Weldon Kees (1914-1955)
[Image: Poetry Foundation]

Making my way through Denver’s new Clyfford Still Museum, I was delighted to find the name of Weldon Kees on the famous “irascibles” letter of 1950, declaring the non-participation of New York’s most “advanced” painters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of new American painting. In the 1930s Kees worked in the central Denver Public Library, just across the street from the new Still museum, filling a number of roles while studying for a degree in library science at the University of Denver. A wry and merciless observer of others – and of himself – he wrote to friends of “Shy virgins wanting to reserve Married Love by Marie Stopes… The deaf and dumb lady who handed me a piece of paper with this legend: ‘goon with the wing.’”

An elusive and haunting figure, best remembered for his poetry, Kees had taken up painting only six years prior to signing the “irascibles” letter. By 1949, he had succeeded Clement Greenberg as art critic for The Nation. By the fall of 1950, he would abandon New York for San Francisco, where the “Poet’s Follies” he organized, mixing burlesque, jazz, and poetry readings, starred a young Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (Kees was a skilled jazz pianist with a passion for early blues and ragtime). Seemingly the archetypal young man from the provinces (he was born in Beatrice – pronounced Be-AT-rice – Nebraska, in 1914. The pronunciation comes first hand from a Beatrice native of my acquaintance), Kees complicated the trajectory of his career by leaving the cultural capital of New York for California, and by foraying into painting, jazz, and film making.

In 1955, a year after divorcing his wife, Kees’s car was found abandoned near the Golden Gate Bridge, keys still in the ignition. Despite the occasional rumor that he had in fact run off to Mexico – one of the alternatives he proposed in the last weeks of his life – he almost certainly jumped to his death. Friends searching his apartment after his disappearance found a curdled saucer of milk left out for his latest cat, Lonesome, and copies of Dostoievsky’s The Devils and The Tragic Sense of Life, by Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamono, at his bedside.

When I first thought of writing about Kees, I intended to use his movement from east to west to demonstrate how the west coast held its own cultural significance in midcentury America — as the proving ground for the Beats and later for the counterculture. Stills, as I noted in my review, spent several formative years as part of the Bay Area art scene. And when abstraction began to emerge as the key style of postwar American art, the “Northwest Mystics”, dominated by Seattle artist Morris Graves, were taken as seriously as the New York School painters. Kees himself wrote that “the jazz, some of the painting, the landscape, the temperature, have it all over the E. seaboard.”

The standard view is to contrast California mysticism and hedonism with New York radicalism and intellectualism, to the detriment of the former, but the movement back and forth of figures like Kees, Stills, and the Beats undermines this easy dichotomy; Kees’s colleagues in San Francisco also included Pauline Kael, just making her name as film critic. Another such bicoastal figure is Harry Smith, the “Paracelsus of the Chelsea Hotel” and creator of the influential Anthology of American Folk Music; Smith arrived in New York, having spent his own formative years in the Bay Area’s bohemian circles, bearing an impeccable left-coast pedigree – a native of Bellingham, Washington, he claimed his real father was the notorious ceremonial magician Aleister (sic) Crowley, who had supposedly encountered Smith’s mother while swimming in Puget Sound.

Yet when I sat down and read Kees’s poetry, another theme forcibly asserted itself – the deep pessimism, the sense of looking into the void, that played such a part in the midcentury state of mind. From his first poem, “Subtitle” — “Kindly consult/ Your programs: observe that/ There are no exits. This is/ A necessary precaution” — through “For My Daughter” – “I have no daughter. I desire none.” – to the “Robinson” poems with their chilly, almost offhand evocations of modern anomie, Kees balances sly detachment against “yawning existential horrors” (to quote an internet comment on an article on Kees).

This is very different stuff than the angst of later confessional poets such as Lowell and Plath, whose despair is essentially personal, rooted in disappointment and disillusionment. Kees, by comparison, proposes that this is simply how it is, and does so with enough coolness and elegance that it comes as no surprise that Wallace Stevens wrote to Kees ordering a volume of a limited edition of his verse. Yet Stevens rarely provides anything like the visceral tug of dread supplied by the lost and nameless dog of “Dog,” or the legless beggar of “La Vita Nuova.” “Crime Club,” perhaps my favorite, juxtaposes a suburban corpse, found with the note “”To be killed this way is quite all right with me’” with the detective, now “incurably insane,” “Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues/Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen.” The closest thing to it may be the bleaker fiction of Shirley Jackson, whose story “The Lottery” was published in 1947.

Kees’s painting is not quite so intense an experience, though it does exhibit continuities with the poetry. A reviewer for the New York Times, seeing some of it in 1999, observed: “It isn’t particularly innovative work, but its dark pessimism, very much in the character of its time, has a polished, personal edge and is cumulatively forceful.” A Boston critic, employing a candor Kees himself would have admired, said of a 2010 exhibition that “I find second- or third-tier abstract expressionism as depressing as anyone, but Kees is better than that.” As others have noted, Kees’s painting carries echoes of Picasso and, especially, Miro as much as of his New York contemporaries (though his painting “After Hours,” with its hieroglyphic-like surface patterns, evokes the work of Adolph Gottlieb). The sleek, faceless gray figure of “Monument” distantly suggests the unnerving biomorphs of French surrealist Yves Tanguy.

After Hours (n.d.) by Weldon Kees
[Image: Coilhouse]

The importance of Kees’s painting does not lie in any claims to innovation, so much as in the connection it provides between his poetry and the work and thought of the artists around him at the moment when Harold Rosenberg spoke of “the void” as the only certainty of modern life. It is the unflinching directness with which Kees gazed into the void that makes his best work memorable. Pessimism has a very bad name in American culture, but it is hard for me not to admire the willingness of Kees and his contemporaries to name the discontents of a war-battered world faced with the threat of nuclear annhilation. Kees was willing to suggest that perhaps this is not the best of all possible worlds – or that, if it is, we’re in deeper trouble than we ever imagined.

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When I saw the Denver Art Museum’s exhibition of the art of Charles Deas last fall, I was as intrigued by the story of Deas’s life as I was by his art. There is a tragic fascination in the way his brief but brilliant career was cut short by mental illness, which led to his commitment to New York City’s Bloomingdale Asylum at the age of 29. Especially fascinating was this enigmatic detail: an acquaintance’s comment that Deas’s illness had first manifested itself in part as “an unnecessary anxiety about the new science of magnetism.”

The “magnetism” referred to here was the kind of “magnetic” healing often known as mesmerism, after its most famous and controversial practitioner, Anton Mesmer. A royal committee debunked Mesmer’s scientific claims in 1784, and researchers’ interest focused instead on the ability of the “magnetic operator” to induce a trancelike state through the power of suggestion (hence, “mesmerize” as a synonym for “hypnotize”).

The story of “magnetism” is a rich and strange one: In Mesmer’s Paris apartments, those seeking treatment crowded around baquets, or magnetized tubs, while those overcome by the experience might need to be carried off to one of the padded and curtained “crisis rooms.” Alternatively, patients could go out to the country and sit under a specially magnetized oak. The committee members who investigated Mesmer’s claims included Benjamin Franklin, chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and Dr. Joseph Guillotin. (Some years later, in the chaos of the revolution, Lavoisier would die in Guillotin’s most famous invention, as would another committee member, Jean Sylvain Bailly.)

The sole remaining example of Mesmer’s baquet, on display at the Musée d’Histoire de la médecine et de la Pharmacie, Lyon, France.
Image source: Cabinet

How might Deas have encountered magnetism? Author Andrew Scull notes that “despite its official rejection mesmerism lived on, and during Victorian times would enjoy a remarkable underground popularity among the well-to-do and the chattering classes, even while medical men dismissed it as a worthless anathema. In the book accompanying the Deas exhibition, curator Carol Clark speculates that Deas may have sought out “magnetic” therapy.

But it could be both simpler, and more complicated, than that. The linkage of madness and mesmerism, and the accounts of Deas’s subsequent treatments, rang a bell. A few years before, I’d come across a book, The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness, by British author Mike Jay. Matthews spent most of his adult life confined to Bedlam (more formally, Bethlem — that is, Bethlehem — Hospital), the infamous London asylum; his primary doctor published a book describing Matthew’s elaborate delusions of persecution as part of an ongoing battle over his institutionalization.

Matthews himself provided a technical illustration of the loom and its workings; in 2006, artist Rod Dickinson, working from Matthews’s drawing, built a version of the machine in collaboration with the Tyne and Wear Museum, which was displayed in the Laing Gallery, Newcastle.

Put as simply as possible, Matthews thought he was being tortured and his thoughts disrupted by remote control, via magnetic currents produced by a machine called the “air loom.” Matthew’s “air loom” was operated by a gang of seven: villainous Bill the King, wisecracking Jack the Schoolmaster, crude Sir Archy, the enigmatic Middle Man, scheming Augusta, poor, maltreated Charlotte, and the sinister Glove Woman, the most skilled operator of the machine.

Jay argues that Matthews’s magnetic “air loom” was an old-school version of what modern clinicians refer to as “influencing machines,” a common feature of psychotic delusions. As Jay observes, “Clinical psychiatric case notes hum with secret radio transmitters, omnipresent surveillance systems, devices implanted in TVs or heating systems or the subject’s brain, controlling beams from political elites or alien craft.” But in 1800, Matthews had no tinfoil from which to make a hat.

So perhaps Deas’s “anxiety about the new science of magnetism” was simply a predictable manifestation of paranoia, of the delusions of persecution which frequently mark the onset of psychotic illness. But this does not mean it is of no interest. Far from it, argues Jay: “It’s well recognized that such delusions have a tendency to worry and tease at rips in the cultural fabric, interpolating themselves into gaps in the social psyche. Delusional subjects often unsettle those who encounter them not by just by the form of their condition but its content: they can reflect back a disturbing, often nightmarish certainty about free-floating anxieties in the broader culture.”

This throws an interesting new light on the haunted landscape of Deas’s art, in which cultural and personal anxieties seem to shade into each other. It also makes me wish we had not lost A Vision, the religious painting created by Deas after he was institutionalized, said to be full of “dim and half-revealed shapes of horror which afflict the feverish minds of the insane” that made “the blood chill and the brain ache.”

What “free-floating anxieties in the broader culture” might Deas have reflected back to in America of the 1840s? The visionary Shaker revival known as the Era of Manifestations had begun in 1837; in 1844, the millennial Millerites had their Great Disappointment, and Joseph Smith was murdered in Illinois. In 1848, the year Deas was institutionalized, the Fox sisters made their first claims about communicating with spirits, including an entity they called “Mr. Splitfoot,” after an outbreak of poltergeist activity in their home. Out of these claims came Spiritualism. (The word “séance”, which the Spiritualists would make so familiar, had also been applied to the sessions Mesmer held in his Paris chambers).

Undoubtedly, Deas’s illness put a sadly premature end to his career as an artist. But grasping the visions of his madness may allow us to read more into the visions of his brief artistic flowering. And, as Jay demonstrates, the lines between individual and societal madness may be blurrier than we like to think.

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Picture of the Maryhill Museum of Art from the 1940s.
Image source: pauldorpat

A hundred miles east of Portland, Oregon, the Columbia River Gorge is neither lush nor densely wooded. The landscape starts to dry out dramatically around Hood River, and by the time you reach Maryhill, on the Washington side of the river, golden grasslands reminiscent of California roll to the very edge of the deep black gorge. Today the bluffs are home to wind farms and vineyards, but this stretch of the gorge still feels remote. Workaday towns such as The Dalles and hamlets such as Goldendale and Lyle seem to have little in common with trendy Portland or Hood River. When I was there last year, fierce winds roared through the gorge, and clouds hid the distant peaks of the Cascades.

All the more surprising, then, to find a Neoclassical mansion of warm buff stone, where glossy peacocks strut across green lawns, and spreading trees shelter flower beds and contemporary sculpture, hundreds of feet above the river. The biography of the mansion’s builder is entitled “The Prince of Nowhere” and the house itself was dubbed Castle Nowhere. This is the Maryhill Museum of Art.

I first heard of Maryhill when I came across a book on the Théâtre de la Mode. I was doing research on the New Look, the wasp-waisted retro-Victorian style that emerged in the later forties as fashion’s riposte to wartime austerity.

The story of the Théâtre de la Mode is as follows: As the Second World War drew to a close, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture – the Parisian fashion industry’s chamber of commerce — sought to reignite international consumers’ desire for French luxuries. The result was a touring exhibition of 27” tall wire mannequins, dressed in couture outfits made from scraps of luxury material that had managed to survive the war, posed in theatrical sets made by artists such as Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard. After touring Europe, Great Britain, and the United States, the “little ambassadors” landed first in the basement of the City of Paris department store in San Francisco, and eventually in Maryhill.

Théâtre de la Mode: Maryhill Museum of Art
Image source: Maryhill Museum of Art

The Théâtre de la Mode has its permanent home on an upper floor of the museum. The tiny wire figures, with their colorless porcelain faces, are ghostly little presences, despite their finery, and their settings – opera houses and ballrooms, columned cityscapes, leafy parks and fantastical gardens — are like an artful mirage of the Europe destroyed by the war. The war erupts into view in Cocteau’s surrealist scene, “Ma Femme est une Sorcière,” (recreated for the museum by Anne Surgers). Mannequins in pale satins and gauzy tulle pose in a lofty attic whose roof has been torn open as if by an air raid, revealing a black and white cityscape seen as if from the angle of a pilot. It is as if Miss Havisham of Great Expectations has hosted Eva Braun’s final dance party in Downfall. Lower floors display, among other things: furnishings made for (and in some cases possibly designed by) Queen Marie of Romania, covered in gold leaf and richly decorated in a sort of folkloric Art-Nouveau style; an extensive collection of Native American art and artifacts; an exhibit on the life of Loïe Fuller, the dancer – born Marie Louise Fuller, of Fullersburg, Illinois — whose performances, using state-of-the-art lighting and stagecraft, mesmerized the intelligentsia of 1890s Paris (just think of her as the Lady Gaga of her day); and, last but not least, a collection of sketches and models by Fuller’s good friend, Auguste Rodin.

How on earth did these diverse and improbable collections end up in this most improbable of locations? It seems that Fuller, Queen Marie of Romania, and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, heiress to a San Francisco sugar fortune and patroness of the arts, were all personal friends of Samuel Hill, the builder of Maryhill. The eccentric Hill, lawyer, entrepreneur, and the son-in-law of a railroad tycoon intended “Castle Nowhere” as his home, seat of a model agricultural community, but made it instead into a museum at Fuller’s urging. Queen Marie of Rumania came west to dedicate the building in 1926, and Spreckels oversaw the early growth of the museum after Hill’s death.

Lavish, eccentric, and beautifully maintained, the museum reminded me of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but with a west coast gloss, and a grand and rugged western setting. I encourage anyone traveling the gorge east of Portland to discover it.

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The Ideal City, Fra Carnevale (Italian, 1445-1484(?) ), ca. 1480-1484
[Image source: Art Walters]

A year or so into my graduate studies in medieval and early modern European history, I had my TV tuned to a rather cheesy show on the paranormal, with segments about alien abductions and ghostly voices and such. A man came on to explain how all major events in human history actually correlated with some cosmic phenomenon or other – sunspots, or maybe solar flares. As proof of his theory, he’d produced a graph of the phenomenon similar to an EKG or a seismograph. “You see?” he said, pointing to an angling upward of the line, “the Italian Renaissance.”

As a budding historian, I laughed, but was also flattered. The idea that a certain set of intellectual and aesthetic developments on one small peninsula of one small continent represented some kind of measurable cosmic impact, like the Tunguska Event or the asteroid that that may have wiped out the dinosaurs, was undoubtedly a PR triumph for my field. (How did he know his graph wasn’t registering the rise of the Inca empire, or the heyday of the Ming dynasty?)

The minor media flurry over Michele Bachmann’s apparent disapproval of the Renaissance seems to be another such PR triumph. As Wonkette notes, these stories pretty much write themselves. An evangelical philosopher, Francis Schaeffer, whom Bachmann cites as an influence produced a series of educational videos describing Western civilization since the Middle Ages as one long decline and fall into secular depravity. As Bachmann has, in the past, seemed a bit hazy on these matters, I’m not sure that examining her historical thinking would be especially fruitful. However, as someone with a vested interest in “the Renaissance,” I have to jump in.

First of all, medievalists – at least the ones I’ve known – have never been wild about the term, as it reinforces the idea of the Dark Ages in which no one did anything but scratch their flea bites and run away from Vikings. Medievalists (and most of the ones I’ve known, for the record, have been thoroughgoing secularists) tend to see continuity rather than revolutionary change.

More importantly, the good-for-you, vitamin-enriched Renaissance we know today is itself a fairly recent, and largely American, historical construction. I’d recommend anyone interested in the topic turn to Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, edited by Gordon S. Wood and Anthony Molho. Molho’s own contribution is entitled “The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA,”; he contends that the field was defined for many years by American scholars who saw in 14th and 15th century Italy a mirror of their own society and its ambitions.

One of the earliest of these writers – now almost forgotten – was critic and collector James Jackson Jarves. In an essay entitled “A Lesson for Merchant Princes,” Jarves describes the businessmen of Renaissance Florence as the source of its greatness, but warns that America cannot expect similar greatness unless its merchant princes learn it is “more honorable to spend money for wise purposes than to make it”; he also warns that the American focus on the nuclear family might undermine its citizens’ civic spirit. I doubt the Tea Party would have much use for Jarves.

American uses of the Renaissance are placed in an even wider context by Eugen Weber in “Western Civilization,” an essay in Imagined Histories tracing the rise of courses by that name. The purpose of “Western Civ,” Weber argues, was to synthesize the information Europeans got in courses on their own national histories, link it to American history, and to provide a crash course in civics and culture along the way. As an American creation, “Western Civ” was naturally an optimistic narrative of progress, in which the Renaissance and the Enlightenment played key roles. The evangelical reading of history cited by Bachmann essentially flips this scheme on its head, reading progress as backward and downward, rather than onward and upward.

But there have been other Renaissances, more shadowed and ambivalent. For the Victorians, the problem with the Renaissance was not that it had too little religion, but too much, of exactly the wrong kind. Roman Catholicism troubled and fascinated English and American Protestants, even as they admired the art produced under its aegis. The legendary excesses of the Borgia and Medici popes (the latter Michaelangelo’s employers) sat uneasily alongside tales of martyrdom, and wild stories of young girls imprisoned in convents (still rife in 19th century Boston), or even walled up alive. For this era, one of the chief symbols of Italian art, of both its achievements and the world that produced them, was the alleged Guido Reni portrait of Beatrice Cenci, executed for conspiring with her brothers to murder the father who had forced her into incest. As I’ve noted before, the painting plays a central role in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun, along with the faun of the title, by Praxiteles, embodying the allure and the danger tangled up with the very idea of art in the post-Puritan mind. The tragic, tainted Miriam exactly resembles the supposed portrait of Beatrice, while an Italian count — named Donatello — whose character has a distinct pagan cast, is the double of the faun.

Henry James evokes this Dark Renaissance when he sends Isabel Archer to Italy in The Portrait of a Lady; there she marries the cruel and manipulative Gilbert Osmond, a connoisseur and collector of early Renaissance art, who says he would have liked to have been the Pope. He lives like a latter day Medici or Borgia, with his illegitimate daughter, surrounded by his pictures and objets. Far from keeping virtuous Americans like Isabel Archer away from Italian art and its dangers, such associations seem to have lured them, challenging them to plumb new depths, to test their moral frontiers in ways not possible at home.

The apotheosis of this view of Renaissance is almost certainly English aesthete Walter Pater’s famous reverie on the Mona Lisa, which appeared in his book The Renaissance, published in 1893. Pater — who supposedly liked to put himself into a kind of trance by repeating “Botticelli, Botticelli” as a kind of mantra — said the Mona Lisa expressed “the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of Paganism, the sins of the Borgias…like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and knows the secrets of the grave…”

And vampires were not the only forbidden lovers evoked by scholars of the Renaissance. Renowned poet and critic John Addington Symonds, whose many works included a seven-volume study of the Italian Renaissance published between 1875 and 1886, was one of the first writers in English to defend gay sexuality and propose related legal reforms in his privately circulated essays. So perhaps Bachmann and her mentors are right, at least by their rules, to fear the Renaissance. Those who ask unsettling questions of their own societies have certainly found the Renaissance “good to think with,” in the phrase of anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

In The Stones of Florence, one of my own favorite modern thinkers about the Renaissance, Mary McCarthy, notes that the invention of the modern world was “not, of course, an unmixed good,” and wonders if “a terrible mistake was committed here [in Florence], at some point between Giotto and Michelangelo, a mistake that had to do with power and megalomania, or gigantism of the human ego.” But there’s a difference, I would argue, in McCarthy’s embrace of ambiguity, her unwillingness to draw a pat moral from the story. The pursuit of knowledge – which is, after all, what the Renaissance has come to stand for – carries risks. When the artists Brunelleschi and Donatello were seen measuring and digging among the ruins of Rome, McCarthy tells us, locals thought they were using black magic to seek buried treasure.

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Still from Stacey Steers’ Night Hunter
Image source: Stacey Steers

Night Hunter, a fifteen and a half minute film by Boulder artist Stacey Steers, places silent film star Lillian Gish in an animated setting created from 4000 collages made up of black-and-white Victorian ephemera. Though the title seems to derive from the classic 1955 thriller, The Night of the Hunter, in which an older Gish starred with Robert Mitchum, the Gish that Steers claims as her own is the early Gish, D. W. Griffith’s Gish, whose waifish build and eerily doll-like face made her an emblem of female innocence tested and wronged in silent films one step removed from stage melodrama (the movies from which Steers has borrowed footage include Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and True Heart Susie).

Here, Gish finds herself amidst a riot of Freudian imagery – snakes, earthworms, and phallic blades of grass; mysterious pulsating eggs that seem to ooze blood. Among the few touches of color (added by hand) are splashes of red in Gish’s clothes (and oozing from those eggs). These, along with the old house deep in a tangled wood which forms the setting, evoke Little Red Riding Hood, perhaps the modern world’s favorite fable of sexual awakening and sexual danger. Flights of death’s head moths underline the conjunction of Eros and Thanatos.

Night Hunter, which has already been shown at the New Directors/New Films festival in New York City, and as part of a media show at Berlin’s Galerie Zink, can be seen through August 14 in the Denver Art Museum’s media installation space, The Fuse Box, along with individual collages used in its making and Night Hunter House, a three-dimensional realization of the film and its setting. The style and technique of the film strongly recall the collage novels of Surrealist Max Ernst, such as Une Semaine de Bonté, and the surrealist-inspired shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell — for many it will recall the animated segments of Monty Python as well.

Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté 2
Image source: Paulo Coelho

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Tilly Losch), 1935-38
Mixed Media
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, Courtesy Aimee and Robert Lehrman.
Image source: C4 Contemporary Art

It’s a style I myself fall for every time, and I find myself wondering why. It seems to be in the air these days, as a few minutes browsing on Etsy will confirm. On New Year’s Eve 2005, I saw DeVotchka (the Denver band best known for their work on the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack) perform at northwest Denver’s Oriental Theater, a silent-era movie house whose murals of Alhambra-esque gardens were then gently decaying without any interference by restorers. It was the perfect setting for DeVotchka’s mix of gypsy, mariachi, and Mittel European influences, and for the black-and-white film clips that accompanied the performance. I found myself reminded of the aesthetic of McSweeney’s, which also plays with the styles of the past.

But it’s not just me. I won’t explore the musical angle, as I am nearly perfectly ignorant of the subject and I would rather debate Irish politics with a mixed group of Sinn Féin and Ulster Unionists than weigh in on the indie music scene. I’m afraid I can’t offer any real conclusions on the visual front, either. Perhaps our cultural moment – if there is such a thing – favors ruins, fragments, and nostalgia, half-heard echoes of the past, over brave new worlds of ideal form.

I only know that I myself have always been drawn to those elements of modernism that favor memory and bricolage over starting from zero – T. S. Eliot rather than Gertrude Stein, Joseph Cornell rather than Jackson Pollock (classic “postmodernism” is a different story — too self-conscious). And Surrealism proper worked best in collage form, I’ve always thought – I’m inclined to agree with the art teacher in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin who calls Salvador Dalí “Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood” (though Rockwell is pretty surreal, if you think about it…). Whatever its appeal to our culture as a whole, I find this kind of art most powerful when, like our actual dreamscapes, it is made up of things half seen and half remembered, made part of a new whole.

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Terence Malick plays the ‘Caller at Rich Man’s House’ in his 1973 film Badlands.

In honor of the premier of Terence Malick’s fifth film, The Tree of Life, at this year’s Cannes film festival, I’m updating my previous post relating Malick’s first film, Badlands, and the photography of Robert Adams. As I mentioned, Badlands was filmed on location in southern Colorado, and recently I finally made it to Pueblo, Colorado’s Rosemount House Museum, aka the interior of the “rich man’s house.” Fans of Malick’s offbeat, lyrical American aesthetic should find plenty to like there.

The exterior shots of the rich man’s house, including the scene in which Malick himself has a brief cameo as an architect, mostly show the Bloom Mansion in nearby Trinidad. While the Bloom Mansion’s Charles Addams-esque facade no doubt made it an irresistible location, the mid-Victorian rooms inside are relatively small and cramped.

Trinidad, Colorado’s Bloom Mansion.

While I’ve yet to fulfill my dream of visiting other Badlands sites, this website records someone else’s visit to the ghost town of Delhi, whose gas station/store featured in the late scene where Martin Sheen, on his final run from the police, unaccountably stops to empty Sissy Spacek’s suitcase of its high school textbooks and girlish clothes. (See clip at the bottom of the linked page.)

The connection to the early work of Robert Adams turns out to be stronger than I realized – if not quite strong enough to justify this post. Driving south into Pueblo along I-25, I was surprised to see off ramps leading to Eden, Colorado, subject of Adams’s early monograph, now almost absorbed into the eastern sprawl of Pueblo. Rosemount, a mansion built in the early 1890s by prominent local businessman John A. Thatcher, stands in for the more gracious old neighborhoods of Pueblo, a former steel town once dominated by Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Mills, set down incongruously on the arid, cactus and juniper studded plains once crossed by the Santa Fe trail. Now a likable and mellow workaday town of about a hundred thousand, its wide, sun-struck streets are lined by architecture reminiscent of Edward Hopper paintings.

The Rosemount House Museum, Pueblo, Colorado

Rosemount was occupied by Thatcher’s son, Raymond Thatcher, until his death in 1968, so when Malick chose it as a location in the early 1970’s, it presumably had undergone little restoration. Today, docents in period costume, largely unaware of the mansion’s moment in the history of independent American cinema, lead the visitor through lavishly furnished late Victorian rooms kept in deep shadow. Badlands fans will recognize the gorgeous woodwork of the central hall (I think I found the closet Sheen locks the rich man and his maid in), the dining room mural reproducing Francois Boucher’s rococo painting, The Nest, which Malick’s camera pans through slowly as Sissy Spacek rings the edge of a wineglass, and the gilded harp she experimentally fingers.

There’s an even stranger treat awaiting connoisseurs of small-museum oddities in the attic — the Andrew McClelland collection, put together at the turn of the last century by a globetrotting local philanthropist for the benefit of his less-travelled fellow Puebloans. The star of the collection is an Egyptian mummy, on full and grisly display. A second mummy and other Egyptian artifacts went to form the core of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Egyptian collection, but the climate-controlled museums of our urban centers don’t generally let you this close.

The collection also includes a taxidermied albatross, native Australian fishing spears, and embroidered slippers for bound feet of Chinese women. In the hallway outside hangs a copy of the so-called portrait of Beatrice Cenci, once attributed to Guido Reni. The portrait, once believed to depict the tragic heroine at the center of a web of incest and murder in baroque Rome, was the Mona Lisa of the early nineteenth century – the one painting English and American tourists had to see in order to prove they’d really been to Europe – and it played a key role in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s late novel, The Marble Faun. Beatrice’s portrait also crops up in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

Portrait of Beatrice Cenci, formerly attributed to Guido Reni.
Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica

For Malick completists who find themselves in the mountain west, and the merely curious, Pueblo lies 112 miles south of Denver and 283 miles north of Santa Fe.

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Former home of Camera Obscura.

Earlier this month, Denver’s nationally known Camera Obscura Gallery closed its doors, a consequence of the recession and, perhaps, the owner’s advancing age — Hal Gould, himself an acclaimed photographer, is now 91. The gallery, one of the first in the country devoted to photography as a fine art, opened in 1979 with an exhibition of Eliot Porter’s Birds in Flight. I was deeply saddened to hear of its closing; for me, as for many, it had been one of the landmarks of Denver’s art scene.

For over three decades, Camera Obscura occupied a two-story warren of rooms in a late-Victorian townhouse just across the street from the Denver Art Museum, so a visit to the museum often ended with a visit to Camera Obscura. This was most likely to happen if I was with my mother, herself a photographer. As other former visitors to the gallery have noted, Gould himself was almost invariably on hand to greet you. An immediately recognizable figure with his silver beard and western-style bolo tie, Gould always seemed eager to engage in conversation –- though, as I remember, his advancing deafness could make this a challenge.

In dramatic contrast to the wide-open, sleekly minimalist aesthetic of most modern art galleries, Camera Obscura’s displays rambled through a series of rooms whose uniform coat of white paint barely obscured their past as a Victorian home. It was in this casual, intimate, even cluttered environment that I encountered many of the luminaries of modern photography, such as Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Imogen Cunningham — my mother bought a print of Cunningham’s Unmade Bed from Gould.

Imogen Cunningham, Unmade Bed, 1957.

My own most vivid memories are of a retrospective of O. Winston Link’s photographs of the steam-powered Norfolk and Western railroad. Link photographed the trains and landscapes they travelled through in the late fifties, the twilight of the great era of train travel. His coolly beautiful, elegantly composed photographs capture the contradictions of midcentury America, in which horse-drawn carts still might appear at small rural stations, while drive-in movie theaters and brightly lit swimming pools rose in glossy suburbs. Seeing Link’s work in a space that mixed high art with domesticity only heightened the experience. Gould also sold photography books, and one day I found a used copy of an Aperture monograph on pioneering English photographer Frederick H. Evans, another landmark in the development of my appreciation of photography.

O. Winston Link, Hot Shot Eastbound at the Laeger Drive In, Laeger, West Virginia, 1956
[Image source: The Silver Lining]

O. Winston Link, Swimming Pool, 1958
[Image source: The Silver Lining]

Camera Obscura also featured contemporary work, such as Baghdad and Beyond, Iraqi photographer Zoriah’s images of the American occupation, in 2008, and championed local photographers such as Gifford Ewing, whose work evokes that of fellow Coloradoan Robert Adams. For more than thirty years, Gould made Denverites and out-of-towners alike part of a very personal conversation about photography and its status as fine art. While Gould continues with his own photography and with his memoirs, and a retrospective of his own work is opening in the historic Byers-Evans house across the street, the gallery he ran for so long will be sorely missed.

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Roland Penrose (photographer), Paul Eluard and ELT Mesens
having a conversation wearing masks
Downshire Hill London England,1936
©The Roland Penrose Estate
[Image source: Billyjane]

Of all the images I encountered in Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, which completed its North American tour this winter with a stay at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology (the catalog also won the International Tribal Book Award) the one that most caught my imagination was a photograph by British Surrealist Roland Penrose. It shows fellow Surrealists Paul Eluard and E. L. T. Mesens posed in conversation, gesticulating vigorously, wearing dark suits and carved African masks.

What startles the eye is how completely the two men are transformed. The masks seem no more or less arbitrary a form of self-fashioning than Eluard’s rumpled socks or Mesens’s white pocket square. The picture opens itself up to a range of readings. Do the masks conceal or reveal? Did Penrose intend a Freudian allegory, using African artifacts to reveal the “savages” beneath the suits? Or are we to think of the masks of Athenian tragedy and Japanese Noh, elements of the rituals by which life becomes art?

There are other questions to ask as well. Can this be anything other than two white men reducing the artifacts of a nonwhite culture to the status of props in their cerebral games? In my years as a graduate student, the academic word on artistic primitivism seemed unambiguous. It was straight-up cultural imperialism, an act of appropriation by western artists and intellectuals eager to project their own Hearts of Darkness onto the so-called savages. But this always seemed less than completely satisfactory to me, part of the story but not the whole of it.

Many of the pleasures of Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens lay in its exploration of the many facets of the modernist fascination with African art, from serious engagement to frivolous exoticism and back again. Celebrities of the Harlem renaissance posed with African sculpture in the studio of African-American photographer Carl van Vechten. Haute couture milliner Lilly Daché collected Congolese hats, which inspired some of her own avant-garde designs. At the lowbrow end of the spectrum, a French publication entitled “Une nuit de Singapore”, would-be highbrow erotica full of dusky maidens, used images of African art to illustrate a textbook example of Edward Said-style Orientalism.

Man Ray, Comtesse de St. Exupery Modeling an African Hat, Mode au Congo, 1937
© 2009 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
NY/ADGAP, Paris, Baltimore Museum of Art.
[Image source: The Jewish Press]

The core of the exhibition, as the title suggests, was Man Ray’s photographs of African art objects, many of them owned by the Danish collector Carl Kjersmeier. Walker Evans photographed some of the same objects, and the contrast between his images and Ray’s was striking. Where Evans photographed objects head-on, in relatively even light, as if for a catalog, Ray used dramatic angles and raking light. The play of light and shadow in Ray’s images create a sense of life, even of movement. In an untitled photograph, an antelope headdress from Mali and a female figure from the Ivory Coast are, in the words of the exhibition label, “intertwined in a web of light and shadow”; the serrated crest of the headdress, in bold silhouette, seems to be in motion.

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Terry Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands

My favorite movie of all time is Badlands Terence Malick’s classic independent, which has had a firm grip on my imagination since I came across it on late-night television as a teenager. It was not until several years later that I learned the movie had been made in my home state of Colorado, on the arid plains east of Pueblo and realized that part of its hold on me came from the fact that the landscapes – and above all the light – were more or less from the world of my childhood. I bring this up here because I cannot write about photographer Robert Adams – a retrospective of whose work was on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in Vancouver, British Columbia, for four months this winter at the Vancouver Art Gallery – without writing about Malick’s film. They share a similar aesthetic, “so spare and poetic it chills you to the bone” as the Los Angeles Times said of Badlands (a quote that now appears on the DVD case).

Burning Oil Sludge North of Denver, Colorado, Robert Adams, American, 1973
Gelatin silver print, 6 x 7 5/8 in.
© Robert Adams

The hugely prolific Adams — he has published more than thirty books — may now live in Astoria, Oregon, but he is most strongly associated with the Denver metropolitan area. Adams was born in New Jersey, but came to Colorado with his family while a teenager; he later worked in the state as a professor of English literature before turning to photography full time. Adams recorded the ever-expanding suburban sprawl of the 1960s and 1970s, and his haunting, classically composed photos of tract houses and shopping centers engulfing what had been farmland helped define what was dubbed the New Topographics movement after the landmark 1975 exhibition. The New Topographic photographers, many of whom worked in the West, focused on exactly those aspects of the landscape which the idealized visions of Ansel Adams (no relation), Eliot Porter and others had neglected. By contrast, the New Topographic photographers and their successors — such as Richard Misrach whose images of nuclear test sites were collected as Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West — aimed to expose the toll that a human presence was taking on the vast yet fragile landscapes of the arid West.

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Charles Deaton’s “Sleeper” House

On November 10, the Sleeper House in Genesee Colorado was sold at a foreclosure. Now, according to the New York Times, the new owner is embroiled in a dispute with the former owner, who will not vacate the property. It’s the opening in yet another uncertain chapter for an architectural icon that seems to embody a future that never quite arrived.

More formally known as the Sculptured House, the mountaintop structure is best known for its starring role in the 1973 Woody Allen film, Sleeper. Other Denver-area structures featured in the movie can be seen here and here. Designed by architect Charles Deaton and built in 1963, the residence — which has almost never been occupied — is also known as the “clamshell house”, for its distinctive shape. As a child I always referred to it as the “flying saucer house”, and made a point of watching for it when we drove by on I-70. Its curvilinear white walls, perched atop a round stem, enfold a wall of windows facing north towards the distant peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park and east over the great plains. It has always had the look of the future – that gleaming, distant future in which we would all drive hover cars. Read more…

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The Misadventures of Romantic Cannibals by Enrique Chagoya
[Image from Fred Pirone]

On October 6, 2010, Kathleen Folden, identified in the media as a 56-year-old truck driver from Kalispell, Montana, smashed her way into a display case at the Loveland Art Museum in Loveland, Colorado with a crowbar. Her purpose was to destroy a work of art, a multi-panel lithograph by Enrique Chagoya entitled “The Misadventures of Romantic Cannibals.” Folden managed to tear up part of the work before she was stopped by a museum patron. Folden was arrested at the scene; her $350.00 bail was paid by an anonymous donor. Google her name, and you’ll find plenty of admirers clamoring to help with the cost of her upcoming trial on a charge of criminal mischief (a Class 4 felony). There is, inevitably, a Facebook page.

Why such an outpouring of support for a woman smashing things up with a crowbar? Because the lithograph in question — or, rather, one of its twelve panels — had been widely reported to depict Jesus Christ – or a female figure with the head of Jesus Christ – receiving oral sex. There’s a man’s head pressed against the figure’s lap, and a protruding red tongue. The word “orgasm” appears next to the Christlike head. There are other words and symbols, what looks like the Spanish phrase “18 años” and a pictograph that may refer to the pope (Chagoya has said the work refers to the pedophilia scandals rocking the Catholic church, and to the corruption of the spiritual). I can’t quite make them all out in the online images I’ve found. And of course I can’t see the original, as Folden tore it up. What’s left of it is being held by the police as evidence.
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A drawing of Christo’s planned “Over the River” project
for the Arkansas River in Colorado
[Image from Big Green Boulder]

Two art-centered controversies unfolding here in Colorado have grabbed national attention, in part because they lend themselves so easily to use – in whatever oversimplified and distorted form – in other debates. The first involves “Over the River”, a proposed work of environmental art by artist Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude, who passed away in 2009. (The second, concerning the destruction of an allegedly blasphemous work of art on display in Fort Collins, by Montana trucker Kathleen Folden, I’ll cover in a future entry.)

“Over the River” would consist of 5.9 miles of silver fabric draped like an intermittent canopy along a 42-mile stretch of the Arkansas River as it flows through the mountains approximately 100 miles southwest of Denver. The two artists are famous for wrapping landmarks such as the Reichstag in Berlin, the Pont-Neuf in Paris, and the islands of Biscayne Bay in similar lengths of fabric.

Christo’s environmental works have always ignited controversy, and “Over the River” is no exception. Given the polarized political climate, and the project’s location in rural Colorado (not far from the rightwing bastion of Colorado Springs), the debate sometimes takes on the all-too-familiar overtones of cultural warfare: urban vs. rural, outsiders vs. locals, elitists vs. populists. But a closer look at the debate reveals a far more complex picture. Read more…

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The Anatomy Lesson by Yiull Damaso
[Photograph: Lisa Skinner/Mail/Guardian, Image source: The Guardian]

Yiull Damaso has achieved a true artistic milestone. He has created what is quite possibly the most offensive image ever made. The BBC reports that the forty-one year old South African artist is completing a large painting depicting former South African president and Nobel Laureate, Nelson Mandela as a corpse in the process of being dissected. Observing this process is a group of South African leaders from the past and present. The completed piece will be displayed in the Hyde Park shopping center in Johannesburg. Not surprisingly, the African National Congress has already criticized the piece, saying that it insults Mr. Mandela’s dignity.

Perhaps we could forgive the artist if he was using this offensive imagery to make an important political statement.  If Damaso was trying say that Mandela was somehow mistreated, or that ANC politicians had somehow exploited Mandela’s revered stature for propaganda purposes, perhaps the painting might make more sense. But Damaso himself has stated that that his piece is not about politics, but about Mandela’s mortality. “Nelson Mandela is a great man,” he told BBC, “but he’s just a man… The eventually passing of Mr. Mandela is something that we will have to face, as individuals, as a nation.” Okay, but why now?  Mandela has not passed away, so the idea of showing his half naked body on a dissecting table while the flesh of his left arm is being cut away is just creepy, arbitrary and disrespectful.

Weirder still is Damaso’s Read more…

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Larry Rivers
[Image source: Havel's House of History]

It is a popular cliché that artists should not be held to the same moral standards as the rest of us. Frequently, this idea is used to justify misbehavior with extremely young girls. Hollywood celebrities from Harrison Ford to Tilda Swinton to Michael Mann have defended filmmaker and statutory rapist, Roman Polanski.  After all, he made some good movies. So what if he also fed quaaludes to a drunk thirteen-year old, ignored her repeated “no’s” and sodomized her?  Mr. Polanski was just getting his creative juices flowing. The great Pablo Picasso began his notorious affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter when she was seventeen.  Who cares if his young mistress was ruined in the eyes of society and left as an unmarriable single mother? Picasso got some great paintings out of her.

One could argue that while we may disapprove of Picasso and Polanski’s behavior, we should separate our opinion of these men from our view of their art. Picasso and Polanski’s questionable morality never filters into their work. (In both cases, this is debatable. Films like Rosemary’s Baby depict the horrendous abuse of a physically young-looking woman. Picasso’s frequently Read more…

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Transition by Paul Emmanuel
[Image source: Spier]

Art has long served as a vehicle for exploring notions of identity and collective guilt.  The German artist Anselm Keifer creates large scale canvases depicting war-scarred landscapes.  His pieces often include train tracks and other reminders of the genocide that took place on his nation’s soil.  The South African artist William Kentridge creates equally bleak environments visibly haunted by the memory of apartheid.  His animated films are populated with characters whose psyches are as scarred as the landscapes they inhabit. Paul Emmanuel: Transitions, a new exhibition at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC shows us a different perspective on collective guilt and societal transformation.  Paul Emmanuel, a white South African artist presents us with a series of images about ritual and identity construction.  Emmanuel’s pieces convey the notion that society organizes a man’s life is into different stages, each marked by a ritual.  He also shows how these rituals can be consciously altered, or can take on new meanings over time.  In this way, societal traditions can become an important vehicle for change.

In 2004, Emmanuel began thinking about how the military creates and propagates notions of masculinity.   He became fascinated by the ritual of shaving the heads of new recruits. Emmanuel spoke to his brother and friends who had gone through the process during the apartheid regime in the 1980’s.  They described a frightening, dehumanizing experience.   Emmanuel decided to see what this ritual had come to mean in post-apartheid South Africa. He attended and photographed the head shavings of the January 2005 intake at the Third South African Infantry Battalion (3SAI) in Kimberley.  Rather than a cold, authoritarian nightmare, Emmanuel was amazed to find “quiet lawns with well tended flower beds full of roses. No shouting…No evidence of the violent breaking down of the human spirit.”    As Emmanuel watched black and white soldiers go through the same seminal moment of transition, he discovered that the process now represented community building, national pride, and the overcoming of past evils rather than prejudice, violence and control.

In Transitions, Emmanuel explores this and other rituals that he calls Read more…

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