Elizabeth Murray

Perhaps more in art than in many other fields, women today are accepted as the norm. There is a feeling that only the art matters.  The age and sex of the artist are at best secondary factors. Once an artist has achieved a name, he or she becomes a "persona" and then critics begin to consider the source in addition to the art, but even then the sex of the artist is seldom either a positive or negative factor. And for the aspiring young artist today, there are dozens of outstanding artists of both sexes for them to admire and emulate. But this is a recent development. For those in the past wishing to emulate, almost without exception, the role models were all men. Even as late as the early 1970s, the outstanding female artists women had to look up to could almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. And for those aspiring female artists with feminist leanings, this was especially troubling, because so many of the male artists whose work they genuinely liked were of the "chauvinist pig" variety. No matter how appealing their painting might be, often their subject matter and personalities were quite the antithesis of what these women stood for or were striving for.

One of 36 panels comprizing Madame
Cezanne in Rocking Chair, 1972,
Elizabeth Murray

One such woman was Elizabeth Murray. Born in 1940, and raised in the Midwest, she came of age artistically at a time when artists were deserting Abstract Expressionism in droves, in favor of figurative painting, Minimalism, and various incarnations of conceptual art. Compared to the lengthy run of the New York School, these all seemed to be merely momentary flashes of brilliance (although some were quite explosive). Most were as broad as a New York pizza and about as deep. Murray was astute enough to see this. Her earliest and strongest influence reached back to Cezanne, and especially his handling of women in his work. Madame Cezanne in Rocking Chair, dating from 1972, comprises 36, six-inch panels in which she takes Cezanne's work and pulls it apart, plays with it, some might even say destroys it, before putting it back together, having gained new insights into the work of this godfather of modern art.

Stirring Still, 1997, Elizabeth Murray

Still, Cezanne was a man. So was Gustave Courbet, another of Murray's early idols, and Picasso, and Vermeer. None of these could be considered any sort of feminist ideal. So, at a time when all women artists of her generation were ardent feminists, Elizabeth Murray rejected the label. Moving beyond that, she rejected any relevance as to her sex in her work. In the short term, this put her outside the mainstream, leaving her to go her merry way until the importance of feminism and femaleness in art diminished, until her work could be seen in an asexual light. Her shaped canvas, Stirring Still, dating from 1997, was typical of her later work. It vigorously resists categorization, much as does its creator. Suggestions of babies, hands, lovers, brushes, shoes, palettes, spoons, telephones, all come to mind in her oddly shaped, sometimes ballooning canvases. And, one can search for influences and infer quite a number of them, but in no case are they overt. In the final analysis, one would have to say that her strongest influence was Elizabeth Murray. She died in 2007.

The First Wildlife Artists

It hasn't been that many years ago when astronauts were going to the moon, scraping up all manner of rocks and dirt to bring back, and taking pictures of each other cavorting in the moon's reduced gravity. When they returned, people lined up at museums to view in pressurized glass cases the moon rocks, or to peer through Plexiglas at the photos. Things haven't changed all that much in the last three or four hundred years; only the means of bringing the glimpses of a strange new world back home.  About 225 years ago, George Abbot, the son of an English lawyer, left his homeland at the age of twenty-two, never to return again. He spent the rest of his life exploring the "new world" (which was already almost three hundred years old), drawing and painting wildlife in the Virginia and Georgia colonies. He complained about wars and the politics that brought to life a new nation around him.  And, he noted as early as 1812, that the new symbol of that new nation was already rare. But most of what he drew and painted was not for domestic consumption. He sent it back to England accompanied by actual specimens of the animals involved. He made a good living at it too. For most of his life, his work was in constant demand by European collectors and scientists (often one and the same at the time).

Sir Ashton Lever, 1729-88

From these specimens, another artist, Sarah Stone, made a career of drawing additional illustrations for books and scientific periodicals of the time. Born in 1760, what began as an amateur's hobby, eventually evolved into a full-time career illustrating the collection of Sir Ashton Lever, and eccentric collector of just about anything the swam, flew, or crawled across the face of the earth. In many cases, her illustrations were the first ever for some of these creatures, many of which are now, extinct. In 1806, when Sir Ashton died, his possessions were sold to museums all over the world. The collection was so huge, the auction took 65 days. The effect was to scatter the relics to the four winds. Only Sarah Stone's illustrations remained intact. And, though little else is known about her, her artwork bears testimony to the meticulous nature of her mind and eye.

Niam Niam Parrot, c. 1785, Sarah Stone

Keep in mind this was some fifty years before John James Audubon did his thing. In fact it was George Abbot who first took Alexander Wilson, the father of American ornithology, on his first field exhibitions. (Wilson was later one of Audubon's benefactors.) But bird watching in America goes back even further than this. Sir Walter Raleigh employed an artist by the name of John White to draw the flora and fauna of his ill-fated Roanoke Island colony as early as 1585. The work of Abbot and other similar artists has filled the dusty showcases of eager European collectors for centuries since, though they remained largely unseen by the public. Abbot worked quietly and diligently for over 65 years even though demand for his drawings eventually decrease to the point that when he died at the age of 87, he was penniless and forgotten. The work of these scientist/artists was later overshadowed by Audubon's publications. Only in recent years have these early wildlife artists begun to finally receive their due. In 1999 The Natural History Museum and the University of Washington Press together published a series of nine volumes of their work.

Land Crab,  c. 1600, John White

The First Art Historian

As artists, most of us have a general knowledge of art history. For some it's little more than a spotty list of names and dates forming a "hit or miss" chronology and a sort of instinctive feeling for the gradual evolution of art and art forms. We've put this together through the visiting of museums and perusing art books in stores, libraries, and the occasional boring class in art history/appreciation. Others who are fascinated by history in general, and art in particular, have a bit more detailed understanding of what went before and what came after. We tend to fall into two groups, those with a linear view of art, and more recently, those with a cyclical view. As one wag put it, the linearists conclude that art is,"just one damned thing after another." The cyclical view is that art is "the same damned thing over and over again."

Orestes and Electra, c. 50 BCE.,
Pasiteles

Whatever the case, we all know where the history of art began--cave painting, right? Okay, now, where did art history begin? The same thing? Nope, the difference is between prehistoric and historic. His name was Pasiteles. He was a Greek-Italian sculptor. He was also quite likely the very first art historian. Strangely, for a historian, he neglected to record the year of his birth but we can deduce, given the average life span of the time, and by the fact that he became a Roman citizen in 89 BCE, that he was born probably between 125 and 100 BCE. As a sculptor, his specialty seemed to be Roman generals from the then recent civil wars and copies of Greek antiquarian sculptures the Romans so loved. He seems to have been a very personable, well-traveled, and highly educated young man as well. And, had he been "merely" a sculptor, he'd be, at best, a footnote on the written pages of some other art historian.

Castor and Pollux,
first century BCE., Pasiteles

However, his five-volume opus, The Noble Works of Art Throughout the World, goes down in history as the first ever attempt to catalog, classify, and critique art. Despite its grandiose title, the work dealt primarily with Roman sculpture and more specifically sculpture in Rome. But that in no way minimizes its importance. Given the time and place, Rome was one gigantic museum of Greek and Roman sculpted images. Yet a museum is virtually worthless without some systematic guide to its contents; and that's what Pasiteles provided. Artists then used his writings as a study guide in developing a sense of style and aesthetics. Artists now use his work as a priceless guide through the maze of styles and aesthetics of the time. Pasiteles even went so far as to theorize on a spectral range of styles spanning what he termed "Attic purity" to "Asiatic license" --what we today might term realism to abstraction, or perhaps conservative to liberal. He went on to found a school of sculpture that combined the best of Greek grace and beauty with the daring and technical virtuosity of Roman stonecutting. He left a legacy of broken bits and pieces of carved stone, coupled with a written text making sense of it all that would inspire the likes of Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and El Grecco fifteen hundred years later.

Renaissance Cities--Ferrara

Ferrara's Castello Esterno,  Note the wide moat.

Imagine New York City declaring war on Washington, DC. It might not be a good time to live in the crossfire near Philadelphia. Today it might happen on a football field, but in Renaissance Italy armies from one city almost routinely did battle with armies from neighboring cities. So, what would you do if you were a small city sandwiched between to much bigger and more powerful cities? You throw lavish parties, smile a lot, and build wide moats. If you're the Este family living in Ferrara, you marry off your sons and daughters to the ruling families of other cities all over Europe, maintain a high social prominence, and just to be on the safe side, build your luxurious Renaissance palace adjacent to your well-fortified Medieval castle. In short, you forge astute diplomatic alliances and try to keep your neighbors happy.

Allegorical Figure of Calliope,
1460, Cosimo Tura

The city of Ferrara is located at the top of the Italian boot, inland from the Adriatic Sea and the east coast of Italy. And for the Ferrarese, it was also far too close for comfort to Venice. Meanwhile at its back door, something over a hundred miles away, was Milan. The Este family maintained one of the richest, most influential courts, in not just Italy, but in all of Europe. They claimed a lineage back to King Arthur and the Round Table, though it's strange that an Italian family should have an English connection. We don't often hear much about it, but there was even a Ferrarese school of painting, centering on the work of Cosimo Tura, Ercole de Roberti, and Francesco del Cossa. Though influence by Piero della Francesca and Donatello, Ferrarese painting has a look all its own. It's highly stylized, very decorative, colorful, and strangely enough, has a northern Renaissance look about it. But then again, perhaps it's not so strange.  Ferrara was a northern, very cosmopolitan town.

Members of the Este Family, c.1486 
Ercole de Roberti

Ferrara was actually quite the party town. If not really descended from English kings, at least their favorite sport came from western Europe and England--jousting. So rich and influential was the Este family that any royalty traveling through Italy in Renaissance times felt duty bound to stop by and pay their respects. And when they did, it was cause for celebration--pitch the party tents, light the lights (err...candles) and strike up the band. So well-connected was the Este family to nearly every city/state in the developing political environment in Europe at the time that they were in a position to exert social and political influence all over the continent far beyond the realm of their size and defensive military power. And their art was the rich, highly decorated backdrop against which such pomp and circumstance was played out. Even into the 21st century, Ferrara and the Este family remain quite prominent in the social and political circles of the Italian nation.

Fantasia

On November 13, 1940, just short of 71 years ago, was first displayed what I'm sure will be considered for centuries to come, as one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century. It would rank right up there with Picasso's Guernica, Monet's water lilies, Rockwell's Four Freedoms and Wright's Guggenheim. And at a cost in the neighborhood of $2 million to create, notwithstanding the cost of Wright's masterpiece, for its time, it ranked as perhaps the most expensive work of art ever created (certainly the most expensive painted work of art). The artist, with the help of hundreds of assistants, worked for two and a half years to create it though in fact, he never actually drew one line or painted a single stroke. His contribution was inspirational and conceptual rather than physical. His name was Walter Elias Disney, his masterpiece was called Fantasia. And never before or since has music and painting been so exquisitely matched in such a way that one compliments and expounds upon the other.  In a very real sense, Disney invented a whole new type of painting.

Fantasia poster, 1940

Flushed with more than $6 million in profits from "Snow White," Walt Disney was troubled by the lack of respect his new art medium was given both in the world of Hollywood as well as the broader art world in general. Even with a feature film under his belt, his work was seen as little more than animated comic strips. And as groundbreaking as Snow White had been, even he realized he was merely "toying" with a serious new art form.  Fantasia was his attempt to rise above "Mickey Mouse" cartoon shorts or merely illustrating moving picture books for children. Classical music such as came from Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or Bach was serious stuff. It would give "class" to any animated images associated with it, especially if he and his artists could meld the two arts into a single, symbiotic relationship--even if the star of the picture was still Mickey Mouse. In doing so, he moved the art and science of both sound and animation forward in quantum leaps. Never before had recorded sound seemed so real or animated art been so expressive.

Fantasia 2000 poster, 2000

A mere dozen years after the debut of Mickey in Steamboat Willy, at the Broadway Theater in New York, Fantasia was unveiled at the same venue. The reviews were uneven. Some saw it for the masterful synthesis of animated painting and music it was. In general, music critics were less kind. They were profoundly impressed by the quality of sound reproduction Disney's Fantasound presented but disturbed that anyone should find it necessary to add pictures (especially cartoons) to such expressive musical works. They saw it as cheapening classical music. This Disney and his bankers could live with, but the fact that the public found it to be so far from what they'd come to expect from Disney--that really hurt. On its initial release, it made back less than one-forth it's cost. Financially, Fantasia was a victim too of W.W.II, in that with the world at war, fully 45% of Disney's revenue (from foreign release) also went down the tubes. Eventually, in re-release, the film made money, spectacular money, in fact, when, in the 1960s, the psychedelic crowd adopted it as one of their own.  Today, Fantasia earns for Disney Studios more than its $2 million cost per year. And finally, as Walt had hoped all along, there came a sequel.  From the beginning, he saw Fantasia as an ever-evolving work in progress. On December 17, 1999 an evolved Fantasia 2000 opened to the public, not at a traditional movie theater but at New York's Carnegie Hall, then in 183 IMAX theaters in some 25 countries around the world.

(Note: I do not own any Disney stock.  Wish I did.)

Mary

The Holy Virgin, 1997, Chris Ofili

Several years ago much was written and said about the Chris Ofili "stink" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art along with its implications in terms of free speech. So much "dung" was flung in both directions that we may have missed the whole point in what the artist was trying to say. Speaking of dung, one thing this exhibit said was that anything is now fair game to be used as an art medium. I figure emu dung will be the next rage. Think of it as recycling. If Ofili were reusing aluminum beer cans we'd be praising his conscientious efforts in preserving the environment--"Madonna of the Rolling Rocks" maybe? But seriously, having said that, maybe we should set aside matters of dung, beer cans, and good taste. Frankly, I'm not sure good taste means much anymore in the rarified world of New York art. On the other hand, publicity does. Standing in the shadows of the Met and the MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum curator may have felt like staking out a little ground with this controversial British exhibit as his lightning rod, hoping the politicians and media would react exactly as they did.

Madonna with the Long Neck,
1540, Parmigianino

The very limited word from the artists himself in all this is that he was underlining the "sexually charged" nature of traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary in this work using  his highly abstracted African-American vernacular (read elephant dung) in depicting her. He has a point. From at least as far back as the Medieval period, the clergy, aided and abetted by artists such as Giotto, Cimabue, and Duccio with their enthroned Madonnas, going right up through the Baroque era and beyond, have sought to fill a vacuum in Christian iconography--that being the lack of a female godhead as in various pagan religions. An interesting example of the Ofili's "sexually charged" Madonna images can be seen in Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck, painted around 1540. In this centuries old process, the Catholic church and its paid painters have attempted to elevate Mary to a position on a par with Christ himself, praying for intercession with God through her, rather than through Christ. According to the Bible, Mary was chosen by God to be the earthly mother of Christ, and a shining example of motherhood for all time, nothing more.

A regal Mary, 1390-95

In his apparent disgust with what has become known over the centuries as the "Cult of the Virgin" in which the figure of Mary began to assume something close to a "queen of heaven" or "wife of God" status, (something definitely not supported by biblical teaching), Ofili would seem to be doing nothing less than what Martin Luther and other Reformation figures did in attacking the blatant iconography so present in the church of their time. The Counter Reformation reversed (or at least buried) many of the practices the Northern branch of the church found objectionable including the nudity and other sexually charged elements that had crept into religious painting at the time. It is not so much religion, but a man made religious institution that Ofili (a Catholic himself) appears to be attacking in his clumsy, ham handed way with his elephant dung Madonna. The only question came to be, once he had the world's attention, whether his chosen medium might have gotten in the way of his message. It's unfortunate Ofili's protest had to take on the tasteless guise it did, but perhaps, it had to be so tasteless in order to effectively make its point. Thanks to the combined efforts of the church and state (city) he seems to have succeeded. When is the last time you can recall a single painting having had such an impact?

A thoroughly modern Mary
takes on monumental
proportions.

This queenly Mary seems a far cry from
that of Bethlehem

The Exotic Orient

1799, Palermo, Sicily

We all dream of one day traveling to exotic locations on the globe, savoring the strange romanticism of unfamiliar landmarks, climate, food, language, music, and art, then bringing it all back in pictures, souvenirs and memories. And no area on earth is more exotic for Westerners than the orient.  Except for Marco Polo, there was little contact between Europe and the orient until the dawn of the nineteenth century. Europeans were too wrapped up in themselves and travel too long, hard, and dangerous for them to give in to wanderlust on any grand scale. But a number of military-political events (Napoleon, for instance) in the first half of the century moved to change all that. And with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1863, the East suddenly drew ten-thousand miles closer. Europeans began to invade the Orient and Oriental culture began to invade Europe. Of course our the definition of "Orient" has changed somewhat since then. In the early 1800s, the Orient was anything east of Turkey and south of Sicily. In fact it was there that the first Chinese palace in Europe was built (above left). The godawful mixture of orient and Occident made for one of the strangest (and ugliest) pieces of architecture on earth, resembling nothing from either culture.

The Turkish Bath, 1862, Jean Auguste Ingres

European painters of the time, flush with the warm glow of the Romantic era, were quickly draw to the exotic, sometimes even erotic nature of the "Orient." Sometimes they actually traveled to the strange lands they painted, like Antoine-Jean Gros, or Eugene Delacroix, or sometimes they simply imagined it all as did Ingres in his 1863 round painting Turkish Bath (right), depicting a whole room literally filled with rolling, round mounds of naked female flesh. They painted their visions of grand historic events, biblical figures, female nudes, and sometimes all three rolled into one, such as Theodore Chasseriau's 1841 semi-nude portrayal of The Bath of Esther (as a blond, no less, below left) or Francesco Hayez's bare-chested Ruth (below right), painted with all the photographic realism of a Vargas centerfold.

The Bath of Esther, 1841,
Theodore Chasseriau

But the effect was not all one-sided. In India for instance, Dutch missionaries influence customs of dress, art, architecture, music and literature. There is an Italian influence in the Taj Mahal. Even today English culture and customs still hold sway in many areas of the subcontinent. In England's Kew Gardens stands a ten-story Chinese pagoda. In Shanghai China, whole neighborhoods near the harbor look like they were transplanted stone for stone from France or England. It was in these port cities that western suits and ties first invaded upper classes of Chinese society. England especially left its mark all over the East, removing themselves from Hong Kong only since 2000.  Even the U.S. was not immune. Chinese-Chippendale style furniture was immensely popular in the newly united states during the early part of the 1800s, coming almost three-quarters of the way around the world, imported from England, from whence the designs, and often the actual pieces, were imported from China itself. Moreover, the world hasn't stopped shrinking since.

Ruth, 1835, Francesco Hayez