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

I step from the cool marble lobby of a mid-town office building into the blazing sunlight of a New York City summer afternoon. Glancing left and right in the glare, I accommodate my eyes and my will to the next event on my schedule. In the distance the heat rises from the streets and sidewalks of 5th Avenue in visible waves. A maze of stoplights and brake lights blink back at me. My next meeting is in Queens, across the East River, in a large warehouse, turned artist’s studio. Today, I had planned to go subterranean, taking the ‘4’ down to Grand Central, then transferring to the ’7’ train to Queens. But, the heat and the extra weight in my backpack of a large book given to me at my last meeting prove too much. I step to the curb and raise my hand in that casual pointing-to-the-sky way that New Yorkers do to hail a cab.

Within seconds, a yellow Checker pulls up, just missing my toes. I open the back door, throw my pack onto the seat and crawl in. I lean forward and give the driver the address of my destination. He presses a button or two on his meter and we are off! artes fine arts magazine

I am separated from the front seat and the driver by the customary plastic divider, with a small rectangular window in the center. The passenger space is festooned with all the information I should ever need to know about rates, liability and precautions…with my safety in mind, of course. The irony of this strikes me as the driver reaches speeds of close to sixty between stops—and in heavy traffic. His favorite toy seems to be his horn and the sides of his vehicle appear to come dangerously close to brushing both pedestrians and other encroaching vehicles off the road as we speed south to the Queensboro Bridge. I sit rod-stiff, gripping my pack and staring at the side of the driver’s head, trying my best to telepathically communicate the message: “Slow down. I want to live!”

“Are you English?” he suddenly says, in fractured English.

“Excuse me, did you ask me a question? I say, having heard the inquiry, but being momentarily disarmed by how this man can manage to initiate a discussion when I believe he should be using all of his mental faculties to win at the game of “Chicken” he is playing with the other cab drivers on Lexington Avenue.

“Are you English?” he repeats

“Uh…no, American. Why do you ask?”

“I think you sound English when you tell me where you are going. I am in America for six months and I try to learn the difference. Where I am from, you are all English.”

I now dare to drop my eyes from the windshield re-enactment of Bullitt and Steve McQueen’s high speed chase through the streets of San Francisco, to glance at the picture and name on the license posted in a frame on the back of the driver’s seat. In his photograph, he is dark skinned, with a shock of disorderly black hair and dark eyes. I catch his first name as Adam…last name unintelligible.

“Are you Israeli? I ask, using all of my deductive skills to decipher the word, a-dam, meaning ‘first man’ in Hebrew and draw an immediate conclusion from this bit of trivia. I am also trying to pigeonhole the possible ethnic origins of this nascent conversationalist, as he grips the steering wheel of our bright-yellow death wagon. To my chagrin, his eyes are now cast in my general direction, as we careen down 59th Street.

“No, I am Palestinian, from West Bank. I live with my brother’s family in Astoria. Big Arab neighborhood there. Why do you think I am a Jew?”

“Because of your name, ‘Adam’. That is a common name for Jewish men,” I say, trying to rescue my erudition and keep from being dumped into the East River, as we now cross the bridge and I glance through the back window at the Manhattan skyline falling away—hopefully not, in my case, for the last time.

“It is Arab name, too. We both have Adam in our religion. Do you like politics?” he asks, as though trying to spare me the embarrassment I already felt. “I am glad Bush is gone,” he adds, not waiting for an answer to his question. “He hated Palestinians and Sadat. He made nice to Sadat in front of cameras, but he was really a Jew lover.”

“I didn’t like Bush either,” I say, trying to win this man’s loyalty back and talk my way out of a possible hostage-for-cash situation, as I imagine myself missing the upcoming meeting and find myself, instead, bound and gagged in some darkened back room in his brother’s house. “But I think everyone wants peace in the Middle East. It’s just very hard to figure out how to do it so both sides get what they want.”

“We stand a better chance with Obama,” Adam says, “He’s Arab, too, so he is on our side.”

“Adam,” I say, reflexively leaning forward to engage him, knowing full well that I might be throwing my tenuous grasp on my own safety out the window, “Obama is an American. That has been proven time and time again. His interests are exactly the same as yours and mine. He just wants this big problem to be fixed.” I hesitate for a moment then shift the focus away from this no-win situation. “You’ve been here for six months. Did you come to be with your family?”

“I stay with my brother while I am here for two years to make money. My wife and kids are back home. My son is smart and he wants to go to American college to be engineer. The only way we can do that if I work here to send money home. Then, my son comes to U.S. for school. My son is very smart…not like his father.”

“I think you’re smart for having a plan and carrying it out. You must miss your family,” I say, relaxing a bit now that we have diffused the situation and found some common ground. “And you get to see your brother a lot,” I add.

The cab moves out of heavy stop-and-go traffic on the bridge and into the borough of Queens. A jumble of small retail shops, warehouses and poorly-parked trucks covered with graffiti line the narrow side streets that Adam takes, in a zigzag route to my destination. He drives with the confidence of someone who is in familiar territory and I ask him if his family lives nearby.

“Yes, just a few blocks for here, he replies. Then he adds, almost as a random afterthought, “Do you know why the Jews don’t eat pork?”

“Why? “I ask, watching the meter tick off the dollars and wondering if I won’t have to pay if I suddenly disappear down a dark alley and into the back of a waiting van, the cold steel floor against my cheek as I am rushed out of the city to an unceremonious encounter with a New Jersey backwater landfill.

“Because,” Adam carefully explains, “when God made the world, he put lots of animals here, including pigs. The pigs grew so fast that there were too many of them. So when God decided to add people, he turned some of the pigs into Jews. That is why Jews don’t eat pork. They would be eating their relatives.”

I sit dumbfounded by this logic, my mouth agape in disbelief. I weigh the odds of my safe arrival at my destination against the need to speak out once more against this astounding explanation. I, of course, cast safety to the wind and respond, “Adam, that is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard! You brag about your intelligent son and how you want him to come to school in the U.S. Does he believe this, too? Did you teach him this nonsense?”

“All Arabs believe this. The kids have their own ideas, but my generation has many stories about why the Jews are the way they are.”

“And you think there can be peace in Palestine if people keep thinking like this?” I ask.

“The Koran teaches these things and it is not our place to question it. God will decide who will win.”

“Adam, God has nothing to do with this. It’s about people like Obama, Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority who will solve this problem. Hamas needs to stop shooting mortars into Israel and Israel should stop expanding settlements on the West Bank for any of this to work out. But nothing positive can ever happen if you keep talking this nonsense about the Jews and pigs!

I am angry now and disbelieving that I am having a heated debate with a cab driver about an issue that I had never given much thought to. I am leaning forward, close to the tiny window separating us, eager to engage the discussion. Adam has now turned in his seat and is smiling back at me. “We’re here,” he says.

I look around in disbelief. The yellow death mobile is parked in front of a towering warehouse on a deeply-shadowed side street, far from the hustle of Queens’ main thoroughfares. It appears, after all, that I might live to tell the tale.

“Thank you,” I say, “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

“In our country we talk like this all the time,” Adam says. “It is good to have these debates. I like that you say what you feel.”

I open the door, grateful to have solid ground under my feet. I reach for my pack and pay my fare through the open side window of the cab. As I turn to go, surveying my isolated surroundings, I turn back to the cab as Adam is making a note on a clip board propped against the steering wheel. “Adam, my meeting will take about an hour. Do you think you could work the streets of Queens for a while and pick me up here for the ride back to Grand Central?”

Adam reaches to his dashboard for a business card and scribbles his cell phone number on the back. “Call me five minutes before you are ready to leave and I will be here for you.”

Later, when I emerge from my meeting, having followed his instructions, the shiny yellow cab sits idling, a sunny beacon in the dull gray surrounding of this warehouse district. Adam is behind the wheel and has someone else with him in the front seat (takes two to drag a body, I briefly consider). I open the back door to toss my back pack in, only to find a flat white object, about the size of a shirt box, sitting in my place on the seat. Cautiously, I move it aside, listening for a tell-tale tick-tock-tick-tock and climb in.

Adam turns to me and says, “This is my nephew, Shamir. He is my brother’s son and he goes to school here in Queens. I wanted him to meet you.”

I extend my reach through the small window to introduce myself. A broad-faced boy, with apple-red cheeks and widely-set, black eyes, Shamir shakes my hand and offers me a demurring smile, eyes slightly downcast. As we speak, the cab slowly pulls away.

“Shamir is going to go to college too,” Adam says as he guides the cab, more cautiously this time, toward Queens Boulevard. “I went to the house to get him because I want him to meet a smart American man and to know that he could be that also.” He looks at Shamir for signs of recognition for the importance of this message. Shamir now trains his dark eyes on me, but says nothing.

“Thank you, Adam,” I say. “I take that as a good sign,” hinting at our previous debate.

“And box in the back seat…that is for you.”

I reach for the small box and am surprised by its heft. Given its size, I can’t imagine what might be inside that could weigh this much and still not be life-threatening. I carefully open the top to discover an assortment of rich, honey and almond-soaked deserts, in neat rows. There is a well-ordered line of triangle-cut baklava, honey oozing from the sides; six glazed brown cookies with a toasted almond pressed into the center of each and a third row of flaky-crusted rolled creations, a creamed confection spilling out of each end. All sit on neatly-arrayed, pierced paper doilies, evoking an image of a family dinner table presentation from another, slower-paced world.

“My God, Adam, what is this?” I say in utter disbelief.

It’s from my brother’s bakery, he announces proudly. “I want you to have a taste of my homeland and to remember our talk. Take them with you on the train and share them with your family at home.”

I thank him profusely and we talk eagerly about his son and wife and family back home. We avoid politics. Shamir sits quietly and attentively, not missing a word, appearing proud to be in his uncle’s cab on such an important occasion.

We get to the station in good time, the majority of traffic flowing out of the city as we drive in-town, late in the day. On 42nd Street, Adam pulls over to the curb near the station entrance. I lean forward through the window to shake his hand in thanks and farewell and to say goodbye to Shamir, as well. I gather up my possessions, including my gift, nudge the door open with my foot and turn my attention back to the tiny window.

“How much do I owe you?” I ask.

“Nothing,” Adam said. “My compliments.”

Edgar Degas, La Toilette (1884-86) Private Collection. See End Note #1

 “I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine…of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament—temperament is the word—I know nothing.” ~Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas, best known in the public imagination for his more sentimental, impressionistic works—ballet scenes, race tracks, opera and music hall scenes—was, first and foremost, a student of the human figure. With the current exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), Degas and the Nude, a first-ever sweeping survey of some of his best and also least-known figurative works, here is an artist who still has the capacity to shock and surprise. Pulled from the extensive holdings of the MFA, The Musee D’Orsay, in Paris and dozens of other private and public collections, Degas and the Nude offers a retrospective of his work over a fifty-year time frame, from his days as a classically-trained student, to his ‘modern’ work at the turn of the 20th century. Much to the dismay of many late 19th century critics and the Parisian public-at-large, Degas, the radically-inventive artist, challenged a then, time-honored establishment’s approach to representing nude subjects, as he relentlessly strove to capture the most intimate and disarmingly candid moments in their private lives. artes fine arts magazine

Edgar Degas, Self-Portrait (1886)

The nude figure was, in fact, critically important to the art of Degas from the beginning of his career in the 1850s to the end of his working life at the dawn of the 20th century. The MFA exhibition presents works in every medium that Degas practiced: drawings, both academic and experimental; paintings made for official exhibitions and those never seen by the public in his lifetime; pictures in pastel, the medium most associated with the artist; sculpture, both in wax and bronze; printed media, including etchings, lithographs, and the monotype which he mastered. This common thread throughout the show is the human figure, transformed in his hands from the classically portrayed symbol of perfection and grace—to the most modern of demystified subjects—where composition, color and objectivity became his signature style. But, this was to be an approach to subject matter that, for Degas, would be more evolutionary than revolutionary.

E, Degas, Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65), Musee d'Orsay. End Note #2

In his student years, Degas was captive to the nostalgic tastes of the past, as were so many French artists working and learning in the state-sanctioned, tradition-bound ecole d’art. Like so many Romantic era painters who went before, he initially wanted to be a history painter: to paint monumental stories from the past, the Bible and classical mythology. The exhibit features drawings from those years, as he studied the nude form in both the classroom and abroad, in the museums of Paris and Italy. Following the traditional plan of a young artist, he sketched classical sculpture and works by renaissance masters, like Michelangelo and Botticelli. Also working with live models, he began to adopt his own style, capturing likenesses that would soon appear in his own paintings. He later painted his only ‘historical’ work, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, showcasing the use of nudes in support of his desire to create an important work. Exhibited in the annual show of the Academie des Beaux Arts, in Paris in 1865, its portrayal of violence and complex action can be broadly understood as an illustration of war’s atrocities, but also an examination of man’s inhumanity toward women in a time of war. It would be Degas’s first and last historic painting, as he was about to step off in a new direction: interpreting the nude body—not in classical or historical terms—but as a contemporary figure in her own setting.

According to show curator and MFA’s Chair, Art of Europe, George Shackelford, “For Degas, these early years weren’t just an education in history, technique and anatomy, but something much more. As he relentlessly copied the nudes of the Old Masters and drew from live models, he developed a desire to be rigorous, but also rigorously original: a desire he would bring to bear in his important early paining of the nude, Young Spartans Exercising, and that would continue for the rest of his career.” Degas was in many ways, his own teacher, insisting critically, “that I get it into my head that I know nothing at all. That is the only way to go forward.”

Edouard Manet, Effect of Snow, Montrouge, Dec. 28, 1870

The son of a Parisian banker, Degas was closer to Manet than any other Impressionist in age and social background. Manet, who he met in 1862, and his artistic circle gradually persuaded Degas to turn from history painting to the depiction of contemporary life. The two artists were present and involved in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the humiliating siege and blockade of Paris that brought the city’s population to near starvation. The civil war that immediately followed, pitting Socialist Communards against Republican monarchists, led to further wide-spread death and chaos in the streets, leaving an indelible mark on both artists and the intellectual community as a whole. With the restoration of government and civil order, the Impressionists once again turned their attention to pastoral and bourgeois themes—in celebration of the ‘new’ France, while Degas headed in a very different direction.

The Serious Client (1876-77). End Note #3.

In the 1870s, Degas set out to work on a series of nudes that were neither classically-based nor studies for larger paintings. In fact, this series of monotypes were decidedly anti-classical, even as the idealized body of his earlier works gave way to more natural interpretations. Largely unknown until after his death, the works depict prostitutes in Paris’s high-class brothels. The pictures are explicit in detail—emphasizing the prostitutes’ heavy, full breasts, large bodies, and luxuriant pubic hair—and sometimes sexually explicit as well. Degas never intended these pictures to be seen publically. Both intimate and revealing of both subject and artist, they represent an extended engagement by the artist with an indecent, but widely accepted, underbelly of Paris bourgeoisie society. They were based on observation and study, but also on contemporary public opinion regarding sanitation, disease, morality and social standing.

Upon closer examination of a work like The Serious Client (1876-77), Degas may be invoking a role that John House (Impressionism: Paint and Politics, 2oo4), calls the flâneur-detective. Always the objective observer, the artist enters the forbidden world of the brothel “to find order and meaning in the seeming incoherence of the modern urban environment.” The standard markers of difference—class, sex and race—are very much at play in many of Degas’s works, and his brothel monotype series is no exception. Given the context of the pictures, the artist is making clear distinctions between male and female, working and upper class, master and servant. The women are portrayed through posture and dress as being clear about their functionary role. The setting, by extension, is pictured as conspicuously overdone, yet hermetically sealed from the outside world by mutual agreement among all parties. Men of influence move through the space—typecast as in control, on view…and fully dressed to reflect their professional status in society.

The Siesta-Scene from a Brothel (1870-80). End Note #4.

For a brief period of time, in the 1870s, Degas embraced the view of certain members of the scientific community, who believed that physical characteristics were seen to relate to social standing and typecasting. Individual physiognomy was thought to predetermine such traits as intelligence, criminality, and emotional stability. Ironically, this male-generated theory was held to be particularly attributable to members of the opposite sex. In the brothel series, as well as in some early ballet drawings and painting, Degas was inclined toward typecasting, where working-class dancers were shown with snub noses and slightly simian features, conforming closely to stereotypical ideas of the physiognomy of the lower classes. Fortunately, for his career and reputation, Degas ultimately rejected these theories, going on to become a leading proponent of artistic representation of the working poor.

As an employed technique, monotype was considered an experimental and contemporary medium. Lacking an etched or engraved plate, the process depended on paint or ink being applied directly to a smooth metal plate, which was then run through a press. Special effects and changes in the images were an inherent part of the process, with certain parts of the finished image left to chance. Degas fully exploited this characteristic in his use of monotypes to represent the settings and figures in the brothels. Spontaneity and loosely-defined details characterized the finished product—an important step for the artist as he moved away from his classical training and into the realm of sensory impressionism.

Degas’s focus shifted again in the late 1870s, when he turned his attention to the outside world. Here, his female models were pictured in private settings, often alone: lounging, reading, stepping into or out of the bath. Recurring themes became a feature of his work, with naturalism ‘coloring’ his style as he moved farther away from the classical traditions that were his roots. Still enamored of monotypes, Degas continued to rely on the medium as he broadened his repertoire of subjects. But now, he was running inked plates through the press twice, creating ambiguous, sensual and shadowy images that could then be further enhanced with chalk and colored pastels.

Nude Woman Standing, ca. 1878 (left: See End Note 5) invites the viewer to share a private moment with his model. In this remarkable work, consciousness, rather than nudity, is the principle theme. As if caught unaware, the woman has withdrawn into herself, appearing to forget for the moment that she is in the presence of another. We marvel, today, at reality TV participants, as they reveal all in front of prying cameras; yet this work illustrates how easily we can slip the reins of self-consciousness and retreat into our own thoughts and emotions. Cool flesh tones on pale blue paper help to avert the simmering sensuality that would ordinarily accompany a drawing of this kind. The figure grips her temples, elbows resting on her knee. Posed against a stark background, evidence of her toilette is nowhere to be seen. She is frozen in contemplation—a static drama unfolding before our eyes. Degas’s mastery of the human gesture is in evidence here: the artist’s machinery of illusion in full swing as he asks us to consider this simple scene as an homage to everyday life and our own vulnerability, uniting us in our humanity.

Degas exhibited small pastel nudes in the Impressionist exhibit of 1877. Now affiliated with the Impressionists, he sought safety and expanded recognition in their numbers. Nude Woman Drying Herself, 1884-92 (near right, End Note #6) was completed during that time in the hopes that it would serve as a showpiece for his skills and garner the attention of buyers and the critics, either with the Impressionists, or on his own.

His friend Henri Gervex had exhibited a large painting of a nude, Rola, in 1878; its treatment of a naked prostitute provoking both public admiration and criticism. At the same time, painter and collector, Gustave Caillebotte was finishing large-scale male and female nudes, including Man at His Bath, 1884 (above right, End Note #7). Degas’s unfinished Nude Woman Drying Herself is evidence of his intention to create a modern oil painting with the scale of Gervex’s canvas, but with a greater sense of narrative detachment than he had demonstrated in the pastels, monotypes and etchings of the previous decade, in keeping with Caillebotte’s unabashed realism.

Henri Gervex, Rolla (1878). End Note #8.

The last Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 was a pivotal moment for Degas. He showed new works—including a group of bathers. The exhibition checklist announced a “Suite of female nudes” by Degas: “bathing, washing, drying themselves, wiping themselves, combing themselves or being combed.” These works represent one of Degas’s highest achievements as an artist. Executed in pastel, the medium held strong appeal for him since it yielded effects of line, tone and color simultaneously. As he had done with monotype, the artist fully exploited the expressive possibilities of the medium: wiping and blending colors, smudging and carving into the surface with the butt-end of his paint brush.

As most contemporary museum visitors know, dancers were a favorite subject of Degas. He remained fascinated with the moving body throughout his career—specifically the dancer’s body. First, he would sketch them nude, or work their images in clay or wax. Carefully studying these gestures, movements and poses at moments of stillness, he would then clothe the dancers in tutus for final versions in oil or pastel. While no longer actively portraying prostitutes, his interest in ballet was not far removed from this unseemly side of Paris culture. Unlike today’s classical dancers, 19th century ballerinas generally came from working class families and, because they exhibited their scantily-clad bodies in public—something that ‘respectable’ bourgeois women did not do—they were widely assumed to be sexually available. They were often ‘sponsored’ by wealthy businessmen, who exchanged their patronage for sexual favors. Several of Degas’s paintings contain images of these men, sitting on the sidelines of a rehearsal; or conversely, mothers of the dancers hovering nearby at rehearsals and performances in order to safeguard their daughters’s virtue.

Right: After the Bath, Woman with a Towel (1893-97). See End Note # 9.

This careful analysis of his subject, and strong reliance on the studio setting to achieve a finished piece becomes an important way to understand that, while Degas was a champion of the Impressionist movement (and accepted as one of their own in exhibitions and in personal friendships), his working style did not qualify him for what contemporaneous critic, Jules-Antoine Castegnary called, “modern forms of naturalism.” By this he meant a certain spontaneity-of-response by the artist (plein air painting, for example), together with an objectivity of representation. While Degas certainly qualified in the latter, his allegiance to draftsmanship, boldly-calculated compositions, and a methodical (classically-styled) approach to repeatedly rendering his subject, placed him in a unique category. Yet, as a consequence of his studio-based use of seemingly-spontaneous mark-making, his bold use of color and loosely-configured drawing techniques, today we consider Degas’s work an important part of the Impressionist genre.

Jean Auguste Ingres,The Valpincon Bather (1808). Louvre, Paris.

Drawings and paintings during this period highlight Degas’s continuing focus on the backs of his models. Trained in the tradition—and an admirer—of neo-classicist painter, Jean Auguste Ingres, who famously extolled the female back as a sensual anatomical feature (see: The Valpincon Bather, 1812), Degas, too, was to follow in the footsteps of this master of the neglected side of the nude, throughout his career. Since the 1870s, Degas had used the back as a locus of character and expression: in depictions of women walking, of mounted jockeys or dancers in the wings. But the bather’s back is more complex. Degas almost never depicted his bathers, except from behind. Perhaps he did not want to show their faces, to create identifiable individuals—women with names, identities and personalities. The female form, for Degas, was now more iconic or symbolic, than real, as they focused on the same everyday tasks, like bathing or drying, common to everyone. By stripping his bathers of specifics, the back served as a locus for the body’s expressive powers and poetic center.

In the late 1880s and 1890s, Degas’s art making underwent a transformation—one that was subtle, but also completely revelatory. His nudes became a vehicle for experimentation, in style and method, as well as impact. His earlier, methodical etchings gave way to expressive lithography. Drawing, the cornerstone of his practice, shifted from the careful pencil academies to strokes of charcoal or black chalk for forceful studies of nude bathers. He tossed aside the care with which he had approached Scene of War in the Middle Ages in the 1860s to create oil paintings with celebratory swaths and daubs of paint. As a key sign of the times, Impressionism transitioned to the more personalized work of the Post-Impressionists. And perhaps, (like Monet during this same period) Degas began fell prey to failing eye sight, dogging him as he aged. Anatomical accuracy became less important to the artist than expressing emotion and feeling that were palpable in the work.

The Tub (1886) Musee d'Orsay. End Note #10.

On exhibit, The Tub (1886), like other works in which Degas achieves drama with unusual perspectives on his subject, assumes an oblique—even severely geometric angle: the tub and the crouching woman, both vigorously outlined, form a circle within a square. The remainder of the rectangular format is filled by a shelf so sharply tilted at an unnatural angle that nearly shares the plane of the picture, itself. On this shelf Degas has placed two pitchers (note the curve of the small one fitting into the handle of the other), which are not in-the-least foreshortened. Here, the tension between two-dimensions and three—surface and depth—comes close to the breaking point. The carelessly placed brush, with its handle hanging precariously over the edge, tempts the viewer to reach out and grab it before it tumbles to the floor.

Degas would revisit the same theme and position with his models, over a period of two decades. With slight variations, all would be placed in the same anonymous pose, with strict physical demands placed on the women during the posing process. The pose he demanded was difficult to hold. “Standing on her left leg, her knee slightly bent, [the model] lifts her other foot behind her with a strong movement, graspsher foot with her right hand, while her left elbow shoots out to maintain her balance,” as one observer described it. “For a whole minute, she remains almost immobile, her muscles all taut; but suddenly her left leg shifts and—in order not to fall—she has to give it up.”

After the bath, Woman drying Her Neck (1895-98). End Note #11.

In the 1890s, Degas’s propensity to revisit familiar poses reached new levels. Repetition intrigued him, as did (in all likelihood) the enthusiastic market for his work by galleries and collectors. He began copying himself by placing smooth tracing paper over previous works to translate poses, one to the other. During this time he also began using recent charcoal drawings and tracings as the basis for finished pastels, as he had done with monotypes earlier in his career. Repetition could simply be a matter of revisiting favorite poses, but for Degas, the concept was more complicated. With changing times and shifting social values in the face of Western Europe’s industrialization and modernization, themes of war’s inhumanity and the abuses of women meant that motifs embodied in some of Degas’s work, going back decades, were still resonant. The image of a woman in one bathing scene—head bent, one arm curved across her chest, the other lifted into the air, palm upward—as though gesturing, partly in defense, partly as a warning, was reminiscent of a figure in his violent 1963-65, Scene of War in the Middle Ages. Across thirty years, the emotions remain constant, while the social context changes.

Dancer...(1896-1911) Note #12.

By the late 1880s, Degas’s eyesight had begun to fail, perhaps a result of an injury suffered during his service in defending Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. After that time he focused almost exclusively on dancers and nudes, increasingly turning to sculpture as his eyesight weakened. In his later years, he was concerned chiefly with women bathing, entirely without self-consciousness and emphatically, not posed. Despite the seemingly fleeting glimpses he portrayed, he achieved a solidity in his figures that is almost sculptural.

In later life, Degas became reclusive, morose, and given to bouts of depression, probably a consequence of his increasing blindness. His monotype Coastal Landscape ,c. 1892 (left, below, End Note #13) an unusual work from this period, is an unexpected instance of Degas presenting an outdoor scene with no obvious figures, showing an imaginative and expressive use of color and freedom-of-line that may have arisen, at least in part, as a result of his struggle to adapt to his deteriorating vision. Show organizers invite viewers to detect the subtle suggestion of a reclining figure disguised in the hillside, however; positing that it served as a gentle send-up to Monet, the consummate landscape painter, from an old colleague and adversary who made the representation of the human form his life’s work

Near the end of his career, Degas was already well-known throughout Europe and in North America. Collectors from Paris, London, New York Chicago and Boston vied for his work, many purchasing his bathers from the 1880s and 90s. His reputation was also strong among his peers, bridging the generations between the Paris avant garde and a new generation of artists for a new century. In 1918, at the sale of Degas’s atelier after his death, the broader public viewed many of his works for the first time. Most connoisseurs were shocked by what they saw—dozens of works by this painter of dancers on the stage, of jockeys, laundresses, and milliners. “We looked at these walls,” wrote one of Degas’s friends, “covered with works that were powerful but horrible, which frightened us all the more because the energy of their lines and the beauty of their tones kept us from looking at or thinking of anything else.”

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Rare film footage of Edgar Degas, Paris, c. 1914:

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END NOTES:

1. Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917), La Toilette (1884-86), pastel over monotype laid down on board. Private collection. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
2. Edgar Degas, Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65), oil on paper. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. ©Photo: Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
3. Edgar Degas, The Serious Client (1876-77), monotype on woven paper. National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa. Purchases 1977. Photo ©National Gallery of Canada. National gallery of Canada, Ottowa. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
4. Edgar Degas, The Siesta—Scene from a Brothel (1878-80), monotype in black ink. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Katerine E. Bullard Fund in memory of Francis Bullard 61.1215. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
5. Edgar Degas, Nude Woman Standing (ca. 1878), black chalk and pastel on blue wove paper. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo: © Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
6. Edgar Degas, Nude Woman Drying Herself (1884-92), oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Carl H. de Silver Fund 31.813. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
7. Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894), Man at His Bath (1884), oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Museum purchase with funds by exchange and from the Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Edward Jackson Holmes Fund, Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory of Alice Thevin, Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Parkmen Oliver—Eliza R. Oliver Fund, Sophie F. Friedman Fund, Robert M. Rosenberg Family Fund, and Mary L. Cornille and John F. Cogan Jr. Fund for the Art of Europe. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
8. Henri Gervex (French, 1852-1929), Rolla (1878), oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (on deposit at Musée des Beaux Arts des Bordeaux). Bequest of M. Bérardi, 1926 BX E 1455. Photo: Musée des Beaux Arts des Bordeaux/Art resource, NY.
9. Edgar Degas, After the Bath, Woman with a Towel (1893-97), pastel on brown cardboard. Harvard Art museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of mrs. J. Montgomery Sears. Photo: Allan Macintyre ©President and Fellows of Harvard College. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
10. Edgar Degas, The Tub (1886), pastel. Paris, Musée d’Orday, Bequest of Comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911. Photo: © Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
11. Edgar Degas, After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Neck (1895-98), pastel on woven paper. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Bequest of Comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911 RF 4044. Photo: Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN; photographed by Patrice Schmidt.
12. Edgar Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot (modeled between 1896-1911, cast between 1921-31), bronze. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, acquired through the generosity of the heirs of the artist and of Hébrard. Photo © Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
13. Edgar Degas, Coastal Landscape (ca. 1892), pastel on paper. Collection Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski.  Boston only.

Enola Gay, restored & ready for exhibition (2004)

 Editor’s Note: Occasionally, an article published in ARTES evokes a profoundly personal and instructive reply by a reader. On very rare occasions, that response is crafted by a fellow writer and regular contributor to the magazine.  Recently (November, 2011), we ran a feature-length article by curator and consultant, Ken Yellis, as an expanded article originally appearing in Curator Magazine (2009).  Then, as now, he reflects on the social responsibility of collection-based and historical-oriented institutions to accurately represent our cultural and natural history in authentic and illuminating ways—even if it touches the ‘third rail’ of painful or controversial facets of our collective consciousness.  The myths we construct for ourselves—repeated with such frequency that they become our shared reality—are often at odds with the factual record. The nexus of these two world—fact and fable—serves as fertile ground for dialogue, debate, and even open conflict. artes fine arts magazine

Here, Stephen Vincent Kobasa evinces Smithsonian’s recent Enola Gay exhibition, drawing poignant and powerful associations in his own life; as well as on the warp and weft of the social fabric in which we, as a society, often choose to cloak ourselves. The first of these essays was originally published, in a somewhat different form, in the September, 1995 issue of Peacework; the second in the August 1, 2004 issue of The Nuclear Resister. After several years, they appear now on the pages of ARTES,  at the request of this editor. Their relevancy today—with historical facts and partisan emotions being played so fast and loose by our 21st century politicians—is that the first-person, singular narrative must continue to serve our communities as a powerful beacon for our responsibility as museums and institutions-of-learning to find balance in our story-telling. And it also reminds us that, while the historical record is cumulative and often anonymous, it is an unfolding saga that manifests itself each day, often in singular and profoundly personal ways.

A Machine for Lying: Reflections on the Enola Gay

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Guest Editorial Contributor

English school children in air raid trenches, 1942.

Sometimes, what we inherit from our parents are lies, not so much malevolent as they are necessary fictions, devices meant to convince us that our lives have found justification in situations where we are deeply afraid that there is no justification available.

In the early summer of 1945, my father was in Germany, having survived the violence of war for over one year. I have heard only fragments of his life during that time – he would recount one or two comic interludes (a tent collapsing under the weight of a heavy rain, leaving him muffled in a muddy ditch) – but only rarely would other moments surface: the soldier crouching alone in the middle of an English field as the rest of his unit drove away in the dark; the line of corpses like a tide mark along a Normandy beach; the accidental slaughter recorded in the British voice over my father’s headphones, “You’ve shot down one of ours.” This is all by way of evidence that I can never know the terror my father learned, somehow, to live with during that time – the ways in which he had to strip his humanity away in order to keep himself from madness. So when the war ended in Europe it must have seemed to him a release beyond measure – while the word which came soon after, that he would be shipping out to the violence which continued in the Pacific – can only have come as a brutal betrayal.

B-29 dropping bombs on Germany, 1944.

Here, then, the histories of my father and the Enola Gay come together, as they do for many other veterans of that time, and for their children. The atomic explosion over Hiroshima became an image of salvation, a terrible parody of the Crucifixion, in which the dying of a city spared their lives. And the Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb, was transformed into the icon of their escape, a machine not only for destruction, but for lying. The skillful technology of the plane and the bomb was read as evidence of their worthiness, and the degree of the slaughter was proportionate to the value of their survival.

But these soldiers, now veterans, were not unaware of the horror the bomb had caused, and as details of the destruction became gradually available, their need for a myth to explain them away became more and more desperate. Atrocities carried out by the Japanese were essential to this rationalizing, although these arguments never acknowledged their assumption that our actions were atrocities as well; and that, for all our assertions of moral superiority, we actually yearned to become our enemy, to become capable of the crimes our enemy committed. We had begun to measure the world in competing levels of terror, and the atomic bomb now meant that our terror could be absolute.*

Horoshima civilians near hypocenter 3 hours after bomb, August 6, 1945.

These are not mere abstractions. They play themselves out in the realities of parents and children of that time – for if my father’s logic prevailed, then my survival, too, was linked to the incineration of vast numbers of human beings and the slow dying of many thousands more.In this version of the story, the Enola Gay carried me to safety. This is the unforgiving inheritance that the children of many World War II veterans (and their spouses – I think of my mother’s role as companion to my father’s need for the lie) find imposed on their experience of the past.

And so, outrage at the original proposal for the 1995 exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian must be seen as an act of self-defense on the part of those veterans who are as yet unprepared to let the lie go. In order to preserve a fragile fiction of moral sanity, the veterans who believe what my father does could not tolerate any threat to their attempt at self-justification. And while the much reduced form of that first exhibition of sections of the plane –echoed in the current display of the aircraft intact – does not recount their version of history in any great detail, it still serves their purposes through its silence – the myth remains intact.

Restored cockpit, Enola Gay, 2004.

How would it be possible, then, to confront that myth in the only way that is really essential – to ask what it means to live out lives that we believe depend entirely upon our willingness to undertake, at this very moment, an act of nuclear genocide? Although the machines themselves have evolved into Trident ballistic missile submarines, the lie of the Enola Gay is unchanged, and the exhibition is complicit in it.

Museums like the ones devoted to Air and Space on the Mall in Washington, D.C. – and now in the recently opened Udvar -Hazy facility near Dulles Airport – are, in one sense at least, as great a threat as any of our current working armaments. While obsolete as a weapon, the Enola Gay retains its power to deceive. It has not been so much restored as recreated in the form of a storytelling mechanism which depicts the reality of total war as a glittering prop in a theatre meant to indoctrinate and reassure. When Kathy Boylan, Anne Quintano and I undertook a direct action at the Smithsonian on July 2, 1995, it was not our purpose to damage that object – that thing – known as the Enola Gay (although we were, of course, charged with just such a crime). It would have been pointless to mangle a machine that is not capable of functioning, but even though our gesture was symbolic, it had a real object. We were after the illusion of the Enola Gay with our blood and ashes; not to destroy the “property” which was the government’s controlling notion about its museum artifact, but to expose it as a self-justifying fabrication, and reveal, in some small way, the horrible reality it attempts to suppress.

Crew autographs, photo of Little Boy, Hiroshima Atomic Bomb, 1945.

When, at our trial, the state’s attorney used the word ‘desecrate’ to describe what we had done to the airplane, he dramatically, if inadvertently, confirmed the necessity for our action. In an extraordinary perversion of the sacred, the machine that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima had been transformed into an object of worship, a relic of salvation through terror.

But where was the legal argument that would counter this idolatry? The necessity defense does not apply in the same way that it would for a plowshares action against a Minuteman missile silo – a working machine of the present moment. The Enola Gay is simply a lying story that helps this culture explain away the horrors it has committed in the past, while serving to give license for both our current willingness to commit nuclear genocide and our uncritical acceptance of the the claim that violence is inevitable in all human affairs.

And where in the constrained procedure of the court was there a place for arguments in defense of historical and moral truth? There have been suits successfully brought against revisionist historians who claimed that the Holocaust had not taken place. During our trial, Kathy Boylan described “the blood of the victims of Hiroshima finally reaching up to touch the plane,” but we were granted no legal formula that would acknowledge the voices of the dead as there is in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashômon, where a ghost testifies at a murder investigation.

Autographed photo, explosion over Hiroshima, 1945

We attempted to put the Smithsonian Institution itself on trial. What obligation does a museum have to present accurate information in its exhibits? Can it be held legally responsible for failing to do that? In the Holocaust Memorial Museum, visitors are confronted with the fatal indifference of the United States’ denial of asylum to Jewish refugees on board the ship St. Louis in 1939, and the later refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz because, according to a 1944 War Department letter, “it would not warrant the use of our resources.” Do the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserve any less of an acknowledgement from our collective conscience?

We argued that our action was meant to repair a display that was in a vandalized condition when we came to it, with its real history mutilated by censorship and fear. If there was any alteration in value to the plane as a result of what we did, it was in restoring its importance as evidence of a crime. Our hope was that the museum leave the plane permanently transformed as a way of acknowledging – finally – its own part in the conspiracy to keep us from the truth…and from repentance. That did not happen. But our action is a part of the Enola Gay’s history now, and brief as it was, the plane can never be quite the same again to those who witnessed its moment of exposure.

What right do we, or any, have to demand that this country confront the horrors of its own creating? What consolation can be offered to veterans like my father in return for abandoning the lie? Our acts of resistance are always, if not only, in the form of stories meant to bring people, not simply to their senses, but to their consciences. To tell the secret of the Enola Gay is to drain that machine of its power over us to accept it as an inevitability in our lives. And when the fatalism of violence is broken – then real salvation is possible.

July, 1995– August, 2004

*This has its obvious contemporary parallels, most succinctly stated by John K. Stoner: “A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality.”

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More Lies from a Machine: Revisiting the Enola Gay

25 milliseconds after detonation, Trinity test site, Aug. 17, 1945

But I have words

That would be howled out in the desert air,

Where hearing should not latch them.” – Macbeth, IV, iii

Crowded in the vast museum hangar, a war toy now, the Enola Gay is once again intact. The weapon proved restorable, but not the world it destroyed. This is an example of those ironies which, along with violence, are our culture’s most notable products. But what protest is adequate to the outrage?

Eight years ago, when a part of the Enola Gay’s fuselage was first displayed at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, three of us marked it with blood and ashes, part of the history of resistance to the exhibit which has been lost in the same way the plane’s history has been erased by the Smithsonian curators.

For a brief moment, the plane was like one of those legendary sites of murder which ooze the evidence of the crimes committed there.

Cockpit, B-29 "Superfortress" Enola Gay 1945. Photo: David Polermo

Now the plane has been once again washed clean, and the academics have gathered to beg for words, demanding that a more complete history of the plane’s use be included in a display which now praises it as merely a triumph of technology.

But what printed narrative would be complete? What list of the dead? How account for the mutilated conscience of a man like the one for whose mother the plane is named and who, when asked his opinion of the more contemporary demands for the use of nuclear weapons, replied:

“Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice.”

How will the Hibakusha present at the opening of this new museum console the dead with their message that they have seen the distant machine a second time, now displayed as near and wonderful?

A possible answer would be to drag the plane into the desert to be scoured by sand to a metal skeleton, puzzled over by wandering naturalists, and explained by no documents other than the screaming of ghosts.  – S.V.K., January, 2004

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Editor’s Footnote: I think the reason that Stephen’s narrative stikes such a strong emotional cord with me is that the deeply engrainedveil of fear we lived, under as a generation of children during the Cold War `50s and `60s, seemed to know no rational bounds.  Global annihilation was a reality that post-war generations came to accept as a distinct possibility.  The U.S. government was principally responsible for shaping and managing public awareness regarding the devastating consequences of a nuclear stike on any major city in the country.  Mutually Assurred Destruction was the watch-word–an unsettling claim that an ever-expanding atomic arms program was essential to insure that any enemy (assumed to be the Soviets) would be dissuaded from a pre-emptive strike–if they understood an equally-destructive counter-attack as a virtual certainty. 

Pulic education became a priority in the face of this looming Armagedon.  The language adopted to address the threat of nuclear war was carefully crafted to impart information aimed at survival strategies.  Popular notions of ‘Duck and Cover’ were practiced in all public schools and businesses in the 1950s.  The public felt reassured and prepared (my father built a fall-out shelter in our celler), while the reality confronting all those in range of a nuclear attack would have been certian incineration, or lingering death from burns, radiation and the calamatous failure of the societal infrastructure.

What follows is a brief exerpt from a national education program for children in the `50s that exemplifies the “lies” and “myths” alluded to in the esssays above.  I recall that we all allowed ourselves to be convinced that survival was possible after the awful reality of a nearby nucelar explosion; because to consider the alternative was just too unimaginable: http://youtu.be/u1MQ4eyg6U4

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

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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) 

The 'Z'-Chair, a Zaha Hadid design, on view at PMA

On view through spring, 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art features a unique exhibition, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion. This show includes furniture and design objects in a space entirely transformed by the prominent female architect. The fluid, site-specific installation is the first of its kind in the United States, assembled by a team of designers from Hadid Architects. The show reflects Hadid’s seamless work methods, as well as her technological breakthroughs in architecture and design. artes fine arts magazine

Hadid's Opera House, Guangzhou, China (2010)

Born in Bagdad, Iraq, Hadid is known worldwide for her visionary architecture. She is responsible for many breakthroughs in her field, and is the first woman recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She is the founder of London-based Zaha Hadid Architects, and has numerous projects completed around the world, most recently including MAXXI: National Museum of XXI Century in Rome (2009), Guangzhaou Opera House in China (2010), and Olympic Aquatics Centre in London (2011). She is now based in London and works internationally in the fields of urbanism, architecture and design.

Mesa Tables, Design by Zaha Hadid

The museum gallery housing the exhibition, in the Perelman building, is completely transformed. The installation greets the viewer with sleek, attention-grabbing furniture and functional objects, such as the Z-Chair, Vortexx Chandeliers and the Mesa Table. To the left, there is a rippling wall—a temporary structure built on site. This undulating form also serves as a shelving unit for Hadid-designed objects, including limited-edition footwear, jewelry and silverware. The silver lines painted on the floor echo the shadows made by the furniture, creating a seamless visual composition.

Lighting plays an important role in this exhibition. The metallic chairs and tables reflect the natural light casted from the window, evolving and morphing as they are viewed from different angle. The functional objects on the shelving unit, including Flatware, Crevasse Vases and other items seem to flash from the light cast through a small opening in the shelves. The Vortexx Chandeliers, continuously changing hues with the use of high-intensity, light emitting diodes LED, cast an ephemeral glow on the surrounding objects and walls.

Flatware, by Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid makes it a goal to integrate her designs to their environment. In this exhibition silver lines painted on the floor fuse the shadows to the objects, at times creating a 3-dimensional effect. The fluidity in her work stems from her creative process. According to curator Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, Hadid works on her designs simultaneously, having several computer screens open at a time with various objects and architectural images, resulting the work that is interrelated and flowing. Design similarities can be seen throughout both her architectural and object designs.

Most objects in the exhibition are made from steel, aluminum, and polyurethane, apart from the sofa, which is upholstered with metallic fabric. Despite the hard materials, the objects are surprisingly organic. They walk the line between fine art and product design, and are often viewed as functional sculptures. Hadid sells her objects as both art and useable products.

Hadid's Z-Car I, a Hydrogen-powered, 3-wheel prototype

Some of the highlights of this exhibition are the mini-sculptural jewelry pieces—Celeste Necklace and Cuff and Glace Collection Jewelry—which are both made with Swarowski Crystals. Like most of the objects in the show, the unusual jewelry shapes elevate them beyond mere utility, to become works of art. Another unexpected design offering by Hadid, is the hydrogen-powered, three-wheel vehicle, Z-Car I prototype. It is presented outside the immediate gallery area, gracing the hallway of the Perelman building with its aerodynamically sleek, quirky presence. As if to leave no part of our lives unattended to, the exhibit also features futuristic Hadid footwear designs, produced in conjunction with clothing brand Lacoste.

Not only does this show offer an exclusive look into the future, with spectacular Hadid designs, the museum also honored the architect with a Design of Excellence Award on November 19, 2011. Collab, a volunteer committee specializing in design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be presenting this award to Hadid, with her multi-faceted contributions in the fields of design, architecture and urbanism. The architect used the award event as an opportunity to share her views on design with the audience.

By Ekaterina Popova, Contributing Writer

Visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art at: www.philamuseum.org

See more of Zaha Hadid’s design concepts at: www.zaha-hadid.com

Inspired by, ‘Picasso: Guitars (1912-14)’- At the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2011

Pablo Picasso, Self Portrait (1906). Coll. MoMA, NY

Though living in France most of his life, Picasso was a Spaniard, through-and-through, remaining proud of his birthright, cultural heritage and sun-drenched memories of childhood, over his lifetime. Any retrospective of his work as a painter and sculptor reveals that he was continually informed by the iconic images of Spain, at both conscious and unconscious levels: the raven-haired, large-eyed female figures, matadors and bull-fighting motifs, the open-balcony studio settings of his imagination, replete with palm-strewn vistas of warm seas, mythic creatures from Greco-Roman legend and seductive naked sylphs, all belie his enduring visceral attachment to las cosas de españa. artes fine arts magazine

Pablo Picasso, Old Guitarist (1903). Coll. Art Institute Chicago

This past spring, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited works by Picasso, focusing on two early collages (1912-14), where the guitar figures prominently as the central theme. This period represents Picasso’s formative years, when he was living in a cold-water Montmartre flat, befriending people who would later become the giants of 20th century arts and letters and struggling to find his own creative voice in a radical climate of aesthetic reinterpretation. Experimenting with form and composition, subject matter and materials, Picasso’s unheated studio was an experimental laboratory for d’artes absurd. He had already produced his monumental painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), so rife with controversy for its stylistic bravado, fractured planes of color and ‘in-your-face’ social commentary, that it still lay propped in his studio—five years after its completion and viewed by only his closest allies—when he turned to a new medium.

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, mixed media (1912), Coll. MoMA, NY

Like his friend and fellow artist, Georg Braque, Picasso was intrigued by the use of everyday objects to make art: cardboard, newspaper, discarded sketches, theater broadsides, wallpaper and string. In 1912, he turned his creative attention to this new medium of collage (from the French, coller, for ‘glue’). Thematically, and even politically, the use of found objects to create art was intended to make a statement about the direction that art was taking at the time. With a break from past traditions, European culture was considering the impact of such modern innovations as the airplane, motorcar and assembly line production on the course of human history. The nations of Western Europe were also poised on the brink of another armed conflict—just how horrific—no one was yet to know.

So, Picasso gathered up scissors, knife and glue pot to produce serious art, even as the cultural ground was shifting beneath his feet. And what did he chose to create for the world’s first-ever sculptural collage?…a guitar. Deconstructed in a way that would become his signature Cubist style, unplayable and hardly recognizable to early 20th century eyes for what it was; it was, nevertheless, an interpretation of a classical guitar—known as the Spanish guitar—symbolic voice of his motherland . It must have evoked memories as he cut and pasted, placing pieces of cardboard and string into a loose configuration, resembling a musical instrument. The sights and sounds of his childhood in Barcelona and Seville surely filled his senses, as this 31-year old artist sat alone in his cold-water studio on the outskirts of Paris–cultural center of the world and the ‘City of Light’– far from his true home. Picasso’s Guitar (1912) and the many other images of this instrument he was to produce in paper, on canvas and in prints, were not merely exercises in creativity, but served as a potent symbol of national identity and his indelible past—perhaps a very personal evocation of sensation and longing.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Go to the MOMA Picasso page at: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1101 ,read about the exhibition and listen to the curator’s brief podcasts.

*Listen to the sounds of the Spanish guitar, a prominent subject in Picasso’s art, played by Andre Segovia in a live performance (circ. 1980) of Asturias (Leyenda), by Isaac Albeniz, on site at Alhambra, Seville, Spain

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(Above) Ferdinand Holder, Die Nacht (Night), Detail, 1889. Coll. Kunstmuseum, Bern

Artists have treated this emotionally-charged topic in many ways over the centuries, appropriating the symbols of life and death, in ways that both illustrate and expound on their relevance to us. Particularly in the modern era, the ‘Age of Anxiety’, the bridge between symbolism-as-motif in the visual arts and our first-hand experiences of alienation and vulnerability remain particularly germane. For purposes of comparison, the work of two artists, working more than one-hundred years apart will be compared and contrasted here; allowing for the thread of common themes to link the two, while observing how the symbols employed in each painting and the cultural milieu that produced each, differed widely.

Ferdinand Holder, Die Nacht (Night), 1889. Coll. Kunstmuseum, Bern

The first is Ferdinand Holder’s, Die Nacht (Night), 1890. A little-known Swiss artist in the U.S., his work is held by only one museum in this county (Art Institute of Chicago). Well-known in Western Europe in the early 20th century, he was praised as one of the greatest artists of the time. His work was compared to that of Cezanne and one critic summarized his significance by seeing in him the realization of, “our era’s deep yearning for greatness and immortality.” [1] His early work however, continued to be largely representational portraiture and landscapes, “painted after nature exactly as the artist saw it.” [2]

It was only after 1885, that his recently exhibited work caught the attention of a group of Genovese poets, who embraced the French Symbolist lyrics of Mallarme and Verlaine. Under their direction, Holder became more interested in abstract and philosophical themes, “…to make use of Naturalism to create the ideal.” [3] At that stage in his career, themes of the Eternal and the fragile relationship between man and the creative forces of the universe entered into a visual dialogue on his canvases. Following the success of the first showing of Night, in 1890, amid some controversy in Geneva, the painting and Holder’s reputation as a Spiritualist quickly spread to other cities in Germany and the Netherlands.

The metaphysical themes of Night, in which the eerily-draped, amorphous form of the phantom of death, shrouded in black and crouching over the naked body of a terrified man, brings the evocative power of symbolism home to the viewer. We find the man, who moments before, had been reclining amidst the ethereally illuminated figures of other sleeping figure, is now suddenly wrenched from the intimate scene of warm and sensually-rendered flesh, intimate contact between sleeping lovers and the mannerist posturing of figures, reflecting another, more classically-inspired time in historical painting. Here, an expression of fear and panic isolate the single figure (thought to be a portrayal of the artist, himself), as the harbinger of death—faceless and nearly formless—bears down on his body and soul, about to reap his harvest.

Another Symbolist painter of the period: Gustav Klimt, Danaē (1907). Private Collection, Vienna

This painting is a study in isolation and alienation, common themes among the intellectual forces of the late Victorian period, that were driving the discussion of man’s increasingly marginal role in an industrialized world. Created at a time when Holder was plagued by fears of his own death, following that of his sister, the painting must have served to fix and allay those anxieties. But, in accordance with the demands of Symbolism for the portrayal of the mystical, the full significance of the painting may be intended to defy clarification, with its mixture of the traditional and personal, the naturalistic and the abstracted. [4]

Yet, many elements of Western belief systems are represented in this piece: death’s visage as horrific and unexpected, leading to an uncertain and perhaps frightening final destination; the lone, suffering figure at odds with the uncertainty of his future in the world; the notion of being trapped or cornered by fate, where freedom and choice is suddenly limited by civilization around us and the marked indifference and non-participation of the other figures in the scene, represented in their ultimate state of naked vulnerability and private reverie. The representation of death and destruction in the lives of Western man is often personified in art (though only hinted at here), where our God and his symbolic correlates posses an alien, other-worldly quality that intrude as unwelcome visitors in our lives, when least expected. The adversarial symbol of death portrayed in Night is an aberrant and terrifying visitor, serving as a universal Christian symbol for our solo spiritual journey through a world, where temptation and its chilling consequences thrust us into an unremittingly tempestuous journey through the world around us.

Like the Romantics before them, the Symbolists opposed the values of rationalism and material progress that dominated (and continues to) western culture, exploring instead, the non-material realms of emotion, imagination and spirituality. Ultimately, Symbolists seek a deeper and more meaningful reality than that encountered in everyday life. They reject formal, stylized compositional structure in their work, favoring instead, the realm of the imagination and figurative ambiguity that reflect our mysterious and elusive connection to life and our surroundings.

Manuel Mendive, Shango y la Vida (Shango and Life), 2004. Courtesy, private collection

In contrast to the more Western, formalized Spiritualistic constructs found in Holder’s Night, is the recent work of Cuban artist, Manuel Mendive and his narrative painting, Shangó y la Vida (Shangó and Life), 2004. This painting, by one of Cuba’s most famous artists, is a blend of religious and spiritual motifs that define the very essence of the island nation. A cultural admixture of indigenous Cuban, Spanish-Catholic, African tribal folk and religious traditions—and even Asian influences— go to make up a rich ethnic stew, known by the rich, meaty hotchpotch known as Ajiacó.

Raised in a blue collar neighborhood outside Havana, Mendive began painting in the 1960s, incorporating the vivid mythical traditions of his African, Yoruba tribal ancestors, with the Santería religious practices of Cuba. Santería is a system of beliefs that merge the Yoruba religion (brought to the New World by slaves imported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations), with Roman Catholic and Native Indian traditions. The term Santería was originally a derisive term applied by the Spanish to mock followers’ seeming over-devotion to the saints and their perceived neglect of God. It was later applied to the religion by others. This thin ‘veil’ separating the relationship between Catholic saints and Cuban Orisha (a spirit or deity that reflects one of the manifestations of Olodumare (God) in the Yoruba spiritual or religious system), however, is somewhat undermined by the fact that the vast majority of santerós in Cuba today also consider themselves to be Catholics, have been baptized and often require initiates to be baptized. Many hold separate rituals to honor the saints and orisha respectively, even though the disguise of Catholicism is no longer needed.

Rich with spiritual symbolism: Manuel Mendive, Untitled (7), 2003. Private Collection

Mendive captures the vital forces of nature and his ancestral past in his painting. Shangó and Life, immortalizing the ‘Spirit of Thunder,’ the Orish that embodies power. Shangó, known for his passion and virility, is represented in the center of the painting by a large phallus that links the two halves of the composition and then turns into a Royal palm. This tree serves as a symbol of Sangó’s divinity and home. He is a womanizer, charming, generous and a fearless warrior. Of the many figures in the piece, each serves a particular function: there is ‘Osain,’ keeper of the jungle and plants, but has only one eye and hears out of just one ear; there are the ‘Ibeyi’ twins, sons of Shangó, who must remain tied together to avoid losing their power. They represent fortune and good luck and here, offer their fruits. Snails, roosters, goats, turtles, birds and fish nourish other figures. Here, in this single work, are found a pantheon of figures that represent the rich heritage related to Shangó. [5]

Spiritualism in a culture, like Cuba with its strong African and colonialist roots, having known so much pain and suffering has, by its very nature, evolved in a more forgiving and interactive light. The surface of the Mendive painting (even its edges have meaning!) comes to life with an array of figures that offer nurturance, flexibility and hints of cultural unification, while evolving to remain steadfastly and pragmatically relevant to its community of believers, over generations. In Shangó, the forces of nature unite in support of the people. By comparison to Holder’s Night, with the terrifying consequences of life’s end being played out alone, in a shadowy room of the indifferent and unaware, Mendive’s colorful and mystical canvas, Shangó and Life, with its interactive spiritual panoply, tells the story of engagement and connectedness to the population; serving as a bridge to understanding in a complex, harsh and unforgiving world.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

________________________________

Citations:

[1.2.3] Museum Studies, Vol. 12, No.2, Art Institute of Chicago: ‘Ferdinand Holder, A Unique Note in the Birch Bartlett Collection’ (1986), pp. 166-187.

[4] Marilyn Stokstad, Art History, Vol. 2, Prentice Hall (2005), pp. 998-9.

[5] Gail Gelburd, ‘Ajiaco, Stirrings of the Cuban Soul’, University Press of New England (2009), prepared in conjunction with the Lyman Allyn Museum Exhibition, New London, CT

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.

Paris Photographs: World Fair Exhibition, 1900

 What follows is a wonderful historical record of how a particular artist resolved the issues of a particular subject, to yield a masterpiece of art. It was written by Blaise Cendrars in 1924, about his friend, the painter Robert Delaunay, and the creation of his painting, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911).* 

The Eiffel Tower

-dedicated to Madame Sonia Dulauney 

“…In the years 1910, 1911, Robert Delaunay and I were perhaps the only ones in Paris talking about machines and art and with a vague awareness of the great transformation of the modern world. 

At that time, I was working in Chartres, with B…, on the perfecting of his plane with various angles of incidence, and Robert, who had worked for a time as a journeyman mechanic, in some artisan locksmith shop, was prowling, in a blue coat, around the Eiffel Tower. artes fine arts magazine 

Folding Eiffel Tower postcard, c.1895.

One day, as I was coming back from Chartres, I fell out of the car at the exit of the Parc du Saint-Cloud and broke my leg. I was carried to the nearest hotel, the Hôtel de Palais, kept by Alexandre Dumas and his sons. I stayed there, in that hotel bed for twenty-eight days, lying on my back with a weight pulling on my leg. I had the bed pushed against the window. Thus, every morning, when the boy brought me my breakfast, threw open the shutters and opened the window wide, I had the impression that he was bringing me Paris on his tray. I could see, through the window, the Eiffel Tower like a clear flask of water, the domes of the Invalides and the Panthéon like a teapot and a sugar bowl, and Sacré-Cœur, white and pink, like a candy. Delaunay came almost every day to keep me company. He was always haunted by the Tower and the view from my window attracted him strongly. He would often sketch of bring his box of colors. 

It was thus I was able to be present at an unforgettable drama: the struggle of an artist with a subject so new that he didn’t know how to capture it, to subdue it. I have never seen a man struggle and defend himself so, except perhaps the mortally wounded men abandoned on the field of battle who, after two or three days of superhuman efforts, would finally quiet down and return to the night. But he, Delaunay remained victor. 

And now, think of my hotel window opening onto Paris. It was the subject of all his preoccupations, a ready-made painting which had to be interpreted, constructed, painted, created, expressed. And it was quite difficult. In that year, 1911 Delaunay painted, I believe, fifty one canvases o f the Eiffel Tower before succeeding. 

As soon as I could go out, I went with Delaunay to see the Tower. Here is our trip around and in the Tower. 

No art formula known until then could make the pretense of resolving plastically the problem of the Eiffel Tower. Realism made it smaller; the old laws of Italian perspective made it look thinner. The Tower rose above Paris, as slender as a hat pin. When we walked away from it, it dominated Paris, stiff and perpendicular; when we approached it, it bowed and leaned out over us. Seen from the first platform, it wound like a cork screw, and seen from the top, it collapsed under its own weight, its legs spread out, its neck sunk in. Delaunay always wanted to depict Paris around it, to situate it. We tried all points of view, we looked at it from all angles, from all sides, and its sharpest profile is the one you can see from the Passy footbridge. 

Robert Delauney, Champs de Mars, the Red Tower (1911). Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Winterbotham Collection.

And those thousands of tons of iron, those 35 million bolts, those 300 meters high of interlaced girders and beams, those four arches with a spread of 100 meters, all that jelly-like mass flirted with us. On certain spring days it was supple and laughing and opened its parasol of clouds under our very nose. On certain stormy days it sulked, sour and ungracious; it seemed cold. At midnight we ceased to exist, all its fires were for New York with whom it was already flirting then; and at noon it gave the time to ships on the high seas. It taught me the Morse Code which allows me today to understand radio messages. And as we were prowling around it, we discovered that it exerted a singular attraction for a host of people. Lovers climbed a hundred, two hundred meters over Paris to be alone; couples on their honeymoon came from the provinces and from abroad to visit it; one day we met a boy of fifteen who had traveled from Dusseldorf to Paris, on foot, just to see it. The first planes turned about it and said hello, Santos-Dumont had already taken it for his destination at the time of his memorable dirigible flight, as the germans were taking it for their target during the war, a symbolic and not a strategic target, and I can assure you that he wouldn’t have hit it because the Parisians would have killed themselves for it, and Gallieni had decided to blow it up, our own Tower! 

So many points of view to treat the problem of the Eiffel Tower. But Delaunay wanted to interpret it plastically. He finally succeeded with the famous canvas that everybody knows. He took the Tower apart to make it fit into his frame, he truncated it, and bent it to give it 300 meters of dizzying height, he adopted 10 points of view, 15 perspectives, so that one part is seen from below, another from above, the houses surrounding it are taken from the right, from the left, bird’s-eye view, level with the ground…” (1924). 

Edited by Richard Friswell, Managing Editor 

*Excerpt from, Transforming Visions- Writers on Art, an Art Institute of Chicago publication, Bullfinch Press, Little Brown & Co. (1994).