Category: ART

    

      Hollywood’s collective idea of a great movie these days trends toward combining the wizardry of modern computers and animation with comic books. Caught between the strain of developing a complex storyline and knocking out another Batman movie, Batman wins every time. Since 1989, dark knight has been the focus of Batman (1989) Batman Returns (1992), Batman Forever (1995), Batman and Robin (1997), Batman Begins (2005), and The Dark Knight (2008). And perhaps if you thought telling, re-telling and re-re-telling the story was sufficiently exploitive of Hollywood’s creative juices and financial commitment, fear not, for in 2012, all eyes will turn to, you guessed it, The Dark Knight Rises. I would think by now we all get it, the flawed hero who saves us despite ourselves.

     The result of all this redundancy is a movie industry that speaks ever more expensively to a steadily diminishing viewing audience who, like a 8 year old on a sugar high,, wants the same desert over and over and over.  The beauty of cinema is forever lost in the cartoon effects of heroes stopping bullets in slow motion, cars that disassemble into warriors, people who kling like spiders to buildings, and spaceships that shoot laser beams.

     Enough with the laser beams.  There was a time when cinema was considered an art , where complex emotions were explored through acting control, cinematography, music, and story in a perfect dance.  The audience was captive to a primitive manipulation beyond their control, and transported in the dark to a world of inner fantasy, emotion, and depth of feeling that could change their very existence, and made gods out of the special talents that could elicit such moments.   It was the time of the silent movie, with larger then life stars like Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Lillian Gish, Charles Fairbanks, and Greta Garbo.   It was the time of epic movies like Birth of A Nation, The Gold Rush, Metropolis, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Ben Hur.  With limited technology and no sound, the artists had to take over, with emotions as large as the screen, lighting that increased tension, careful scripting that told the story through careful sentences, and direction that brought pace without the element of the spoken voice.  Batman without sound or computers is better left to the cartoon book from which it came. 

      The cherished beauty of silent cinematic force is apparently not entirely a faint historical memory.  According to excellent internet blog Libertas Film Magazine,  a French film has made a heroic attempt to recapture the special nature of silent film,  and is challenging audiences at the New York Film Festival to channel their deeper movie watching instincts and take on the challenge of a modern movie production told silently.  Libertas reviews the film The Artist and is spellbound by the power of cinema to once again envelop the viewer in the artful beauty of silent screen.  The story cleverly evokes the stress to a major silent screen actor, who must face the destruction of the art he knows with the coming of Talkies, and the relationship he has that bridges the two worlds.  The story , the actors, and the moment come together according to Libertas in a special film that may prove award caliber and make all involved in the movie business re-visit the art form as it first presented in its most pristine evocation.  I am looking forward to the opportunity to see this film, sit in the dark, and watch art unfold with the splendor of a time gone by. I suspect it will recall a depth rarely reached in this time of the superficial, and this era of acceptance for that which is easy and ephemeral, rather than that which is hard and oh, so lasting.

    

      Unlike film,  portrait painting and painting in general, must create an emotional reaction from the viewer perceiving a single fused projection of a moment in time.  Its necessary immobility creates a vague sense of passiveness as the emotions created do not build  into complex directions that create tension with the original impulse.  It is the great painter that creates tension in the viewer, the desire to know more of the subject, to want to know what happened to the subject before and after  the fixed moment in time.   It is the great painter that succeeds in injecting the spark of life into the inanimate canvas and layers of paint that make the viewer feel more than see the painting.  John Singer Sargent was that kind of  painter.

      John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an anachronism.  He was an American painter through and through , but was born in Italy and spent the better part of his working life in Paris and London.  David McCullough’s excellent new book The Greater Journey : Americans in Paris relates the story of many American artists who came to Paris in the 19th century to hone their craft or become recognized as “trained” by the French school of artists when they returned home. John Singer Sargent was different in that he did not discover Paris; Paris discovered him. From his first classes with eminent French portrait painter Carolus-Duran, it was clear this teenager was a throwback to the greats, in that he had an epic talent that needed only to be unsheathed, not developed. He burst upon the public consciousness with a portrait of his teacher Carolus that was not a likeness, but instead a capture of a soul of the painter. Carolus is staring directly at the viewer, intense and confident, his body at a jaunty angle, his clothes modern and dandyish, a contained flamboyance of an artist. The hands are languid and flexible and speak to their occupation. Most dramatic are the signature Sargent creation, the eyes. The eyes have what time and time again would project from a Sargent portrait, the radiating energy of a living being, not a memory. This powerful Sargent characteristic was an irresistible draw for wealthy and powerful individuals who wished to be preserved through time with their youth, beauty, and power intact, and Sargent gave them their wish as no other artist of his time.
A particularly favorite portrait of mine, and there are so many, was Singer Sargent’s 1893 portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. The colors are cool and restrained, as befits a British lady of the Victorian era. She is relaxed, refined, assured of her place and time, and closed to the momentary emotional impulses that would effect a woman of lesser stature. But Sargent as he did time and time again let the viewer know she is all woman, fully aware of her beauty and her effect on those who would gaze upon her. Again Sargent brings the eyes to bear – a cool blue grey that dares you to look away, and know you can not. Once again, though rigidly positioned in the clothes and culture of her time, she is as alive as a breathing being that could easily walk out of the painting and across the room, if she so desired.
This intense realism was in juxtaposition to the trends of of painting in the late 19th century that became dominant and “modern”, the winning out of tone and color known as Impressionism, over true reproduction. But Sargent wasn’t about the immediate truth of a subject, more of the eternal truth that reflected more of their soul and life force. It is seen again in his visions of the powerful – take the portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt. In Sargent’s view, Roosevelt is every bit the world statesman, but Roosevelt’s nervous, inextinguishable energy shines through. He is a coiled spring and at the height of his personal physicality and power.  His confident hand rests on the stairwell, but it might as well as well be the globe of the world given his posture.  It was no wonder Sargent never struggled to find subjects for his portraits, as he never failed to pull out the most humanity from whatever unique source  they had to give.

     John Singer Sargent was no less gifted in a media that has never held the respect that magnificent oil paintings do, but can be equally complex and illuminating, that of the watercolor.  The media of watercolor requires a innate understanding of each color’s interaction and each color’s effect on the painting’s light as the process of watercolor painting is similar to plein-air oil in its immediacy, but also permanent and mistaken impressions irretrievable.  Sargent somehow manage to bring the same nervous tension to the watercolor that he did to the oil painting.  In the watercolor Bedouins, Sargent once again uses the eyes to fuel in both the male and female subjects their pride and vitality, despite the pastel nature of the color.  In the landscape Gondolier’s Siesta,Sargent inflects a dream-like state that brings motion to the water and impressive depth to the rough charactertures of the gondoliers.

     Over a lifetime of prodigious work, John Singer Sargent created over 900 oil paintings and over 2000 watercolors and has become an American giant in the world of art.  At the end of his life he seemed hopelessly old fashioned, tied more to Titian and Velazquez than Van Gogh and Picasso.  The school of Realism, denigrated for almost a hundred years as art turned to more and more abstract interpretations of the world in which we live, has seen a comeback of late and an increased respect for the creativity and talent required to open the human eye to more complexity than its already complex view of the world records.  John Singer Sargent was a realist but recognized that people at their core were a special form of energy, that held all of life’s pain and exuberance, introspection and vitality, in equal measure.  Sargent was recorder of the Spark of Life, and will provide for anyone who gazes upon his masterpieces far flung across the world,  a small surge of understanding of what it means to be human, and to have lived life to its fullest.

     After over three consecutive weeks of rain, sleet, and dismally chilly temperatures, the National Weather Service for the great Lakes Region informed the suffering hordes that this spring was the coldest in 15 years, averaging 8 degrees below the seasonal norm.  Where in the world is that rising CO2 level that assures global warming when you need it most?  I know, I know – weather is not climate – as readers have had to reflect upon my sermons on the subject, time and again.  But I was getting queasy from the relentless misery, when today, as if noting the depths of my funk, broke out an exceptional day with a  temperature topping 60 degrees Fahrenheit and the sky a perfect day long azure blue.  If such climatic bounty does not stir thoughts of spring, I don’t know what does.  The other signs of the stirring earth after a harsh winter are nervously showing themselves;  green willowy buds on the trees, an occasional brave flower, and morning music from the birds in the trees.  Spring may well be here and thoughts of such reawakening lead to a reminder of how such natural wonder invigorates the soul and stimulates the creative impulse in our artful civilization.  A few reverential monuments to spring come to mind…

     Auguste Rodin, a French sculptor of the late 19th century was pointing in a direction far from Spring when he devised and created the The Kiss.  Planning an expansive sculptural project reflecting Dante’s Inferno and specifically the Gates of Hell, a statue arose that signified forbidden love. Dante’s epic prose described the discovered souls of Paolo and Francesca, lost for all time to heaven due to their partaking of a kiss driven by the most fundamental impulse of spring, youthful love.  The Lord of Rimini, Gianciotto Malatesta, had trusted his wife to his much younger brother Paolo to deliver his protection in his absence. The forces of love overwhelmed them, and in a moment of reckless love, they exchanged a kiss.  Gianciotto caught them, and stabbed them both to death.  Participating in forbidden love led to eternal damnation, and their “shadows” reflect to Dante that “Love has led us to a unique death.”  Rodin worried the statue’s meaning might be entirely lost through the sculpture’s raw visible passion that might offend his audience.  The message was lost, but for entirely a different reason.  The public response to the sculpture was uniformly positive, and felt the lovers radiated true happiness – a little out of sorts with the central position the sculpture was to hold in the Gates of Hell.  Rodin determined to allow it to stand on its own, and it continues to project Love to all that view it now standing on its own in the Rodin Museum in Paris.

     Spring lives in the vibrant colors of Pierre Auguste Renoir, a French impressionist painter, whose masterpiece, On The Terrace , is a prized exhibit of the Art Institute of Chicago. Renoir was a leader of the French Impressionist movement that dominated art in the last half of the 19th century.  His art characterized the height of Impressionist vision capturing transient mid day light and its streaming effect on people landscape and colors.  The Renoir achieved the vibrancy of the paintings through multi-laying of oils in both kaleidoscopic color and physical relief, creating a shimmering light effect that exploded on flowers, faces, and landscapes.  Formally named, (Two Sisters) On The Terrace, the painting captures youthful beauty and the promise of spring. The relief of the flowers and vines are accented by the porcelain skin and azure blue eyes of the girls, in a striking juxtaposed tome to Spring’s gift of color and beauty to the world recovered from the grey winter.

     Ludwig Von Beethoven was an irascible man, but a romantic one.  His escapes to the countryside elevated his view of the world and focused his discerning artist’s passion to the colors and smells evidenced in Spring.  Progressively unable to hear the unique sounds of the awakening earth, he transformed the visual into a feast of cosmic sound that is the Sixth Symphony. The Symphony in F Major , referred to as “The Pastoral” , completed in 1808,  was clearly a programmatic musical form. Beethoven himself wrote that “It is left to the listener to find out the situations … Anyone that has formed any idea of rural life does not need titles to imagine the composer’s intentions.”  This was not  the Beethoven of the Romantic Ideal or the Heroic Everyman.  This was Beethoven reminding us that Spring is musical, and all that hear it, feel its beauty.

Spring is Here, Ol’ Man Winter – let go and let us revel in its majesty.

      What did you accomplish by your 24th birthday? Well, the pleasant little stone carving pictured above was the work of a young Italian from Caprese named Michelangelo, and it is worth reminding us all of this man’s brilliance and contribution to western civilization on the occasion of his birthday today. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6th, 1475, in the Tuscan nursery of one of the truly great explosions of man’s intellect and creativity, the Italian Renaissance. He was one of a line of spectacular talents that the beautiful rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside seemed to boundlessly produce, including Leonardo DaVinci, Ghirlandaio, Giotto, Duccio, Donatello, and Botticelli. Of this group of giants he was in particular, the Rock Star, a sculptor of immense talent and visions that could extract the most base human emotion and tension out of inert marble stone. His talents were recognized by his father early in life, and he managed to get young Michelangelo  into the De’Medici school for artists in Florence, where he had access to the Medici’s great collection of Roman age sculpture and technical training from the sculptor Bertoldo Giovanni, but it was obvious to all that the student would soon be the teacher. The magnificent PIETA pictured above was Michelangelo’s early twenties coming out party, and he followed that masterpiece with the equally spectacular DAVID. The intense sorrow of the Madonna for her dead son of the PIETA is transposed into the young male arrogance and aggression of the powerful DAVID, muscled, tensed, scanning the horizon for his opponent the giant Goliath, and convinced of the outcome of the titanic battle. These are not the emotionless immortals of Roman art. These are personal, entirely human subjects that are ageless not in their eternal youth, but in the universality of their human emotions and intellect.

     Michelangelo considered himself above all, a Rock Star, and never stopped in his words releasing the entrapped figures that were encased in stone, but he was not beyond showing his virtuosity in the artistic venue he thought least of, the art of painting. A sculptor of monuments needed a monumental scale for his painting expressions and found it in Pope Julius II’s commission to Michelangelo to the paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Asked to devise paintings of the 12 Apostles, Michelangelo lobbied and won the Pope’s permission to dramatically expand the scope to the story of Man’s Divine creation by God, the Downfall of Man, and the Promise of Salvation through the guidance of Christ. This huge fresco contained over 300 figures and nine episodes from the book of Genesis, culminating for the viewer in the spectacle of the CREATION OF ADAM , the critical spark of humanity, encompassing all its creativity, capability, and dark flaws, passed from the Creator to his creation with the recognition of free will passed between their eyes. The myths of the chapel ceiling suggest that Pope Julius in a perpetual battle with Michelangelo and his difficult personality, looked to the ceiling as a way of reining him in, by forcing him to express himself in the media he was least comfortable with, fresco, allowing for comparisons with his contemporary rival, Raphael. If the story is true, no one viewing the Sistine Chapel upon its completion had any doubt of the dominant figure in Renaissance artistic expression thereafter.

      At a time when human free will and expression were under the oppressive dominance of a universal church and dictatorial overlords like the Medicis, artist of Michelangelo’s stature led surprisingly unencumbered existences. He lived life like he wanted, stated what was on his mind, and refused to work for patrons he felt would not allow him artistic freedom. A dangerous tact of life for most to take, Michelangelo’s genius appears to have been the unseen protector for him, as patrons clambered and competed for his time for project after project.
      Michelangelo lived to the ripe old age of 88 when the average lifespan was in the forties, and remained prolific to his death. It is hard to view the Renaissance development without his pronounced imprint upon it. A man of his age, he was more a human for all ages, living the ideal of the human individual at a time when a individual life was unrecorded and unappreciated, and showed that the most valuable components of civilization were not its tyrant kings, but its individual talents and creativity. On the occasion of his 526th birthday, Ramparts of Civilization takes this moment to thank him for helping to make the world a better, more interesting place for the rest of us.

       The North American continent landmass has inspired from its first explorers onward a special spiritual awareness.  The explorers and early settlers, predominantly from lands crowded with civilization and restricted by their birth position found a overwhelming sense of a higher reality in the huge, untamed, and essentially uninhabited and unbounded country.  Even as the eastern seaboard began to gain a civility more associated with its older European ancestral home, a group of artists determined to evoke in their landscapes the enormity and beauty of the American wilderness before the contracting effects of a civilizing humanity.  They are known collectively as the Hudson River School artists, and have maintained an almost 200 year grip on the American public’s artistic appreciation of the land in which we live.

      The recognized founder of the group was Thomas Cole, who through his paintings of the lower Hudson River valley, began the separation of man’s influences from God’s in the scope and intimate details assigned to the landscape, rather than man’s action within that landscape. His pupil Frederic Edwin Church, influenced greatly by Cole and of superior talent, made the style prominent and valued, and he and his contemporaries John Kensett and Sanford Gifford created a subvein of landscape known as Luminism, where nature’s intense light took on sacred power and spiritual overtones, increasing the landscape’s monumental status and drama.  The zenith of the movement was 1855 to 1875, when Church and the great interpreter of the American West, Albert Bierstadt put on shows that brought something not seen before in American art culture, ticket sales, public buzz, and celebrity status.

esbit     The American populus has lived the double life of manifest destiny and regret for the loss of the unsullied nature of the land they conquered.   It is the eternal argument of progress, that which  is lost in the effort to bring progress and order, that was captured perfectly by the Hudson River artists.  It is at the heart of America’s notion of the the land’s romantic lure and its inseparable link to the sense of exceptionalism.  The measurable wonder that led to a unique American invention, the National Park, was a direct result of these artists, and influences the great American landscape interpreters, like Jacob Collins and Peter Nisbet, to this day. 

   

     The Hudson River School artists were not Nature’s illustrators, but rather God’s photographers, and they remain some of the best reasons to visit the premier American Museums.  They continue to illuminate the special pact of a land and its people, and keep this American experiment from getting too lost in what brings us comfort, and more appropriately focused on what brings us such wonder and thanks.

The Portland Maine Museum of Art is hosting a large retrospective on the artwork of American artist Winslow Homer on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death. The exposition, “Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place”, is highlighted in the New York Sun and focuses on Homer’s unique American gifts for translating the quiet but heroic dignity of regular citizens in their daily lives. Homer’s realistic technique, storied canvas settings, and understanding of water and man’s relation to it makes the consideration of a road trip to Maine a tempting prospect.

     American art in the the first half of the 19th century lived with an inferiority complex in relation to its European cousins’ art tradition. The acknowledged talent was in protrait and generally a copied European style epitomized by the work of portraitists such as Gilbert Stuart. As the internal continent, however, was discovered by the new American nation, an increasing self awareness of the uniquely American panorama and story began to take hold. Artists such as Thomas Cole, Frederich Church, and Sanford Gifford romanticized the pristine and enormous scope of the American landscape that began to record the noble American countryside in a fashion as eternal as any European equivalent. This so called Hudson School began to create an American theme that was popular and commercial, and art progressively became a means of a proud American expression of nationhood.

     Winslow Homer was something entirely different. His initial training was as an illustrator for the large American magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, where he perfected the craft of telling a complex story through single illustration. He learned of the importance of people to the visual story and became a mature artist and infinitely more serious projector of American society with his personal experience with the Civil War. He brought home to ten of thousands who read the weeklies the lives of soldiers and civilians in the epic conflict in such a way all recognized their own brethren in each compelling illustration. the seriousness of the conflict elevated Homer’s technique and more complex oil paintings became the norm. As a means of eventually separating himself from the tragedies of the battle conflict, he returned after the war to more intimate and pastoral scenes of women and children, that may have elevated the recent pain he felt, but had an underlying solemnity that defied the subject matter. The influence of French impressionism through Manet converted his oil technique to a style of more substantial tension and color in his paintings, epitomized by the ocean paintings, which captured man’s elemental struggle and the awesome power of the sea in an unforgettable fashion. Though the romance of the American West continued to be a theme in the successful paintings of such painters as Bierstadt and Moran, Homer never let the monumental story on the canvas overwhelm man’s position in it, and forever make him in my mind simply the more interesting American painter in comparison.

     Winslow Homer’s paintings lie in every great American museum and he takes now a back seat to nobody in popularity.  In a genra as silent as painting, his works virtually shout out the internal thoughts and emotions of the participants and codify their American roots in a way that elevates the American story for all of us – with quiet, quiet pride.  Happy Anniversary, Winslow Homer.

     Illustration has been a driving force of artistic expression in human culture since the earliest identified images applied to cave walls by pre-literate man some 30,000 years ago in Lascaux, France. The explosion of public appreciation for this skill through the act of painting on a canvas as a form of expression of symbolism or beauty for its own sake was a gift of the light of the Renaissance and has not waned since. We continue to this day to enjoy a plethora of talented artists the world over that create a singular image through applied pigments that move us and increase immeasurably our quality of life and interpretation of the world around us.

     We have in our local midst in Wisconsin a world class interpreter of the art of  portrait and landscape in Dan Gerhartz .   Dan was born and lives in Kewaskum, Wisconsin.  His skill set for painting is innate but received additional instruction at the American Academy of Arts in Chicago, Illinois.  His portraits are, in particular, studies immersed in multiple references of artistic inspiration.  To my mind the intense and intimate expression of the portraited individual reminds one of the impressionistic stylings of John Singer Sargent, but the presentation a myraid of influences – the geometric orientation of the grecian urn, the organic interaction of subject ,color, and place reflective of Klimt and the Art Nouveau, the composition of timelessness and curvilinear classic beauty art Deco,  the multi-layered splash of intense colors reminescent of Russian Impressionists, and the underlying religious symbolism evocative of the 19th century Spanish Neo-classicists.  It all blends into a image of great beauty and inspiration that says Dan Gerhartz. 

    Dan has just begun his journey through the artform of painting but it is obvious to the art world that he has much to contribute.  His paintings have won major national awards, and his works are hanging in many prestigious galleries across the nation and internationally – including mine.   You too, can be so lucky.