Art Book Review: Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York

There have been many attempts to neatly tie Reginald Marsh to various movements of American painting from the Fourteenth Street School to the Regionalist and yet that with which he was really most closely aligned, in spirit if not always in style, was the Ashcan School whose influence had peaked a decade or more before Marsh created his most significant work.  Like John Sloan and George Bellows before him, Marsh was mesmerized by the teeming life that filled the streets of New York City.  Though himself of upper class origins (born in Paris to an upper middle class family and educated at Yale), Marsh was always attracted to the lower classes - subway riders, burlesque strippers, Bowery bums, and Coney Island musclemen.  These were his subjects of choice in a city suffering through the worst years of the Depression.

Several years ago, I saw an excellent retrospective at the New York Historical Society entitled Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York that had been curated by Barbara Haskell of the Whitney Museum.  It was one of the few major exhibits that had been devoted to the artist following his death in 1954.  On view were many of his best known works as well as those of other artists who were active during the Depression.  The exhibit was accompanied by a catalog which I recently purchased at the Strand Bookstore on 12th Street, very near the Union Square location where Marsh once had his studio.

In developing his distinctive style, Marsh did not slavishly follow the Ashcan artists or other American realist painters such as Thomas Eakins but instead looked to old masters whose works he had seen and copied on his travels through Europe.  His great breakthrough came when he was introduced, by his friend Thomas Hart Benton, to the egg tempera process.  Used extensively by medieval and early Renaissance artists for panel painting, tempera had the great advantage of drying quickly, thus allowing Marsh to continuously apply brushstrokes to a given work without the necessity of first allowing the layers beneath to stand and dry.  As for content, Marsh's work was distinguished by crowding figures into the foreground against cityscape backgrounds.  With this technique, Marsh was able to convey the frenzied rush that filled the streets and sidewalks of New York.

The catalog contains several short but highly relevant essays.  The first of these, by Barbara Haskell herself, provides an overview of the artist's work and places him securely in the period of his greatest productivity.  It also furnishes the biographical details needed to understand his highly complex personality.  Even though Marsh's upper class background gave him entry to high society - his first wife was the daughter of Bryson Burroughs, at the time curator of painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - he was never at home in such a milieu and resolutely refused to paint those who were.  Taking the position that "well-bred people are no fun to paint," Marsh was repelled by the artificial manners of the rich if for no other reason than that "People of wealth spend money to disguise themselves."  One has to assume that this was, at least to an extent, a reaction against his father's career as a society painter.

The most interesting essay in the catalog is "Keeping the Carnival in Town" by Jackson Lears who details the manner in which the "anything goes" license traditionally granted revelers during Europe's carnival season became a permanent fixture in New York City during the Depression years.  Another essay by Sasha Nicholas investigates Marsh's use of photography to capture detail for his paintings while still another by Lance Mayer and Gay Myers provides and in-depth analysis of the materials and processes used by Marsh to create his works.

One unfortunate omission from both the exhibit and catalog are almost any examples of Marsh's graphic work. Marsh was extremely accomplished at etching and explored in his graphic work the same themes, and very often the same subjects, as in his paintings. It could be argued that certain scenes seeking to convey a sense of stark realism actually work better in graphic form, for example the 1932 Bread Line - No One Has Starved, the only graphic work that is reproduced in the catalog. To see more of Marsh's etchings, as well as engravings and linocuts, the interested reader should turn to the 1976 study The Prints of Reginald Marsh by Norman Sasowsky.

Art Book Review: Surrealism in Exile

Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School by Martica Sawin is quite simply one of the best art histories I've come across.  Not only is it well written but it's obvious that it's also been exhaustively researched to provide the wealth of detail contained within it.  Dealing with the period from 1938 to 1945, it traces the emigration to the United States and Mexico of European Surrealist artists fleeing the Nazis and their subsequent encounter with the young American artists who were later to form the nucleus of the New York School.  While this might seem a simple enough matter to chronicle, the huge number of artists involved, both European and American, and the complex personal and artistic interrelationships that existed among them actually make any attempt at a comprehensive survey extremely daunting.  Moreover, such a task requires an in-depth knowledge of modern art in the first half of the twentieth century and an ability to analyze and correctly evaluate individual paintings and sculptures.

Though its historic importance is largely forgotten today, Surrealism was the major cultural movement to arise in Western Europe, particularly in France, as a response to the carnage wrought by World War I.  At its most basic level, it was an attempt to replace traditional subject matter, now discredited by the insanity of total war, with a new approach to the arts, one linked closely to the expressions of the unconscious mind, already mapped by Freud at the beginning of the century, in the form of automatism.  This focus on the unconscious in turn greatly influenced the young American artists with whom the Surrealists came in contact and eventually led them to the breakthrough that became Abstract Expressionism, originally referred to as Abstract Surrealism.

The contribution of the Surrealists to their American counterparts was not, however, limited to the purely philosophical but also involved actual technique.  In the chapter "New York, 1941" there is a fascinating reproduction of a collaborative painting, the only surviving example of a series, in which the painters William Baziotes, Gerome Kamrowski and Jackson Pollock experimented in jointly dripping fast drying enamel paint on a canvas surface.  This obviously anticipated by more than a decade Pollock's famous drip paintings that were to become the the very avatars of American post-war art.  The idea did not, however, originate with these Americans.  Already in 1939 Gordon Onslow Ford, while working in his Paris studio with Victor Brauner, had tried his hand at the same technique, which he called coulage, using Ripolin enamel and had brought with him when he emigrated to New York the paintings he had created while using it.

At the center of the story (which, if he were alive today, he would consider his proper place) is André Breton.  Even if he were thoroughly irascible and a petty tyrant, Breton still deserves credit for holding together a band of temperamental artists in a cohesive school and for having the insight to understand intuitively their strengths and weaknesses.  This is all the more remarkable in that Breton and the other cofounders of Surrealism were not visual artists themselves but poets and writers.  There are also many other artists, such as Gordon Onslow Ford himself (as one of the last surviving Surrealists at the time the book was written he was able to give his account directly to the author and so secure for himself a more prominent position than he might otherwise have been allotted), who are little remembered today but who are here given their due in this book.  In addition, Sawin sheds new light on the development of such famous artists as Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Roberto Matta and Arshile Gorky while convincingly demonstrating the manner in which their distinctive styles evolved.

The passing of the torch from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism was also emblematic of the larger cultural shift that occurred after the end of World War II when the United States became not only the earth's greatest superpower but also its acknowledged leader in the arts.  Paris was replaced by New York City as the new world capital, a position it still holds today.  This transformation could not have been possible without the resources the transplanted Surrealists brought with them from Europe.  It was they who inspired the opening of many of New York's most prominent galleries, Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century foremost among them, that were later to be the first to showcase the works of the New York School.  

The one fault of this book is the quality of the reproductions.  These are rarely full page but more often in smaller format.  Worse, they are all monochromatic and have a murky appearance.  The absence of color makes it difficult for the reader to appreciate the quality of the original artworks and it's sometimes even difficult to decipher the content of the images shown.  There are, however, extensive notes and a voluminous bibliography.

Art Book Review: From Drawing to Painting

Pierre Rosenberg is an extremely accomplished scholar and art historian.  When it comes to the five artists - Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - who are the subject of From Drawing to Painting, few others are as competent to discuss their merits and faults.  As co-author of the catalogues raisonné of all five artists, whom Rosenberg considers "among the greatest of French draftsmen," he possesses an exhaustive knowledge of their lives and works.

The book itself is an adaptation of a series of A.W. Mellon Lectures given at Washington's National Gallery of Art in1996.  As such, the tone is informal and thankfully much less dry than one would expect of so erudite a scholar.  Moreover, both the book's excellent design and the inclusion of some 230 reproductions illustrating the author's arguments make the work fully accessible to laymen, even those possessing only a rudiementary knowledge of French art.

Rather than devoting a single chapter to each artist, the author has wisely chosen in each of the six chapters to address a specific problem by discussing the work of all five artists in relation to it. Thus, while the first chapter serves as an introduction to all five, the second, entitled "The Drawings: Their Histories, Techniques, and Themes," compares the five's drawings to one another, noting the similarities and differences in styles among them.  In this respect, it should be noted that the later artists were influenced, sometimes heavily, by their predecessors.  At times they even made copies of one another's works.  David, for example, was not only the teacher of Ingres but even found Fragonard employment at the Louvre when that artist found himself in dire straits.

Many of the issues addressed in the various chapters have applicability beyond the works of the five artists, and indeed of French art in general.  One particularly fascinating essay, "On the Attribution and Dating of the Drawings," has relevance to anyone interested in the process by which works of uncertain provenance are assigned to particular artists.  Forgeries, though rampant, are not the only problems faced by an author attempting a catalogue raisonné or a gallery owner preparing an exhibit.  In one instance, Rosenberg goes into a great deal of detail in explaing why in compiling the catalogue raisonné of Poussin's oeuvre, he and his co-author disallowed a large number of drawings formerly attributed to that artist, most notably a series of highly admired works that once formed part of the Crozat estate.

While the book is in general remarkably successful in educating its audience - I for one greatly enjoyed reading it - there remain a few quibbles.  For one thing, the title is somewhat misleading in its reference to painting.  Although several paintings by the five artists are discussed, it is almost always in relation to drawings that served as prepatory studies for the final works.  Throughout the book, emphasis is placed almost exclusively on the artists' drawings.  This is in itself not so great a drawback as long as the unwary reader does not anticipate any in-depth analysis of the painted works. 

The second problem has to do with the choice of artists.  After having only last year seen the two major exhibits of Delacroix's works at the Met Museum, I find it unforgiveable that so great an artist should have been entirely omitted from consideration here.  His absence seriously skews the study of the remaining five.  The famous rivalry between Delacroix and Ingres, for example, was representative of the conflict between Romanticism and neo-Classicism for ascendancy in nineteenth century French art.  Rosenberg himself is aware of the problem.  In the introduction he writes:

"Delacroix, I confess, does not inspire me.  I acknowledge his genius but it holds no attraction for me, and I do not understand him well (can we understand what we do not really appreciate?)."

An art historian, of course, is as entitled to his likes and dislikes as any layman.  Such a blatant disregard for one of the greatest French artists, however, cannot help but call into question the author's objectivity.

A final concern is the quality of the reproductions,  Though as noted above there are copious illustrations in every chapter, they are unfortunately all in monochrome.  Any consideration of the artists' use of color is thereby rendered moot.  This is hardly a minor point. 

Art Book Review: Arcadia and Metropolis

Whenever modern art is mentioned, one invariably thinks first of France in the early part of the twentieth century.  Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealism - these are the stuff of legend.  Rarely does anyone pause long enough to give a thought to Germany, even though two vitally important schools, Expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit, both originated there.  It is only when one makes this comparison that one realizes how successful were Hitler and his Nazis in their campaign to eradicate all traces of modernism from German heritage.

Few institutions bore the brunt of this cultural vandalism more directly than the Nationalgalerie Berlin's annex, the Kronprinzenpalais, which the Nationalgalerie had acquired following the fall of the monarchy at the end of World War I and which, under the directorship of Ludwig Justi, it had given over to the display of modern art, including a gallery of living artists (the Galerie der Lebenden).  On July 7, 1937, a commission led by Adolf Ziegler, the official in charge of the Reich Association of Fine Art, arrived at the Kronprinzenpalais and confiscated sixty-eight paintings, seven sculptures and a number of works on paper, all by Germany's most prominent modern artists.  Not content with these spoils, the commission next went to the Nationalgalerie's main building on August 12 and this time removed seventy-two paintings, twenty-four sculptures and hundreds of drawings.  When the museum's new director Eberhard Hanfstaengl refused to meet with the commission he was immediately replaced.  The works taken were then displayed at the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibit held soon thereafter in Munich.  Many of these were subsequently lost, as was the case with Franz Marc's masterpiece Turm der blauen Pferde ("Tower of Blue Horses"), or else destroyed outright.

It was appropriate then that one of the earliest exhibits to be staged at New York's Neue Galerie consisted of works of modern art on loan from the Nationalgalerie which had done its utmost over the years to rebuild its ransacked collection.  The show consisted of paintings by the very same artists whose lives and careers had been so violently disrupted by the events of 1937,  Among the works displayed were Paula Modersohn-Becker's Kniende Mutter mit Kind ("Kneeling Mother with Child"), Max Pechstein's Am Strand von Nidden ("On Hidden Beach"), Emil Nolde's Pfingsten ("Pentecost"), Max Beckmann's Adam und Eva ("Adam and Eve"), Otto Dix's Altes Liebespaar ("Old Couple") and George Grosz's Grauer Tag ("Gloomy Day").  The highlights of the exhibit were a number of paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the finest of which was unquestionably one of his studies of Berlin streetwalkers, the 1914 Potsdamer Platz.  Kirchner was an especially tragic figure.  His mental health unbalanced by the virulence directed toward him by the Nazis, he committed suicide in Switzerland in 1938.  

While we must be grateful for these works, their relatively small number are a constant reminder of the extent of the Nazis' depredations.  One can't help imagining how much more extensive this show would have been if not for their pillaging.  There were no works on view, for example, by the aforementioned Franz Marc, not only a notable artist but a war hero who had perished on the front in 1916 while fighting for his country in World War I.

Arcadia and Metropolis: Masterworks of German Expressionism is the catalog published to accompany the Neue Galerie's 2004 exhibit.  It's an excellent work that carefully presents each of the paintings accompanied by a page of insightful analysis.  In addition, there are five essays that trace the development of modern art in Germany as well as a discussion of its most important critics, the establishment of the Kronprinzenpalais as a venue for the permanent display of these works, and finally a detailed chronicle of the shameful actions of the Nazis who could only destroy what they could not understand.  There are also two appendices, one of which reproduces four full color posters advertising relevant art exhibits held between 1904 and 1912, and the other containing detailed biographies of the artists whose work is reproduced within the catalog.  The volume is valuable not only as an art book but also as a visual history of what can occur when an entire nation loses its way.

Art Book Review: The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult

The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, published to accompany a 2005 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, is one of the most delightful photography books I've come across in a long while. It's the first comprehensive study of which I'm aware to devote itself to the use of photography as a tool in parapsychological research and to trace the uneasy relationship between photographic science and spiritualist belief.

The book is divided into three sections - Photographs of Spirits, Photographs of Fluids and Photographs of  Mediums - and consists of a series of scholarly essays, each followed by reproductions that illustrate the content of the text.  This system is not always strictly adhered to.  The chapter on Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, is followed not only by the relevant photographs of the Cottingley fairies but also by the "skotographs" of Madge Donohoe who is nowhere mentioned in the essay.

The book's Foreword, written by Philippe de Montebello and Jean-Luc Monterosso, sets forth the academic rigor with which the subject is to be viewed:

"While the controversies over the existence of occult forces cannot be discounted, the approach of this exhibition is resolutely historical.  The curators present the photographs on their own terms,without authoritative comment on their veracity."

While such objectivity is in many ways admirable, it sometimes leads to unintended hilarity as when curators discuss obviously faked photographs in the same pedantic manner that might be employed in evaluating genuine works of art.  In such cases, a more skeptical tone would have served better.  Then again, some of the photos belong to the Met Museum's Gilman collection and the contributors might very well have considered it indiscreet to have labeled them outright deceptions.  What is remarkable is that spiritualist believers, when confronted by these same photographs, refused to believe the evidence of their eyes and insisted the phenomena recorded were real.  Even when photographers such as Buguet admitted to trickery, his supporters refused to accept his word for it.

On a technical note, it's interesting that infrared photography is mentioned only in passing, and then solely as a means of taking pictures in total darkness.  One would have thought that that film's ability to capture wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye would have made it a great resource for those attempting to capture the paranormal.

None of the photographers whose works are displayed in this volume were masters of their craft.  Far from it.  But while there's nothing shown here that remotely approaches the artistry of Man Ray, the entire book, when taken as a whole, can alternatively be viewed as an anthology of surrealist photography that rivals anything deliberately created by that movement in its self-conscious search for dreamlike imagery.  As such, many of these photographs possess and unintended beauty.  In the Fluids section, some of the representations are reminiscent of abstract art, a genre they prefigured by several decades.  Others have the charm of antique postcards from a Victorian sanitarium.  And in the end, this unintended artistry may represent the real value of the publication.  Thomas Mann, as quoted on page 177, derisively described the photographs taken of the medium Eva C. as "grotesque, fantastic and silly."  It is exactly that aspect which makes them worth viewing.

Art Book Review: The Art of Zen

I had a copy of The Art of Zen, in an oversize softcover edition, lying around my apartment for years before I recently picked it up and read through it.  I hadn't had any great expectations - books on Zen and Eastern mysticism have become something of a cottage industry since the 1960's and are usually nothing more than lightweight overviews that offer no real insight into their subject but instead do as much as possible to obfuscate it.  This brief study by Stephen Addiss, however, contains a wealth of information regarding not only Japanese art and calligraphy during the Momoyama and Edo eras, when Zen had already ceased to be the primary form of Buddhism in Japan, but also a history and explanation of Zen practice during that same period.

Proceeding in chronological order, the book begins with a discussion of the origins of modern Zen art, zenga, at the Daitoku-ji Rinzai monastery in Kyoto where the fourteenth century monk Ikkyū had once practiced calligraphy.  Addiss argues that as the shogunate consolidated its power in the seventeenth century it deliberately promoted Confucianism, with its emphasis on the respect to be paid to filial and social obligations, over the Zen beliefs that had prevailed during the Muromachi era.  The author feels that this politically expedient move actually freed Zen from the duties and functions which its previous position as the state religion had imposed upon it.  Zen was consequently once again able to return to its original emphasis on individual enlightenment and make increasing use of art and calligraphy to accomplish this purpose.

In subsequent chapters, Addiss discusses the continuation of the Rinzai tradition from successive masters, each imparting to his pupils the direct communication of satori, the form of sudden enlightenment that is the ultimate goal of Zen practice.  He also devotes a chapter to the growth of the Obaku sect, characterized by its inclusion of aspects of other forms of Buddhism such as the Pure Land school, that first appeared in Japan when Chinese monks fleeing the Manchu invaders who had overthrown the Ming dynasty landed in Nagasaki, the only Japanese port open to foreigners.  This was easily the most accessible school of Zen and soon became the most popular in Japan.

In each chapter Addiss discusses the most important monk/artists of the period under review.  An entire chapter is devoted to the life and art of Hakuin whom he terms the most important Zen artist of the past four hundred years.  In discussing the artists, the author furnishes a short biography that focuses on the individual's quest for enlightenment and the manner in which one finally attains it.  There is also an examination of each artist's style in both painting and calligraphy accompanied by high quality reproductions that illustrate not only the artwork but the character of the individual who created it.

One of the paradoxes of Zen is that while the state of enlightenment is undifferentiated, those who achieve it still retain highly distinctive personal styles in the art they subsequently create.  Addiss accordingly reviews some of the most common motifs to be found in Zenga - for example, representations of Bodhidharma, the monk who brought Buddhism to China from India, or of the ensō, the empty circle that represents the void and by extension the enlightened mind - and shows how their representations differ from one artist to the next.

Addiss's book is important not only as an art history but as a text on Zen itself.  Along with Alan Watts's The Way of Zen, this is one of the best introductions available to the general reader when it comes to the meaning and practice of Zen, a subject very difficult for the Western reader to comprehend.  This is because Zen regards rational thought as the greatest hindrance to attaining satori, and the master deliberately moves in apparently illogical fashion to shock the novice into an awareness of a higher state of being.  While a true understanding of Zen cannot be obtained from reading this or any other book, a study of the art left by its practitioners does give some idea how an enlightened mind views the world about him.  Moreover, Addiss's writing captures something of this  spirit in his erudite yet genial approach that is never pretentious as it leads the reader into greater awareness of the meaning of Buddhism.

Art Book Review: Man Ray: Photography and Its Double

The irony of Man Ray's life was that while he is today almost universally regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century photographers, second only to Stieglitz in my own opinion, he himself wanted to be known as a painter.  Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, he came by his photography career almost by accident.  When he arrived in Paris in 1921, he found that it was his skill in photographing artwork (it had been to make a record his own art that he had first taken up the camera in New York) that was most in demand and gave him an entree into European art circles.  Unable to earn a living as a painter - he failed to sell a single work at his first show at Librairie Six - he instead became extremely successful on both sides of the Atlantic as a portraitist and fashion photographer.

It was through his photography and his experimental short films that Man Ray came to be associated with Dadaism and Surrealism, the two most important art movements in France between the World Wars.  He had already become friends with Marcel Duchamp while still living in America.  When Man Ray arrived in Paris he was met by Duchamp who thereupon introduced him to the leading avant garde artists residing in the city.  Afterwards, Man Ray lived more or less a double life that could only have been possible in the French capital.  On the one hand, he found great commercial success through his fashion and portrait work while on the other hand he was respected as one of the leading Surrealists.  The two different strands of his life came together in his photographic work.  His fashion photos very often contained artistic elements that raised them above the use for which they had been intended, and his art photography benefited from the commercial skills he had mastered.  This continued until the outbreak of World War II when Man Ray was forced to flee the Nazis and returned to America at which point his career as a photographer came to an abrupt end.

There are a number of art books on the market dealing with Man Ray's photography, but Man Ray: Photography and Its Double is the best I've come across.  It was compiled in 1998 to accompany an "external exhibit" organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris during its renovation.  (I saw the exhibit at ICP here in New York City and was impressed by its inclusion not only of the photographer's final prints but of his contact sheets as well.)  The catalog consists of a number of essays by different scholars, including Serge Bramly, but at its heart are those by Emmanuelle de l'Ecotais who reviewed the Man Ray archives, including thousands of his negatives, that had been acquired by the Centre after a settlement with the estate of the photographer's widow Juliet in lieu of payment of estate taxes.  De l'Ecotais's access to the negatives and contact sheets provided her with a unique perspective that sometimes contradicted the artist's own account.  For example, Man Ray had always claimed that his portrait work was unretouched;  in actuality de l'Ecotais found evidence of substantial negative retouching done as a matter of routine in order to produce the desired effect.

In addition to providing an overview of Man Ray's fashion and portrait photography, the essays also provide welcome information on the more esoteric aspects of his photography, principally the Sabattier Effect and the Rayographs.  Though Man Ray was not the first to have discovered these processes, he used them carefully to bring a new level of artistry to his work and to express his vision in new ways.  In this regard, an essay by Michel Sanouillet traces artistic implications of the relationship between Man Ray and Duchamp.  Finally, there is an interview with Lucien Treillard, the photographer's friend and assistant for the last fifteen years of his life. 

One of the best features of the book is the variety of the images shown, all of them beautifully reproduced.  Over his lifetime, Man Ray had carefully selected for public display the photographs by which he wished to be remembered.  While that selection contained his best and most iconic works, it represented only a small fraction of his total oeuvre.  In contrast, this book, though it shows all the favorites, also has a large number of images with which I had previously been unfamiliar and which are well worth viewing.

This book is not by any means a biography.  Those wishing to learn more about the photographer and his work should read the 1988 study by Neil Baldwin entitled Man Ray: American Artist.  It's an excellent account of the career of one of the greatest artists this country has produced.

Art Book Review: Possessing the Past

Possessing the Past: Treasures of the National Museum, Taipei was published as a catalog to accompany an exhibit held at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1996 that featured an incredible display of masterpieces of Chinese art taken from the collection of the National Museum in Taipei.  These works were originally brought to Taiwan by Chiang-Kai Shek when he fled China in 1949 and represent the collection first amassed by the Ch'ing dynasty emperor Ch'ien-lung.  So many masterpieces from all periods are included in it that the catalog's authors are able to present a systematic overview of Chinese art from the neoltithic period through the founding of the Chinese republic in 1911.

The book proceeds chronologically with a section devoted to the art of each of the major dynasties.  In total, there are twenty-four essays written by noted scholars including Wen C. Fong and James C.Y. Watt, the book's two attributed authors.  Each essay is illustrated by splendid full color reproductions of the works included in the exhibit as well as smaller black & white reproductions of works not included but referenced in the essays.  In addition, there are notes, a bibliography and maps.

The essays are scholarly but easily accessible to anyone with a serious interest in Chinese art.  Though written by different authors, they follow one another seamlessly and avoid the erratic shifts in point of view that sometimes blight such anthologies.  An excellent feature common to all the essays is the in-depth analysis of each major work in the exhibit.  The reader is not only given a short biography of the artist but also a background to the creation of the work that includes any symbolism, political or otherwise, the artist may have employed.  Most importantly, the work is presented in context, i.e., the authors are careful to show how an idividual artist's style developed in relation to that of his contemporaries and how that style fit in with the reigning dyanasty's aesthetic principles.  This is particularly important since virtually all the artists discussed belonged to a particular school, some of which were quite loosely organized while others were formalized into "academies" during the Sung and Ming dynasties 

While every period of Chinese history produced artists of note, the high point of Chinese art was unquestionably the landscape painting of the Sung dynasty, both the monumental work of the Northern Sung and the more imtimate creations of the Southern Sung.  Although a politically troubled period that ended with the eventual victory of the Mongol invaders, it was during this same time that Chinese civilization reached its peak.  One can only look in awe at such works as Early Spring by Kuo Hsi or Listening to the Wind in the Pines by Ma Lin.  So pervasive was the Sung influence that only recently has it been recognized that many later Ming paintings have for centuries been incorrectly attributed to Sung artists.

Although the focus is naturally on painting, there is also great attention paid to calligraphy which in China has long been elevated to the status of a high art, if not the highest.  In fact, painting and calligraphy are closely interrelated, and it's not at all surprising that some of the greatest Chinese painters were also master calligraphers.  The association between the two arts is emphasized in such essays as "The Scholar-Official as Artist" in which author Wen C. Fong details the connection between the ink-bamboo paintings of Northern Sung artist Wen T'ung and the calligraphy of his contemporary, the poet Su Shih.  As another Sung scholar Hsien-yü Shu later wrote, "There is calligraphy in the painting, and painting in the calligraphy."  Certainly, calligraphy permitted as much freedom of expression as painting.  The reader has only to view at the work of the T'ang Buddhist monk Huai-su, known as the "Sage of Cursive Calligraphy," to understand the scope calligraphy permitted for individual styles and even idiosyncrasies.

There are also essays devoted to the applied arts.  In the section devoted to the Ming dynasty, for example, there is a long essay entitled "Official Art and Commercial Art" by James C.Y. Watt that discusses the exquisite porcelains of that era that are now so prized by Westerners.

Possessing the Past is one of the finest art histories I've come across.  I cannot recommend it too highly to anyone interested in Chinese art, or for that matter in art in general.

Art Book Review: Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

Even if not so well known to Westerners as his predecessors, Hiroshige and Hokusai, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi was arguably the greatest of Japanese ukioy-e artists.  Certainly it was largely through his artistry that the woodblock print form continued to flourish in the tumultuous era of the Meiji Restoration when important elements of the Japanese cultural tradition were discarded wholesale amid the rush to adopt everything Western.  If not for his efforts, ukiyo-e might in the late nineteenth century have existed only in a debased form devoid of the meticulous craftsmanship that had hitherto characterized it, if indeed it did not disappear altogether in favor of photography and other European methods of pictorial representation.

As might be expected, Yoshitoshi himself was a highly complex individual.  Born in the last years of the Edo Period, he was caught in the power struggle that enveloped Japan after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate.  The strife was not only political but cultural as well in that an entire way of life that had remained frozen during the centuries the country had been cut off from the outside world suddenly crumbled in the face of forced Westernization.  This radical change in direction had profound psychological consequences for the Japanese; they could no longer be sure of their own identity.  To continue to practice a traditional art form in such circumstances amounted to an act of defiance in its refusal to relinquish what was best in the Japanese spirit.

Yoshitoshi paid the price for his courage.  A student of the master printmaker Kuniyoshi, it took him years to achieve even a small amount of success.  During this time Yoshitoshi experienced such grueling poverty that his mistress Okoto sold herself to a brothel in order to support the artist with her earnings.  It was during this period that Yoshitoshi produced his most sensationalist work, such as the notorious Eimei nijūhasshūku ("Twenty-eight famous murders with verse").  Filled with violence and depictions of ghosts and demons, these works reflected well the discordant nature of the times.  Though Kuniyoshi had also treated this same supernatural subject matter (see, for example, Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre), nothing could compare with the savagery with which Yoshitoshi invested such works as Saijiro Kills Kohagi.  In the end it all became too much for Yohsitoshi and in 1872 he suffered the first of his two mental breakdowns.

Tsuki hayakushi ("One Hundred Aspects of the Moon") comes from a much later period in Yoshitoshi's life when he had finally achieved a measure of security and critical success and had settled down long enough to marry Sakamaki Taiko, a former geisha who already had two children.  Even though in 1885, the year he began work on Tsuki hayakushi, he produced his most horrific print, The Lonely House on Adachi Moor, the new series was far gentler and more contemplative in nature.  Filled with scenes from Japanese history and folklore and held together only by the constant motif of the moon, Tsuki hayakushi can be seen as an elegy to the old Japan that was on the point of vanishing forever.  Into it Yoshitoshi poured everything he had learned of art, and the resulting work is a masterpiece of technical skill.  Thus, at the very end of its existence, ukiyo-e achieved its greatest triumph.

John Stevenson's guide to Yoshitoshi's penultimate work - the artist suffered a second mental breakdown after completing the final images and then died of a cerebral hemorrhage shortly after having been released from the hospital - is a delight for anyone with an interest in Japanese art.  It begins with a long biographical essay that traces Yoshitoshi's life and development as an artist at the same time that it outlines the  historical events that occurred about him, a knowledge of which is essential to understanding any of the works created by this artist.  This section is profusely illustrated with small color reproductions of Yoshitoshi's most important works before beginning the present series.  There follows a short essay on the publication of the series and the technical details of its production along with a timeline of Japanese history and even a map showing the locations of the artwork's settings.  After this comes the catalog itself.  Each of the prints is exquisitely reproduced in large format on its own page.  Facing each is the story the print illustrates and detailed attention is paid to the iconography contained within it.  Stevenson has a scholarly knowledge of his subject and great erudition, but his style is never pedantic.  It's obvious throughout the book that he has sincere affection for Yoshitoshi and very much enjoys relating the stories behind each of his prints.  As a result, Stevenson's writing is thoroughly intelligible, even when dealing with the most arcane matters, and makes Japanese history come vibrantly alive for the reader.

As for the prints themselves, my favorite is one entitled Genji yugao no maki that illustrates a particularly poignant episode from Murasaki's classic Genji monogatari.  It should be noted that the coloring of the print in Stevenson's book is much more subtle than in many of the examples shown online.  That might mean that they are from later impressions when production standards were not as high.  Stevenson generally chose the earliest impressions available for reproduction in his book.  Another coloring change, usually in bright oranges turned brown, came about as a result of oxidation of the ink pigments over the years.

Art Book Review: New Worlds

The great problem with the Neue Galerie publication New Worlds is its subtitle, "German and Austrian Art 1890 - 1940."  The wording would lead one to believe that this is a comprehensive survey of developments in the art of those two countries from roughly the Vienna Secession to the outbreak of World War II.  Would that this were the case.  Instead, the book is actually a museum catalog, the Neue Galerie's first, that treats only those artists represented in the museum's collection and reproduces only the artworks actually owned by the Neue Galerie.  This inevitably leads to a skewed perspective on modern German art as a number of important artists have not yet found their way into the museum's collection.  Käthe Kollwitz, for example, is universally regarded as a major Expressionist (see my 2/5/2018 post) and yet she might just as well never have existed for all the mention she's given in this study.  On the other hand, a balanced evaluation of the artists who are included is hampered by the paucity of artworks taken from their various oeuvres. Examples include Max Pechstein, a co-founder of  Die Brücke, and Franz Marc, a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, essays on each of whom are illustrated by only one work apiece.  Although several female artists are discussed in the final section of the book dealing with applied arts, only one woman merits inclusion in the fine arts section - Gabriele Münter, another founding member of Der Blaue Reiter and the partner of Wassily Kandinsky.

Fine artists are grouped together according to the movements they best represent, e.g., Vienna Succession, Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, Bauhaus.  A short essay is devoted to each artist.  Although these essays have been authored by a number of different scholars, each follows the same format.  There is a brief biography that usually contains significantly less information than can be found in the corresponding Wikipedia article, a short discussion on the evolution of the artist's style that inevitably ends with his inclusion in the infamous 1937 Munich Entartete Kunst exhibit (here, of course, a badge of honor), and finally an overview of the artist's reception in the United States.  Considering that many German artists never set foot in this country, the last is somewhat perplexing.  There can be no doubt, however, that the catalog editors see this as an essential point.  Driving the point home, at some 31 pages, is "The Myths of Expressionism in America," by far the longest essay in the book.

The final third of New Worlds is devoted to an examination of German applied arts during the period under discussion.  This is divided into two sections: "Viennese Decorative Arts around 1900" and "Applied Arts and Architecture in Germany, 1890's to 1930."  Here the format changes.  Each section is prefaced by a short essay that is then followed by copious illustrations that are in turn followed by artist and architect biographies.  The longer of the two is the first, dealing primarily with the Vienna Secession, while the second is dominated by the contributions of the Bauhaus.  Again, emphasis is placed on the connection to America as the discussion, and for that matter the book itself, concludes with the essay "Moments in the Reception of Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Decorative Arts in the United States."

I would never recommend New Worlds to someone seeking an encyclopedic study of modern German art.  Nevertheless, the book does contain some useful information that may be of genuine interest to those who already possess some knowledge of the subject.  It might be particularly valuable to those planning a visit to the Neue Galerie on 86th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The Blue Hours

A few months back, I published my fourth novel as an ebook at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  I'm very excited about it and honestly think this is my best work yet.

The book is intended as a tribute to Cornell Woolrich, who more or less invented the noir genre, and at the same time an attempt to explore the very meaning of the term.  After all, noir is, by definition, dark.  A number of authors, however, lighten their narratives in order to achieve better sales and attract more readers.  Their protagonists, no matter how tough they initially appear, usually prove to be decent law abiding citizens caught in circumstances beyond their control.  In contrast, I've chosen to tell my story from the point of view of a violent drug user with few, if any, redeeming features.  My intent was not to make the character sympathetic but compelling.  If a monster, he is not a cardboard villain but rather a living breathing human being tormented by his failings while unable to break free of them.

The Blue Hours is set in New York City in 1970, long before gentrification, when the town was still gritty and crime ridden.  It tells of a violent junkie, just released from jail, who wakes one morning in an East Village tenement to find himself holding a smoking gun and sitting beside a corpse.  With the police relentlessly pursuing him, he desperately tries to find the one witness who can tell him what really happened.

In addition to writing the text, I shot the cover photo on infrared film and then printed the negative in a wet darkroom.  I also designed the book's cover in Photoshop.

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Art Book Review: Picasso and Dora

Despite its title, Picasso and Dora is not a dual biography of the two artists, nor even a chronicle of their relationship, but rather author James Lord's memoir of his expatriate youth in France during which time he became acquainted with both Picasso and Maar.  Picasso himself makes only a few cameo appearances, but his presence hangs over the narrative and has a profound effect upon Maar's and Lord's somewhat confused relationship.  

It is Lord's portrayal of Maar that is most problematical.  Lord himself was never more than a minor figure on the fringes of the European art scene in the 1950's, and it is doubtful he would ever have been invited to all the lunches and dinners he so lovingly describes - he is constantly dropping names, the more famous the better - if he had not been Maar's companion.  Despite his best efforts to present himself as a highly likable if somewhat naïve connoisseur of the arts, he is a devious and ultimately untrustworthy narrator.  For example, though he is forever reminding the reader how highly he idealizes Maar, he never misses an opportunity to portray her in a bad light as a miserly, grasping middle-aged woman, eccentric to the point of neurosis.  While Maar was one of the most important and highly respected photographers of the Surrealist period, Lord glosses over her involvement with the medium in a paragraph or two as if it were some minor phase through which she passed before finally finding fulfillment as the lover of Picasso.  Lord also downplays the art Maar created after her split from Picasso and strongly suggests it was never more than mediocre.  (Perhaps it was at that, but there is no way of knowing from what little analysis is presented here.)

The book contains some interesting anecdotes regarding the artists and collectors Lord met during his time abroad, but it should be read with caution.  It is a highly biased account and sometimes seems little more than an excuse for literary revenge on all those, particularly Maar, the author felt had slighted him.

Art Book: Shadowplay Eterniday

Published in 2003 to celebrate the centennial of Josph Cornell's birth, Shadowplay Eterniday is one of the most beautifully designed books I've come across.  It's apparent on every page that the editors and contributors not only possessed great respect for Cornell as an artist but also had a deep personal affecton for him as a man.  It's a loving tribute to the most enigmatic of the Surrealists, an outsider who lived his entire adult life in a middle class home in Queens, New York, probably the most unlikely location on the planet to find an artist of his stature.

Cornell's entire career was something of an anomaly.  There was nothing in his upper middle-class background or in his education that had anything to do with art.  On the one hand he could be viewed as a recluse who had no deep personal relationships other than with his mother and his brother Robert, an invalid who suffered from cerebral palsy, both of whom lived with him in Queens.  And yet paradoxically, while never promoting himself or traveling outside New York, he became a major figure in the art world and during his lifetime had major retrospectives at both the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Though he was much too shy and sexually inexeperienced to have any romantic relationships, he did manage to form friendships with several of the actresses and ballerinas he so admired.

While he also made a number of avant garde films, Cornell is most widely known for his boxes.  These glass fronted displays normally contain a number of disparate elements, most of them taken from the artist's extensive collections of bric a brac that he accumulated compulsively in his wanderings through New York City.  When placed together, however, the assembled boxes become self-contained universes and represent far more than the sum of their parts.  If often playful, they have at the same time far deeper meanings that require a great deal of time and patience to fathom.  Along the way, the use of found objects in the creation of the boxes made Cornell a pioneer of appropriation art and an unlikely confederate of Marcel Duchamp who in his "readymades" also sought to transform everyday objects into works of art.  In fact, Duchamp's idea for the Boîte-en-valise owed much to Cornell who even assisted in the design of the valise itself.

If the contradictory elements of Cornell's life make it difficult to get a grasp on the man himself, there's a quote on page 37 of the present volume that's extremely helpful.  

"'You don't know how terrible it is to be locked into boxes all your life,' he [Cornell] told dealer David Mann, 'you have no idea what a terrible thing it is.'"

This is really key to understanding not only Cornell's art but his life as well.  He apparently saw himself as a prisoner trapped in a strictured environment from which there was no escape much as the actresses and other figures to whom he paid tribute were sealed within the containers he created to hold them.  The boxes thus became a metaphor for his own existence.

Shadowplay Eterniday contains three relatively brief essays as well as a biographical sketch and a bibliography.  The first essay, by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, is a general introduction to the artist's working methods and provides some idea of the scope of his accomplishments.  The second and by far the most interesting, by Richard Vine, traces the influence of Cornell's strongly held Christian Science beliefs on his oeuvre.  The third, by Robert Lehrman, is a collector's musings on several seminal works with which he has long been acquainted.  The real heart of the book, of course, is the catalog of the artworks themselves.  The reproductions are of the finest quality and are sometimes accompanied by details of the pieces shown.  Though Cornell's three dimensional works invariably lose something of their essence when reduced to a two dimensional format, the excellence of the illustrations does go a long way in helping the reader appreciate the complexity and mystery of the originals.

In an unusual touch, the book contains a DVD that "delivers an encyclopediac compedium of the artist's work and source materials, the insights of numerous scholars and critics, access to Cornell's experimental films and interactive opportunities..."

Serialized Noir Fiction

I've recently posted the first three chapters of my noir novel, The Dark Veil, on my other blog Central Park Blues and will continue to post a chapter each Wednesday until I've made the entire book available in serialized form.

I'd first thought of attaching a pdf to each week's post, but finally decided it would be more convenient to post each chapter within the body of the post itself.  There's no need then to download any files.

Those who who would rather download the entire book can click here for the Amazon Kindle edition or here for the Barnes & Noble Nook Book edition.

I hope at least some of my readers will find the story entertaining.  For those who are interested, here's a summary of the plot:

A down & out photographer is found shot to death in an alley in New York City's Chinatown. There weren't any witnesses, and so far the police haven't managed to come up with a single lead. Was it really nothing more than a random killing, or was the victim in possession of some terrible secret that cost him his life? 

That's the situation Quinn faces when he arrives back in Manhattan determined to find the killer. Thwarted by the police and barely surviving an attempt on his own life, Quinn struggles to find his way in a gentrified city that no longer has any place for him. Violent and unpredictable, he wanders the streets looking for answers.

Soon Quinn has come up with his own list of suspects, one that includes a knife wielding ex-con, a perverted Japanese filmmaker and a villainous Wall Street financier who just happens to be an expert marksman. Along the way, he falls in love with the gorgeous mystery woman who once modeled for the murdered photographer. But is Quinn too deeply involved to see where his quest is leading him? 

Set against a tumultuous background where rich and poor struggle for the soul of a city, the story moves relentlessly forward through death and mayhem until at last it reaches its bloody climax.

"Pictorialist Models" Now Free of Charge

For the time being at least, Pictorialist Models - which is actually my photography portfolio in ebook format - is available free of charge from the Smashwords website.

This is traditional (non-digital) photography.  I shot all the photographs contained within the book on black & white film and then printed the negatives in a wet darkroom.

The ebook is in pdf format and can be downloaded at the link shown below.  Note that some of the photos contain artistic nudity.

Click Here for Download Page

Art Book: Metropolitan Lives

One of my favorite schools of painting, perhaps because I'm a native New Yorker, is that of the Ashcan Artists - Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan and George Bellows.  From roughly 1904 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 they pioneered a distinctive style of American realism.  The group actually had its beginnings in Philadelphia in the 1890's where most of its members were employed as illustrators at the city's newspapers.  It was Henri who drew them together there with the inspirational Tuesday evening talks he gave at his studio.  Rebecca Zurier's essay, "The Making of Six New York Artists," fails to mention, though, that Henri and several of his protégés had previously studied under Thomas Anshutz, a former student of Thomas Eakins, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.  After the artists had relocated to New York City the movement gained its greatest renown with the show of "the Eight" at Macbeth Galleries in 1908.  (The membership of the Ashcan Artists and the Eight was not identical.  Three of the Eight – Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast - did not paint in the Ashcan style while George Bellows, who did, was not included in the 1908 exhibit.)

If there was a literary inspiration for the Ashcan Artists, it was certainly Walt Whitman whose celebration of the common man and the American spirit was embodied in their paintings.  As political radicals (Sloan was a member of the Socialist Party and served on the editorial board of The Masses), the artists did not hesitate to go into the tenements and red light districts and make them the subject of their paintings.  It was this that distinguished their work from other strands of American realism.  And in this sense New York City was the perfect subject for their art.  Robert Snyder's essay "City in Transition" begins:

"The greatest theater in New York has always been the theater of its streets, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century. The city that emerged was both coarse and inspiring.  Tenements sprawled in the shadows of skyscrapers.  Sidewalks rang with a symphony of languages.  Street-corner socialists battled sweatshop tyrants.  Bright lights illuminated nickelodeons and vaudeville theaters, the new temples of mass culture."

But the paintings these artists produced were not in any way didactic but rather celebrations of the teeming life that filled the streets from the Battery to Harlem.  They portrayed the immigrants in their ethnic neighborhoods, the shopgirls on their way to work, the crowds gathered underneath the elevated lines to hear election results with pure affection.  They realized that it was these masses of people pursuing their dreams and enjoying their leisure that made this country great.  It's no accident that the longest essay in the book is Snyder and Zurier's "Picturing the City."

What makes this book especially poignant is the fact that when it was published much of the New York City the Ashcan Artists portrayed could still be found in spirit if not in fact.  The rich still lived side by side with the poor and the same polyglot mixture of peoples could still be seen following their traditional routines.  In the last twenty years, though, that New York City has disappeared as real estate interests have transformed the city into an enclave that's now exclusively for the rich.  The vibrance and zest for life is gone now as venerable institutions are put out of business and the buildings that housed them torn down to make way for high-rise condos.  The few venues that remain, such as McSorley's in the East Village, are nothing more than museums left intact to provide local color.  

Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York was published to accompany a 1995-1996 exhibit of the same name presented by the National Museum of American Art.  It consists of a series of well written essays by Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder and Virginia M. Mecklenburg and a huge number of reproductions, not only of the Ashcan Artists' paintings, but of photographs, postcards, newspaper clippings and memorabilia from the period in which they worked.  Together they bring back to life, if only in print, the dynamic metropolis New York City was at the beginning of the twentieth century when everything seemed possible to its inhabitants.  It's not so much a scholarly work as a loving tribute.

Max Beckmann: The Path to Myth

Max Beckmann: The Path to Myth by Reinhard Spieler is one of a series of soft-cover monographs on German artists published by Taschen.  Like others in the series, it is profusely illustrated, though the quality of the reproductions leaves much to be desired, and is a mixture of biography and art criticism.  In this case, however, the criticism is so intense that it leaves little room for a more detailed description of the major events in the artist's life.  And not only that, but the reader often feels Spieler is reading too much into the artworks in order to provide each with a mythic dimension that is not necessarily there.  For example, when discussing the 1930 painting The Bath, the author goes to a great deal of trouble to link the work to the ancient Greek tragedy of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.  In his reading, the work is charged with erotic tension and homicidal inclinations.  But the associations are at best obscure.  The painting can just as easily be seen as a depiction of a playful interlude between the artist and his wife Quappi as she prepares to join him in his bath.

Beckmann had a troubled career representative of the sometimes insurmountable difficulties faced by many twentieth century modern German artists, including George Grosz, Otto Dix, Christian Schad and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, to name only a few.  Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884 at a time when the newly unified German state was rapidly becoming the major power in Europe.  His early life was spent in comfortable middle class surroundings and he achieved early success as an academic painter.  He might have continued in this vein indefinitely had it not been for the outbreak of World War I when he was 30 years old.  It's difficult at a distance of one hundred years to appreciate how traumatic the conflict was to those living in once proud Germany, a country that prided itself not only on its military might but on its cultural achievements as well.  Beckmann's military service proved to be the turning point in his life.  While serving in the medical corps at the front lines he, like many others on both sides, suffered a nervous breakdown from which it took years to recover.  Once the war was over, there was no going back to his previous if only because that world no longer existed.  Not surprisingly, Beckmann's wartime experiences had a profound impact on his painting.  As the art historian Ferdinand Schmidt wrote in 1919:

"His [Beckmann's] earlier work seems to have come to an abrupt end.  Those who knew and admired the Beckmann of 1913 may well be appalled by so radical an alteration in style.  There can hardly be any other example in recent German art of such a fundamental change in an artist's approach."

One has only to look at such works as The Night (1919), an oil on canvas, to appreciate the depth of Beckmann's suffering.  There were also changes on a technical level as the artist sought a new medium to better express the horror of his new worldview.  Beckmann produced several portfolios of graphic works in the years immediately following the war's end.  The best and most harrowing of these is a set of ten lithographs collectively entitled Hell (1919), including a monochromatic version of The Night.  It was only gradually, in the relative stability of the Weimar period, that Beckmann was able to reestablish his career and leave behind his nightmarish visions.

Beckmann did indeed include mythic content in his later work.  The most powerful example of this is to be found in his first triptych entitled The Departure (1932), completed shortly before his flight to Amsterdam.  Through the use of mythic content, the artist was able to create new dimensions of meaning in his work, much as James Joyce had done in Ulysses.  But there was another reason Beckmann moved in this direction.  His work had already been castigated by the Nazis, and mythic content that could not be linked directly to any current political situation provided a safe outlet for the expression of his ideas even if they did include veiled references to world affairs.  It did little good.  Beckmann's was condemned as a "cultural Bolshevik" by the Nazis and was forced to give up his teaching position in Frankfurt and eventually fled to Amsterdam where he spent ten years in precarious exile.  Meanwhile, his work was removed from German museums and galleries and was included in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibit held in Munich in 1937.

One facet of Beckmann's career that this monograph explores in detail is his absorption with self-portraits.  In the tradition of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Beckmann ceaselessly painted his own likeness throughout the length of his career.  Better than any text, these portraits show the evolution of the artist from an idealistic youth to an embittered old man crippled by the heart disease that was finally to kill him at age 66 in New York City.

The book is worth reading if only because there are so few works devoted to this major German artist who, due to world events beyond his control, never truly received the recognition he deserved.  Hopefully, there will someday appear a definitive full length biography that will provide him greater prominence in the history of modern art.

Gertrude Käsebier: The Photographer and Her Photographs

It's difficult to believe now, so completely has she been forgotten,  that at the turn of the twentieth century Gertrude Käsebier was one of America's most successful and best known photographers.  So important did Stieglitz consider her work that he dedicated the first issue of Camera Work to displaying her photographs rather than those of his disciple Steichen.

Käsebier was lucky enough to have been born into a family of moderate wealth and then married, however unhappily, to a successful businessman.  As a result, she did not have to worry about earning enough money to pay the rent.  In fact, Käsebier was already age 36 and her children nearly grown when she first took up the study of photography.  While it's true that her social standing enabled her to secure many wealthy clients for her lucrative portrait business, Käsebier was a strong minded business woman who worked hard to make herself a success.  She also had enough foresight to ally herself with Stieglitz when he first began to seriously promote photography as an art form and she thus became a charter member of the Photo Secession.

If Käsebier is passed over today, it's most likely because so much of her oeuvre was given over to the celebration of motherhood and children.  Ironically, those photographs that first established her reputation, such as Blessed Art Thou and The Manger (both from 1899), are the same that now cause her to be rejected on the grounds that her work is too cloyingly sentimental to be worthy of serious consideration.  Actually, shortly after it was created, a print of The Manger sold for $100, at the time the highest price ever paid for a photographic work.  In contrast, the photograph for which Käsebier is best remembered today is her sensual portrait of Evelyn Nesbit, reproduced on this book's cover, whose cocaine addled husband gained notoriety when on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden he sensationally murdered the showgirl's former lover, the playboy architect Stanford White, who was also Käsebier's friend and patron.

The other reason Käsebier is given so little attention today is that her photographic style was unabashedly "pictorialist."  This term has been given a pejorative connotation since at least the 1930's when Ansel Adams and other members of the f64 Group began to relentlessly promote "straight" photography at the expense of all other forms of photographic representation.  Their closed minded insistence on their sharp and straightforward style as the only viable approach to the medium did incalculable harm to mid-twentieth century photography.  Käsebier was, on the other hand, the pictorialist photographer par excellence.  She had no hesitation at all in painting in backgrounds or details on her prints or in using alternative printing methods such as platinum and gum bichromate.  Although some pictorialists no doubt did go too far in their image manipulations, by and large they created works of incredible beauty that were far more imaginative than the literal, matter-of-fact reproductions of reality favored by the f64 Group.

Gertrude Käsebier: The Photographer and Her Photographs, is a highly sympathetic biography written by Barbara L. Michaels.  It is a short work, really not more than an extended essay, that would have benefited greatly from more detail regarding Käsebier's associations with some of the greatest artists of her time.  These included not only Stieglitz and Steichen, but also such seminal photographers as Alvin Langdon Coburn (who once worked as Käsebier's assistant), F. Holland Day, Clarence White and Baron de Meyer as well as leading painters and sculptors in both Europe and America, most notably Auguste Rodin whom Käsebier photographed extensively at his home near Paris.  The book, published by Abrams, is handsomely designed and filled with excellent reproductions of Käsebier's black & white photographs, including all her most famous works as well as many with which I had previously been unfamiliar.

William Blake

Perhaps no British literary figure is so hard to classify as William Blake.  For one thing, he was a much a visual artist as a poet and it's impossible to study the one aspect of his art independently of the other.  Then again, there is the deliberate veil of ambiguity - in the manner of his self-assumed role of prophet - that he placed over almost all his works, which ranged from the children's Songs of Innocence to the theological opus The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  While the period in which he lived coincided with the Romantic era and his work sometimes exhibited that movement's preoccupations, he had little in common with the great Romantic poets and no association with any of them.  To the extent he was known at all to his contemporaries, he was viewed as eccentric to the point of madness.

The large format study simply entitled William Blake, edited by  Robin Hamlyn, Marilyn Butler, Michael Phillips, was originally published to accompany a 2000-2001 exhibit at London's Tate Gallery and accordingly concentrates on the visual work while at the same time seeking to place it in the context of his writings.  It begins with two short essays by Peter Ackroyd and Marilyn Butler and is then divided into four parts that deal respectively with his interest in the Gothic ("One of the Gothic Artists"), the development of his visionary art in the 1790's ("The Furnace of Lambeth's Vale"), the outline of his personal mythology ("Chambers of the Imagination") and finally an overview of his illustrated books ("Many Formidable Works").

Blake began his career as an engraver's apprentice and part of his training required him to spend long hours at the British museum making copies of masterpieces from classical antiquity.  He became expert at the etching process, a detailed description of which is included at the beginning of the second section, and managed to produce with this method vividly colored "illuminated prints."  Blake did not limit himself to this medium, however, and many of the illustrations he completed are in the form of watercolors or pen and ink.  As for painting in oils, he identified that with the Renaissance rather than with the Gothic period to which he was most drawn and so did not make use of them.

Blake was an extreme individualist and, as such, determinedly at odds with almost all forms of organized religion.  This can be seen clearly in his illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy.  For example, Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo are shown embracing in the light of the sun rather than suffering in hell as Dante depicted them.  Blake's outspoken views on religion and personal freedom put him in danger of imprisonment during the time of the French Revolution when the English government under William Pitt clamped down on any form of expression that might conceivably be considered seditious.  Print shops were especially singled out as sources of objectionable material.  Blake had already in 1780 taken part in a mob attack on Newgate Prison.  In 1803 he was accused by a soldier of assault and of having cursed the king.  He was eventually exonerated at trial.

The real draw of this book, published by Abrams, is the excellent quality of the reproductions.  No matter what one may think of Blake, there is no denying the compelling quality of his artwork.  Perhaps because he stood so far outside the margins of his own era, his work speaks more directly to the modern sensibility than most of that produced in the early nineteenth century.  The visionary aspect is so imaginative that his illustrations at times appear to belong to the realm of science fiction (e.g., "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun").  At the same time, they possess a deep psychological penetration and occasionally operate on an almost existential level.

One curious feature of the book is that, although descriptions of all the works shown in the exhibit are included, many of the artworks themselves are not.  No explanation is given for their absence.  The Foreword mentions that the show was reduced in size when it traveled from the Tate to the Metropolitan Museum and perhaps the missing illustrations are those that were not included in the New York show.

Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde

Alfred Stieglitz was arguably the greatest photographer in the history of the medium.  His work, as seen in the "key set" at the National Gallery of Art, displays a mastery that has never been surpassed.  Photographs such as  "The Terminal" (1893), cannot fully be appreciated until one recalls they were created in an era when the only equipment available consisted of bulky view cameras that held similarly cumbersome glass plates.  Even so, "The Steerage" from 1907 is often considered the finest single photograph ever taken.  

And yet there is another side to Stieglitz that is equally important and yet often overlooked.  In his quest to have photography fully recognized as an art form, Stieglitz managed a succession of galleries, beginning with 291, that displayed not only photography but also the most important modern art of the period.  In the years before the 1913 Armory Show, Stieglitz had already introduced to America some of most influential artists in Europe.  The 291 shows included the first showing of Rodin's late pencil and watercolor figure drawings (1908), the first exhibition of Matisse's work ever held in the United States (1908), the first U.S. one-man show given to of Cézanne (1911) and first one-man show given to Picasso (1911) outside France.  Though the primary mover behind these exhibits was Edward Steichen, who was located in Europe at the time, Stieglitz deserves every credit for having recognized the importance of these artists and for having purchased their work for his own collection.

In addition, Stieglitz acted as patron and mentor to several seminal American artists.  Most prominent among these were John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Max Weber.  And of course it was Stieglitz who discovered Georgia O'Keeffe and immortalized her in a stunning series of portraits while at the same time doing everything in his power to promote her work.  It is without question that the course of art in this country would have been significantly different without Stieglitz's herculean efforts.

There has recently been given more attention to Stieglitz's role as artistic muse. In 2011, New York's Met Museum staged an excellent exhibit entitled Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe comprised of works from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection bequeathed to the museum by Georgia O'Keeffe over a period of years following the photographer's death in 1946.  The irony is that the museum, in the person of its curator Bryson Burroughs, had in 1911 refused to purchase the eighty-three Picasso works shown by Stieglitz at 291 when offered them for the paltry sum of $2,000.

Long before the Met Museum exhibit, however, a groundbreaking study of Stieglitz's complex relationship with modern art was published in 1977.  This was Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde by William Innes Homer.  Homer, who died in 2012, was a knowledgeable critic of American art who also authored books on Thomas Eakins, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Robert Henri.  His expertise was invaluable in this book in evaluating Stieglitz's role in the development of the American avant-garde.  He was moreover a sympathetic biographer who in this volume displayed a deep understanding of both the photographer's strengths and weaknesses.  Homer also traced here the careers of the American artists Stieglitz championed and noted the influence upon them of the Europeans artists shown at 291.  In later chapters, he discussed the work of O'Keeffe and Paul Strand.

Homer's style, while erudite, is engaging and highly readable.  If there is a fault with this book, it's not due to him.  That fault is the quality of the illustrations which are here only shown here in black & white reproductions, a major shortcoming when discussing the works of artists such as Matisse.  I'd suggest keeping on hand a copy of the lavishly illustrated catalog to the above mentioned Met Museum exhibit as an adjunct to remedy this situation.  Otherwise, Homer's study stands on its own as a major piece of scholarship.