Who’s the greatest American artist of the late 19th century? I think you have to leave John Singer Sargent out of the running: though he had American citizenship, he was born in Italy, trained in France, and spent most of his life in Europe. Sargent aside, I suspect that most art historians would award the crown to either Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer. You can make the case either way, but I prefer Homer, and much of the American art public agrees with me, or so it seems based on the crowds for the recent Homer exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Winslow Homer exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, photo by author. Roberta and I attended the show a week before its closing, and the place was packed. You needed Roller Derby-style elbow armor to see everything, or at least an enormous amount of patience. (Roberta asked a guard when the best time to see the show was if you didn’t want to feel as if you were on the subway at rush hour. “Wednesday afternoon, 4:00 PM to closing,” was his answer.) It’s not surprising. Generations of schoolchildren grew up seeing reproductions of Snap the Whip, The Herring Net, The Gulf Stream, or half a dozen other Homer paintings in textbooks or as illustrations on the wall of their classrooms. Union soldiers in the Civil War, deer hunters in the Adirondacks, elegant young ladies playing croquet, fishermen earning a cold and brutal living — Homer captured all aspects of American life. There’s a subject in his work to interest almost anyone. Most of the works...
In a famous 1929 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf was right, of course – any novelist needs peace and quiet in which to work. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who reportedly wrote at a corner of the kitchen table while her seven children cavorted nearby, was an obvious exception, although I find the story as dubious as that of the Chinese peasant woman who interrupts her plowing to give birth in the field and then picks up the reins again. For painters, the need for a physical space – call it a studio or whatever you will – in which to create art is paramount. Oil paints take time to dry before revisions can be made. A session must be ended for the day when the light changes, and the easel must be left undisturbed. The physical needs of a painter are much more difficult to satisfy than those of a writer. Traveling through the Berkshires recently, Roberta and I visited a site which reflects the truth of Woolf’s perception. The Frelinghuysen-Morris House and Studio in Lennox was the home of two abstract artists who were dubbed “the Park Avenue Cubists,” George L.K. Morris (1905-1975) and Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988). Entrance foyer to Frelinghuysen-Morris House, Lennox, MAPhoto courtesy Frelinghuysen-Morris House and Studio. Born at the tail end of The Gilded Age, the artists, who married in 1935, grew up in privilege as members of New York and New Jersey families who had produced generations of statesmen and diplomats. After graduating from Yale, Morris rejected his...
Leaving aside the World War II years, which were more than just an “era,” there have been two periods in the past hundred years that have caught the popular imagination. The more recent was the Sixties in America, particularly the Summer of Love in 1968. Psychedelics, shaggy hair, and tie-dye shirts with bell-bottom pants all found their way into mainstream aesthetics and became a world-wide influence. The other period was the Roaring Twenties. The French called that period les années folles, the Crazy Years, and the center of that craziness was Paris, where French modernists escaping conformity, White Russians escaping Bolshevism, and rich Americans escaping Prohibition made a clean break with the strictures of the preceding war-blasted decade to concoct a heady scene from which emerged a new artistic style – clean, luminous, and merciless – which became known as Art Deco. Two of the best-known practitioners of the style in Paris were from Eastern Europe. One was the noted designer Romaine de Tertoff, better known as Erté. The other, Tamara de Lempicka, is currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland or Russia in 1898 (her birthplace is a matter of dispute), Lempicka was the daughter of a wealthy lawyer with roots both in Warsaw and St. Petersburg. Raised in Warsaw, she began making art at an early age. At 17 she had a brief term at school in Switzerland, but left to travel with her grandmother on a long tour of Italy, where she became familiar with Old Master art, including that of Bronzino...
“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” the painter Ad Reinhardt once famously opined, and it’s true that the physical accommodations that sculptures demand have made them problematic for many collectors. They take up so damned much space, and their weight, for anything larger that a table-top piece, means they’re pretty much going to stay wherever they’re plopped. This inconvenience is true for institutions as well as for private collectors: a church the size of St. Peter’s in Rome can handle a 14-foot-high sculpture such as Bernini’s Saint Longinus; most American churches can’t. This means that large-scale sculpture usually works best out-of-doors. Baroque princes had formal gardens with occasional sculptures sited at strategic points. Contemporary sculpture, however, often finds itself in a park devoted to the art. Roberta and I live within an easy hour’s drive from two such parks. Storm King Art Center, established in 1960, occupies almost 500 acres of beautiful landscape outside New Windsor, NY. An hour north of New York City, it attracts around 200,000 visitors a year from all over the world. The collection is world-class, featuring a Who’s Who of major contemporary sculptors such as Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, and many others. Mark di Suvero, E=MC2, 1996-1997. Steel, 92-3/4 feet high.Collection Storm King Art Center. Photo by author. Storm King is an environment that rewards Abstract-Expressionist inspired, testosterone-fueled sculptures. The environment practically shouts, Go Big or Go Home. George Rickey is a wonderful sculptor, but compared with di Suvero’s behemoths, Rickey’s 14-foot-high sculptures, displayed in a grove of trees, seem...
Can something horrible be made beautiful? It’s a question that came to mind after Roberta and I recently visited The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, a project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). EJI is a non-profit organization founded in 1989 to provide legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who were denied a fair trial. It guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama in a death penalty case. Through the efforts of EJI’s attorneys, several persons wrongfully convicted have been exonerated of the crimes of which they were accused. A memorial project began in 2018, and EJI now has three memorials in Montgomery to the victims of slavery and racial violence: The Legacy Museum, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (commonly known as the Lynching Memorial, as it lists the names of all known lynching victims), and, open for the past three months, The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. A visit to any of those sites is a moving experience, but I want to talk here about The Legacy Museum. More of a historical museum than an art museum (though it does have a gallery exhibiting the works of Black artists responding to racial injustice), the museum uses a variety of media to record history of slavery: interactive maps showing the routes of slave ships from Africa to the Americas, slave holding cells inhabited by holograms of actors in the roles of enslaved persons who describe their ordeals during the Middle Passage, transcriptions of the accounts of Black families being separated for sale, images of lynchings,...
A reader of this blog recently sent me an article from Bloomberg News entitled, “Prices of Contemporary Indigenous American Art Have Risen Over 1,000 Percent.” That statement is undoubtedly true, although, as with all “hot” tips on Wall Street, by the time the tip reaches the general public, insiders have already made their profit and moved on. New buyers will pay much higher prices. The savviest contemporary collector I know transitioned his buying from Black art to Native American contemporary art at least three years ago. It’s easy to get cynical about the art market. Is Native American contemporary art just the new Flavor of the Month? With art, there is no inherent demand. You have to eat; you need someplace to live. Prices for food and housing may go up or down, but there will always be a market. The market for works of art, by contrast, is influenced by any number of things, all of them artificial, no pun intended. Dealers are seeking to get in on the ground floor of the latest thing, trying to create a demand they can stoke. Curators are aware of political concerns as much as aesthetic ones as they try to organize shows that will receive critical approbation while still bringing in crowds. Critics are looking for new movements on which they can make their names. The climate is constantly changing, and art fads can be as short-lived as those of the world of fashion. After centuries in which art markets and art museums were dominated by white men, hitherto under-represented artists are now being aquired with a vengeance, particularly by...
