Carleton Watkins

el Capitan, Yosemite Park, California, 1861,
Carlton Watkins

We all think of sitting in our living rooms watching the "idiot box" as something of a 20th century phenomena. Well, guess what? It's not. Americans in the last quarter of the 19th century could do it too. In fact, they had a certain advantage over our high-tech electronic contraptions. They could view their "shows" in 3-D! Granted, there was no color, and no sound, and no brilliant illumination, but they could peer into an attractive, two-foot-tall wooden cabinet, turn a knob on the side, and view a surprisingly realistic "movie" of San Francisco Bay or Yosemite right from their victorian parlors. Although it was closer to a modern-day Rolodex than television, or even the movies, it was surprisingly advanced for its time. Buyers could choose from eighteen different models averaging about $23 in price (the equivalent of several hundred dollars today). It was all the brainchild of the pioneering photographer, Carleton Watkins.

Watkins' camera, definitely not for amateurs.

Watkins was born in 1829, at a time when photography hadn't even been invented yet. He got his start in San Francisco in 1853 as an assistant in a portrait photo shop. When we think of landscape photography, especially that of Yosemite, we think first of Ansel Adams. Watkins was taking outstanding, large-scale photos of Yosemite long before Adams was even born. In fact, some of the equipment Adams used, Watkins invented including the stereographic camera used to create the 3-D photos which amazed and delighted victorian armchair travelers. Dissatisfied with the quality of photos from existing box cameras of the Civil War era, Watkins had a cabinet maker build an enormous piece of equipment (below) capable of handling wet glass Collodion plates as large as 18 by 22 inches.

Watkins' custom camera--no wonder
he needed a railroad car.

It wasn't easy. Watkins' camera and glass plates (four pounds each) weighed hundreds of pounds. Moreover, the photos had to be shot and developed while the plates remained wet, which usually meant within a time span of no more than a half-hour to forty-five minutes. For the would-be landscape photographer, this entailed carrying with him his own portable darkroom to some of the most remote but beautiful places on earth. The gear was so heavy, bulky, and fragile it would fill a railroad boxcar, which is exactly what Watkins used. But in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with railroads probing even the most inaccessible corners of the country, this was no problem. He even got the railroads to support his efforts.

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, you can see his art. You can even peer into his victorian motion picture viewer and see why someone decided television (even without 3-D effects) would be a marked improvement. 

Watkins' studio and most of his fragile glass plates were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Despondent, Watkins (then 78) is seen being led from his studio in advance of the fire. A few years later he was commited to an insane asylum where he died penniless in 1916.

The Brownie

Some time ago I discussed a few of the names and the chemistry from the distant past that went into making photography the "people's art"--an art form everyone in the civilized world can use to create and enjoy. Thanks to these persistent pioneers, anyone who can aim through a viewfinder and press a button can, if not create art, at least capture the moment. And, thanks to Edwin Land who pioneered  Polaroid technology, the results of that effort can be held in your hand in about a minute. Now,with  digital photography or video imaging, you can view your creative genius in just seconds. Talk about your "instant gratification." Can you recall the first time you ever held a Polaroid print or peered at the back of a digital camera gasping in amazement as the image appeared on the tiny screen?  Showing this to someone who had never seen a digital camera before was one of the greatest joys in owning one. Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre, if not rolling over in their graves, must surely be blinking their eyes in amazement.

"You push the button, we do the rest."

As much as we owe to these two men, and others, their efforts, despite some commerical applications, were largely along the line of what we could call today, "basic research." The man who really put photography in the hands of the common man was George Eastman. And the marvelous little gadget which he used to do it is now, (February, 2012) 112 years old. Eastman called it the "Brownie." The name originally came from Canadian author Palmer Cox's "Brownie" elves, cartoon characters that once adorned the plain little cardboard box camera. The first Brownie camera cost just one dollar (the equivalent of $25 today) and came already loaded with film allowing approximately six to eight exposures.  Once the pictures were taken, you mailed the whole thing back to Eastman Kodak for processing. In a week or two, you got back your photos and an identical camera once more loaded and ready to go. And, while this system went a long way in "democratizing" and popularizing photography, one didn't exactly go around snapping off pictures of any momentary creative impulse. You were creating precious, documentary treasures. People dressed up in their Sunday best, squinted into the bright sun, posed stiffly in neat little rows, and "said cheese." Click-Clock.

The Fiesta R4, the last of the Brownies

Improvements came quickly, more film, wooden cameras you could load and unload yourself (the post office must have been grateful for that development), better lenses, faster film, flash attachments, bigger pictures, color pictures, plastic cameras, flash cubes, flash bars, built in flash, and always, lower and lower prices (adjusted for inflation, of course). Their names were as colorful as the pictures they took--the Hawkeye (below, right), Target, Vecta, and the last Brownie, the Fiesta R4 (above), which was made in 1970.  By that time the best cameras were no longer made in America nor bore the totally fabricated name, "Kodak." (More recently, it appears that name may soon go the way of the Brownie.)

The 1950s Hawkeye Brownie, my own first camera

The 35mm format invaded, first from Germany, aimed at "serious" photographers, then in ever greater numbers and ever more simplified forms, from Japan came names like Nikon, Yashica, Minolta, and Canon aimed at everyone else. And, while the lovable old Brownies were quite simple to operate, it was also very easy to take bad pictures at the click of a button. I know, I did so quite often. Later, replacing the Brownies, came the "brainy" cameras with their high-speed, highly-forgiving color film we called "idiot cameras" (any idiot could use one and seldom take a "bad" picture). While decades ahead in design and technology, they somehow just didn't seem nearly as friendly, lovable, or wholesome as those which Eastman wrought. From an artist who created his first "art" with an Kodak Brownie--Happy Birthday, old buddy, you don't look a day over sixty!

Bill Mauldin

Bill Mauldin, 1945, sweet-
faced kid with a pencil, a pad,
and a Pulitizer Prize

Someone once said, "In the end, you are known by the quality of the friends and the enemies you make in life." Snoopy (of Peanuts fame) used to meet with him every November 11th, in a small French bistro where they'd throw back a few root beers and talk about old times. General George Patton once wrung him out good for depicting in his cartoons such a ratty pair of dogfaced privates as Willie and Joe instead of a couple clean-cut, patriotic, all-American types. Give me Snoopy over General George any day. His name was Bill Mauldin, and you know you're talking about a legend when yet another cartooning legend, the late Charles Schulz idolized your work.

Front-line funny lines

William Henry Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, New Mexico, in 1921, which would have made him something like nineteen years old when he joined the 45th Infantry Division in 1940.  Armed with little more than paper, pencil, and a $500 art course he took from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts before the war, his offbeat cartoons soon began appearing in the division's newspaper and from there quickly came to the attention of The Stars and Stripes, which managed to get him out of the trenches, but not necessarily out of the line of fire.  The "grunts" loved Willie and Joe, his two battle weary private slobs, while the "brass" hated them. Fortunately, the brass had a war to fight and they needed Mauldin to help those fighting it let off steam so he pretty much got away with any insubordination he turned his pen to. He, Willie, and Joe saw "duty" all over Europe from Salerno to the South of France.  And when it was over, Sergeant Mauldin went home something of a war hero; a status confirmed when, in 1945, he became the youngest person ever to win a Pulitzer Prize (Up Front with Mauldin).  He was 24. 

In 1951 Mauldin went to Hollywood to fight the Civil War
with Audie Murphy (left) in Red Badge of Courage.

After the war, Mauldin briefly tried civilianizing Willie and Joe in a syndicated comic strip, but the sardonic realism of their postwar trials and travails was out of sync with the "feel good" attitude of the American public during the late 1940s. The strip folded. And when he turned his hand to political cartoons, his strident views on racism, McCarthyism, and Republican "feel-good-ism" made his work unpalatable with the majority of small town newspapers of the time. Disillusioned, he gave up cartooning in 1949 to try his hand in the movies. Mauldin made two, the most notable, opposite fellow war hero, Audie Murphy, in Red Badge of Courage. After that he wrote more books, and even saw Willie and Joe through a couple of their own movies. The Korean war found him back on the front but this time as a civilian with sufficient following to be given free rein to draw what he liked any way he liked.

Mauldin's most famous political cartoon came
following the death of President Kennedy,
November, 1963.

In 1959, Mauldin came out of retirement to join the Chicago Sun-Times where his political cartoons won him a second Pulitzer that same year. Thirty-two years later, with the two Pulitzers, a list of 16 books, legions of friends, at least a company or two of enemies, and enough awards to fill the walls of a half-dozen dens, Bill Mauldin again retired to his native New Mexico, still spinning yarns with old-time war buddies even as their number grew thinner with each passing year. He joined their ranks in 2003 at the age of 81. But like his friend Snoopy, Bill Mauldin lives on from the walls of the cartoon hall of fame.

Barnett Newman

Moment, 1946, Barnett Newman

As I write about various artists, I find myself building something like tribute memorials in their names, part biography, part philosophy, part trivia, part technical treatises, and in some part, little pleas for understanding. In a tribute to Barnett Newman, I guess I should most appropriately leave the paper (or screen) blank with perhaps one or two long, vertical stripes ("zips" he called them) from top to bottom. If I were discussing his work from 1958 to 1962, the screen would be white with black, or black with white "zips." After that time, you'd have to tone down your monitor setting to avoid being burned by the brightness of his colors. Of course Newman used words too, though usually not in written form. He was very vocal, very articulate in discussing his work, sometimes to the point it's hard to differentiate between what he says he was doing in his painting and what he actually did.

Horizon Light, 1949, Barnett Newman

Newman was born in 1905, the son of Russian immigrants in New York, where his father owned a men's garment factory. Though Newman studied at the Art Student's League and the City College of New York, and worked at a substitute art teacher, much of his life he was involved directly in the family business. He was an accomplished ornithologist, anthropologist, theologist, philosopher, and poet. He also dabbled in politics. As a painter, his early work was Expressionist in style, often dealing with plant and seed growth, featuring images of fertilization. It must have taken some courage when, in 1940, he not only stopped painting but destroyed all his work. After the war, he once more took up the brush as well as the pen in writing about art as well as creating it. But he was just one of hundreds of struggling Abstract Expressionists populating the New York School, hoping to attract some kind of attention.

Only in a gallery setting, juxtaposed against human proportions, can the immense scale of
Newman's paintings be appreciated.

Barnett Newman became a transitional artist. He swerved away from the expressionistic "action painting" so popular in the immediate postwar era in favor of color fields. His 1946 Moment (top, left) he considered one of his first successful paintings. Perhaps one might call it the "birth of the zip."  His 1949 Horizon Light (above, right) was the star attraction of his first one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950. Not only did the public not like or understand his work, but even his fellow abstractionists complained he had somehow betrayed them in distilling their movement into such minimal terms. He was about ten years ahead of his time. With the growing acceptance of Frankenthaler and the other color field painters in the sixties, Newman could justly claim to have "been there, done that," in effect to have invented the genre. Given that Newman's ego was every bit as enormous as his paintings, that might tend to be something of an overstatement, but nonetheless, his work very effectively serves as a bridge between the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and the Minimal Art of the 1970s.

Barnett Newman

Newman died in 1970, the fledgling Minimalist movement of the time a fitting tribute to his memory.  His epitaph, written by a New York critic read:  "Barnett Newman...work(ed) with emptiness as if it were a substance."

Bauhaus Diners

The Nighthawks, 1941, Edward hopper

Yesterday, an online artist friend and I were having virtual coffee when the conversation strayed from painting to the not totally unrelated topic of diner decor. He described his local burger place  as: "White laminated plastic surfaces everywhere, lit by a dreadful combination of cold white fluorescent tubes and unbelievably long neon strips in predominately pale blue with pink accents. The neon makes the place as inviting as an abattoir, (French for slaughterhouse) and as comfortable as a fishmonger's marble slab. The place makes the diner in Hopper's Nighthawks look kinda homey." He concluded by adding contemptuously, "Modern interior design, queen of the arts--Hah!  Bring back the Bauhaus." I didn't want to burst his bubble by mentioning it at the time, but much of what he describe from his burger palace was pure Bauhaus. (The Bauhaus, by the way, was a highly influential German school of architecture, painting, interior, and industrial design operating from 1919 to 1933.)

Bauhaus rectilinear lines and simplicity, replete
with neon signage, are evidenced in this 1950s
era diner in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey

In the early 1950s, diners (not known as fast food back then) adopted and adapted many Bauhaus design principles to denote a "squeaky clean" efficient look. This was totally at odds with the "greasy spoon" look (and taste) which many lunch spots had at the time, having grown out of the neighborhood bar and grill (not unlike the impressionist hangout, Paris's Cafe Guerbois). For example, in the U.S., we have an institution which men tend to love and women often hate called the White Castle (below). The place is designed to look a little like a white porcelain steel castle, with a small tower, crenelated cornice and all. Inside, the ambiance is a cross between a bus station and an operating room. The burgers are tiny, salty, little squares, paper thin, with minced onion on top, served on cute little square buns (ketchup and mustard to taste). They are about three bites each and known to give you gas big time. And, in spite of what I've just described, they are shamefully delicious. People often consume a dozen at a time. I think Burger King use to have something similar called Burger Buddies.

Before there was a MacDonalds, before there
was Burger King, almost before there was
a Bauhaus, there was White Castle. The
5-cent burgers and the architecture date
from the early 1920s.

Though White Castle "architecture" is something of a departure from Bauhaus design, the rationale has something in common: The world is a dark, dirty place, come inside to our pristine, brightness for a quick, healthy (yeah, sure) lunch; and while you're at it, take home a bagful for dinner. The wife and kiddies will love you for it (cold, greasy little hamburgers?...the kids maybe, but the wife?).  Believe it or not, in some neighborhoods, these establishments are treated as something akin to an ethnic culinary shrine. And in many neighborhoods, they are a sanctuary of cleanliness and even safety in the midst of poverty, crime, and despair. In Columbus, Ohio, there was an old White Castle in danger of being torn down. The local populace revolted, had a big protest rally, and started petitions. In the end, restaurant was moved a few hundred yards, restored, and even placed on the register of historic structures, which means this dubious architectural masterpiece will be preserved for something like an eternity or longer.

Photo by Daniel Schwen

The interior of this modern day

 Brooklyn, New York, diner is not

without Bauhaus influences.

However, this New Zealand Burger
King may be pushing the Bauhaus
 50s thing a bit too far.

Anthony Van Dyck

In today's world it would be hard to conceive. It would be the equivalent of closing up the National Gallery of Art in Washington, loading up a couple dozen semi-trucks with its contents, and carting them all off to Sotheby's in New York for the grand art auction to end all grand art auctions. Yet in the year 1650, in London, something like that actually happened. The art collection of England's King Charles I was sold at auction. A few pieces were held back of course, some portraits of the monarch, his Stuart ancestors, his father, James I, and a few other historic pieces, but 90% of it went on the block.

Self-Portrait with a Sunflower, after 1633,
Sir Anthony Van Dyck

Of course to understand this radical turn of events in the art world, it might be helpful to recall that the king's head itself had, just the year before, also gone on the block...in this case the chopping block. In the culmination of a decades old rivalry between the monarchy and his enemies in parliament, the king lost. Regicide was a fact of life in Europe at the time, one of the chances one took in becoming king. The dissolution of his magnificent art collection was, in a sense, a symbolic act representing the dissolution of the monarchy itself. There were economic reasons too, of course. There were war debts to pay off, and if you can imagine it, the British government was broke. Some British generals, noblemen, and other court hangers on grabbed a few pieces for their magnificent country manors, but by and large the pieces mostly left the country. Art collecting had become all the rage in Europe at the time, and the various ruling families were known by the company they kept in terms of art and artists.  And the greatest, most collectible artist of this time in all of Europe was Anthony Van Dyck.

The Villers Brothers, 1635,
Sir Anthony Van Dyck

Sir Anthony (Charles I had knighted the Flemish painter in 1633) spent eight years in London, working full time for the monarchy.  Born in 1599, in Antwerp, Van Dyck was a child prodigy student of Peter Paul Rubens. By the time he was eighteen he had his own studio, turning out portraits, religious, and mythologic pieces with an effortless skill even Rubens found remarkable. He spent seven years studying in Rome where his dignified, insightful, yet warmly informal portraits of aristocracy won him an international following.

Triple Portrait of Charles I, 1635, Sir Anthony Van Dyck

Lured to London by the promise of a knighthood, his own palatial studio, and a stipend generous even by today's standard's, Van Dyck proved not only to be a prodigy but also prodigious. In the eight years spent in London, he produced over 700 portraits, an almost unbelievable one per week. And they're all the more remarkable for their high quality. His portraits of the king are solemn, yet regal only in his depiction of the king's bearing, unlike the flamboyant caricatures of royalty Rigaud employed in painting Louis XIV. Van Dyck's Triple Portrait of Charles I from 1635 is typical, yet amazing in its depiction of the monarch in profile, full faced, and three-quarter view, all on the same canvas. Charles I was a man highly conscious of his own image, his own behavior, and a king given to ruling by example. Van Dyck was, in a sense, his PR man, and a very good one at that. Van Dyck died in 1641.  One has to wonder whether, if his image maker had survived, the king might have also.

Anni Albers

The German Bauhaus of the
1930s was probably the most
influential force in 20th
century art.

Perhaps it's my fault in being a man, but I get the feeling sometimes even women don't totally realize how far female artists have come in the past century. At a time when they may even outnumber their male counterparts, I think we all have a tendency to overlook just how far they've come in leveling the creative playing field even during our lifetimes. Anni Albers is an interesting example. She was born Annelise Fleischmann in Berlin something over 100 years ago, which makes her a convenient barometer for measuring women's role in the arts. At the age of twenty-two, she found her way to the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, one of the few art schools or any stature where women were even admitted at the time. The Bauhaus was notable for having an extremely liberal overview of the fine arts and crafts, and their interrelationship to industrial design and production. It was also probably the closest thing around to our current concept of women as being the equal of men in the arts. Anni completed the grueling foundations course, but despite the institution's egalitarian leanings, was barred from architecture, wall painting, and furniture workshops because the course of study was considered too demanding for their fragile physiques. Instead, she found herself seated behind a loom.

Anni and Joseph Albers

Anni Fleischmann became a Bauhausfrau. She married the painter Josef Albers who was thirteen years her senior. They were an odd match. She was the daughter of a Jewish furniture manufacturer, he the Catholic son of a skilled laborer from the coal-mining Ruhr Valley. They both remained with the Bauhaus, her work with the weavers workshop laying the groundwork for much of what we consider modern textile design fundamentals of this century. Bauhaus concepts tended toward simple rectilinear design, which made them a perfect match for the rectilinear qualities imposed by looms upon woven textiles. She brought the "less is more" Bauhaus mantra to her weaving, while employing subtle elements such as knots, twists, or irregularities, and materials such as raffia, fiberglass, jute, horse hair, harnessmaker's thread, metal thread, foil, Lurex, and plastics in her work. Today, weavers take all these things for granted.

Though she may not have written "the"
book on weaving, Anni Albers certainly
wrote "a" very influential treatise on the
subject.

In 1933, as Hitler closed the Bauhaus, Anni and her husband were invited by American architect, Phillip Johnson, to emigrate to the United States where they spent sixteen years teaching at the fabled Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. Later they moved to Connecticut where Josef Albers taught at Yale until his death in 1976. Anni Albers had her first one-woman show in 1949 at the Museum of Modern Art, the first textile artist ever to be so honored. She continued to design and weave fabrics of all kind until her death in 1994 at the age of 94. Her life was a living, breathing testament to the changing place of women in the arts all around the world. Today, many of her designs are still commercially available. 

Silk Wall Hanging, 1926,
Anni Albers

Second Movement II, 1978, Anni Albers