Christo Javacheff

Wrapping the Reichstag, Berlin, 1995

One of the saddest things for an artist is to see one of his or her works deteriorate. Art is supposed to be permanent, archival, everlasting, eternal, right? Sometimes it's through misuse, sometimes because of the natural elements, sometimes just poor planning on the part of the artist. Up until the early 1960s, it was taken for granted that all art should last forever. Then came the advent of conceptual art, and its greatest proponent, Christo Javacheff. With an ethnic name like that, it's little wonder we know him  today simply as Christo. We also know him as the number one "wrap artist" of all time. His 1976 Running Fence in California, his thousands of umbrellas in California and Japan in 1991, his wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995 (top), and his pink skirted Key Biscayne Islands in 1983 (below, left), have cemented his name in the art history books for all time.  Yet not one of these works of art exists today.

Pink Skirted Islands, 1983, Biscayne Bay,
Miami, Flordia, Christo

But they do. They all continue to exist--in the memories of those who saw them and gaped in awe at their daring magnificence; in countless, heavy coffee table tomes, in thousands of photos, and in the documentary films of Albert and David Maysles. There is more to Christo's art than covering up landmarks with plastic or cloth so that they may be seen in a new light. His works have enabled millions to see art in a new light. He takes art out of galleries and museums and made it span rivers of complacency as he did both literally and figuratively when he wrapped Paris' Pont Neuf (New Bridge) in millions of yards of golden fabric, turning its hard stone into billowing softness. Not uncommonly, locals who have scoffed at his projects find themselves wishing they could remain  permanently. But that kind of familiarity would again breed complacency. There is nothing natural about Christo's art. It is intended to be startling, both in its visual impact as well as its conceptual daring.

Christo started out small, wrapping cans and
bottles in 1958-59 as the Pop movement and
conceptual environmental art were in their infancy.

Christo was born in Bulgaria in 1935. He grew up studying art behind the "iron curtain" where realism was the only kind of art; and art was only deemed to be of value insofar as it supported national goals. Christo fled to Paris in the 1950s where he met his wife and manager, Jeanne-Claude (who died in 2009). They emigrated to the U.S. in 1964 and became citizens. Christo started wrapping items as mundane as beer cans (above, right), then moved up to ever larger and larger items, finally evolving to whole buildings, bridges, valleys and islands. Moreover, quite apart from the works themselves, coming from a communist homeland, Christo is ever involved in the democracy of his undertakings. Years are spent getting permission from dozens of governmental agencies and citizen groups, involving thousands of individuals and millions of dollars. His personal income derives from royalties from photos, books, and films but in every case, each community demands a cut. He works with local politicians, but ironically, Christo is no great "schmoozer."  Even at 77, he waxes eloquently about his art before these many groups yet the man had a sharp temper and takes offense at kissing hands or any other part of the human anatomy.

Over the River, current proposed work since 2009. Christo
plans to cover 42 miles of the Arkansas River with luminous
fabric for two weeks during the summer of 2014.

What's in the future?  With the kind of "lag time" involved in each of his projects, Christo has to plan ahead. The Reichstag wrapping took over fifteen years to come to fruition, which makes the Running Fence seem like a "Flash in the Pan." It took only four years to negotiate. The Miami project took three years, and the Pont Neuf work, ten. For the past twenty years, in Abu Dhabi, Christo has been planning a gigantic pyramid of 390,500 oil barrels. Given its location, there should be no shortage of art materials.

Richard Morris Hunt

The John Griswold House, 1864, Newport, RI,
Hunt's first Newport house and one of his
earliest, bears traditional English Tudor styling
before Hunt glamorized his French influences.

When we think about various influences having to do with American architecture we usually dwell mostly on the English, and with good reason. Of course it's not hard to find  Spanish/American architecture, especially in the Southwest. But except for some French colonial structures in the deep South there was very little French influence on American architecture, at least until one Mr. Richard Morris Hunt came on the scene. He was the first American to study architecture at Paris' Ecole des Beaux-arts. He hit town around 1843 and spent the next twelve years soaking up everything French he could find. Then he brought so much of it back to the U.S. he might well have needed an import license. At the time, the prevailing style in France was called Francis I. The same thing we here in the U.S. call the Chateau style or sometimes Chateauesque. And running parallel with this, was a somewhat more restrained, boxier style most often referred to in the U.S. as Beaux-Arts.

Photo by Daderot

Hunt's Marble House, Newport, RI, 1888-92

Although they differ considerably in appearance, it's fitting these two styles should be discussed together in that, first of all, they came from the same country; second, they were popular during roughly the same era in the U.S. history, and third, in both cases only the wealthiest could afford them (and sometimes, even then,  just barely). I think it was Mark Twain who referred to the 1870s through to 1910 as the "Gilded Age." Richard Morris Hunt was the architect of Twain's Gilded Age. He was the architect of the Vanderbilts, and the...well, when you have the Vanderbilt family as clients, who needs anyone else. Both the Chateauesque and Beaux Arts styles would be quite minor ripples in the mainstream of late nineteenth, early twentieth century architecture except for Newport, Rhode Island, and a couple other east coast venues where costly, exuberant, megalithic examples have been preserved as tourist attractions and architectural oddities. Richard Morris Hunt designed several of them. He didn't, however, design for the "man on the street." Thus, you'd have to live in some pretty ritzy neighborhoods to spot more than one or two.

George Washington slept here...George Washington Vanderbilt, that is,
 Hunt's most lavish work, Biltmore, Asheville, NC, 1889-95. 
Even in France, few chateaus could match this scale and opulence.

In picturing the Chateauesque style, think French chateau, with it's mixture of Renaissance Italian and Gothic influences. Since they were exclusively architect designed, they are surprisingly pure in their translation to the American architectural idiom. Unlike other American styles, it would be quite difficult to craft a cheap rip-off of either of these French flavors. Seldom, in fact, do you even see one made of brick, and never of wood. Sizes varied somewhat from the merely large to humongous. Rarely, in fact, do you see an example of either style in a house to small for the larger-than-life masonry and decorative details. And once you acclimate yourself to the style, accepting that overbearing, over-decorated, and pretentious are "good," in fact, the hallmarks of the style; then get used to the mindset that more really is better (or was thought to be, at least), then they can be really quite beautiful. Biltmore (above), near Asheville, North Carolina, the home of the youngest of the three Vanderbilt brothers, is the perfect example of this style.

660 Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1885,
Hunt's Chateauesque edifice for George's
big brother William K. Vanderbilt
(since demolished).

The Chateauesque style has a country look to it, as indeed, most of them both here and in France are located in the country, Hunt's Vanderbilt mansion, (left), in New York City being an exception. The Beaux Arts style though is thoroughly citified. In certain parts of Paris, you can see block after block of them, culminating in the glorious Paris Opera House. In the U.S., today at least, you'd have to go to Newport, Rhode Island, to see that many Beaux Arts homes and even then, they are set spaciously amid acres of grassy landscapes. Picture a turn-of-the-century bank building in nearly any major or minor city in this country and you'll get a pretty good idea of the Beaux Arts style. Roofs are usually low-pitched or flat.  Porticoes feature arches at least as often as columns, and there is as much an Italian Renaissance flavor to them as French. Decoration is more restrained than in the Chateauesque and tends toward the lower, heavier, levels of the structure. Mansard roofs and dormers are quite common; and even though they occasionally rise to as much as four stories, insofar as homes are concerned, the tendency is for horizontal lines to predominated. Marble or limestone is the favored architectural medium with symmetry a must. In cities often the style is limited to the street facades of the buildings to save costs. And although curves are occasionally seen, in window groupings, most other aspects are severely rectilinear.

Americans have always loved the French and all things French. The French have panache. However, when it comes to architecture, from Richard Morris Hunt to the present,  few could afford it. Moreover, whether Chateauesque or Beaux Art, any attempt at a less costly version always comes out looking...well...fake.

Charles-Francois Daubigny

The River Seine at Mantes, 1850-60,
Charles-Francois Daubigny

It's strange how we develop "notions" regarding various things that may or may not have any basis in reality. For instance, in art, we commonly think the Impressionists "invented" the divided brush stroke, the sketchy, unfinished look of their paintings, and even the act of painting outside "en plein air" as it's called. Actually none of these things are true. One only has to look at the work of Charles-Francois Daubigny (pronounced DOE-bin-YEE), his date of birth (1817), and the dates of some of his early landscape paintings to realize otherwise. He's commonly regarded as a Barbizon painter, and while it's true that he, Rousseau, and others once frequented this tiny village on the edge of the Fountainbleu Forrest to paint, actually (especially after 1850), he spent very little time there. And while, sometimes he did work in his studio, painting his loosely handled landscape masterpieces, he was one of the first French artists to advertise the joys of painting outside. And as for his painting style, his work was criticized as early as 1852 by the art columnist, Grunn: "Is Monsieur Daubigny afraid of ruining his work by finishing it?"

le Meuel, 1826, Charles-Francois Daubigny
When Daubigny painted hatstacks, he didn't
mess around. Perhaps this was the inspiration
for Monet's.

Daubigny came from a whole family of landscape painters. His father, Edme, and his Uncle Pierre were both accomplished landscapists, though both worked in a traditional, highly conservative style. And Daubigny passed on his style, his love of art, and the twilight riverscape, to his own son, Karl Pierre, who continued his father's painting legacy until his death in 1886. Charles-Francois' training in art came largely from his family as well, though he had a smattering of formal input from the academician Paul Delaroche, and a yearlong painting sojourn to Italy. Surprisingly though, given his style, Daubigny had a fair amount of success in entering Salon Shows through most of the 1840s. He even managed to win a Salon prize in 1848. Though his family was well-to-do and he seems to have lived much of his life on a stipend from his father, by the 1850s, he was making a respectable living as an etcher and illustrator even as his paintings began to win popular acceptance and respectable prices in spite of their style being a good deal "fresher," as we might say today, than was common at the time.

l'Atelier Flottant en 1874, Claude Monet,
Daubigny with his son and his floating studio.

But Daubigny's real impact, aside from spending every spare franc he could muster in buying the art of his impressionist friends, came in 1857 when he was award the legion of Honor leading to his election to the Salon jury itself in 1865 and again in 1868. It was from this position of some influence that he was able to play a role in shining a public light on the younger generation of plein air daubers such as Monet, Pissarro, and Boudin, even Cezanne, helping them to get their work into salon exhibitions. He was also responsible for introducing several of the impressionists to his agent, Paul Durand-Ruel, who later helped promote their careers. But despite dabbling in the "art politics" of the much-hated salon jury system, Daubigny was first and foremost a landscape painter, traveling all over France and neighboring countries, setting up his easel on some of the most picturesque, and then unspoiled, riverbanks in the country. He even acquired a houseboat allowing him to paint his beloved rivers while on the river. (Monet later got the idea for his own such floating platform from Daubigny.) 

Coucher de Soleil, 1865, Charles-Francois Daubigny
While it could be said that Daubigny made an
"impression" on the impressionist, Impressionism
seems to have made an impression on him as well.

Daubigny is important, not so much for his golden, watery landscapes themselves, though they are exquisitely beautiful, but for being another of what I term "transitional" artists--painters who effectively served as a bridge from one dominant style (Academicism in this case) to another (as in here, Impressionism). Daubigny didn't "invent" Impressionism, but late in life one could easily say he became one. By the fact that his style presaged theirs by some twenty or thirty years, gaining acceptance several years earlier than did Impressionism, he was instrumental in bringing about the ascendancy of the impressionist era shortly before his death in 1878. His early moral and financial support of these hapless young artists carves a deep niche for both them and himself in the art history "wall of fame."

Charles Demuth

Charles Demuth Self-portrait, 1907

I don't suppose it's quite so much a factor today as it once was, but there was a time, throughout much of the 20th century, when girls had an easier time of it than guys when it came to studying art. Though they never outnumbered the male sex until perhaps fairly recently, time was when it was definitely not considered very manly to study art. In fact, in many rural parts of the country, for a teenage boy to take art lessons was "sissy stuff," only a little less so than studying ballet. Against this backdrop, around the turn of the century, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a talented teenage boy took his first art classes. The only thing available locally was china painting, mostly fruit and flowers. He was good at it. He continued to favor such subjects for the rest of his life. He moved on to watercolors, then oils, studied at the Drexel Institute (until they closed their art department) at which time he moved to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was thin, walked with a limp as a result of a childhood disease, was always frail of health, and always felt the sting of being a man pursuing what was seen as a feminine calling. On the plus side, he had the best art education money could buy (including trips to study in Paris), he was a doted-upon only child, he was bright, intellectual, sensitive, his family was comfortably well-off, and he came from a long line of amateur painters. His name was Charles Demuth.

My Egypt, 1927, Charles Demuth

Demuth was born in 1883. He was, in fact, homosexual. All his best friends were men except for a long, affectionate, professional relationship with Georgia O'Keefe. He is often credited with leading her into the painting of flowers. When he died, he split his work. His watercolors went to his lifelong friend, Robert Locher. His oils, to O'Keefe. His watercolors were mostly small, fresh, sensitive handlings of his favorite subjects--still-lifes and flowers. His oils, ranged from abstracted, nonfigurative portraits of close friends to a sort of post-impressionist or cubistic landscape scenes of Bermuda, Provincetown, and his hometown of Lancaster.  Two of his most famous paintings are from this collection of oils. In 1927 he painted My Egypt. It's a grain elevator. Influenced by Picasso, Duchamp, and Cubism, it is a monumental rendering of a middle-American staple. But imposed upon its dominant verticals is a pattern of diagonal and horizontal lines, creating planes of subtle color variations seldom seen at the time, west of the Hudson. He brought Cubism to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, 1928,
Charles Demuth

One of Demuth's closest friends was the poet, William Carlos Williams. Often considered his greatest painting, Demuth's I Saw the Figure Five in Gold is a homage portrait to "Bill." There is no face, no body, only the number "5" three times, and part of his friend's name at the top, amid a forced, Cubist perspective of surging, gray planes. At the bottom it is signed with his own initials and those of his friend. Demuth considered the work a collaborative effort. It's based upon a line from a poem by Williams, The Great Figure. "Among the rain and lights, I saw the clangs, siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city." Demuth's "portrait" of his friend is the wild, cubistic, headlong flight of a fire truck through the dark, deserted streets of New York. It's often considered the most quintessentially "American" painting ever created. Unlike his friend, Bill, who lived to be eighty years old, Charlie, as he was known to his friends, died in 1935 at the age of 53. He might have died some thirteen years earlier had it not been for a new, experimental drug. A diabetic for much of his adult life, Demuth was only the second individual in this country to receive Insulin. And though he was notoriously careless about maintaining his treatments, they literally saved his life. Demuth was affluent enough that he never had to sell his work. What he did sell during his lifetime was primarily representational watercolors. And though he could move effortlessly back and forth between these and his more experimental oils, it was only after his death when O'Keeffe's husband, Alfred Stieglitz, began to handle the paintings which his wife had inherited, that his more avant-garde efforts began to dominate his life's work.

Turkish Bath with Self-portrait, 1918,
Charles Demuth

Chaim Soutine

Portrait of Soutine, 1916,
 Amadeo, Modigliani (one of several)

We all have our idols. Not surprisingly, painters idolize other painters. I drool over Salvadore Dali. I respect Norman Rockwell. I love John Singer Sargent. I'm in awe of Rembrandt. I can lose myself in a Caravaggio. The thing we don't often think about is that our idols also had idols. Abstract Expressionists tend to idolize Kandinsky, DeKooning, or Pollock of the New York School. Ever wonder whom they idolized? There were several. Amongst them were Picasso, of course, Chagall, Matisse, van Gogh, and also a man whose name is not a household word (I'm talking an art household here) among nonrepresentational painters--Chaim Soutine.

Nature Mort a la Soupiere, 1916, Chaim Soutine

If the name is not familiar, it's little wonder. First of all he is, by art history standards, relatively recent. He was born in 1894 in Smilovich, Lithuania to an impoverished Jewish tailor and his wife. He was the tenth of eleven children (which would no doubt account for the poverty). He landed in Paris in the early 1920s where he took a few art classes and seemingly enjoyed the Bohemian lifestyle which characterized the art community all over Europe between the wars. His painting from this period was thoroughly expressionistic, even at times abstract expressionistic twenty years before there was such a term. He loved to buy used canvases at flea markets upon which he painted. His work was thought of as "naive." In fact, a shrewd American collector of such work, named Dr. Albert Barnes, spotted his paintings in Paris and gobbled them up for a song--all fifty-two of them (one of which is pictured above). Soutine was suddenly successful beyond his wildest dreams. And success changed him.

Piece of Beef, 1925, Chaim Soutine

He immersed himself in Rembrandt.  he critic, Clement Greenberg, called him a victim of the Louvre. He also devoured Chardin and Courbet. And if you liked his early work, you'd probably not care much for that which followed. Soutine discovered the slaughterhouse next door to the to the tenement commune where he lived, as well as more traditional French subject matter. His style, his palette, his content from this period is raw...as in raw beef, painted from a carcass (right) which hung in his studio until health authorities forced him to dispose of it. (One of these carcass paintings sold for $13.8 million in 2006.) Though the Paris art world of the 1920s hadn't cared much for Soutine the savage, uncouth, immigrant Lithuanian, they loved the "new" Soutine. They loved his series of uniformed servants, his 1925 Page Boy at Maxim's (below, right) and his 1927 Pastry Cook (below, left), for instance.  In each case, you have the feeling that the artist and his model were at war, the canvas the battlefield, and that, though it was a close call, Soutine eventually "won." But in due time, this war ceased being figurative and became real. Hitler invaded France. Soutine was Jewish. For three years he hid out, on the run, the trauma precipitating a perforated ulcer. Eventually, as allied forces were pushing the Germans out of Paris, Soutine found his way to a hospital there (or what passed for one under those circumstances).  But it was too late. He died in 1943.  He was 50.

The Pastry Cook, 1927,
Chaim Soutine
(one of several by the same title)

The Page Boy at Maxims, 1925,
Chaim Soutine
(one of at least three by the same title)

Epilogue--Just seven years after his death, Soutine's work came to New York.  A retrospective in 1950 at the Museum of Modern Art coincided perfectly with the nascent period of Abstract Expressionism.  Many critics, looking back, consider it the spark that ignited the popularity of the New York School.  DeKooning and Pollock both have called Soutine an idol, one of their greatest influences.  I can believe that.

The Carracci School

If you look up the word "eclectic" in the dictionary you'll find it refers to a mixing of different styles usually in philosophy, architecture, or interior design. As in mixing various flavors in cooking, the hope is that the chosen styles will complement one another. However, just  as too many cooks, very often spoil the broth;  in art, too many styles are very often just as tasteless, even distasteful. Thus the term "eclectic" has come to have something of a negative connotation. The Victorian era of the late 19th century is sometimes held up as a prime example of this.

However, in the late 16th century there developed an eclectic school of art, perhaps even the first use of the term as related to art. It was founded in Bologna in 1589 by the painter, etcher, and engraver, Lodovico Carracci, and called the Academy degli Incamminati (Academy of the Progressives), taking as it's motto, "The school of those who regret the past, despise the present, and aspire to a better future." The Italian Futurists 350 years later echoed this same sentiment.

The Lamentation, ca. 1582, Lodovico Carracci

Lodovico Carracci was, at best, a rather pedestrian painter. Though he studied under the great Mannerists, Tintoretto, and later Fontana; not only they, but his fellow students tried to talk him out of a career in art. By all accounts he was a rather dull, "plodding" painter, though he has two or three excellent pieces of work to his credit such as The Lamentation (left) from around 1582. However, Lodovico was best known by the work of those whom he trained, and particularly by his talented proteges, his nephews, Annibale, and Agostino. For eleven years, they worked with him, teaching and painting in their popular art academy, establishing what has since come to be known as the School of Bologna in painting. Other students include Albani, Guido Remi, Domenichino, Lanfranco, Spada Riarini, and Bonzi (Il Gobbo)--none of them exactly household names today, but all outstanding practitioners of the painter's art of their time.

Farnese Palace Ceiling, ca. 1600,
Anniale and Agostino Carracci

The Carracci school in Bologna had as its eclectic ideal to combine Michelangelo's line, Titian's color, Correggio's chiaroscuro, and Raphael's symmetry and grace. Yeah, nice trick if you can do it. Actually, in large part, they did; in effect, "reforming" the Mannerist style and laying the groundwork for the Baroque period that was to follow. Annibale and Agostino left the school around 1600 for Rome, there employment by the wealthy and powerful Farnese family in the decoration of their ornate palace. Their work is often considered the seventeenth century secular equivalent of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling. They took as their theme that of Ovid's The Loves of the Gods (right)merging mythological, religious, and tromp l'oeil virtuosity into a magnificent, celestial masterpiece of massive proportions and truly eclectic content.

The Flight Into Egypt, 1604, Annibale Carracci

The star of the show, Annibale (pronounced ann-IB-aly) encored by producing numerous religious works, principally his 1604 Flight into Egypt (left), which became a model for later Italian landscapes and was to have a profound influence on both Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.  On the lighter side, he left behind a number of very natural genre paintings such as The Butcher's Shop (bottom, left) and a surprisingly diverse collection of caricatures (bottom, right), an artform which he is generally credited with having invented. An eclectic man, from an eclectic family, and an ecelectic school--who says eclecticism has to have a bad name?

The Butcher Shop, 1580-90,
Annibale Carracci

A Sheet of Caricatures,
1595, Annibale Carracci,
note that they're all in profile.

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.