, early Renaissance was Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). He was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the region ever since. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His watercolors mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium. In his lifetime, he was also known to produce a number of theoretical treatises, involving principles of mathematics, perspective and ideal proportions, which were published posthumously.

Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515. See End Note #11.

The Sackler Museum exhibition contains several important examples of Durer’s printmaking. As iconic example of a Dürer animal rendering (though not, as in the case of Saenredam’s Whale or de Gheyn’s Great Lion, for first hand observation), is Rhinoceros (1515). Consider a remarkable creature—defying even the most fantastical imaginings of Europeans of that time—Dürer produced a dramatic portrait of the animal. It was (and still is!) captivating, by reason of the artist’s au fait command of the woodcut medium and for the primal power evident in his subject. Claiming that it was a ‘faithful’ rendering, the image appeared time-and-again as collectable prints and in animal encyclopediae. Exhibition organizers point out that, “with the exaggerated tactility of its plated hide…it can be seen to embody the process of which it is a product: printing itself.

Albrecht Dürer and Johannes Stabius, after Conrad Heinfogel, Map of the Northern Celestial Hemisphere, 1515. End Note # 12.

As further evidence of his technical proclivity across a wide range of subjects are Durer’s celestial charts. On view are Durer’s (working with astronomers, Johannes Stabius and Conrad Heinfogel) Maps of the Northern and Southern Celestial Hemisphere (1515). Exhibition notes explain that, “Durer’s celestial charts are the first known printed maps of the northern and southern celestial hemispheres. Based on Ptolemy’s 2nd century catalogue of the stars, they document what, in the 16th century, was current knowledge of the skys. The artist presents a 3-dimensional concept—a celestial sphere- in 2-dimensional form by flattening it. Line of longitude radiate from the center.” Durer’s vivid animation of the colorful creatures inhabiting the twelve signs of the zodiac, overlaying the observable constellations, represents a melding of objective science and ancient belief-systems drawn from astrology that characterized the transition from superstition to science during the early Renaissance.

Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Nicolaus Petri van Deventer, 1595. End Note #13.

Emblematic of the exhibition’s motif—the mutually-enriching relationship between art and science during a period when the boundary between the two was not as sharply drawn as today—is dramatically embodied in a rendering by the little-known, Hendrick Goltzius. A portrait of the mathematician and astronomer Nicholaus Petri van Deventer, rendered during this epochal period, projects all the same regal bearing as portraits of kings and princes by other, better-known artists. And like other portraits, commissioned to extol the interests and influence of a monarch, this image was devised as a promotional device to promote the subject’s manuals on mathematics, accounting and the use of globes. Petri is pictures with globe and dividers, with other instruments, like a sextant and rulers on the table. Above his right shoulder is a polyhedron, symbol of proficiency in geometry; above the left, an armillary sphere, denoting knowledge in the field of astronomy. These tropes are intended to communicate to the sophisticated reader that Petri is a master in various disciplines and in the world around him. As noted in the exhibition text, “Despite the inscription at the top of the print (‘Man proposes and God disposes’), Goltzius presents [his client in a flattering light], as an expert in full control.”

The rich collection of over 200 prints and artifacts on exhibit at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum is drawn from the university’s extensive collection. The exhibition reinforces the premise that there were close and mutually-beneficial links between artists and scientists, emphasizing that exchanges of influence could work both ways. Artists-as-skilled-technicians and scientists eager to shed the medieval label of extraneous dabblers found solace and respect in one another’s skills. The invention and expanded use of the printing press, paper production and broader dissemination of printed images and text created a ‘perfect storm’ in the late 16th century—the powers of observation and the desire to investigate any-and-all features of the natural world combined with the artist’s ability to give form and substance to those discoveries. This partnership gave rise to a period of prodigious learning known as the Northern European Renaissance.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

The exhibition, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe will be on display at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum until December, 10, 2011 and then at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL from January 17th-April 8, 2012.

__________________________________

 End Notes:

Image 1. Hendrick Goltzius, The Great Hercules, 1589, engraving sheet. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gray Collection of Engravings Fund, G4613. Photo: Department of Digital Imaging and Visual Resources, Harvard Art Museums, © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Arthur M. Sackler Museum, one of Harvard University Museums, Cambridge, MA

Image 2. Stradanus (Jan van der Straet), From Nova reperta (New inventions and discoveries of modern times), c. 1599-1603. Hans Collaert the younger, after Nostradanus, Title Page (detail). Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, BF.1998.9.10.

Hans von Gersdorff and Hans Wechtlin the elder, Instruments for Use in Cranial Surgery, in Gersdorff, Field manual for the treatment of wounds, 1540. End Note #14.

Image 3. Heinrich Vogtherr the elder, Anatomy, or, a Faithful Reproduction of the Body of a Female, Strasbourg: Jacob Fröhlich, 1544. Woodcuts with hand-coloring and letterpress. Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, ff QM33.A16. Photo: Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. (left: viewing flap raised; right: flap lowered)

Image 4. Unknown woodcutter, Anatomy of the Bones of the Human Body (1493). Woodcut with hand- coloring. Photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München.

Image 5. Andreas Vesalius and unknown woodcutter, Title Page, from Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septum (Seven books on the fabric of the human body), Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1543. Woodcut and letterpress image. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the SmithKline Beckman Corporation Fund, 1949, 1949-97-41a.

Image 6. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Engraving. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray, G1098. Photo: Department of Digital Imaging and Visual Resources, Harvard Art Museums, © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Image 7. Hans Baldung, called Grien, Dissection of the Scalp (left), Exposure of the Hemispheres of the Brain (right), from Walter Ryff, Des Aller furtrefflischsten, höchsten und adelichsten geschöpffs aller Creaturen […] (On the most sublime, elevated, and noble creature of all creatures), Strasbourg, 1541. Woodcuts and letterpress and hand coloring, sheets. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the SmithKline Beckman Corporation Fund, 1982-40-1f-o.

Image 8. Georg Glockendon the elder, after Hans Burgkmair the elder, People of Africa and India (detail), Neuremberg, 1511. Woodcut and letterpress from five blocks on six sheets, frieze. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University. Purchased with the Susan A.E. Morse Fund, 1962, Typ 520.11.428 F.

Georg Brentel the younger, from Pamphlet describing the construction and function of a conical sundial, 1615. See End Note #15.

Image 9. Jacques de Gheyn II, Great Lion, c. 1590. Engraving. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Anonymous Fund for the Acquisition of Prints Older than 150 Years, 2009.46. Photo: Department of Digital Imaging and Visual Resources, Harvard Art Museums, © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Image 10. Jan Saenredam, Beached Whale near Beverwijk, 1602. Engraving. New Bedford Whaling Museum, Kendall Collection, 2001.100.6017.

Image 11. Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515. Woodcut and letterpress. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Stephen Bullard Memorial Fund, by exchange, 68.247. Photo: Photograph © 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Image 12. Albrecht Dürer and Johannes Stabius, after Conrad Heinfogel, Map of the Northern Celestial Hemisphere, 1515. Woodcut with handcoloring. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, Inv. 118930. Photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München.

Image 13. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Nicolaus Petri van Deventer, 1595. Engraving. Harvard University Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of John S. Newberry, M6486. Photo: Department of Digital Imaging and Visual Resources, Harvard Art Museums, © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Image 14. Hans von Gersdorff and Hans Wechtlin the elder, Instruments for Use in Cranial Surgery, in Gersdorff’s Field manual for the treatment of wounds, Strasbourg: Hans Schott, 1540. Book with woodcuts with hand-coloring. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the SmithKline Beckman Corporation Fund, 1949-97-11. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Image 15. Georg Brentel the younger, from Pamphlet describing the construction and function of a conical sundial, Lauingen: Jacob Winter, 1615. Pamphlet with engravings and woodcuts. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Anonymous Fund for the Acquisition of Prints Older than 150 Years, 2007.205. Photo: Department of Digital Imaging and Visual Resources, Harvard Art Museums, © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Karen Jacobsen, Chorus of Tubeworms, w/c, 48x48" Photo:Muscarelle Museum of Art staff

“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”  ~Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.” ~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” ~ Jules Verne , 20,000 Leagues under the Sea

Imagine, if you can, that your destination is a leviathan labyrinth, teeming with “never-before-seen” but now, “never-to-be forgotten”, vegetation, organisms and sea creatures, all thriving in abyssal sea vents, assuming a palette of cool, delicate gray and browns, juxtaposed with ochre, hot pink, red and oranges.

Experiencing Beyond the Edge of the Sea  is to embark on that deep ocean adventure –the thrill of the aqua-blue-through-black descent and search, primordial discoveries, and finally, the artful, intelligently-rendered seascapes that dramatically animate the voyage. artes fine arts magazine

Tu'i Malila Vents, Lau Basin, mixed media, 32x40"

The project is the other-worldly culmination of work by submersible pilot/ marine scientist, Cindy Lee Van Dover and artist/collaborator, Karen Jacobsen. The women have together pioneered numerous forays into the deep, culling their combined efforts’ trove to include 75 (plus five specially-commissioned) mixed media works, for the traveling exhibit–originally exhibited at The College of William and Mary’s, Muscarelle Museum. In speaking of the project’s import, museum director Aaron H. De Groft, references prehistoric cave painters and the likes of Darwin and Audubon, adding that “these two incredible women are as forward thinking and cutting edge for our time as earlier vanguards, Matilda of Canossa, Isabella d’Estes, and Maria de’Medici…”

“The deep sea is not an obvious place to dedicate a life to science . Few of us find our way there. It has none of the enviro-political cachet of an Amazonian rainforest, Alaskan tundra, or Arctic ice shelf. When I first became interested in the deep sea, there was not even the fantasia world tenanted by alien-looking and gigantically proportioned tubeworms to attract notice. Their discovery, among many others, was still several years away.” ~Cindy Lee Van Dover, The Octopus Garden, p.9.

Dr Cindy Less Van Dover, Alvin pilot, Exhibit curator

“My decision [as an artist] is to be in the field amidst my subject matter—this is not a novel inspiration. I follow in the footsteps of other naturalist artists, including the plein air painters, the Fauvists, and the others who have done the same thing for centuries. But my motif, my plein air, is plein eau (water), and I am submerged not at scuba depths but at bone-crushing depths of a mile or more beneath the surface of the sea.” ~Karen Jacobsen, Exhibition Catalogue: Beyond the Edge of the Sea, p. 20.

It was the mid-1970’s when three-person submersibles, Alvin and Cyana, were first built and available to the scientific community, allowing researchers to dive two and one-half miles down for deep sea exploration, revealing a “riot of life” thriving in sulfide-laden geothermal hot springs.

Aosisia species (probably new), Saguaro, Pacific Antarctic Ridge, 2334 meters (2005)

Not surprisingly, Cindy Van Dover was the first woman to pilot the Alvin and has availed her scientific mission of discovery of its technology in over one-hundred dives. Her technical expertise, paired with Karen Jacobsen’s naturalistic, creative sensibility in Beyond the Edge of the Sea, has gained the attention and respect of former NASA Astronaut and fellow-Alvin diver, Dr. Katherine D. Sullivan. She recounts in the show’s comprehensive catalogue, how her own admittedly stale memory of space travel only came to life when jogged, “like a bolt of lightening,” by a piece of inspirational music. And that from the first woman to walk in space! “Nearly a quarter of a century has passed, “she muses, “but this music has lost none of its effect: I’m instantly back in orbit when I hear it, completely absorbed in a flood of vivid memories.”

“Beyond the Edge of the Sea worked similar magic on me,” Sullivan continues, ”transporting me back to the pressure sphere of Alvin …nobody is ‘doing’ art or ‘doing’ science at moments like this. Instead, every fiber and cognitive circuit of your being is alert and active at once…open on all levels to learning, that most quintessential human activity.”

“Reaching the sea floor is a study in understatement. Although the technological feat seems akin to sending a man into orbit about the earth, Alvin dives up to 4,500 meters [14,000+feet] below the surface of the sea, day in and day out, following a routine that is stunningly anticlimactic. There is no countdown, no army of personnel to supervise the launch or recovery. Even the audience of curious scientists diminishes to naught after they have watched one of two launches […] The submersible’s and ship’s crews pride themselves on making the whole operation seem effortless. ~Cindy Lee Van Dover, The Octopus Garden, p.29.

Deep-Diving Human Occupied Vessel, Alvin. Photo: Mark Spear, Woods Hole Oceanographic Instit., MA

“The descent to the seafloor in Alvin is a lesson in the blue color palette, from vibrant tropical hues of cyan, cerulean, and turquoise, into more saturated cobalt, ultramarine, Prussian blue, indigo, anthraquinone deep blue, and on into inky black layers below 500 meters, where the last light fades away and there can be no more color. We sink further into darkness. Cindy slips a tape of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons into the player and the music seems alive as it rolls around the sphere.  Through the view port, small animal—zooplankton—flare like tiny shooting stars through space.” ~ Karen Jacobsen, Exhibition Catalogue: Beyond the Edge of the Sea, p.22.

The exhibition’s vibrant collection is especially attractive and effective in its uniquely intuitive blend of art and science– the “alien” life forms so sensitively and respectfully treated as to take on a naturalistic, rather than freakishly clinical, tone. Jacobsen confirms that she is devoted to striving to “emphasize a specific morphological attribute or behavior….once I immerse myself in an illustration, I always find some marvelous biological ingenuity, something beautiful and unique about the animal.”

Welk Snail, Hermit Crab, 6-Armed Starfish, Bering Sea (2003)

It is with a similarly respectful manner and sense of wonder that Cindy Van Dover shares her bottomless wealth of deep ocean knowledge and interpretation of its creatures, their behaviors and environments. She has also garnered the inclusion of several essays by other prominent members of the scientific community for Beyond the Edge of the Sea.

In his contribution to the exhibit catalogue, NASA’s John D. Rummel recalls chief Galapagos Rift scientist, Jack Corliss’ findings: “While details may be debated, this hypothesis offers a viable explanation of how life could both arise in an energetically and chemically dynamic environment capable of forming new organic molecules and, once established, survive recurrent asteroid impacts of Earth….then life might just as easily arise on other worlds where hot rock and water react to form hot springs.”

“The stunning implication is that submarine hydrothermal systems, fueled by the heat of volcanic processes, can support life in the absence of sunlight. Vent water may be the ultimate soup in the sorcerer’s kettle […] Deep-sea vents may have been the site where life originated on the planet.” ~Cindy Lee Van Dover, The Octopus Garden, p.56.

Eyeless Shrimp, Rainbow, Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 2314 meters (2001)

“As we approach the periphery of the vent area, clues tell us we are getting close […] Soon we see the first white clams and mounds of mussels sitting in cracks between pillows of basalt. The sulfur yellow of the mussels against the blackness is a visual delight […] Small snails bejewel the mussels and lobster-like galatheid crabs perch like sentries atop the mounds. This is a warm and colorful oasis of life in a cold desert of black. ~ Karen Jacobsen, Exhibition Catalogue: Beyond the Edge of the Sea, p.23.

That possibility (or, if you prefer, probability) connects NASA’s astrobiological research for extraterrestrial life forms with that of man’s search for earth’s own biological origins.

Since Alvin’s earliest explorations, research from subsequent voyages has yielded and strengthened evidence suggesting that life on earth likely spawned in a young, deep-sea environment, and it has also strengthened Cindy Van Dover’s resolve to continue her ocean mission.

Lavender Octopus on Mussels, West Florida Escarpment Seep, 3293 meters (2000)

“Since the discovery of the hydrothermal vents in 1977,” says Van Dover, “the pace of exploration in the deep sea has steadily increased…Man has observed less than one percent of the seafloor…During the twentieth century, the deep sea became accessible. In this twenty-first century,” she predicts, “the deep sea will become known.”

And, thanks to the collaborative, innovative success of Cindy Van Dover and Karen Jacobsen in Beyond the Edge of the Sea, we, too, are able to share in that knowledge—and beauty—of the deep.

By Katherine Arcano, Contributing Editor

___________________________________ 

Beyond the Edge of the Sea will be showing at the Ebling Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from September 16, 2011-January 31, 2012. Beyond the Edge was brought to UW in conjunction with UW-Madison’s Geology Museum, with funding provided by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Scientific & Expeditionary Illustrator, Karen Jacobsen, at her shipboard work station (2003)

This exhibition is a collaborative effort involving Cindy Lee Van Dover, U.S. Navy-qualified, deep-diving Alvin pilot-in-command and explorer, with more than one-hundred dives to her credit. She is currently the Harvey W. Smith Professor of Biological Oceanography in the Division of Marine Science and Conservation of the Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, where she serves as Chair of the Division, Director of the Undergraduate Certificate in Marine Science and Conservation, and Director of the Marine Laboratory.

Dr. Van Dover is the author of numerous scientific articles, as well as The Octopus’s Garden; Hypothermal Vents and other Mysteries of the Deep Sea. New York: Addison Wesley Press, 1996.

Scientific and expeditionary illustrator, Karen Jacobsen, has worked jointly with Dr. Van Dover for 15-years, accompanying her on numerous dives around the world and recording the findings of the Alvin’s deep sea explorations, both while on board the mothership, the research vessel (R/V) Atlantis, and back in her studio.

Crab species found with Whale Fall #7, Sagami Bay, 923 meters (2006)

The exhibition, Beyond the Edge of the Sea: Diversity of Life in the Deep Ocean Wilderness, curated by Dr. Van Dover, highlights the findings of numerous dives and represents a commitment on the part of these two experts to merge the language of science and art in unique and innovative ways. They bring the little-known and rarely observed world of undersea life to light in dramatic and colorful terms. Cindy and Karen have candidly shared their thoughts, feelings and observations, providing the world with extraordinary documentation of their shared experience, in the hopes of increasing understanding and appreciation for our deep-ocean environments.

The exhibition, Beyond the Edge of the Sea is available for showing at select venues. Please contact traveling exhibitions at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at The College of William & Mary, museum@wm.edu

Or go to the Web site: http//:web.wm.edu/muscarelle/exhibitions/traveling/beyond/images.html

Or contact the principles at:

Dr. Aaron de Groft, Director, Muscarelle Museum of Art: adegroft@wm.org

Dr. Cindy Van Dover: c.vandover@duke.edu or http://oceanography.ml.duke.edu/vandover/

Karen Jacobsen: insituart@gmail.com

In collaboration with: The Muscarelle Museum of Art; The College of William and Mary; Duke University and The North Carolina Maritime Museum.

With financial support from: The National Science Foundation and the NASA Astrobiology Institute

I

(Left) Heinrich Kley, Harvest Time (Erntezeit), pen and ink (c.1908-10)

Little known, even today, the question has to be asked: who was this brilliantly acerbic social commentator, Heinrich Kley? This was a question that was probably also being asked in Munich at the time his work was first published, because the sketches aroused a considerable amount of interest. Actually, Kley was one of the last men who could be expected to create such imaginative work. artes fine arts magazine

Sabatage (Betriebsstorung)

Before 1908, he had simply been one of thousands of capable academic artists. Born in 1963, in Karlsruhe in the Rhineland, he received his first training in the ‘practical arts’ curriculum of the Karlsruhe Akademie, one of many technical schools scattered around Germany during the decades book-ending the turn of the century. He continued his studies in Munich under the traditional tutelage of studio artist, C. Frithjof Smith. His earliest work, from 1888 to about 1892, consisted of portraits, still lifes, city scenes and historical paintings—mostly unexceptional work. Some of his work found its way into museum collections and a handful of murals graced public buildings in Baden Baden and elsewhere.

Kley had also created for himself a small reputation, in the 1890s, as a competent depicter of industrial scenes. Working in both oil and watercolor, he gathers his subject matter from the processes of manufacturing, as industrialization became an increasingly common feature of the German landscape. He turned the forces of industry—coal, steam and sweat—into paintings, showing considerable understanding of the processes involved in industry. Critics at the time wrote that, “He captured the poetry of the modern machine world.” Those images, along with his landscapes of the Black Forest garnered considerable attention from the press, but none belied the work in pen and ink that would soon made him famous.

Hey Diddle (Dulich)

The Heinrich Kley of record was not the Kley who was now producing volumes of sketches and submitting them to Die Jungend and the other Munich satirical periodical, Simplizissimus. An important transformation had occurred for reasons that may never be known. The Heinrich Kley who once “caught the poetry” of factories now revealed the devil lurking behind the smokestacks; the Kley who painted symbolically acceptable and politically inoffensive historical murals in city halls and post offices now skewered the bureaucracy at every possible occasion. Kley had now become a “Rubens corrupted by Rabelais.”

Based on his prolific artistic output for popular, left-leaning periodicals, Kley quickly became well-known. Even beyond the technical virtuosity which his pen sketches showed, he captured the disillusionment that had become a strong undercurrent (despite the war spirit that existed at other levels in society), his visual jibes achieving a strong emotional resonance with his audiences. He was a deft burster of political bubbles; even more shocking in his perceptive send-ups of bourgeois German society. Social life, as illustrated by Kley, took on the quality of Restif de la Brettone or Crebillon, with cruelty, pain and laughter emerging unexpectedly in the jittery, highly-personalized lines that cris-crossed social conventions and cultural trends of the day.

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), Hell (1546)

Kley was now immersing himself in the fun-house mirrored world of metaphor, irony and paradox as widely bizarre as the visions of Hieronymus Bosch, the elder Breughel, Goya or the animal scrolls of 13th century Japan—sharing obvious affinities with both. Animals and monsters and weird emergences of bestiality from a human base all served to symbolize the various vices, foibles and follies besetting mankind. Human virtues were of little interest to Kley.

At first glance, we might think that Kley had some deep symbolism in mind, with his elephants, bird-women, satyrs, crocodiles and assorted chimeras. But a closer examination shows that there are some elementary similarities became many of the themes commonly represented in Kley’s work: elephants, babies and children share common traits of awkwardness, shyness and endearing innocence (elephants may have entered his roster of caricatures because of their popularity in advertising of the day—the result of African and Asian colonization). Perhaps this is the reason that the image of the elephants and their wet nurse arouse feelings of horror and dismay in some viewers. Elsewhere, his symbolism is often traditional: the centaur usually equals lust, the faun or devil is usually to be found where human suffering is a predominant theme. Inversions of images are sometimes used, like racing snails, word and visual puns and thought play also find their way into his images. The erotic element is strong, and there is a certain infantile delight in words, utensils and postures suggestive of excretion—an obvious attempt to shock at all costs.

Wet Nurse to Elephants (Die Elefantenamme)

As Kley’s work is considered in an historical context, they now seem to be an integral part of the multi-channeled artistic outflow that was occurring in Europe during the tumultuous 1910s and early `20s. Kley lived in the same pre-war Munich that harbored Kandinsky, Klee and the other members of the Blaue Reiter art movement. Yet, despite coincidence in time and place, there seems to have been no social or artistic relationship between Kley and the modernists. Perhaps it was a difference in age: Kley in that period would have been about 50, paunchy and solemn, according to a self portrait of the time. Perhaps it was because Kley was more absorbed in the world of pain and revulsion than they were. Perhaps Kley, an astonishing draftsman whose animal sketches rank technically among the best, had little understanding, patience or sympathy for the experimental artistic heights that the early moderns were attempting to achieve through their abstract and reductionist work.

Untitled

So, this was the Heinrich Kley during his last period of high-profile productivity, between 1908 and World War I; a mysterious satirist, whose frequent inclusion of satyric figures may have been self-referential—much like Picasso’s frequently-appearing metamorphosed bull—lending first-person intensity to the body of political and socially-charged drawings. His emotional range was palpable in his work: he felt pain where others laughed, and laughed sardonically, when others remained silent. Little is known about his personally, beyond what can be seen in the unpredicted reversal in the style of his work and the personality that seems to emerge in the sketches that survive to this day. Apart from occasional appearances in German pamphlets and art journals until about 1923, Kley disappears from the artistic stage until 1939, when his work appeared in the March issue of Gebrauchsgraphik (Practical Graphics). There, he is cited as an outstanding commercial artist and a number of his industrial scenes, in pen and ink, with color washes, are reproduced. After this, he drops from sight.

Testing for Stress and Strain (Die Belastungsprobe)

Looking at the trajectory of Freidrich Kley’s career in the context of 20th century German history, it is easy to see why his radical take on the country’s political culture and society would have been feared and disliked by the expanding sphere of influence of the Third Reich. His sketches reflect the growing tensions of the early 20th century and the strong undercurrent of disillusionment that Europe was prey to. His frantic, posturing brainchildren lash mercilessly at bureaucracy, militarism, false “Gemütlichkeit” (coziness), the eccentricities of reformers, the ballast of majesty, and many other facets of a conflict-weary civilization. Many official cultural texts produced during the period, 1920-1940 ignored Kley’s contribution to the field of art and mass-media magazines. He was passed over while many artists of lesser ability were discussed, principally because their work conformed to the right-wing conservative message of the new ruling class, bent on reshaping German history in the interests of European domination.

Kley’s death has been reported many times, so much so that it is not certain when he actually died. Various authoritative sources cite 1940, 1945, and finally, August 2, 1952. Kley, who perpetually evoked the demonic and absurd in man, would have enjoyed this confusion.

Reviewed by Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Excerpted from a November, 1960, Dover Publications, Inc. forward to sketchbooks (Skizzenbuch I and II), presenting Kley’s work. While out of print, copies of The Drawings of Heinrich Kley are available through book sellers on the Internet.

B

Historically, Johnson’s work has been under-examined in the modern art literature, but awareness and interest in this artist has been on the rise in recent years. President Obama created a buzz when he selected four of Johnson’s works from the Smithsonian’s collections—the most by any one artist—to decorate the White House. Now, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) has joined with Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, to bring Johnson’s work to communities across the nation. This fall marks the opening and release of William H. Johnson: An American Modern, a traveling exhibition and scholarly book of the same name. 

(Above) William H. Johnson, Self Portrait (c. 1923-1926). Collection Smithsonian American Art Museum.  All other images courtesy Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD.artes fine arts magazine  

W.H. Johnson, Boats on Keterminde (1938)

Forty years ago, in 1971, after receiving a historic donation of over 1000 pieces of Johnson’s art from the William Harmon Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum published the first book on Johnson, cataloging their collection of his work. Although Johnson had reached a level of fame and exhibited widely in the 1930s and early 1940s, his career came to abrupt halt in 1945 with the onset of severe medical issues, and his subsequent institutionalization. This book re-introduced Johnson’s art to the world through black and white reproductions, along with a biography of the artist and a brief analysis. Twenty years later, scholar Richard J. Powell published his groundbreaking monograph, Homecoming: the Art and Life of William H. Johnson. His biographical-critical overview of Johnson’s life and work was grounded in extensive research and brought Johnson to the fore—inspiring multiple exhibitions, articles, a children’s book, and new analysis of his art. 

Today, 20 years after Powell published Homecoming, a new book from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and Morgan State University introduces a range of scholarly debate currently surrounding the artist. Thanks to the foundation of knowledge laid by Powell and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, William H. Johnson: An American Modern is able to present Johnson in a new light and analyzes important themes and patterns in his work. The book also examines Johnson’s work on a different scale: This volume considers just 20 paintings from Morgan State’s holdings. The Morgan collection encapsulates the pivotal stages in Johnson’s career as a modernist painter, including post-impressionist and expressionist works reminiscent of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Soutine, and the vernacular paintings in which he articulates his specific, unforgettable voice as an artist. 

Aunt Alice (1944)

These works were acquired in 1967 by James E. Lewis, then the director of the Museum of Art at Morgan State. The terms of the Harmon Foundation donation to the Smithsonian enabled Mr. Lewis, along with representatives from a handful of other historically black colleges and universities, to select works by Johnson for their institutions’ permanent collections. Lewis was the first to arrive and had first choice of the works available. His keen eye aided him in selecting these specific 20 pieces, which together offer a concise overview of Johnson’s life and work. 

This new book presents Johnson as a quintessential modern painter firmly planted in the pantheon of great American artists. In this new text, some of the world’s premier scholars of William H. Johnson and African American art history examine the artist and his modern artistic genius in fresh new ways, including his relationship with one of his earliest patrons, the Harmon Foundation; the critical role played by scholars at the nation’s historically black colleges and universities; the context of Johnson’s experiences living in Harlem and his deep southern roots; and Johnson as a trailblazer in the genres of still life and landscape painting. 

Among the essays presented in his volume are two new works by Richard Powell, grounded in his lifetime of studying Johnson and his work: “Trembling Vistas, Primal Youth: William H. Johnson’s Expressionism,” and “Devotion and Disrepute: William H. Johnson’s Florence, South Carolina, Paintings, circa 1944.” Viewed as discreet analyses, each tells the story of a moment of change in Johnson’s style. Read in tandem, however, they tell a story of profound artistic growth and maturation. “Trembling Vistas” explores Johnson’s hesitant departure from his academic training into the realm of European modernism, and “Devotion and Disrepute” examines Johnson’s “vertiginous turn” away from the visual language of Expressionism to the neo-primitive vernacular employed in the final period of his career (William H. Johnson: An American Modern, 92). 

Cagnes, White Houses (c. 1928-29)

For many critics, the decisive shift in Johnson’s style discussed in Powell’s second essay constituted “mutin[y] against predictable techniques” (91). Powell acknowledges that the use of this vernacular was a significant risk for Johnson, as it “contradicted what many people expected from an academically trained, European associated artist” (90); however, Powell’s analysis of Johnson’s oeuvre throughout the two essays supports Johnson’s own explanation of his new style, which he voiced in a 1946 interview with the New York Amsterdam News: “It was not a change but a development.” 

Powell muses over the significance of this statement in his second essay (93): “Describing his French and Scandinavian landscapes as developmental works prior to the largely figurative paintings of the 1940s is intriguing, suggesting that the lessons learned as an Expressionist charted the path to becoming a neo-primitive.” 

His reference to “the lessons learned” during Johnson’s Expressionist days indirectly points to his earlier essay in this volume (“Trembling Vistas”), in which he presents Johnson’s first ten years abroad as a period of continued art education (albeit in the modernist tradition). In “Trembling Vistas,” Powell documents Johnson’s initially cautious “experiments in various forms of modernism” and attempts to “work out a style of [his] own” (29, 27). His cogent analysis reveals that over a period of one decade, Johnson’s work become progressively bolder, his paint thicker, and his colors more brightly hued as he absorbed various artistic influences and immersed himself deeper into the art and social scene of European Expressionism. 

Lofoten Island (1937)

Although Johnson eventually abandons his thick impasto technique and solid Expressionist approach in favor of an “emphatic[ally] two-dimensional” style, the impact of other lessons learned in his Expressionist period is evident in Johnson’s vernacular work (90). Of particular note, says Powell, is Johnson’s early epiphany that “to truly represent the world around them, the artist must become one with his/her subject” (24). Throughout his career, Johnson focuses on his individual subjective experience of his subjects, rather than trying to capture objective reality. He articulated this objective to a Scandinavian journalist in 1932, saying, “my aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually.” In doing so, Powell claims, Johnson is “articulat[ing] in line, shape, and hue the social and psychological dimensions of peoples and places and their interconnections”—a focus which he began to develop in his early days in Europe but which is seen most clearly in his later work (25). 

Danish Youth (1930)

In his 1946 interview with the New York Amsterdam News, Johnson asserts that, “In all my years of painting, I have had only one absorbing and inspired idea…– to give, in simple and stark form – the story of the Negro as he has existed.” While Johnson’s achievement of this goal is readily apparent in his later works, his early works seemed to deviate from this idea. However, Powell argues in “Trembling Vistas” that Johnson’s interest in “primitiveness and tradition” is evident even in his early years as a professional painter. For one image, inspired by a brief trip home to the American South, Johnson expresses his hope “‘to abstract’ and to put onto canvas that ‘something’ which the surrounding ‘little Negro boys and girls’ possessed” in a letter written to a sponsor in 1930, eight years before he begins exploring African American subject matter in depth (28). In addition, Johnson’s depictions of rural Scandinavian folk culture served as an important foundation for his later exploration of black folk life in the U.S. Although Johnson ultimately—in Powell’s analysis—came to find his voice as “an authentic community commentator,” highlighting the importance of the African American story his paintings told, his “attraction to the primitive was neither race-based nor specific to non-Western cultural traditions,” as evidenced by his earlier work in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (91, 31). 

Ring around the Rosey (1944)

According to Powell, “Johnson’s was a blackness that refused to proselytize for its inclusion in high society; that wasn’t about to apologize for its coarse honesty and intrusive, antithetical visibility; that stood, or tumbled, in its rightful universality alongside other races and ethnicities…” (95). In William H. Johnson: An American Modern, the “rightful universality” of Johnson’s work is celebrated as it is examined in the context of other modern painters of “other races and ethnicities.” The essays in this collection explore the ways in which Johnson marshaled the ideas and techniques of European modernism to create a highly personal visual language and capture authentically and respectfully the American story with which he was most familiar—that of the African American community. Powell eloquently articulates the evolution of Johnson’s singular style and the continuity of his philosophical vision from his early days as a bohemian Expressionist in Europe to his final paintings which offer a haunting and insightful commentary on rural Southern African American life. This new book brings to life Johnson’s conscious combination of formal training, international influences, and personal experiences to pare his style down to the very simplest, starkest terms. He achieves this without sacrificing the strength of his message or the profound emotional quality he could instill in his works, forever marking him as a truly American modern. 

By Robin Meyer, Contributing Writer 

William H. Johnson: An American Modern, by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and Morgan State University, published by University of Washington Press. Includes essays from Richard J. Powell, Leslie King-Hammond, David Driskell and Lowery Stokes Sims. The exhibition of the same name began a national tour September 10, 2011at the Gari Melchers Home and Studio in Fredericksburg, VA., and will tour the country through 2014. Visit www.sites.si.edu for a detailed itinerary.

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” ~Pablo Picasso

The exuberance of a child exploring her world is a pleasure to watch. Children convey an unbridled truth and inventiveness in their observations of the people and objects around them. Most importantly, they believe in the absoluteness of their place at the center of the universe and the fantastic possibilities of everything within their reach. The magic of children’s art lies in its ability to engage the imagined world, unencumbered by rules of physics or probability; where they may ascribe unique shape and color to everything they see around them. We were all part of that world at one time in our lives. We once all intuited the secrets to unbridled creativity. At one time, we were each artists in our own right. Only a small fraction of us, however, have attempted to find our way back.  

(above) Jean Miro, Tete bleue et oiseau fleche (1935). Private collection artes fine arts magazine  

Drawing by Keira Bucher, age 5 (2010)

Helen Levitt, Street Drawing, NYC, silver print (c.1938)

 The idea that modern art looks like something that can be accomplished by a child is a cliché. Yet, most artists understand that to paint in an abstract style is more difficult than representational art by an order of magnitude. The logical breakdown is two-fold: first, to assume that the child is intending to create an abstract work of art. They are, in fact, using untrained muscles and a set of drawing skills not yet impacted by the rules of perspective, relative size and color guidelines that impede the rest of us. They are working hard to create a realistic drawing and, for them, their effort, no matter how quaint or ‘naive’ in our view, is usually a success in theirs; the second is to assume that the professional artist is incapable of creating a refined rendering of their subject. Suspending the formal rules of rendering or mark-making in art, in the interest of a desired effect or impact on the viewer, is only possible once you understand what those rules are! Their finished product may look accidental or even erroneous, but the intention is most often deliberate and calculated.  

To what end, you may ask?  

In order to understand the apparent visual link between children’s art and its possible influence on the ‘childlike’ features of certain modernist works, it is important to highlight the research of Jonathan Fineberg and his publication, The Innocent Eye (1997). Years of exhaustive research on the topic resulted in his curating a 1995 exhibition, “The Innocent Eye-Children’s Art and the Modern Artist”, at two European museums. Feinberg noted that, “the roots of child art lie in the Romantic movement and their notion of ‘genius’ in the form of childlike innocence. Accordingly: they believed that children have more direct access to artistic inspiration; the ability to see things objectively (what Ruskin, in 1850, called, ‘without consciousness of what they signify’; the ability to see beyond the appearance to the ‘truth’ of things and fourth; a privileged view of the mysteries of life.” (Editor’s note: as youths, they were believed to be that much closer to their Creator, chronologically— and therefore, to the spiritual—than their adult counterparts).  

Wassily Kandinsky, Little Pleasures (1913) includes references to drawings of his childhood village in Russia

Fineberg then goes on to say that, “As realism and then Impressionism placed unprecedented priority on objective, unfettered vision, the notion of what Ruskin had termed, ‘the innocence of the eye’ was transformed into an active aesthetic principle.” So, as the turn of the 20th century ushered in a whole new way of looking at and thinking about the world, led by advances in science, industry and technology, artistic pursuits had to go in search of appropriate inspiration. One result was the re-birth of the naïveté of simpler times. It took the form of the Arts and Craft Movement in the U.S. and t he introduction of African and other remote tribal cultural influences in artistic expression, drawn from worlds far-removed from Western society. This so-called ‘Primitivism’ was an increasingly important influence in the work of major European artists of that time. There was erroneously thought to be a bridge between these far-flung examples of crudely-executed figurative sculpture and drawings and the creative output of children. Although misguided in their view, misogyny and ethnocentrism nevertheless prevailed, as newly-explored parts of the world opened to the scrutiny of the Anglo-European intellectual community.  

Joan Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)

As a result of this assumed link, the experimental, even politically-radical climate within artistic movements in Europe, surrounding the World War I period, would begin to make allowances for the inclusion of children’s art. As more traditional sources of inspiration and old-school methods of making art were being challenged, new, more ‘modern’ approaches dominated the scene. Again, Fineberg notes that Andre Derain commented, in 1902, “I like to study the drawings of kids. That’s where the truth is, without a doubt.” August Macke, in The Blue Rider Almanac commented, “Are not children more creative in drawing directly from the secret of their sensations than the imitator of Greek forms?” And he observes that, for the Dadaists, childhood served as a symbol of their strategic retreat from social norms in search of spontaneity. For the Russian Symbolist painter, Leon Bakst, “what delights and moves us [in children’s’ pictures] is candor/sincerity, movement and clear, clean color.”  

Pablo Picasso, Paloma en Bleu (1952)

Artists like Henri Matisse noted the importance of children’s art, but did not eagerly embrace it as an influence in his work; Wassily Kandinsky collected children’s work and actively included imagery from some of these drawings in his paintings, particularly in his earlier pre-war landscapes; Picasso was known to say that, “when [he] was a child, [he] could draw like Raphael. It took [him] years to learn to draw like a child.” While he never admittedly embraced children’s motifs in his work, he was known to follow, with interest, the drawings of his own and other children. Ironically, it is to certain aspects of Picasso’s oeuvre that the attribution of ‘childlike’ is most frequently applied. This is clearly unwarranted, as the complexity of his imagery is often veiled in the appearance of simplicity, even crudeness. These characteristics of seeming spontaneity and simplicity-of-line took him, as for most artists choosing to work in this style, years to perfect.  

Joan Miro and Paul Klee are often seen to work in a ‘childlike’ style of simple geometric forms and scattered, gravity-defying figuration. For Klee (see, Angelus Novus, 1920), as Fineberg points out, “the discovery of a set of his own childhood drawings set him on a path of cataloguing ‘these primitive beginnings of art’… and to have them serve, in part, as coordinates for his own mature artistic journey.” For Miro, on the other hand, the author notes that his fascination with the drawing of his own daughter, born in 1930, held him spellbound. Unlike his own childhood drawing, which lacked spontaneity and exuberance, Miro spent his lifetime trying to recapture the direct connection to the subject that he believed characterized children’s art. As he told the French art critic, Dora Vallier, “The older I get and the more I master the medium, the more I return to my earliest experiences. I think that at the end of my life I will recover all the forces of my childhood.”  

Jean Dubuffet, Poiro Zanzibar, detail (1962), Private Collection

It can certainly be said that, as the 20th century progressed and the post-World War II period ushered in the Abstract Expressionists like Pollack and de Kooning and Rothko, the art of throwing, dripping, splashing and troweling paint onto canvas in gestures befitting the most aggressive child reached a high point. The expressive immediacy of deliberately ‘bad art’ can be seen in later works by Jean-Michael Basquiat, Karel Apel, Phillip Guston and Jean Dubuffet. The point of their work is not to flaunt the rules learned as a result of years of art training, but to apply those skills in emulating the experiential directness and unfiltered sensations of a child’s perception of the world.  

Their bold attempts at the mastery of naïveté could only be approximations of the truth, as seen through the eyes of a child. Over the generations of the modern and post-modern period, artists have embraced the knowledge that their work can only be a simulation of the vivid reality and unfiltered consciousness of childhood. And every artist has understood that there is no returning.  

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor  

Reference: Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye, Princeton University Press, 1997.

Harbor, Newport, RI, at peak of the season. Photo: Keith W. Stokes

Newport, Rhode Island, widely renowned for its Jazz Festival every August and its Gilded Age, turn-of -the-century mansions—many of the most awesome overlooking the Atlantic – is filled to the brim with hidden and not-so-hidden treasure. Saying that this small enclave of some 26,000 year-round folk (swelling three-fold, plus, in the summertime) is an embarrassment of riches, is a gross understatement, for around every corner await astonishing surprises, many of mesmerizing proportions. fine arts magazine

On a recent, 2 night, 3-day visit there, I dined and wined—well, actually, vodka is my preference— and toured some of the city’s finest wonders.

The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt's 70-room Italianate Newport 'cottage'

Right off the bat, after checking into The Clarkeston – yes, I’d gladly stay there again – I took my father’s advice: “See everything in one fell swoop, get the lay of the land, then return to those places you want to see in depth.” I hopped on the Viking Tour’s Trolley for a guided tour and for ninety minutes was treated to an eye-popping, history-rich lesson in “Newport 101”.

The town’s many Gilded Age mansions cum museums are its biggest draw, as everybody dreams – gilt by association – of being rich. Around three hundred thousand of those dreamers visit the art-filled troves every year. Two of the most popular—Rough Point, the 49-room home of Doris Duke until her death in 1993, and The Breakers, the Vanderbilt’s 70-room summer Italianate “cottage” designed by Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) were at the top of my list. Hunt also designed the façade and the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. His last work, the Breakers, was built in 1893-95, and is over-the-top in royal grandeur. The main hall is fifty wide-by-fifty long-by-fifty feet tall, and a John La Farge (1835-1910) stained glass skylight hovers over the grand staircase. Rough Point, however, its rich interior filled with French furniture, Chinese porcelain, Turkish carpets, and paintings by Gainsborough, Van Dyck, and Renoir– all collected by the tobacco heiress, herself– has a homey, lived-in feel. So personal and present is Duke’s taste that one almost expects her to suddenly waltz into the room. For those interested in fashion, The Sporty Style of Doris Duke exhibition is on view through November 5, featuring a selection of Duke’s clothes and photographs documenting her surfing, swimming, playing golf and tennis, as well as scuba diving and bowling.

John N.A. Griswold House, home of Newport Art Museum & Art Association

Another architectural classic was Richard Morris Hunt’s first major Newport commission–The John N.A. Griswold House (1864). It is the main building of Newport Art Museum & Art Association’s three-building campus, and houses the museum’s permanent collection and exhibitions, both focusing on the work of Newport and southeastern New England artists– contemporary and 18th, 19th and 20th Century. Its walls are a lively walk through the history of American art, populated with paintings by Fitz Henry Lane, George Inness, William Trost Richards, John La Farge, and Gilbert Stuart. Also on view, following in the footsteps of their respective fathers, are works by John Allen Twachtman (1882-1975), son of John Henry Twachtman, and Gilbert Stuart’s daughter, Jane (1812-88).

China Blue, with an installation piece from Firefly Projects. Photo: David Hansen

On the contemporary scene, during my early June visit, I viewed still-current, solo exhibitions by artist China Blue and Trent Burleson, whose work occupies the museum’s largest gallery, with around 22 bird paintings, most dated 2010. This uber-prolific artist is obviously a factory unto himself! Many of his birds soar in full flight, diving for berries and insects amid beautifully-rendered foliage. Though reminiscent of Audubon, they are post modern in their soft colored tones and slightly blurred execution. Viewing Burleson’s paintings, as museum curator Nancy Whipple Grinnell suggests, is as though we are seeing them “through a gossamer veil.” His exhibition ends August 17th.

Firefly Projects is China Blue’s ‘fragility of life’ installation, occupying a chamber-like gallery on the first floor. A small, dark room, it is lit with twinkling blue lights, while sounds, robotics, and several electrifying photographs create an other-worldly feel, where the artist brings us back to our ‘collecting fireflies in a jar childhood.’ Commanding pride of place are two 7 ½-foot artist-constructed trees, on whose thin wooden branches perch flashing LED fireflies, all faithfully synchronized to mimic a mating dance. Known internationally for her interest in the intersection of science, art and technology, the iconoclastic Blue has recorded vibrations emanating from the Eiffel Tower, as well as sounds permeating Venetian canals, the latter with recording devices fixed to the underside of a gondola.

International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum, Newport, RI

The two biggest surprises – who knew such museums even existed – are the International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum and the National Museum of American Illustration at Vernon Court (1898), a Beaux Arts adaptation of a 17th century French Chateau. The mansion was designed by Carrére & Hastings, architects for the New York City Public Library, the U.S. Senate Office Building, and the Frick Collection in New York, and features the work of the most illustrious illustration icons: Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, NS Wyeth, JC Leyendecker, Charles Dana Gibson, and Howard Chandler. Sharing the spotlight through the summer, along with Norman Rockwell’s America exhibition of 70 paintings, is another surprise–writer Tom Wolfe’s humorous pen and ink illustrations from his book, In Our Time, a compilation of essays originally printed in Harper’s Magazine, during the 70’s.

The International Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum—with its 13 manicured grass tennis courts—shares grounds with the recently renovated 1880 Stanford White Casino Theatre, where Orson Wells, Helene Hayes, Lillian Gish, Will Rogers and Oscar Wilde tread the boards. How’s that for theatrical history!? The museum itself, in the historic Newport Casino, was designed by McKim, Mead & White in Victorian shingle-style, and chronicles the history of tennis from the 12th century to the present, in its 18 galleries. It overflows with tennis memorabilia– photographs, videos, art, fashion, trophies, and attire–many donated by the game’s biggest stars: Gussy Moran’s once “scandalous” 1949 Wimbledon lace-trimmed tennis ensemble and a Chris Evert portrait by Warhol – he is everywhere – are among them. While I am still skeptical of interactive anything, I did find the museum’s touch screen research kiosks addictive!

John LaFarge, Snow: January, Southerly Wind, Cloudy Sky and Sunlight (1879), o/c. Courtesy Wm. Vareika Fine Arts

The most serious museum-quality gallery in Newport– some say in all of New England– is William Vareika Fine Arts. I happened upon this little bit of heaven – think of it as a mini Metropolitan Museum or even a room or two at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts – at the tail end of the stunning John La Forge: In Paradise: The Painter and His Muse exhibition, curated by William Vareika, gallery proprietor. Enough of the show remained, though, to set my head spinning! The gallery specializes in the purchase and sale, of 18th, 19th, and 20th century American paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints. One is apt to run across the work of John La Farge, whose estate they represent, as well as the work of William Morris Hunt, John F. Kensett, Winslow Homer, Worthington Whittredge, Alfred T. Bricher, William Trost Richards, William S. Haseltine, George Bellows, John H. Twachtman, Childe Hassam, John S. Sargent, and Martin Johnson Heade– all American artists inspired by Newport’s unique society and the sublime natural environment of Narragansett Bay.

Cloyery Georges, Carrefoure at Adjame (2010). Courtesy Cadeaux de Monde (Gifts of the World)

While my days were spent running with the big boys, on Newport Gallery Night which occurs the second Thursday each month from 5:30-8pm, I managed to get up close and personal to some of the local artists, thanks to my guide du nuit, Katie Dyer, the proprietress of Cadeaux de Monde (Gifts of the World). Her domain is an eclectic, green, fair trade, international folk art gallery, including several of Newport’s own contemporary artists.

My tour started at Cadeaux with Nina Hope Pfanstiehl, a local jewelry and ceramic artist, demonstrating various jewelry wire wrapping techniques. Also catching my attention – it practically jumped off the wall – was Carrefoure at Adjame, an exquisite city scene painting by Cote d’Ivoire painter Cloyery Georges. Interesting, also, was T.M. Dyer’s abstract pen and ink drawings lining the walls of Galerie Escalier, a section of Cadeaux dedicated to New England artists.

Edward Fey, The Sooloo of Salem, Mass (2010). Courtesy Harbor Fine Arts Gallery

Harbor Fine Art Gallery—in a 1704 wooden building in the historic downtown area for 3 years now—specializes in Rhode Island artists, primarily plein air painters, whose subject is Newport and its surroundings. Artist Betty Anne Morris owns and operates the gallery, also featuring original glass art and jewelry. It functions as a studio, as well, where visitors can experience artists immersed in creating new pieces. Laura B. Fernandez’s stained glass fishes, Edward Fey’s ship paintings, and Kathy Weber’s peopled beach scenes are veritable showstoppers. Following a plein air workshop, Morris– previously a leather and freeform basketry enthusiast and purveyor of antiques—very successfully dedicated herself to outdoor painting. She recently converted the top floor of the gallery into The Borden House B-no-B, meaning a soft queen size bed there and breakfast at one of many nearby eateries.

Didi Suydam, PaTh (2005), digital print, 40x40" Courtesy Didi Suydam Contemporary

Artist Didi Suydam and husband, sculptor Peter Diepenbrock, founded Didi Suydam Contemporary 12 years ago, and feature fine art and studio-designed jewelry. The gallery is architecturally light and airy, modern and minimal, and housed in an historic firehouse. It is also a showcase for their own work. While Suydam’s jewelry was displayed elegantly in the back of the gallery, it was her stunning black and white digital photography in front that held my eye. PaTh (2005), an other-worldly photograph of storm clouds–with a graphic ‘T’ symbol placed slightly left of center–is the artist’s attempt, as she explained to me, “to visually convey the metaphysical notion of alternate or coexistent, concurrent realities. The image and the presence of the symbol,” she adds, “may also be interpreted as a metaphor for the passage from the life experience to an afterlife experience.”

The Lady Who Paints Gallery houses both the studio and gallery of Rosemary Kavanagh O’Carroll and is one of the most unique art-viewing spaces in Newport. Part warehouse, gallery, and a little bit salon, it is dedicated solely to her own work, most based on her life experiences. The very Irish O’Carroll – reddish brown hair and freckles add to her charm – is a consummate story teller, verbally and in paint, following her passions wherever they lead.

Rosemary Kavanagh O'Carroll, Flamenco Dancer (2010). Courtesy The Lady Who Paints Gallery

In Grenada, Spain, she explored a cave below Alhambra, where, “There were flamenco gypsy dancers and I was totally fascinated. The woman dancing was intense and raw. There weren’t any windows in the cave, no air to breathe, but it was the real thing. I pulled out my sketch book and started going to work,” O’Carroll told us. “I took photos of her different movements and worked on the paintings in my studio back in America. To document migrant workers, I flew down to Florida, rented a car and drove to Homestead, where they toil in the fields.” Both trips yielded a series of paintings.

Since The Lady Who Paints was the last stop on our whirlwind treasure hunt, I was able to sit and chat for a while. It was a lovely way to end the evening. But this all was just the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully I would be able to return soon, to discover even more!

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

___________________________________________

Newport Contact Information:

Below you will find the websites as well as the telephone numbers of the B & B that I stayed at, the room was large and airy, and the home cooked breakfasts scrumptious, the 3 restaurants I ate at – I had a different lobster dish at each one – and every museum and gallery venue that I visited.

While prices fluctuate season-to-season (summer is the high season), accommodations, eateries, and entertainment can be found to fit every pocket, from baked beans and beer to champagne, caviar, and a yacht in the harbor. Newport’s official website www.gonewport.com also has a wealth of information, from travel packages, special deals, and events, to where to stay, eat, shop, and things to do.

Bannister's Wharf, Newport, RI. Photo: Newport Breeze

The Clarkeston www.innsofNewport.com 28 Clarke Street (800) 524-1386

Viking Tours www.vikingtoursnewport.com (401) 847-6921

The Breakers 44 Ochre Point Avenue www.newportmansions.org (401) 847-1000

Rough Point 680 Bellevue Avenue www.newportrestoration.org (401) 847-8344

Newport Art Museum & Art Association 76 Bellevue Ave. www.newportartmuseum.com (401)488-8200

International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum 194 Bellevue Ave. www.tennisfame.com (401) 849-3990

National Museum of American Illustration www.americanillustration.org (401) 851-8949

William Vareika Fine Arts Gallery 212 Bellevue Avenue www.vareikafinearts.com (401) 849-6149

Cadeaux du Monde 26 Mary Street www.cadeauxdumonde.com (401) 848-0550

One of many Norman Rockwell originals on view at Nat'l Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI

The Lady Who Paints Gallery & Studio 94 Bridge Street www.theladywhopaints.com (401) 450-4791

Harbor Fine Arts 134 Spring Street www.harborfineart.com (401) 338-4462

Borden House B no B 134 Spring Street www.bordenhousenewport.com (401) 338-4462

Located in an old fire house, 25 Mill St. www.didisuydamcontemporary.com (401) 848-9414

The Lady Who Paints Gallery and Studio www.theladywhopaints.com (401) 450-4791

Newport Jazz Festival www.newportjazzfest.net (800) 745-3000

Great shopping and yacht watching at www.bannisterswharf.com

Gas Lamp Grille, 206 Thames Street www.gaslampgrille.com (401) 845-9300 $$

The Cliff Walk Terrace at the Chanler Hotel 117 Memorial Blvd. www.thechanler.com (401) 847-1300

One Bellevue Fine Dining & Seafood Restaurant at the Viking Hotel One Bellevue Avenue www.hotelviking.com for Reservations (401) 848-4824 $$$

Flo’s Clam Shack, 4 Wave Avenue www.flosclamshack.net (401) 847-8141 $