orange-tinted glasses

Looking for the Real Joan

Mystique de Jeanne d’Arc: Photographs by Alex Labry
Old Ursuline Convent, New Orleans
Through June 30, 2012

Austin-based photographer Alex Labry grew up in New Orleans and attended Catholic schools. He writes that the presence of Joan of Arc was “nearly ubiquitous” in his life. Could anyone be as devout, reverent, and courageous as the Maid of Orleans? Possibly. Could any other Christian lay claim to having been both convicted of heresy and canonized as a saint? Only Jeanne d’Arc.

Labry’s project, on view at the Old Ursuline Convent through the end of June, is the result of several photography trips to France, beginning in 2005. Over the years, he visited Orléans, Chinon, Reims, and Paris, capturing Saint Joan in armor and often on horseback, frequently veiled in cobwebs or mottled with mildew. Naturally, Labry also includes some shots of New Orleans’s own gilded Joan of Arc statue (donated by Charles de Gaulle in 1959) at the French Market.

Labry shoots with a digital camera but conceived this project as “straight documentary. . . [avoiding] digital enhancements beyond what can reasonably be done in a wet darkroom.” The prints on view at the Ursulines Convent are large format, black and white pigment prints. Labry varies the perspective from acute close-up with no depth of field to long focus shots that capture foreground and background. The result is a survey of Joan of Arc that says as much about the art of monuments as it does about the concept of memorializing.

After an immersive period of research that included history, biography, and fiction, Labry set out to try to discover the real Joan. He ended up with as many questions as he had had when he started. “Joan of Arc was a real person,” he concludes, “[but one] who has been transformed over time into mystical assemblage.” Heretic, saint, mystic, national hero, or feminist icon, it is impossible to separate fifteenth-century Jeanne of Domrémy from a protean figure who is different things to different people. Those who commissioned these statues certainly had their own interpretations and the means to project them incontrovertibly to public view.

Although Labry finds statues of Joan as a supplicant, she is more frequently depicted as the fearless soldier, bearing the banner of France and equipped with “the whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11). Indeed, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, particularly in the sixth chapter, calls on Christians to battle forces of darkness in spiritual warfare. As the Roman capital of Asia, Ephesus had been since ancient times a site for temples and warfare; modern archaeologists have noted its cemetery for gladiators. It was also an outpost of fledgling Christianity and Paul uses what would have been familiar martial imagery to rally the new disciples.

In terms of Christian symbolism, then, Joan the warrior is an ideal combination. She is protected by “the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:14–17). She is the warrior for Christ, calling on the Lord as her strength and shield (Psalm 28:7). This is not the gentle submission of Bernadette Soubirous.

Of course, many of the artists commissioned to create portraits of Joan of Arc could hardly resist one of sculpture’s most enduring and technically-challenging motifs, the equestrian statue. Again, the Bible offers numerous references to horses in battle, “The horse is prepared against the day of battle, but safety is of the Lord (Proverbs 21:31). And of course there are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing conquest, war, famine, and death.

Labry includes in this exhibition numerous versions of the equestrian Joan. Most of these photos appear to have been taken from the ground with compositions that focus on contours, textures, and details. Casting scars lost to the faraway eye, for example, are brought into sharp relief as are clothing details, armor plate, or the metalwork of mail. One image from 2005 of an armored torso, a purposeful hand gripping the reins, and a rippling horse’s mane distill the essence of this particular interpretation of Joan of Arc.

Over the course of several images of Joan in armor, one even starts to think about the artistic decision of whether to portray Joan in man’s armor or in woman’s armor. Surely, she wore the only armor available, that of a man, rather than having the means to commission her own set of custom-molded woman’s armor. In this way, one interpretation becomes perhaps more historically objective while the other is poetically subjective.

Among some of the most poignant images are those in which cobwebs catch the light. Labry is very good in general with light and contrast, but it must have been especially challenging to catch just the right angle and time of day to capture this effect. A 2005 image of an allegorical Joan in flowing dress and plumed diadem takes on a new interpretation festooned as it is with cobwebs. Even though she wears mail beneath the dress, this Joan carries a lowered sword in her right hand and has her left arm crossed over to raise a banner. The face is insipid and the body language elusive. Surely, the symbolism of Joan the warrior is potent enough without turning her into an outmoded, classically-dated admixture of Minerva and Marianne.

Whether the implacable soldier or the tender girl with eyes raised heavenward, Labry’s views of Joan show that she continues to be a vital and relevant symbol. Regardless of the other ways in which she’s been co-opted, Joan remains first and foremost a Christian symbol. If Labry wants to discover the real Joan, he need look no further.

A few words on the Old Ursuline Convent: Completed in 1753, the convent is the oldest remaining French colonial building in the country. The Sisters of Ursula taught there wealthy creoles as well as black and Indian girls. Today, it houses the Catholic Cultural Heritage Center of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Dating from 1845, St. Mary’s Church adjoins the convent and has especially beautiful stations of the cross in French. The convent with its formal boxwood garden is a fine example of Louis XV architecture at its most austerely beautiful. Behind the convent are gardens with a variety of flowers, herbs (inspired by a nun who became one of the first pharmacists in the nation), and vegetables. A mosaic commemorates Our Lady of Prompt Succor who saved the convent from fire in 1812; inside, another statue of Our Lady, one venerated by Catholics around the world, stands in a niche where she is called on frequently to protect the city. Franco Alessandrini’s white marble statues of important Catholic figures associated with New Orleans decorate the back garden, including Venerable Henriette de Lille, Saint Katharine Drexel, Saint Rose Phillippine Duchesne, Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, and Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini.

Photography: © Alex Labry, www.labry.net
Text © Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.

Angels in America

Reflections on “America and the Angels of Sacré-Coeur” by David Bentley Hart

In the December 2011 issue of The New Criterion, David Bentley Hart explores his signature theme, the confluence of culture and religion, using as a departure point the interior decoration—in particular, the pendentive angels—of Paris’s famous Montmartre Basilica. Hart’s argument centers on causality, citing the Basilica’s birth as a product of the faltering French Christianity of the late nineteenth century, one composed of politics, history, economics, aesthetics, and, last but presumably not least, spirituality. He reflects on how causality has shaped western civilization, giving rise to an increasingly secular culture—one that is arid, brittle, and bereft of “spiritual labor [and] an openness to revelation.”

Sacré-Coeur sits impudently above the city, its gaudy blend of the Romanesque and Byzantine irresistible to photographers. An obliging blue sky forms the perfect contrast for its improbable whiteness; the façade resists city soot because it is clad in travertine marble, a stone that exudes calcite, thus perpetually renewing the building against the depredations of the environment. (The spiritual metaphor here is clear.) Hart sees it as a “synthetic memorial . . . concocted from equal parts morbid nostalgia and sugary fantasy.” Inside, he passes from the “huge, hideous mosaic” of the apse to concentrate on the four chancel vault angels carved in high relief on the natural stone supporting the center dome. “Were it not for the transcendent longings they embodied, or for the ecstatic creativity those longings once evoked, there would be no church there at all. And one knows this, however fleetingly, in the instant of their apparition.”

He continues with a splendid summation of just how four stone angels signify the divine intimations inherent in western civilization:

“After all—and this is a truth so certain that only the most doctrinaire Marxist or lumpen British atheist could deny—the structure of culture is essentially an idealist one, and a living culture is a spiritual dispensation. A civilization’s values, symbols, ideals, and imaginative capacities flow down from above, from the most exalted objects of its transcendental desires, and a people’s greatest collective achievements are always in some sense attempts to translate eternal into temporal order. This will always be especially obvious in places of worship. To wax vaguely Heideggerean, temples are built to summon the gods, but only because the gods have first called out to mortals. There are invisible powers (whether truly divine powers or only powers of the imagination) that seek to become manifest, to emerge from their invisibility, and they can do this only by inspiring human beings to wrest beautiful forms out of intractable elements. They disclose their unseen world by transforming this world into its concrete image, allegory, or reflection, in a few privileged places where divine and human gazes briefly meet.

Such places, moreover, are only the most concentrated crystallizations of a culture’s highest visions of the good, true, and beautiful; they are not isolated retreats, set apart from the society around them, but are rather the most intense expressions of that society’s rational and poetic capacities. And it is under the shelter of the heavens made visible in such places that all of a people’s laws and institutions, admirable or defective, take shape, as well as all its arts, civic or private, sacred or profane, festal or ordinary. This is a claim not about private beliefs, or about the particular motives that may have led to any particular law or work of art, but about the conceptual and aesthetic resources that any culture can possess or impart, and those are determined by religious traditions—by shared pictures of eternity, shared stories of the absolute. That is why the very concept of a secular civilization is nearly meaningless.”

Hart does not introduce Sacré-Coeur and its angels in order to contrast moribund European Christianity with jingoistic paeans to American spiritualism. American religious life is too “odd and paradoxical” for broad generalizations, Hart writes. Rather, he is warning us about the “final triumph of true cultural secularism.” He sees this as a real possibility given that we are a nation built on a constitution that categorically separated itself from the politically-integrated Christendom of Europe. In addition, we have further rejected the invigorating potential of the supernatural by entrenching material reality in American culture, by fiercely guarding our position of global leadership, and by maintaining a perverse pride in our social enlightenment. How baffling it is, Hart muses, to discover that “American society has [never] really succeeded in erecting a partition between its religious and its civic identities.” How could it be otherwise in a nation that engraves "In God We Trust" on our national currency?

Further, Hart contends, we are especially susceptible to the secular—and, conversely, oblivious to the supernatural—because American religion offers so few imaginative resources. It seldom aspires, Hart notes, to a higher culture. We carry over the separationist principles of our political groundwork, so that “inward conviction and outward form” seldom converge. The result is a religion of pragmatism and austerity, but very little beauty. “It is,” Hart writes in a fine distinction, “a religion of feeling, not of sensibility; it might be able to express itself in great scale, but not as a rule in good taste.”

Which brings us back to Sacré-Coeur. Its grandeur and scale make it almost impervious to criticism and it is easy to forget its real purpose as a house of worship. The Basilica’s official Web site carries this adjuration:  “Tout visiteur de Paris aperçevant les coupoles de la Basilique se dit: La haut, en ce moment, quelqu’un prie pour moi!” By looking up to the domes of Sacré-Coeur, we are reminded that someone up there is praying for us. As he looked up to the Basilica’s angels, Hart, too, perceived this in the form of “the advent—and the gaze—of immense and numinous presences.” Prayer is another form of what he calls “transcendent longings,” and he expresses hope for a future if we recognize this as a form of grace given to ease our spiritual labors on behalf of civilization.

© Leann Davis Alspaugh 2012. All rights reserved. Photograph of the pendentive angels of the chancel vault, The Basilica of Sacré-Coeur by Didier B, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 13 January 2012; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sacre_Coeur_-_Coupole.jpg

Remembering the Tennessee

“AIR RAID. PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.”

The 32,300-ton battleship USS Tennessee left the New York Navy Yard in June 1920. A member of Battleship Force, Tennessee rated an E for excellence during gunnery training in the 1920s along the Pacific Coast. As tensions with Japan increased, her base was moved to Pearl Harbor in 1940.

Tennessee was moored on Battleship Row at Pearl, alongside USS West Virginia when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941. Her crew manned the anti-aircraft guns and attempted a defense, but Japanese bombs struck two of her four gun turrets and eventually all four were rendered inoperable. Debris from the hit to turret 2 struck and mortally wounded the commanding officer of the West Virginia, Mervyn S. Bennion. When the magazine of the Arizona exploded, burning oil showered down on the Tennessee. The ship remained trapped for 10 days before it could be freed and sailed to Puget Sound for repairs.

By May 1943, an updated and modernized Tennessee set sail. She steamed to the Aleutians area, where she bombarded Kiska when that island was invaded in August. During the next year, from November 1943 into September 1944, she participated in bombardments of Tarawa, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, New Ireland, Saipan (where she was damaged by Japanese counter-fire), Guam, Tinian, Anguar, and Peleliu. In October, Tennessee’s guns pounded the Leyte invasion area as U.S. forces returned to the Philippines, and she helped sink the Japanese battleship Yamashiro in the Battle of Surigao Strait.

After a stateside overhaul, Tennessee supported the Iwo Jima and Okinawa operations in February and March 1945. Hit by a suicide plane on 12 April, Tennessee remained in action for a few more weeks until she went in for repairs; she returned to Okinawa to continue her gunfire support during June. In July and August, she operated in the waters off China. Following Japan’s surrender, the battleship took part in the occupation effort before returning to the Philadelphia Navy Yard in December 1946.

In 1947, she underwent the “mothballing” process and was decommissioned. USS Tennessee was part of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet for 12 more years and was sold for scrapping in July 1959.

 

USS Tennessee: Combat Statistics

339 days of combat operation

Shot down 16 enemy aircraft

Shot down or damaged another 11 more with other ships

Helped sink 8 Japanese naval vessels

Damaged five times by enemy fire

Total of 219 casualties over the course of her life—at Pearl Harbor, 4 killed, 22 wounded, and 1 missing

From 1941–1945, steamed a total of 170,073 miles

Received 10 service stars and, following naval commendation, her personnel were allowed to wear the Navy Unit Commendation ribbon

 

Her Navy Commendation reads, in part,

“For outstanding heroism in action against Japanese enemy forces during the period from January 31,
1944, to June 21, 1945. Conducting extensive bombardments with devastating accuracy throughout thirteen major operations, the U.S.S. TENNESSEE methodically reduced enemy defenses . . . making possible the
advance of our forces through the Central Pacific without prohibitive loss of life. In the historic Battle of Surigao Straits, she contributed materially to the destruction of a powerful
portion of the Japanese Fleet, including at least two
battleships. The TENNESSEE's splendid record of 
achievements, from the Aleutians to the Ryukyus, reflects the superb teamwork and gallantry of her valiant officers and men and is in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

 

Adapted from U.S. Department of the Navy, Naval Historical Center and USS Tennessee cruise book. Photograph: Battleships West Virginia (BB-48) (sunken at left) and Tennessee (BB-43) shrouded in smoke following the Japanese air raid, December 7, 1941, U.S. Naval Institute Photograph Collection, U.S. Navy Historical Center.

 

Rescued Frescoes Return Home

It’s the sort of rescue that Indiana Jones could have made, but instead it was the intrepid art collector Dominique de Menil, who along with her husband John founded Houston’s Menil Collection. In 1983, Mrs. de Menil learned of the sale of two thirteenth-century Byzantine frescoes—or rather the 38 fragments left after Turkish looters chiseled them from the walls of an Orthodox chapel in Lysi, Cyprus. She alerted the church authorities in Cyprus and offered them more than $500,000 in exchange for the restoration of the frescoes and long-term loan. The frescoes were restored and have been on display in the Menil’s Byzantine Chapel since 1997. In February 2012, the frescoes return Cyprus to be exhibited in the Byzantine Museum in capital city of Nicosia. The frescoes will not be returning to Lysi because Turkey still occupies that area.

Conceived as a chapel museum to “to restore the sacred fragments to their original spiritual function,” the stone and concrete chapel was designed by architect François de Menil, Mrs. de Menil’s son. It is an exceptional space. Intimate in scale with indirect natural light and simple wooden benches, the chapel reflects the original spiritual context of the frescoes while drawing attention to their delicate position in the parlous world of religion and politics. Menil director Josef Helfenstein has stated that the chapel will be repurposed, but no plans have yet been released.

The frescoes hang in a cocoon of translucent glass, a setting that replicates the dome and apse of the original chapel. The Byzantine idea of a domed chapel combined the Roman taste for circular mausoleums with the early Christian cruciform basilica. Byzantine architects ensured their place in history by perfecting this model of a dome resting on pendentives. The most well-known example is Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, originally called Constantinople when it was the capital of the Byzantine empire. Even the modest chapel of Lysi follows this form.

The apse fresco shows the Virgin Mary flanked by archangels Gabriel and Michael, her hands raised in an invitation for intercession. The archangels were each present at an important event in Mary’s life. Gabriel announced to Mary that she had found favor with God and would give birth to a son conceived by the Holy Spirit. Saint Michael the archangel was said to have uncovered the Madonna’s tomb so that her soul could be reunited with her body and carried up to heaven in what is known as The Assumption of the Virgin. The Lysi Virgin wears the blue gown that is her traditional color along with a royal purple cloak—a double assertion of her place in celestial hierarchy. A medallion of the Christ child on her breast calls to mind the Immaculate Conception. Her sensitive features and feminine demeanor impart a sense of both Mary’s humanity and her queenly nature.

The dome fresco of Christ Pantokrator, or Christ Almighty, is ringed by 12 angels who seem to be asking “Men of Galilee, why stand you gazing up into the heavens?” (Acts 1:11). Characteristically, the Pantokrator’s right hand is raised in benediction and his left holds a jewel-encrusted Bible. The rendering of this monumental figure of Christ is quintessentially Byzantine. His expression is forbiddingly stern with strongly delineated features and a down-turned mouth. His rich garments in gold and blue are outlined in heavy black with the mannered flatness of drapery common to this period. The haloed angels surround the central figure in graceful attitudes against a brilliant Mediterranean blue background (in richer churches, this blue was ground lapis lazuli).

The figure of Christ as Pantokrator became one of the dominant images of the Almighty following the end of the Iconoclasm Controversy in 843. After more than a century of debate about Christian iconography and church decoration, Byzantine artists settled into certain forms of representation that have come to exemplify that period’s style—an almost abstract decorative style with an emphasis on formalism and linearity. Illustrated books, metalwork, ivory carvings, and mosaics (especially those of Ravenna) reached exquisite heights of artistry during this period. The artists of the Lysi Christ also followed Byzantine iconography by including a Bible with a hammered gold and jeweled cover in order to make clear the connection between Scriptures and art.

© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved. Photography: Menil Collection, Byzantine Chapel exterior by Hester + Hardaway; interior by Paul Warchol; Christ Pantokrator and Virgin Mary with archangels, Hester + Hardaway, The Menil Collection.

 

Trench Warfare in the Shenandoah Valley

Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, Staunton, Virginia

I’ve written before in this space of Staunton, Virginia, a charming town in the Shenandoah Valley that is home to the American Shakespeare Center and excellent locavore restaurants like Staunton Grocery, Zynodoa, and Mockingbird. Staunton has an unusually high concentration of nineteenth-century commercial and residential buildings due to its importance first as a hops-growing center and later as a Civil War transportation hub.

Woodrow Wilson was also born here in 1856 though he only lived in Staunton for a few years before his father, a Presbyterian minister, moved the family to Georgia. The stately parsonage that served as the family home and a neighboring house today comprise the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. The museum consists of a tour of the home, surprisingly modest but well-restored, and the exemplary museum to Wilson’s life and presidency, with a special emphasis on World War I. The high point of the museum is the replica of a trench network complete with triage room.

During the house tour, I was very impressed with our docent Thomas who made a point of connecting larger developments like the Industrial Revolution to items in the home. In particular, he noted that Staunton’s connection to railroad lines enabled the Wilsons to outfit their home with the latest mass-produced consumer goods like pressed-glass, plated silver, a cast iron stove, and the obligatory Singer sewing machine. The latter was placed in the family’s formal parlor near the window so that passersby could appreciate this important status symbol.

The exhibits of Wilson as a student, educator, and politician are full of fascinating details. The materials generally look fresh and are well-presented. Being a fan of ephemera, I especially enjoyed the political cartoons by the inimitable E.W. Kemble, the presidential campaign and inaugural items, and the World War I sheet music. The Myers Automatic Lever voting machine from 1892 is especially intriguing in our post-chad/electronic voting age.

Wilson who had dyslexia and didn’t learn to read until he was 11 quickly made up for lost time. At Princeton, he made waves by trying to change time-honored dining practices and publishing law articles suggesting British-style reforms for American government. After graduation, he went on to law school and earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins. Everywhere he went, he left the impression that he was eager to overturn entrenched institutions. (As would be seen later, his progressive ideas excluded women’s suffrage and racial equality.) During a stint as a teacher at Bryn Mawr, Wilson earned the ire of dean and suffragist Martha Carey Thomas by delivering himself of statements like “teaching women relaxes my mental muscle.”

Wilson went on to serve as president of Princeton in 1902 and ran for governor of New Jersey in 1910. At the 1912 Democratic Convention (replica ticket above), he unveiled his New Freedom program, a progressive campaign based on individualism and states’ rights. On election, Wilson introduced a new sense of austerity by canceling the 1912 inaugural ball—even the ever-supportive Mrs. Wilson must have been peeved since she already had her dress.

The president’s first term saw the passage of major legislation such as the Federal Reserve Act, the Underwood Act, and the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission. Wilson also approved acts ending child labor and limiting railroad workers to eight-hour days. The president would not, however, agree to the NAACP’s request to form a National Race Commission.

Wilson won victory for a second term on the promise that “he kept us out of war.” But as American support of the Allies gained ground, the president concluded that America could not remain neutral. The museum’s World War I rooms make clear the role of art and popular culture in the spread of war sentiment. The golden age of the poster reached new heights with artists such as Howard Chandler Christy—“I wish I were a man so I could enlist” says one of his curly headed charmers—and Haskell Coffin, whose heroic “Joan of Arc Saved France” poster stirred hearts in America and Europe. The centerpiece of this part of the museum is the World War I trench experience, which opened in Fall 2010.

Though fairly small, the exhibit gives a realistic impression of the sights and sounds of trench warfare. Visitors are fully immersed in the wood-walled trenches and hear ear-splitting sounds of bombardment accompanied by an audio track of soldiers shouting in French. One trooper looks out over the wall through a periscope with another periscope stationed nearby so visitors can share the view. Around the corner, a triage room shows what doughboys injured on the field endured—try to see how many rats you can count peering from the corners. Small display cases show uniforms, gas masks, tools, and, in one, the gruesome results of a shrapnel wound to the face.

Wilson wanted to run for a third term, but his poor health prevented a serious attempt at campaigning. Eventually, it seems that his life came to revolve around daily drives in his elegant Pierce Arrow limousine, a car that the White House purchased to take the president home to Washington after the 1919 Versailles Treaty. Wilson loved the car so much that he allowed friends to purchase it for him and pinstripe it in Princeton Tiger orange. The grill even sports the AAA logo as Wilson was the first president to join to automobile association. The restored limousine returned to the Library in 2008 and the story of how it was nearly lost to history is a fascinating tale.

 

Photographs: The entrance ticket to the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum and the president’s Pierce-Arrow; photographs and text © Leann Davis Alspaugh, all rights reserved.

 

Cy Twombly (1928–2011)

One of Houston’s greatest assets is The Menil Collection, a brilliantly conceived collection housed in Renzo Piano’s gracious, light-infused building on one of the city’s shaded streets. Behind the museum, the Cy Twombly Gallery, also by Piano, holds a permanent retrospective the artist’s works.

Twombly’s canvases are about what might have been as much as what is. They are a kind of palimpsest in which act of becoming is more crucial than realization. Twombly famously noted that he painted for the experience of art and considered it “like finding many wonderful rooms in a house that you never knew existed.” Behind this somewhat disingenuous notion are suggestive biographical tidbits like his work as an army cryptographer, travels with Rauschenberg in Italy, Spain, and North Africa, the Sears and Roebuck art kits he played with as a boy, and artistic studies with the likes of Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, and Spanish modern master Pierre Daura.

Robert Hughes called Twombly the third man of the American expressionism triumvirate, and, in some ways, he does seem to share the “present-ness” of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. (There is really only a “triumvirate” in the most superficial sense as all three artists are very different creative minds.) It speaks to Twombly’s uniqueness that he has been characterized as divisive since his work first began appearing in the 1950s.

His move to Italy in 1957 announced to the art world that the Virginian was not interested in cultivating the American scene. Twombly, born Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr., antagonized peers like Donald Judd (himself a minimalist) who called Twombly’s 1964 show at the Leo Castelli Gallery a “fiasco” and declared that wasn’t “anything to these paintings.” However, Twombly’s lightly-worn iconoclasm coupled with his literary erudition should give pause to viewers and critics alike. In spite of the frequent reaction that “any child could paint that,” Twombly’s art is more than mere gesture. It defies neat and easy conclusions.

The Menil Collection Web site offers an elegant summary: “Inspired by ancient Mediterranean history and geography, Greek and Roman mythology, and epic poetry, Twombly created—sometimes on a grand scale, in multiple-panel works—a sometimes-inscrutable world of iconography, metaphor, and myth. The breadth of Twombly’s imagination and his interdisciplinary approach to subjects traverse vast distances, resulting in works that are at once baroque and spare, modern and ancient.”

Photograph: Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1969. Oil and crayon on canvas, 78 × 103 in. (198.1 × 261.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph B. Schulhof  69.29 

© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.

 

The Crown Goes Down

The Titanic by Stanley Tigerman

Architect and theorist Stanley Tigerman made this photomontage in 1978 as a critique of, in the words of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Web site, “the state of architectural pedagogy in Chicago and its environs in the late 1970s.” Here, Tigerman shows Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology capsizing beneath calm seas and placid skies. A man in a rowboat heads away, the lone survivor of this postmodern shipwreck.

When an architect takes on an icon in his own field, it raises many questions. Tigerman’s antipathy toward van der Rohe seems to come from a rejection of what Tigerman refers as “signature architecture [that] premiates the author over the reader.” This isn’t directed at van der Rohe specifically, but rather at those architects who put form before function—Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, who when questioned about the Guggenheim’s low ceilings, replied “If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!”

Since it is unlikely that any creative person in any field would strive to make unremarkable art, one has to wonder at the disingenuousness of Tigerman’s reluctance to acknowledge the role of style in the pursuit of what he disparages as “signature architecture.” Architects, like artists everywhere, succeed or fail by the ability of the public to identify the unique qualities that make their particular form of creativity rise above the level of mere production. Tradition, discernment, and aesthetics define the artist as well as the patron, or, as Tigerman would have it, the author and the reader. If a client wants a certain type of home or a particular kind of building, he seeks out an architect whose style mirrors his own sentiments, temperament, or ideals. A responsible architect also considers many other factors: the building’s context, its materials, its suitability to its intended use, and, these days, its environmental impact. The age-old equation of form and function vies, as it always has, with aesthetics, budget, and individual will. The experienced architect just like the venerable sculptor or portrait painter will have made his career nurturing his signature style, one that allows him creative satisfaction as well as, one hopes, a livelihood.

Tigerman’s own architectural style revolves obsessively around geometric compartmentalization. This seems at odds with what his firm’s Web site describes as a commitment to “the hybridization intrinsic to an American culture that is the inevitable result of the melting pot.” Certainly, a number of styles from the academic (like van der Rohe) to the mundane inform American architecture. To this viewer, Tigerman’s style follows closely that of the Hamptons chic of Hugh Newell Jacobsen, another architect known for his adherence to American vernacular styles. (Jacobsen has also been described as minimalist.) If Tigerman has a “signature architecture,” it is ironically similar to one he sees as anathema.

Although I could not find a definition of “premiate” in any of three dictionaries I consulted, the context makes its meaning clear. Tigerman does not believe in the cult of personality. He wants to put the client, not his creative impulse, first. All admirable qualities in a businessman and an architect, but where does that leave van der Rohe?

“If a building is neither spontaneous nor sophisticated,” Tigerman told Architectural Digest for his AD100 profile, “there is probably nothing to see.” This kind of self-confidence might be expected from a prominent architect, especially one who considers Minimalism as outmoded and stuffy. But with van der Rohe, there is always something to see. His buildings may not have the exuberance of Gehry or the insistent angularity of Hadid, but they are without question both spontaneous and sophisticated.

The van der Rohe structure that I know best is the 1974 addition (begun in 1958 and completely posthumously) to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Close to the neo-Gothic church of St. Paul’s Methodist, the New England colonial-style First Presbyterian, and Gunnar Birkerts’s 1972 metal trapezoid housing the Contemporary Art Museum, this building completes the neighborhood’s microcosm of twentieth-century architecture. (A few blocks away is Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection.) As an exhibition space, the van der Rohe has been endlessly flexible and surprisingly complementary to everything from intimate Chinese jades to the massive canvases of Julian Schnabel. It remains cool and serene even on the hottest Houston days. The van der Rohe has a subtle refinement that balances the decorative flourishes of William Ward Watkin’s Beaux Arts façade from 1900. (Impressive though it is, the museum’s latest addition, the Audrey Jones Beck building by Rafael Moneo, is much less appealing, though its great hall has fine dramatic proportions.)

Tigerman’s piece is actually more interesting when considered as part of the photomontage tradition of propaganda and protest utilized so well by Dadaists like John Heartfield and Hannah Höch. Like them, he deploys an iconoclastic irreverence for his masters. He gives a slap in the faces of bourgeois critics still mired in admiration of the likes of Neutra and Saarinen. That Tigerman titled his work The Titanic—which sunk on this day in 1915—also reminds us that any work, whether building or ship, is subject to the vicissitudes of time and taste.

Photograph from the top: Stanley Tigerman (b. 1930), The Titanic, 1978, photomontage on paper, Gift of Stanley Tigerman, © 1978 Stanley Tigerman; The Art Institute of Chicago.

Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Caroline Wiess Law Building designed by Mies van der Rohe (1958 and 1974), photo by David Bush

© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.

Art and Economics

Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art
The Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, California, Through May 30, 2011 

Sometimes when two scholars discover that they have been researching similar topics, they circle each other like predators. However, for Taxing Visions, curators Leo G. Mazow and Kevin M. Murphy have pooled their respective findings on art and economics to remind us that the recent financial crisis was no anomaly in American history.

Organized by the Huntington and the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University, the 31 paintings, prints, journals, and ephemera range from 1860 to 1900, a period in which the nation faced several financial panics—1857, 1869, 1873, and 1893—not to mention the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction. There were also social changes such as the emergence of consumer culture and urbanization, along with political issues like the gold standard debate and deepening race-class distinctions.

The artists in Taxing Visions range from the well-known to the obscure, and the quality of their works varies widely with an emphasis on the sentimental narrative. The curators have opted, in their words, “to tax our sensibilities” by including works that may be short on aesthetic merits, but reinforce the exhibition’s premise. For example, John George Brown’s A Tough Story (1886) and Buy a Posy (c. 1881) show street urchins whose ragged clothing is offset by angelic faces. Ragamuffin art was popular with the Vanderbilts and the Astors; Brown was a favorite of department store magnate Isidor Straus. Mazow notes that Brown was no fool when it came to tailoring his art to public expectation. When asked why he portrayed his tattered urchins with clean faces, Brown responded “If you paint them with dirty faces you can’t sell the picture.” Mazow concludes, rather ponderously, that sentimentalizing urban poverty tended to “[distance] the abject and [foreground] the cleansed and the marketable.”

A far more effective work in this line is Julian Alden Weir’s The Flower Seller (c. 1879) in which dignity, resignation, and exemplary brushwork make the point of economic hardship with subtlety and depth. The less said the better about Henry Mosler’s The Fair Exchange (1881), in which a simpering lass in gypsy clothing has her boots shined by a grinning Parisian garçon with muddy pants.

Fortunately, the picturesque is leavened with a welcome dash of satire as in David Gilmour Blythe’s Art Versus Law (1859–1860). In this Daumier-esque work, an artist in tattered coat, patched trousers, and rumpled hat is confronted with a padlocked studio door that is plastered with “to let” notices. For many artists, the studio was not only a place to work, but also a showroom and living quarters. It is instructive to compare Blythe’s work with James Henry Beard’s Studio to Let (1864) depicting almost the same scene. Both might be self-portraits, but Blythe emphasizes the predicament with a more contrasting palette and exaggerated body language. The evicted artist’s chin juts in consternation as he realizes that he’s been thrown out of what is clearly little more than an attic garret. Beard’s artist seems marginally better off, carrying the tools he would need for plein air work. Here, though, the figure is flattened in the picture plan amid all-over neutral tonalities. Blythe’s starving artist holds our attention in a way that Beard’s does not.

Genre pictures are also common in Taxing Visions. Eastman Johnson’s The Pension Claim Agent (1867) is a fine study of humble domesticity and humility as a crippled man, possibly a Civil War veteran, makes his case for a pension. In Crossing the Ferry (1878), Thomas Waterman Wood depicts adults of different ages and classes accosted by a young violin player who is passing the hat. Standing nearby, a black woman in a madras cotton shawl holds her young son who peeps around her head directly at the viewer. It is a charming work executed in an accomplished manner and, with its themes of race, class, economic hardship, and urban variety, it sums up everything that Taxing Visions wants to say.

However, for sheer painterliness, Tattered and Torn (1886) by Alfred Kappes is the stand-out work in the show. Caught in a shaft of light, an aged black woman in a threadbare dress strikes a match to light her pipe. By suspending the action, Kappes holds our attention and forces the eye to linger on every finely-observed detail. The spotlight is on the individual here, rather than, as Mazow sees it, “the seamy underside of financial indigence…and the spectacle of poverty held at a distance.”

The exhibition catalogue has been ill-served by its editors. Although the reproductions are good, there are several typographical errors. In addition, it would have been helpful to have more context for some of the artists. German immigrant Charles Kroll, for example, is represented by Panic of 1869 (1869), a strange view of domestic devastation that was painted in response to contemporaneous events. Knoll’s proto-expressionistic style raises many questions, but we can learn very little from the catalogue.

Taxing Visions offers a unique opportunity to examine relatively unknown works brought together in sharp focus. To see these works in a museum at the estate of railroad titan Henry Huntington adds an extra dimension that surely could not have escaped the curators.

From the top
David Gilmour Blythe (1815–1865), Art versus Law, 1859–60, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum

Alfred Kappes (1850–1894), Tattered and Torn, 1886, oil on canvas, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts

Nudes on the Côte d’Azur

60 Chefs-d’Oeuvre de L’Ecole Russe: Le nu en peintre 1900–1970
(Sixty Masterpieces of the Russian School: The Nude in Painting, 1900–1970)
Centre d’art la Malmaison, Cannes
Through 27 February 2011

Once the site of the Grand Hôtel Malmaison, the remaining building opened as an art museum in 1993. Located squarely at the center of La Croisette, Cannes’ beachfront main street, Centre d’art la Malmaison specializes in changing exhibits of modern art. This exhibition was organized in conjunction with the Musée du Montparnasse during 2010’s year of Russia in France. The 60 works on view come from the collection of Tatiana and Georgy Khatsenkov, directors of Monaco’s MC Fine Arts Gallery.

The works on view were created mostly by exiled Russian artists in Paris where they clearly absorbed the artistic influences of Cézanne, Matisse, Soutine, Seurat, and Picasso. These artists' works range from neo-classical figure studies and delicate Cubist-inflected nudes to extravagant nudes in the illustrative style. Some anticipate major stylistic changes to come, like the nude by Leon Zack (1892–1980) which contains hints of the abstract style that he would later adopt in the 1940s. The watercolors of Lev Tchistovsky (1902–1969) demonstrate that he was a master in handling this difficult medium. His nudes typically recline in foreshortened perspectives among crumpled bedsheets, wearing frothy negligées or jade bracelets. His technical excellence is quite impressive, but his oils are less successful (although they are certainly large enough). Most remarkable are the frames, which are marvelous Art Nouveau works in metal and semi-precious stones.

The grouping of large paintings by Serge Ivanoff are also impressive mainly for the effect of light on bare skin and the still lifes of props that accompany the subjects. As accomplished as they are, Ivanoff’s works are uncomfortably close to pulp novel cover art. The surprise pairing of two nudes by Léonid Frechkopf (1897–1982) shows just how far an artistic style can range. On one wall hangs a naïve style nude of a young woman painted from the waist up in flat, pale colors. Across the room, a full-length odalisque reclines in sensual Orientalist decadence.

The melancholy nudes of Véra Rockline (1896–1934) are represented by Nu au béret rouge à sa toilette, also known as Woman With Mirror. Due to her crossed arms and legs, this woman is rather modest. She ruefully scrutinizes herself in the mirror, still wearing her hat and her necklace—is she preparing to go out or coming in at the end of the night? Rockline’s handling of the skin tones is painterly and assured. The textures and shadows of the wall behind the subject are exceptional in their depth and tonality.

While she was still in Moscow, Rockline painted Cubist works, but once she arrived in Paris after World War I, she devoted herself to the female figure using mainly a Cézanne-like palette. Though virtually unknown (she committed suicide and left few records of her life), her painting The Card Players was purchased at Sotheby’s in 2008 for more than $4 million by a “Russian oligarch” (according to www.artinconnu.com). This purchase has done much to make her work more well known, as has a recent group exhibitions “Elles de Montparnasse.” Though she painted almost exclusively nudes, her Still Life With Fish and view of Paris (1933) are also lovely, reminiscent of seventeenth Dutch still lifes or city views.

© 2011 Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.

Photograph: Véra Rockline, Nu au béret rouge à sa toilette, collection of Tatiana and Georgy Khatsenkov

 

When Pablo Saw Edgar

Picasso Looks at Degas
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 13 June–12 September 2010

 

“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”—Picasso

The influence of Degas on Picasso is well-known and a staple of art criticism. But seldom have the affinities been as clearly delineated as in this landmark exhibition at the Clark.

That Picasso was a prodigy is no revelation, but that he was a superb draftsman by the age of 14 may be a surprise to those who associate him only with cubist deconstructions. The portait of Picasso’s father and teacher Don José Ruiz Blasco with a copy of Gil Blas in his pocket is exceptional, yet the young artist is already a moqueur, showing his father carrying such a vulgar publication. (Interestingly, Degas was almost an exact contemporary of Picasso’s father.)

When he finally settled in Paris in 1904, Picasso lived in the same Montmartre neighborhood as Degas but there is no evidence that the two ever met. In a few short years, Picasso had absorbed Degas’ milieu as well as the older artist’s many innovations in composition, subject matter, and color range. (One wonders how much the arrival of vivid aniline dyes influenced artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and Degas, all of whom favored proto-fauvist colors.) Picasso had also followed the master in translating work on canvas to other media, particularly printmaking and sculpture.

The first gallery offers correlations between how the two artists handled self-portraiture and figure studies. In his Self-Portrait at age 23, Degas depicted himself in a soft hat, his sensitive face in half-shadow. His Mediterranean complexion is downplayed with a muted palette, but his highly-perceptive nature shows through even with a hint of his incipient reclusiveness. Picasso’s early self-portraits, beyond his boyish efforts, have already left reality behind. They explore the plastic potential of the idea of portraiture. His exuberance can seldom be satisfied for any length of time with mere virtuosity and, always with Picasso, the imperative of ego often trumps facility or craft.

In Paris, Picasso soon began a campaign to beat the master at his own game, in what the Clark curators refer to as “an open, friendly competition.” To Degas’ incomparable In a Café (L’Absinthe) (1875–76), Picasso answered with Portrait of Sebastià Junyer i Vidal (1903, right bottom). Degas’ painting (right top) still has the power to shock. Vacantly staring in the direction of the boulevard, the demimondaine’s whole body sags in an attitude of despondency. Her invisible hands, hidden under the marble table, imply powerlessness. Her feet balanced on her soiled, high-heeled slippers turn outward. To her left, a shabby fellow smokes a pipe, consciously looking away from her. Has he turned her down? Is she trying to work up the courage to proposition him, sorry prospect though he is? The shadows, the tabletop still lifes (three in all), and the warm but dull colors refute the idea of the Parisian sophistication. Degas’ tidy composition—the planes of the tables, the banquette, the wall with its smudges—underpins the implication of sordid lives poorly lived.

Picasso’s response is a theatrical double portrait in shades of blue, the well-modeled contours of Junyer’s face luminous in the nightclub gloom. Next to him, a rueful woman in a strapless dress turns her head as if to show off the red cockade in her hair. Picasso’s painting seems to turn in on itself in a series of echoes: the deep V of the woman’s neck, clavicle bones, and decolletage mirror Junyer’s cravat. They each have large eyes and accentuated mouths, hers with a moué and his with a bushy moustache. The couple sits in the corner where two walls meet. The round table allows him an exit, but blocks her in. Picasso’s painting is all cold confrontation, while Degas maintains a confidence in human empathy. Degas invites interaction from the viewer, while Picasso stops the imagination with the stridency of his own vision.

Other galleries explore the major subjects of the ballet and the brothel, or as the curators would have it, “the private world of women.” Women washing themselves or brushing their hair offered both artists classical subject matter, which Picasso promptly transmuted into more brutish or primitive motifs. It must be admitted that Picasso’s Woman Plaiting Her Hair (1906) has an placid, monumental appeal. Like a figure emerging from a block of marble, the woman confronts the viewer in a pensive moment, her ample contours on view but not for prurient purposes. She offers a classical counterpoint to the ever-discreet Degas who painted virtually all such nudes from the rear.

The works on the ballet are predominantly those of Degas, and young museum-goers excitedly exclaimed over the famous Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. This work as well as the bronze The Tub (c.1889) that Degas used mixed media. Little Dancer includes a fabric bodice, hair ribbon, and tulle skirt, while The Tub has a real lead basin, sponge, and crumpled cloth. After his marriage to Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, Picasso, too, took up figure studies in two and three dimensions, although his lumpish bronzes look decidedly unformed compared to Degas’ works. After looking through these galleries, one expects to come upon Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and its absence must have been a disappointment to the curators at the Clark.

The only gallery that falls short is the final room containing Picasso’s 1971 etchings of Degas visiting the brothel. Picasso had long coveted Degas’ brothel monotypes from 1876–77. Between 1958 and 1960, he acquired nine of these prints, which inspired the 1971 series. Executed as single-line drawings, these etchings show Picasso indulging the culmination of a lifetime of parody. Degas’ discretion is called into question and then soundly trounced by being made a part of the action, even if only as an observer in profile. Stylistically, this is Picasso at his most baroque, every line ending in a flourish of curves and curlicues, all proportion and scale jettisoned in favor of gesture.

Picasso, who could never have been accused of modesty (false or otherwise), cannot seem to bear the idea of decorum or reticence. Where these qualities in Degas encourage consideration of the realities of existence, in Picasso, discretion is swept away like silly punctilio. It seems the height of insolence for Picasso to insert Degas into these scenes, not in recognition of his mentor’s role, but as a jest aimed at deflating his master’s preeminence. Yes, it could be argued that both artists used prostitutes for their artistic as well as perhaps for their sexual gratification. By objectifying these women, one might say that both Degas and Picasso showed an unwillingness to see them as anything other than a means to an egotistical end, and that, as such, they were no different from other brothel clients.

However that would be to reduce the efforts of both Degas and Picasso to mechanical responses in which the ego dictates motivation and discernment. As the Clark exhibit shows, the sequence of artistic development is hardly linear. While it possible to trace Picasso’s progress through Degas oeuvre, it is not ultimately a simple matter to understand them either individually or as a pair. The salient conclusion is of the very different trajectories genius may take.

Degas excelled at painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. He introduced mixed media into his work. His monotype prints pushed the limits of the graphic medium and created a sense of immediacy that is especially apparent in the racecourse works. Degas the photographer identifies the power of a relatively new and untried medium by using the camera as a painter would a brush.

Much of the same could be said for Picasso. The Spaniard’s longevity, inventiveness, and celebrity demand our attention. In his art, his psychological insight is of such an intrusive nature that no viewer can escape scrutiny of his own ego after seeing the artist’s on display so unguardedly. It is perhaps this quasi-confessional aspect of Picasso’s art that fits so well in the modern era, and is, to this viewer, so tiresomely clamorous. Degas, on the other hand, is the absent narrator, retiring, distanced. Unobtrusive, he subtly draws the eye, inviting imaginative rapport. Degas is a listener where Picasso is a talker.

Photos: In a Café (L'Absinthe), 1875-76 by Edgar Degas; Musée d'Orsay, Paris, © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Reource, NY; photo: Hervé Lewandowski; Portrait of Sebastià Junyer i Vidal, 1903, by Pablo Picasso; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; © Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource, NY, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ARS, New York

© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.