AUDUBON AND THE VEILED LADY

John Audubon (1785 - 1851) lived in the wilderness during the early years of the United States. He camped and hunted along the frontier as he studied birds for his illustrated masterpiece, The Birds of America. He kept a remarkable journal of his adventures along the Mississippi and down the Ohio River to western Kentucky.

After a year traveling along the Ohio river, Audubon came to New Orleans in 1821 and paused there to earn money teaching art.

One evening Audubon was approached on the street by a woman wearing a veil that hid her face. He wrote: "[She] addressed me quickly ... 'Pray sir... you are he that draws likenesses in black chalk so remarkably strong?'" When Audubon said yes, she replied that she had a task for him. He began to walk alongside her, but the woman became alarmed, saying "Do not follow me now." She wrote down her address and instructed him to wait 30 minutes before arriving. Audubon wrote:

I arrived and as I walked upstairs I saw her apparently waiting. "I am glad you have come, walk in quickly." My feeling became so agitated that I trembled like a leaf. This she perceived, shut the door with a double lock and throwing back her veil shewed me one of the most beautiful faces I ever saw.....

"Your name is Audubon?"

"Yes madam."

"Set down and be easy....I will not hurt you."

I felt such a blush and deathness through me that I could not answer...

"Will you keep my name, if you discover it, and my residence a secret?"

"If you require it."

"I do. You must promise that to me, keep it forever sacred....Have you ever drawn a full figure?"

"Yes."

"Naked?"

Had I been shot with a 48-pounder through the heart my articulating powers could not have been more suddenly stopped.... She raised, walked the room a few times and sitting again said, "I want you to draw my likeness and the whole of my form naked.... The drawing will be completed in this room...."

She drew the curtains and I heard her undress.... I eyed her, but dropped my black lead pencil....

Thus began what John Updike called "the first known nude American portrait done from life." Audubon was amazed that the veiled woman seemed "not at all afraid to disclose to my eyes her sacred beauties." Such a brazen act was unthinkable in the America of the 1820s and Audubon had to struggle to apply himself to his work. He made clumsy mistakes but she smiled and favored him with patience and eventually the picture was completed: "She gazed at [my drawing] for some moments and assured me her wish was at last gratified...."

The veiled lady and her nude portrait are lost to history. She swore him to secrecy, paid him and sent him on his way. Audubon tried to return several times to see her, but servants always told him she wasn't home.

In addition to being a cool story, the psychodrama that took place between artist and model in that candle-lit parlour long ago reminds us how much of the picture-making process is psychological.

Audubon bravely faced death in the wilderness, yet he "trembled like a leaf" at the astonishing sight of the woman unveiled before him. He could draw under the harshest physical conditions, but in the comfort of civilization, emotion and adrenalin clouded his senses and confused his fingers. He was skilled at rendering the shapes of nature, but when he tried to transfer those skills from drawing the curve of a wing to drawing the shapes of a woman, he became flustered. Clearly, all geometric shapes are not equal.

The veiled lady was of course an active partner in the psychological exchange. Audubon was bold when he left civilization behind for uncharted territory, but she was equally bold when she defied society's rules of decency to do something so unforgivable. Audubon's bird subjects came without psychological baggage. This meant they were not hindered by human feelings of guilt or shame, but at the same time they weren't motivated by the human desire to be seen-- to be known completely through the eyes and neurons of another.

So much of this blog is dedicated to the physical mark left by the point of a pencil on the surface of the paper-- and there is certainly a lifetime's worth of discussion to be found in such marks. But every once in a while it makes sense to step back and acknowledge the psychology of art which, like undetectable dark matter in the universe, accounts for far more of the total weight of art than the physical object.

STERLING HUNDLEY

I like the kind of art where you can tell that the artist has a pulse. This passionate image by Sterling Hundley for the Lyric Opera of Kansas City is a prime example:



Hundley's theatrical posters are not only impassioned, they are smart, too.

Marat Sade

Death of a Salesman

He has created posters for theatrical productions around the country. These projects give Hundley creative freedom which he uses to maximum advantage, developing his own themes and putting his human imprint on his subject. His illustrations also appear in publications such as the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, and accompany his own stories in Virginia Living magazine.

Like his theatrical posters, his illustrations tend to be emotionally complex and beautifully designed:









Hundley's pictures don't move, blink, or explode. They have no digital soundtrack or 3D glasses. Instead, they come from the tradition where the picture holds still and your brain moves. Such art is in short supply these days.

ANDREW WYETH, ABSTRACT PAINTER

This week we lost Andrew Wyeth (1917 - 2009), noted abstract expressionist painter. A formidable artistic source, his work was comparable to some of the most avant garde work of the last century. For example, contrast this painting by Wyeth... 

   

 ...with this image by famed abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell:

   

 Or, compare the shimmering effect of this painting by Wyeth...

    

 ...with this very similar painting by radical artist Jean Dubuffet:

   

 Here, a painting by Wyeth...

   

 ...might be compared with this work by famed minimalist sculptor and video artist Richard Serra:

   

 Some people even insist they can find realistic images hidden in Wyeth's lovely designs, like this abstract panting: 

 

 

 As for me, I'm not sure I see it.  But I guess abstract art is kind of like a Rorschach test. Everybody sees something different.

PASSING THE TORCH

The illustrations of William A. Smith capture the mood of his era. I especially like the gritty, urban paintings he did in the 1940s and 1950s which have a tough, noir feeling. Here, one of his preliminary studies transports you back to a 1940s barbershop at Christmas time:



The seeds of this picture might be traced to Smith's sketchbook which he carried everywhere, noting subjects that caught his artist's eye:

His painting is rich with those little details which are so evocative of his time and place. Note the the hue of the street light on shoppers rushing by outside:



The bored little boy waiting his turn in the barber's chair:


The cluttered array of tables lined up against the wall:



Smith's daughter Kim watched her father work and was inspired to follow in his footsteps. She learned traditional art skills from him. "He gave me LOTS of advice," she recalled. "He talked about composition quite a bit. Also, that the whites of eyes aren't white at all. He taught me to make a good green from yellow and black." Kim learned to draw beautifully at a young age and went on to learn painting, printmaking and sculpting.

But when Kim began to work professionally she discovered that the art world had changed. The work that had sustained her father's generation of artists had disappeared. She moved to the west coast, where she eventually found work in movies building models.

Near the end of his life, Smith visited his daughter in California at the model/creature shop and was amazed by the new applications for her artistic talent. Shortly after he died, Kim returned to painting in a way that her father could never have imagined:

My supervisor in the Modelshop at ILM asked me whether I could paint (I'd been sculpting and making molds up until that point). Lacking anyone else to do it, he put me on repainting submarine models we had inherited from another production company. I had never painted a vehicle before, but found myself enjoying making these 12-foot and 22-foot models look panelized and aged. I started using Art Masking Fluid, something I knew about from Dad, to paint on the models. I then rolled the membrane up in areas to get a web-like frisket for making marks on the surface, which was extremely realistic. I started "hearing" Dad behind my shoulder, instructing me how to proceed color-wise and aesthetically to get the right look. This ghost of my father was obviously very interested and excited about this project. In fact, he got so noisy I eventually had to give a swat over my shoulder to shut him down a bit. However, it was all very successful on camera. As a result, I was often chosen to paint vehicles and dirty, rusty machinery, as well as the "clean" stuff, and eventually started leading small crews and passing on what I had learned.

Kim was off and running. She learned to paint digitally and apply her talents in all kinds of new ways. Compare her father's paintings at the beginning of this post with the following video of Kim's painting and model work today, and consider how remarkably the role of an artist has changed in our lifetime:



Kim says that her traditional art training from her father gave her the broad foundation she needed for the challenges of the new media: "All my experience helped me in what I've done in the movies, including printmaking, working in clay, metal, paint and wood. It all gave me qualifications that make me useful."

Old artistic truths have been surrendering to new artistic truths since the world began. No one can stop it. But in stories like Kim's, you see that no matter how much things change, there is a core set of strengths that remain at the center, undiminished.

Ghosts of previous generations of artists will continue to whisper in our ear. We just have to know when to tell them to hush.

CALCULATING THE MARKET PRICE FOR BEAUTY

I consider Adrian Gottlieb one of the finest young figurative painters working in the classical tradition today.



His timeless work speaks with a quiet authority.





On the other hand, the most financially successful figurative painter working in the classical style today is John Currin:



Currin lacks Gottlieb's talent, but this painting recently sold for $5,458,500-- a thousand times more than a painting by Gottlieb.



How do we explain this huge disparity? I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with the visual qualities of the images.



Mia Fineman, art critic for Slate, offers the following explanation for why the art market adores Currin:

This year, the name on everybody's lips is John Currin, whose midcareer retrospective recently arrived at the Whitney Museum. By now, the major critics have weighed in on Currin's slyly satirical, figurative paintings, and the reviews have been unusually enthusiastic. There are some wildly different ideas about exactly what Currin is up to—New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman sees him as "a latter-day Jeff Koons" trafficking in postmodern irony while Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker finds him a blissfully sincere artist tapping into the timeless values of "mystery, sublimity, transcendence." But everyone is unanimous about one thing: John Currin can paint. In almost every review, Currin's technical skill is acknowledged with a kind of breathless wonder.

Currin's "technical skill" can't possibly account for his prices. Currin doesn't even have the technical skill of Gil Evgren, let alone of Adrian Gottlieb. Currin's "technical skill" that Fineman claims excites "breathless wonder" in the fine art market is almost commonplace in the underpaid field of illustration. But the contemporary fine art market turned its back on "technical skill" so long ago that it can no longer remember what skill looks like.

What else might account for the high price of a Currin painting? I suspect that Currin's "post modern irony," his "mystery, sublimity, transcendence" and the rest of the flumadiddle used by oleaginous art dealers accounts for at least $5 million of Currin's price. The fine art world values derivative paintings for the very same qualities that it fails to admire in the original; Currin draws upon "low culture" sources such as 1950s advertisements, pin up art, internet pornography and high school yearbooks. Patrons of the arts would save a lot of money if they had the vision to recognize the attributes in the originals. However these qualities remain invisible to them until some dealer with a continental accent and an expensive suit points out the "post modern irony" in a "low culture" image.

It does not bother me that art dealers prey on the credulity of wealthy simpletons and the venality of art speculators. To the contrary, it serves an important social function by taxing stupidity. The faster that these buyers can be stripped of their excess money, the less damage they will be able to do to society in other areas.

THE END OF 2008

George Bellows

2008 was a rough year for the type of assets that are vulnerable to market fluctuations.

40% of the value of the US stock market ($7.3 trillion) has simply evaporated. Major companies collapsed as the global credit system melted down and a wide variety of sophisticated financial instruments became untrustworthy overnight. Unemployment soared. The world will face some excruciating economic hardships over the next few years.

But there are other assets that don't lose their value regardless of how much markets fluctuate. The strength and insight behind that remarkable Bellows drawing stayed with him, and colored his perception of life, regardless of what was happening in the stock market that day.

In fact, some of the greatest artistic periods in human history arose during periods of great turmoil and strife. The golden age of Greece was forged in a period of bitter feuds between warring city states, when invasion by outside powers threatened to snuff out Greece altogether, and when an impoverished lower class was recovering from subjugation by the wealthy class. Here is Orson Welles' famous cuckoo clock speech from the Third Man:



Laurence Olivier said, "If you are an artist, you have to prove it."

Let's get to work.

WILLIAM APATOFF

He was born and raised in the slums of Boston, the son of Russian immigrants. When he was still a boy, his father died, leaving Apatoff the sole support for his family. He rode a battered bicycle around town after school seeking odd jobs, and he worked nights as a janitor. His childhood was grim and filled with challenges, but through it all he dreamed of becoming an artist.

He put himself through the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, working nights. Here is his portrait of a cleaning woman he admired.

After graduation, he went to Chicago where he set up an easel in his apartment and taught painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He married an Iowa farm girl and had children, who he adored. This is his portrait of me when I was three:

Before long, Apatoff found himself with six children to support and a lot of bills to pay. He put aside his fine art aspirations and became an art director in an advertising agency. Politically radical, he ruefully recounted that now his job was to sell "candy to rot teeth, tobacco to rot lungs, televisions to rot minds, and liquor to rot livers."







Every once in a while his fine art yearnings managed to find an outlet in his commercial work, as in this sketch of a bicentennial bottle for the Miller Brewing Company.



When I was young, I loved to accompany him on Sunday trips to the art museum. He would stride into a huge room filled with grand baroque paintings, size up the room in ten seconds and growl, "they should bring a garbage truck around back and throw out every painting in this room except this one and that one." Then he would stride briskly on to the next room as I raced on my little legs to keep up. But driving home, he might stop the car for 10 minutes to revel in the color of paint on an industrial water tower illuminated in the afternoon sun. I never met a man with more anarchistic taste.



Now my father is gone forever. Today would have been his birthday and I miss him terribly. He sacrificed his own potential as an artist so that his kids could have a better life than he did.

He never expected anyone to see these paintings. I post them here to honor what he gave up for me, and to honor all those caught in the tug of war between art and life.

THE NAKEDNESS OF GOYA

The world has gossiped for 200 years about Goya's twin paintings of the Maja-- one with clothes and one without.





When the secret nude painting was discovered, Spanish society was scandalized: did Goya really have an affair with María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Alvarez de Toledo, the 13th Duchess of Alba (and wife of the wealthiest man in Spain)?? And gee, is that what she really looks like under all those fancy clothes????

Today the two paintings hang side by side in the Prado where visitors continue to ponder those same eternal questions.


From the flickr account of lapernas 2.0

The Maja certainly bared her secrets in this painting but Goya had a few secrets of his own, and he stripped himself bare in artwork that was far more revealing than his painting of the Maja.

For 40 years, Goya was a royal court painter who painted flattering portraits of aristocrats and nobles. But underneath he was the opposite; he detested the idle and corrupt aristocracy and painted passionate images sympathetic to the oppressed peasants.



Goya also championed the philosophy of the Enlightenment. He treasured its ideals of rationality and logic. But underneath, he was a superstitious man, obsessed with dreams and mysticism. He made eerie paintings of devils and witches and bats.



As another example, the public Goya created art glorifying generals and military victories while the private Goya was creating devastating etchings condemning The Disasters of War.







Goya was considered a bon vivant who lived for a while on a lavish estate while he consorted with royalty. Yet, underneath it all, he was a deaf, embittered hermit who distanced himself from others and painted his private musings in dark paintings about a world gone mad.



One of his private black paintings, a "half-submerged dog," is a bleak and ghostly image that makes no sense at all (and for that reason, is all the more frightening):



Goya stripped off civilization, stripped off pretense and affect, even stripped off linear thought, to paint himself in a profoundly naked way.

Most people would rather focus on the bared Maja than on Goya's bared soul. Art experts and pedants have lots of fun obsessing over whether the nude Maja shows the first pubic hair in the history of western art. Even the Spanish Inquisition preferred to focus on the nude Maja; they never investigated Goya for his subversive political views, but they demanded that he appear before them to account for his nude painting (perhaps foreshadowing special prosecutor Kenneth Starr).

In one sense the nudity of the Maja seems frivolous and shallow compared to Goya's nakedness. But on the other hand, if you spend enough time pondering the bleakness of Goya's black paintings, you start to yearn for rescue from the onslaught of the night. And it's in such dire circumstances that you begin to appreciate that a naked thigh or a pubic curl have a profundity of their own.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 23

God, I love comics.

 This cover from a 1940 comic book is not so much a drawing as a riot of the themes inside the heart of an adolescent boy. Anyone who ever learned to draw will recognize their first few faltering steps here: how to hide the feet you don't quite know how to draw; the temptation to squeeze in every cool trick you've learned-- a skull, a punch, a broken wall, an axe-- whether it fits in the drawing or not; and of course, a girl in a slinky dress, perfected during those agonizing years when it was easier to invent your own girl than talk to a real one. The drawing, just like an adolescent boy, is an awkward jumble of overlapping themes with no perspective or coordination. There may come a day when these childish impulses are no longer so benign-- the boy grows up, and the sweet patriotism of that Uncle Sam may lead to narrow minded jingoism; the infatuation with a punch may lead to pointless violence; and the tied up girl may lead to who knows what. But for now, it is perfectly innocent. This is clearly not a well executed drawing, but if you promise not to tell anyone, I think its sweetness and purity still qualify it as a lovely one.