...which are part of an even larger grid...
Monday, September 18, 2023
THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF FACES
...which are part of an even larger grid...
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
ARTISTS IN LOVE, part 22
Another in a series about the strange doings at the intersection of art and love.
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Jimmy Swinnerton |
Jimmy Swinnerton's life was even zanier than the comic strips he created (including Sam and his Laugh, Professor Nix, Little Katy and her Uncle, Mount Ararat, Mr. Batch, Mr. Jack, Little Jimmy, Canyon Kiddies, The Daydreams of Danny Dawes, and Rocky Mason, Government Marshall.)
Born in 1875, Swinnerton ran away from home at age 14 to join a traveling minstrel show. He used blackface makeup as a disguise to elude his parents and the sheriff.
Swinnerton led an adventurous life during the waning days of the wild west. He rambled from job to job (and from bar fight to bar fight). He drank heavily, gambled constantly, spent recklessly, and lied shamelessly. These attributes made him irresistible to women.
Depending on how we count, Swinnerton had somewhere between four and six wives. His biographer claimed that Swinnerton also “had a lady friend hiding behind every sagebrush on the desert," but let's confine ourselves to his wives. Here's the scorecard:
- Swinnerton's first wife was Thalia Treadwell, a glamorous San Francisco heiress. They married under mysterious circumstances; when friends asked for details, Swinnerton would only say, “the marriage took place between [San Francisco and New York] but I can’t tell you the place nor date for legal reasons.” The couple quarreled bitterly, and Thalia abandoned her new husband and went to Japan.
- Swinnerton next married Harriet Hacker after a whirlwind courtship. Harriet was beautiful but she “enjoyed the night scene“ a little too much, going out to the clubs and sometimes not returning for days. When Swinnerton contracted tuberculosis he asked Harriet to move to the desert for his health, but she refused, citing the shortage of nightclubs in the desert.
- Although still legally married to Harriet, Swinnerton moved to the desert alone. There he quickly found a new girlfriend, Espie Castle. The 1910 US census reports that Jimmy married Espie (which would've made him a bigamist) but in response to questions, he was evasive about their status. When Espie had a religious conversion and asked Swinnerton to join her in pious living, he quickly left.
- In 1917 Swinnerton belatedly divorced Harriet and two days later married his third – or fourth – wife, Louise Scher, a statuesque blonde divorcee. The two quarreled constantly over Louise's spending habits on lace nightgowns. Swinnerton borrowed thousands of dollars from her mother to pay for Louise's extravagances, then left without repaying her.
- By 1933, Swinnerton was living in Las Vegas. He divorced Louise and quickly married his fourth – – or fifth – – wife, Gretchen Richardson. On her way to the wedding, Gretchen stopped off at a Vegas casino to play roulette. She placed a silver dollar on number 12 and when the number hit, she decided it was an omen and stayed to gamble rather than go to her wedding. She eventually showed up several hours late.
Swinnerton was quick to marry and just as quick to leave. He seemed to lack the patience or interest to explore what lay beneath the surface of his wives. Yet, his attitude toward art was the exact opposite.
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One has to wonder how Swinnerton's love life would've changed if he'd devoted the same level of effort to his wife |
Saturday, August 26, 2023
NORMAN ROCKWELL, THE THUNDERBOLT OF KARMA
- Critics have studied Norman Rockwell's work from many perspectives, but no one has analyzed Rockwell's role as a vehicle for vengeful gods dispensing karma.
- Behold the gods at work:
- In 1994, a wealthy couple bought a painting by Norman Rockwell. The couple spent a fortune because they admired Rockwell's talent and bonded with the painting which had "all the humor and artistic quality that Rockwell created in... his works.” Decades later, the couple discovered the painting was not by Rockwell but by illustrator Harold Anderson. Suddenly the painting's qualities disappeared in their eyes. The humiliated couple filed a lawsuit blaming the seller for not recognizing that the painting was an “open and obvious” forgery.
- In the 1950s Norman Rockwell's boss, the art director of The Saturday Evening Post, pressured Rockwell to give him several original paintings as a "gift" for the art director's personal collection. When Rockwell mustered the courage to ask for his paintings back, he received no reply. Other artists working for The Post complained that they were similarly pressured to "donate" their originals in order to stay on the art director's good side when he handed out new assignments. In this way, the art director amassed an art collection worth millions. He left that collection to his sons, thinking it would put them on easy street.
However, the inheritance turned out to be a curse. The sons bitterly squabbled over the paintings for the next 30 years. One was accused of manipulating his father to screw his brothers out of the art. Other brothers filed lawsuits claiming the father was mentally incompetent. The brothers accused each other of theft, misconduct, civil violations, liability for damages, etc. They sued each other again and again. By the time they had exhausted themselves and settled their feud, their lives were mostly over and their family was in tatters.
- In 1943, Rockwell created four pictures about people waiting to see President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rockwell admired Roosevelt and gave the pictures to Roosevelt's press secretary. For many years they hung on the walls of the White House to entertain the public. Then in 2017, descendants of Roosevelt's press secretary learned of the pictures and claimed they properly belonged to the family. Family members began fighting amongst themselves over who owned the pictures and who had authority to donate them to the White House. The newspapers noted that in the years of lawsuits that followed, the family tore itself apart over the art.
Rockwell was a thin, soft spoken man who lived for his art. He wasn't always good at defending his own interests. A casual observer might be forgiven for concluding that Rockwell was exploited by aggressive profiteers who saw an opportunity to feed on his talent and sacrifices.
Rockwell may have missed out on some of the money but ask yourself: which side ended up better off? Which side offered a more meaningful existence?
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
RETURNING FROM COMIC-CON
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Celebrating a change in the Cap'n's uniform, adding a stripe which promotes him from Commander to Cap'n. |
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Opossum to rabbit: "I had a drink and it went to my head." Image courtesy of Taraba Illustration Art |
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Note Sullivant's foreshortening of those ears |
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
PHOTOGRAPHS CAN'T HELP YOU DRAW INVISIBLE LINES
Cartoonist Stan Drake had a gift for drawing from photographs. He easily turned photos into elegant line.
But a photograph couldn't show him how to draw those invisible motion lines. Look how awkwardly Drake expressed movement in this next picture.
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Drake's motion lines are contradicted by the hair hanging flat and other body language |
Similarly, look how badly Al Hirschfeld-- a talented artist in other respects-- draws the path of this punch:
Contrast Hirschfeld's motion line with the line of Leonard Starr, who understood the arc of an arm:
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Notice how there's no weight behind this punch. |
Monday, July 03, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES FUMBLES A LEYENDECKER REVIEW
More than any other profession, art criticism creates temptations to say stupid things. It's the duty of every critic to resist those temptations.
That was my thought after reading Blake Gopnik's silly review in the New York Times of the current J.C. Leyendecker exhibition in New York.
People have long understood that Leyendecker was gay, and that his sentiments emerged in his paintings of dashing and muscular men. But in recent years, there has been an effort to abscond with Leyendecker's legacy, injecting gay connotations into every brush stroke, and transforming the artist into a clandestine warrior for gay rights, while neglecting his broader array of artistic talents that produced 322 brilliant covers on a wide variety of subjects for The Saturday Evening Post.As far as I can tell, this unfortunate trend began in 2008 in the poorly researched book, J.C. Leyendecker by Judy Goffman Cutler and Laurence Cutler. It was certainly appropriate for those authors to note that Charles Beach, Leyendecker's model for the famed Arrow man, "was not only a homosexual but a kept man, the live-in lover of the famed artist who thrust himself into such an exalted status," but 200 pages later the book's fixation on "thrusting" continued unabated. We were still reading that "Charles Beach and Joe Leyendecker are held up as examples of monogamy among the gay community, so often criticized for promiscuity," or that "Charles' Dorian Gray image never [ages] in Joe's eyes nor in ours either" or that "members of the gay community [remember Leyendecker] for icons of masculinity and sensitivity." The authors inform us (without support) that Leyendecker was sending out "subliminal" homoerotic messages.
Norman Rockwell, 20 years younger than Leyendecker and eventually his neighbor, writes quite brutally in his memoir about how Beach had “insinuated” himself into Leyendecker’s life and especially about the duo’s social withdrawal once he had.If Gopnik had bothered to read Rockwell's autobiography, he would've learned that Rockwell deeply admired Leyendecker and wrote about him with great affection and concern.
There’s one case where the subversion was barely hidden at all: In an ad for Ivory Soap, the shadow Leyendecker placed on his model’s crotch seems clearly to hint at an erection, according to an exhibition wall text. You can’t unsee it once it gets pointed out.
Friday, June 30, 2023
THE EFFORT THAT COUNTS
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James Dougherty |
Lou Reed recalled the time Andy Warhol scolded him for not working hard enough:
No matter what I did it never seemed enough.
He said I was lazy, I said that I was young.
He said, "how many songs did you write?"
I'd written zero, I'd lied and said "ten."
"You won't be young forever.
You should have written fifteen."
When Reed explained he was uncertain what to write, Warhol brushed him off.
You think too much.
It's work. The most important thing is work.
Milton Glaser was a different type of artist, but agreed on the importance of work. In fact, he urged that we abandon the word "art" and replace it with the word "work." Calling it work, like every other type of honest labor, would not only "restore art to a central, useful activity in daily life" but would also eliminate anxiety for everyone who is obsessing about whether they are artists or not.
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Saul Tepper |
Before the era of video games, civilizations that valued hard work and disparaged slackers were often rewarded with great art. The Italian Renaissance and the golden age of Greece were two such periods; those cultures faced political strife, religious violence, civil uncertainty and military threats as great as ours yet their artists accomplished great things without electric lights or air conditioning.
The Stuart period in England (1603 - 1714), a culture which shamed idleness, produced Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Herbert, followed by Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, before ending the century with Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. It became the cultural home of great painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck. While this was going on, Isaac Newton was transforming human understanding of the universe, Francis Bacon was inventing the modern scientific method and William Harvey was discovering the circulation of the blood. Newspapers were invented and indolent minds which for centuries had dwelt on witchcraft and superstition were challenged. Great architects such as Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones flourished. What a fruitful century!
Of course, not all work pays the same dividends. A lot of what passes for artistic effort today doesn't seem directed at enhancing the quality of the work.
- During the last century, fine art became more fixated on pure self-expression. Illustration, which involved purposeful work in the empirical world, was demoted to a lower spiritual plane. But as Glaser wrote, "The dissociation of art from other human activities has impoverished our lives." He noted, "Michelangelo didn't paint the last judgment to express himself. He painted it because the Pope wanted to scare the bejeesus out of the congregation." The type of "work" involved in pure self-expression primarily involves emoting-- which can be difficult to distinguish from laziness. That's why it helps if fine artists can establish their bona fides with suicide, addiction or emotional incapacity.
- A second type of effort which preoccupies many of today's artists is self-promotion. Artists such as Hirst and Koons have become sensationalists, achieving fame by causing commotions. This is the work involved in smashing plates and gluing them to a great big canvas. While there seems to be no artistic growth or edification from this type of labor, the financial growth can be considerable.
- Perhaps the most slippery and inimical challenge of all is the work currently outsourced to labor-saving software such as ChatGPT and its progeny. "Effortless" art presumes that there was nothing to be gained from the effort. This assumption may resonate easily with a culture centered around "labor saving" kitchen appliances, but it's not clear that art functions the same way. Previous civilizations that were less afraid of hard work would be wary of "easy art." If ChatGPT had spared Michelangelo's four years of hard labor painting the Sistine Chapel, how would that have affected the outcome?
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John Cuneo |
The type of "work" that goes into creating what we now call art has become increasingly wobbly. At the same time, much of the art turns out to be increasingly minor compared to what past civilizations have produced. Are the two trends related? It's too early to say.