Santa Claus

Scenes from the Legend of St. Nicholas,
1332, Ambrogio Lorenzetti

Though we seldom think about it, it's altogether gratifying to realize that every single Christmas icon, with the possible exception of the star of Bethlehem, originated first in the mind of an artist. Even our visualization of the nativity, though from the Bible, is largely based upon the work of early painters. Our Christmas card scenes today are merely derivative of their work. Near the bottom of this iconographic hierarchy we find the lumpy little snowmen, elves, cute little polar bear cubs, candy canes, silver bells, poinsettia, pine wreaths, ornaments, even the angels atop our Christmas trees. All of these were either first created by artists, or illustrated by them as a result of having been adopted and adapted to the season by man in his eternal search for symbolic references to the unfathomable grace of God's gift of his son to the human race.

Santa Claus ala Thomas Nast, 1881

Somewhere in the middle of this iconographic melange is the image perhaps most universally associated with Christmas. Though this image keeps getting updated almost yearly as the season rolls around, its roots in painting go back to around 1300 when Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted his Scenes from the Legend of St. Nicholas. Even then the figure was bearded and wore red. The Dutch embellished the image and persona of the man, as did nearly every other country in Europe at one time or another. But it was left to the American cartoonist, Thomas Nast (right), to bring the character to life in something approaching the image we have of him today. If you say Saint Nicholas fast enough it very easily becomes Santa Claus. In the modern era, from the late forties through the nineteen-sixties this image was polished and modernized even more by an unlikely group of artist and illustrators working for the Coca Cola Company (below, right).

Santa Claus ala Coca Cola and the 1930s.
He gave up smoking for Coke.

He is idolized by children, propitiated by adults, commercialized by retailers, and in the last few decades, even come under a certain amount of scorn by organized religion, which, while acknowledging his religious roots, has become somewhat apprehensive about the power this symbol of giving has assumed (his persona in the song, Here Comes Santa Claus comes very close to that of God). Some years ago I received an e-mail from my minister, no less, a clever, humorous dissertation on the scientific impossibility of Santa Claus which concluded that the man, if indeed he ever existed, was in fact, dead.  As an artist, I like to think that this pronouncement is to be taken with the same grain of salt as a similar allegation many years ago on the part of Friedrich Nietche regarding God.

Not only Coca Cola, but hundreds of other advertisers, and the movies,
not to mention New York's Macy's Department Stores, have all had a hand in
shaping our modern image of St. Nicholas.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Peter Max

Expo74 Commorative Stamp, 1974, Peter Max,
typical of his early style

Every generation has at least one artist that so squarely identifies the hopes, thrills, fears, and images of their chronological group that his work becomes practically synonymous with their lives and times.  For our grandparents, it was probably Maxfield Parrish. For our parents generation, maybe Norman Rockwell. For the baby-boom generation, there is no doubt, it would be Peter Max.  Though technically not a baby boomer himself (he was born in 1937), he and his work came of age at a time when beads, bell-bottoms, black lights, Yellow Submarines, and  flowery Volkswagen mini-buses were the props for a culture escaping the mundane 50's for the sweet, smokey 60's only to find their countercultural Shangri-La go up in the smoke of war and war protests. For a time, Peter Max seemed to be everywhere, album covers, posters, magazine covers, movies, television--though not technically a Pop artists, he was still the hottest art happening in the Pop world of the 60s and 70s.

Barrak Obama, 2009, a  Peter Max Warhol-like portrait today

If you're thinking Peter Max was a small-town American boy growing up to Saturday morning cartoons, Flash Gordon, Marvel comic books, Elvis Presley, and Rock 'n Roll, you'd be so wrong you'd be clear off the charts. He had the misfortune to be born in Berlin just as Hitler was starting to bare his teeth. When he was a year old, his parents fled Germany for the relative peace of Shanghai, China where they lived in a pagoda-style house sandwiched between a Buddhist monastery and a Sikh temple next door to a Vietnamese Restaurant. His family's idea of a fun vacation was a motor trip clear across China to a Tibetan mountain camp 9,000 feet up in the Himalayas, except that it was cut short when word came that Mao Tse-Tung was about to pay a visit to their hometown. Hurrying home, they packed up what they could, loaded everything on a ship bound for the fledgling state of Israel, only to find their way blocked by yet another war in the Suez region, forcing them to detour around Africa.

Peter Max in Las Vegas

In 1953, Peter's family landed in the USA. By the age of sixteen he knew he wanted to be an artist, and after high school, he began his studies at New York's Art Student's League. After college, he moved into the graphic design world, blending European and oriental influences from his youth with the dynamic realism, glamour photography, and commercial art swirling all about him. Photographers such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn influenced him as he and they helped invent the psychedelic art era of the 1960's. But as much as the cosmic, transcendental, pop culture catapulted him to fame, he has also proven himself able to move beyond that, his celebrity, money, and iconographic artistic stature allowing him the luxury to retreat into painting and to experiment with a dozen other art mediums at which he has become equally successful. From celebrating the fall of Communism by carving a dove from a 7,000 pound chunk of the Berlin Wall, to painting for six presidents (above, right), today Max seems to be everywhere at once. He has been the official artist for the Super Bowl, the World Cup USA, the US Tennis Open, the NHL All-star Game, the Grammys, the 25th Anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz Festival, the Woodstock Music Festival, and an entire generation of Americans as hyperactive as he is.

From painting pictures to painting the real thing, a Peter Max Continental Air Line 777
gives the appearance of having flown headlong into a wet painting.

Painting with Light

Self-Portrait Aerograph, Man Ray

Everyone likes to grow as an individual. And as artists, it's practically demanded of us. But I wonder how often any of us have stumbled into a new medium which turned us totally around and pointed us in a new direction with our art. That's what happened in 1915 when painter, Emmanual Radnitsky, purchased a camera to photograph his work. He was twenty-five years old, about the same age as modern photography at the time. And, though he never quite gave up traditional painting, more and more he became known by the title the poet, Jean Cocteau, called him, "The artist who paints with light." At a time when anyone serious about photography had to develop his or her own work, Radnitsky discovered he could create exciting "paintings" by simply manipulating with various objects the light striking a sheet of photographic paper (which required very long exposures at the time). He called them "rayographs" which was not only technically accurate but also a clever pun utilizing his newly adopted name--Man Ray.

Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her
Shadows, 1917, Man Ray

Today, the "rayograph" is more often called an aerograph. It's a neat little trick commonly done in high school photography classes (before darkrooms became obsolete), but in 1917, it was both cutting edge painting and photography, erasing forever the line between the two. Man Ray's most famous painting is a nearly abstract, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows which he also recreated using aerography. As a painter/photographer, he had the best of both worlds, creating equally exciting work with or without a camera. He was already successful as a painter with his first one-man show in 1915 where he sold six paintings for some $2,000 to a single collector. He was also a fixture at the weekly soirees of the Arensbergs in New York where he met all the important American painters of his time including Charles Demuth, Georges Bellows, Joseph Stella and the French expatriate, Marcel Duchamp (then living in New York to escape the war). Duchamp introduced him to the current art rage, Dada, and after the war, persuaded him to move back to Paris with him where he became an important leader in the Surrealist movement.

Aerograph Nudes, 1919, Man Ray

Ray spent the next twenty years of his life there, not so much painting as creating. He loved shocking the artistic sensibilities of Parisian cafe society with his outrageous forays into surrealist sculpture. Today, his flat iron with nails welded to its bottom is a classic illustration of surrealist sculpture--a familiar object whose purpose is deliberately negated by the artist. Forced to return to New York by the Second World War, Man Ray found himself more in vogue as a photographer than a painter. In fact he found his work IN Vogue (the magazine), as a fashion photographer while in his spare time, he was also experimenting with yet another photographic medium--motion pictures. His first movie, The Return to Reason which he made in Paris in 1922, while not a commercial success, certainly broadened the medium, allowing him to explore movement, coupled with painted light and sculpture. Being interested in movie making caused him to gravitate toward the West-coast for a time in the late 40s before returning to his beloved Paris where lived until his death in 1976. He was 86.

Painting by the Square Foot

As painters, we often go our merry way churning out dozens of modest size easel paintings--portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, abstracts--congratulating ourselves, patting ourselves on the back for a job well-done, reasonably satisfied by our artistic efforts, sales, and critical acclaim. If we challenge ourselves, we usually do so in terms of technique, or color, or subject matter. And except for a few abstractionist among us who sometimes let the dimensions of their paintings get a little out of hand, most of us never challenge ourselves in terms of size. How many of you ever completed a painting over a hundred square feet?  I figured as much. Neither have I. I'd like to sometime though, before I get too old to climb the scaffolding.

Cubist Self-Portrait, 1913-17, Diego Rivera

Mural painting brings to mind the geniuses of the Renaissance. On this side of the ocean it brings to mind (first at least) the inimitable Mr. Diego Rivera. Born in 1886, Rivera was a contemporary of Picasso and Matisse, except that he was born on the wrong continent, Guanajuato, Mexico. He began by studying sculpture at the academy of Jose Guadalupe Posada in Mexico City before winning a four-year scholarship which took him to Spain. There he studied with Eduardo Chicharro, a realist painter. However it also served to introduce him to Picasso and Cubism. Both influences stuck. He also picked up a little Ingres, some Cezanne, and a generous helping of Renaissance murals to season the mix.

Alegory of California,
1930-31,
Diego Rivera

In returning to Mexico, Rivera began to emulate the Renaissance masters decorating churches. Eventually, he managed to acquire a government position in the arts allowing him to do his large-scale best all over the country, mostly for the Department of Education. Briefly he served as director of the Academy of San Carlos but was soon booted from that position when his ideas of what an art curriculum should look like turned out too be a little to radical for that institution. It was just as well.  The freedom allowed him to marry fellow-artist Frida Kahlo (who often appeared in his creations as seen in the bottom mural) and pursue more lucrative commissions north of the border during the 1930s, first in San Francisco, where he left behind An Allegory of California (left) for the stock exchange there, then to even more prestigious commissions in Detroit for Henry Ford, and New York for the Rockefellers. He died in 1957 at the age of 71, celebrated as Mexico's greatest artist, and the distinction of probably having covered more square feet with painted images than any artist since Michelangelo.

Pan American Unity Mural, 1940, Diego Rivera, San Francisco Community College,
features his wife (they married twice), Frida Kahlo, holding the palette.

A Painter's Legacy

None of us is going to live forever. Sooner or later we become too old to paint. Eventually we die. Depressing isn't it? What we leave behind as artists is our legacy. And if we are strong enough as artists, we may even leave behind a living legacy--followers so impressed and enamored with our work they pursue the path their mentors might have taken had we lived. Artists such as Leonardo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, and others have been so honored in that their styles have lived on after them. Some, such as Rembrandt and Rubens, practically guaranteed this by nurturing during their lifetimes, a large school or workshop of apprentices who were deftly trained to emulate the master in all things artistic. Others, such as Leonardo and Caravaggio had followers based solely upon their own stature as artists and the power of the images they painted while alive. Yet another artist of similar stature, totally without intending to, left behind a similar living legacy as a painter even though he considered himself primarily a sculptor, designer, and architect. His name is practically synonymous with art--Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Virgin and Child with Saint John and
Angels (Manchester Madonna), 1497,
Michelangelo Buonarroti

The man lived to be 89 years old. If not immortal, he at least seemed that way to those around him, having outlived practically all his friends and most of his enemies at the time. During his lifetime, he worked for no less than seven different popes. And being Michelangelo, he was notorious for having several projects going at one time. He seems to have considered his own death to be highly unlikely. Although he left perhaps a half-dozen unfinished sculptures it was his unfinished painting projects that seem to have inspired later artists. Perhaps sixteenth century sculptors were too overwhelmed by his work, (or too inept) to attempt to copy or pursue his sculpting style. But even during his lifetime, artists as well-known as Raphael, and unknown as Marchello Venusti were already copying his painting style. Its possible, inasmuch as Michelangelo preferred sculpture to painting, they simply filled the void Michelangelo left in his wake.

The Entombment, 1500-01,
Michelangelo Buonarroti

Two unfinished paintings are interesting to inspect. One, known as the Manchester Madonna (above, right), is quite early, begun when Michelangelo was about 22 years old. In it, Christ (as a young child) indicates a passage in a book held by his mother involving his future sacrifice. The right side of the painting (the angels) is largely finished as are the central figures of Christ and his mother (except for her hair). The figures on the left are barely roughed in. A second unfinished painting is titled The Entombment (left) and was begun around 1500. It is unique in that it is probably the only totally nude depiction of Christ in existence. Christ appears among four female figures supported by a man presumed to be Joseph of Aramithea. All six of the main figures are largely complete though a foreground space is bare indicating a seventh figure was planned. After 1530 a number of unknown or little-known artists did paintings based upon Michelangelo's drawings. Subjects were as varied as Leda and the Swan, a Holy Family, and The Purification of the Temple, which is said to have influenced El Greco's Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple painted in 1600, just 36 years after Michelangelo's death. It's ironic indeed that Michelangelo's meager legacy of  painting had many more followers than did that of his sculpture.

Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple, ca. 1600, El Greco

Painted Terracotta

There seems to be no end to the list of things upon which artists have chosen to paint. Wooden panels gave way to stretched canvases, which have become the norm, but before that and in modern times the choices artists have made as the holding surface for their paints have been rather mind-boggling. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Miniatures have been painted on surfaces as small as a pea and murals on surfaces as large as entire buildings. Starving artists have been known to paint on burlap, cardboard, window blinds and flat rocks. The wealthy have used gold and silver. I once painted on two layers of bed sheets gessoed together. One layer seemed too thin so while it was still wet I stretched a second over the first and re-gessoed it. Actually it was a pretty nice surface. I once nailed burlap over the back of a picture frame and carefully gessoed the front. Look Mom, no stretchers!

Christ and Mary Magdalene, 1510-1515,
Giovanni della Robbia, Giovanni Francesco Rustici

Around 1510, the Florentine painter Giovanni della Robbia teamed up with the sculptor Giovanni Francesco Rustici to paint on clay. Rustici crafted large, terracotta panels in sections much like a jigsaw puzzle. Once they were leathery, the back of each panel was carved out to lighten the weight, then they were allowed to air dry. When bone dry, they were carefully fired in a wood kiln. Once removed and cooled, they were turned over to the painter who applied special mineral pigments carefully chosen to withstand the intense heat of a second, glaze firing. The palette was limited--blue, yellow, purple, and green. Once the painting was done, a transparent glaze was applied over the work and it was refired. The results were often quite spectacular--low-relief paintings marrying the best efforts of the sculptor and the painter that, though fragile, could often withstand the ravages of time, fire, and water better than any other surface.

Lamentation, 1480-1520, Guido Mazzoni

These two artist's collaborated to create Christ and Mary Magdalene (above), a large work consisting of over 30 terracotta pieces mounted as an altarpiece. Conceived in two parts, the lower section is a highly detailed and sculpturally realistic confrontation between the two figures in the garden. It is unique because the figures and background were white and only the sky is actually painted because of the fact that it was done in a golden yellow. (Later works by the two artists were much more colorful presentations.) The upper part, a semicircular arch depicts God, holding a book, flanked by a couple putti. Earlier, around 1480-1520, another artist, Guido Mazzoni, sculpted and painted a freestanding group of terracotta figures for San Giovanni Battista, in Modena, Italy. His grouping of seven mourners around the dead Christ who lies out on the ground before them, at first glance, looks like something from a modern-day wax museum. His Lamentation (above, right) is like a frozen moment from a medieval religious drama--striking in its realism, startling in it's emotional impact.

The Original Sculpture Garden

Crown Hill Cemetary Gate, Indianapolis, Indiana

When one wants to see great art from the past, the natural inclination is to visit some big metropolitan art museum. Each major city in the U.S. seems to have one. Some, of course are bigger and better than others, and all have their different strengths and weaknesses. One of the weaknesses of most major art museums is their sculpture collections, especially work from previous centuries. Often steel and concrete abstractions may dot the grounds while inside, there's a solitary nude perhaps, but for the most part, that is the most part. But there is a place in many large cities where you can go and see often some of the best carved works of art created in the past hundred and fifty years--your friendly, neighborhood cemetery. While many small-town "graveyards" as they're often called, offer nothing more in the way of art than a mind-numbing array of nearly identical, twentieth-century, granite lumps, those in bigger cities are more diverse. Indianapolis' Crown Hill Cemetery is a typical example.

Orphant Annie from the grave of poet, James
Whitcomb Riley who created her.

As cemeteries go, Crown Hill is not that old--a mere 147 years. Originally, it was a small, tree-shaded knoll on the outskirts of town, thought to be the highest point in Marion County.Today, its 555 acres has a population of almost 190,000. And it's also the home of some of the best sculptural efforts to be seen in the Midwest. One of the most intriguing is a bronze statue of a woman in mourning created by the noted sculptor Ruolf Schwarz from Austria. Most monuments are more symbolic. Among the graves of President Benjamin Harrison, poet James Whitcomb Riley (above, left), and bank robber John Dillinger, can be found doves (symbolizing love and purity), broken columns (symbolizing a life unexpectedly cut short), open Bibles (often found on the gravestones of the clergy) and life-size angels whose outstretched wings point the way to heaven. One monument bears a carved painters palette marking the grave, not of a famous artist, but the final resting place of one who merely found pleasure in painting.

The recently restored life-size sculpture figure
of young Corliss Randall Ruckle, who died
in 1889 at the age of twelve.

A hundred years ago, a "picnic in the park" might mean a quiet summer's afternoon dining informally from a blanket spread near a departed relatives grave. Today, even in the most beautiful weather, the tree-lined avenues that give access to the burial plots and the acres of outstanding sculptural art are largely deserted. Today, the descendants of those buried here often live in distant cities, but even those living nearby prefer the "Golden Arches" to the three stone arches that mark the main entrance to this beautiful, megalithic park. Apart from its sculpture, Crown Hill is also something of an architectural sampler as well. Here can be found faithful examples of Classical, Gothic, Egyptian, Romanesque, and yes, even Modern styles in the 57 family owned mausoleums with their ornate bronze doors, marble columns, and stained glass windows. It may be a bit eerie toward the waning hours of the day, but the next time you want to see outstanding sculpture and architecture, don't fight the traffic to go downtown. Instead, pack a picnic lunch and head for the biggest cemetery you can find. It's far more "restful." Who knows, you might even find your future place of rest.

The Lady of the Hill