TRUNDLING TOWARD BETHLEHEM

 President John Kennedy was a passionate believer in the importance of the arts; he was a voracious reader and intellectually curious.   He invited over 150 artists, poets and writers to his inauguration.

Composer Leonard Bernstein's invitation to the Kennedy inauguration

The invited artists included Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Alexander Calder, Paul Manship, Charles Burchfield, Mark Rothko, Max Weber, William Zorach, Walter Gropius and Eugene Speicher.  He also invited authors such as W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Pearl Buck, John Dos Pasos, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams. 

Kennedy knew that the government shouldn't attempt to control the arts, but he believed it was important for the president to demonstrate a high regard for cultural excellence, which he felt was one of the greatest fruits of a free society.   He said: 

 Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of 13th century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit. 

After Kennedy was assassinated, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was named in tribute to him.  Kennedy had been instrumental in the private fundraising for the cultural center during his lifetime.  The center was managed by a bipartisan Board of cultural figures.  The activities of the center have been paid for by private donations and ticket sales, but as part of a public/private partnership the government provides the maintenance and upkeep for the building.   This gives the government a say in its management. 

Last week President Trump fired the whole Board and got himself appointed as the new Chairman.  This is not a political blog so I offer no opinions on Trump's fitness as president; for all I know, he may go on to become a great president.  However-- limiting my comments solely to the arts-- Trump is a vulgar brute with the artistic taste of a simple minded child, pathetically attracted to all things glittery and gold.  He is proudly unlettered and can barely muster the curiosity to read more than a few bullet points out of his Presidential briefing books.

Despite his ignorance-- or more likely because of it-- Trump feels that the arts will benefit from his political supervision.

It's not surprising, then, that artists might instinctively bristle at such a natural enemy of the arts.  But what kind of responses are available?  Is the artistic community defenseless in this exchange?  

Well, for one thing, art enjoys the clarifying power of naming.  Which brings me to this dandy cover by Justin Metz for The Atlantic in 2024.  

This magazine cover was not constructed the way that Norman Rockwell used to construct magazine covers 100 years ago, combining pigments with linseed oil on a palette.  Metz curated stock images (the capitol building, the sky and the swamp) and combined them using 3d modeling and Photoshop.  He built the rest of the images, creating a hybrid of an old fashioned circus car and a victorian horse-drawn hearse.  He forced the perspective, using the legerdemain of steam from the swamp and strategic lighting, in order to squeeze in everything he felt was essential.  He crafted and refined the image, including brushing to give it a painterly feel.  He carefully designed that whip, the coachman's bulk, the clenched fist.  The result, I think, is a powerful image that rivals the best propaganda posters by the greatest illustrators of World War I.

Despite the fact that he used new tools, Metz had to make many of the same aesthetic choices required of traditional realistic painters in the past.  The grim colors, the ominous light, the foreboding landscape, the placement of symbols such as the iconic vulture in the dead tree, the pose of the coachman-- these are all the types of elements that Brueghel might have weighed for his landscape, The Triumph of Death.  The choice of how many symbols to include without overloading the picture, and how explicit to make those symbols-- again, these are all traditional aesthetic judgments.   

In developing a "sinister circus" theme, Metz drew upon childhood Disney movies such as Pinocchio and Dumbo, with their dark sequences that terrified generations of children: the coachman with the bullwhip who drove bad little boys off to Pleasure Island where they were turned into donkeys....

...or the wagon where Stromboli locked up Pinocchio and carried him away into the night...

...or the movie Dumbo where poor Mrs. Jumbo was locked in the circus train prison: 

These Disney memes still retain great subliminal power today.  

For me, much of the artistry in Metz's cover lies in his depiction of the captive Republican elephant staring out of the shadows.  His look of resignation, wondering how his past compromises could've led to this, adds an important layer of tragedy to what otherwise might have been a purely angry image.

There has been a mountain of editorials and books and articles with charts and graphs debating the political issues behind the recent election but I think this cover is a good reminder of how much more devastating a picture can be than words.   

TWO FOR THE ROAD

America loves a good "road story" about  traveling companions who encounter adventure and learn lessons along the way.  

Jack Kerouac wrote the famous beat generation classic, On The Road.  Mark Twain wrote the story of Huck Finn and Jim traveling down the Mississippi.  John Steinbeck wrote Travels With Charley.  And James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade wrote the newly re-released The Artist's Guide to Sketching.

As Gurney recounts in their book,

Before he was the painter of light, and before I was the creator of Dinotopia, Tom Kinkade and I were two unknown and penniless art students. We had grown weary of sitting in windowless classrooms, enduring lectures about art theory. We hatched an audacious plan to drop out of school for a while, hop on a freight train and discover America, documenting everything in our sketchbooks. 

I  expected (and would have welcomed) a narrative dedicated to their travels.  The few sections of the book that mention their adventures were quite tantalizing:

 We slept in graveyards and the rooftops and sketched portraits of lumberjacks and coal miners. To make money we drew two dollar portraits in bars by the light of cigarette machines.…  We boarded the freights again and rode all the way to Willard, Ohio, where we were kicked off at gunpoint by police officers, who had received reports that we were trying to fly a kite off the top of the train.

However, the book is focused instead on the art of sketching, and is organized by subject matter (such as "Materials" and "Achieving Accuracy" and "Capturing Motion") rather than chronologically or geographically. It is filled with helpful examples from their travels:

Some of the art was a revelation to me.  For example, I really like the following pile o' chains drawn by Kinkade.  The subject presents an artist with some interesting questions about economy.  Do you fake it by roughly indicating random links, or is it worth going through the hassle of connecting the links in a chain?  

I prefer Kinkade's good hearted pile o' chains to his later, finished paintings of sugary cottages.  I also enjoyed what he saw in this gas pump.

But perhaps the part of the book I enjoyed the most was the rousing essay about the value of sketching.  I like it because it starts out acknowledging how the world conspires to steer us toward more efficient enterprises:  

Many artists tell us: “I guess I should sketch more often, but I never really get the chance.” We know the feeling.  There just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day, and when the opportunity does come up, the sketchbook is never handy.  On a vacation it seems much easier to use a camera than a sketchbook to record your experiences.

But by setting aside an entire journey dedicated to sketching "pictures of abandoned tractors and motel signs and jukeboxes," the duo learned:

The more we sketched, the more we began to realize that sketching is both the motivation and the reward for experiencing new things.

A TALE OF TWO COMIC STRIPS

 In the 1980s, there were two comic strips about the White House.  One was well written, the other was well drawn. 

Doonesbury was brilliant, witty satire.  Its caustic humor revolutionized the comics page (and in fact, some newspapers moved it from the comics page to the editorial page).  It developed a huge following.  However, the drawing in Doonesbury was always mediocre at best.  Artist Garry Trudeau could not draw a decent caricature to save his life, so he would always draw the President off screen, either with a word balloon above the White House...  

... or a word balloon from outside the panel at a press conference.

As the decades went by and Trudeau's drawing didn't improve, he compensated by drawing George H.W. Bush as a disembodied voice (to connote his lack of substance), or Dan Quayle as a talking feather or Bill Clinton as a talking waffle.  As with many artists, necessity became the mother of invention. 

Rather than draw George W. Bush's face, Trudeau drew an empty warrior's helmet.

The comic strip Benchley by Mort Drucker and Jerry Dumas had the opposite problem.  The drawings by Drucker were impeccable-- every day there were fresh caricatures of Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Tip O'Neil and many others.  

Unfortunately, the text from Jerry Dumas tended to be corny, old fashioned pablum.   Drucker described the strip as "somewhat like a mild roast....Newspapers don't want to alienate their readership, whether it's Democrat or Republican.  Therefore you have to be a bit milder....For now our intent is to do a humorous strip and possibly at some later date do more political social satire."  But the strip ended after 3 years, in 1987.  Doonesbury is now in its 55th year.

As it became clear that Benchley was not going to make it, Dumas and Drucker allowed themselves a biting remark or two about their competition:

The newspaper comic page has its finger on the pulse of America.  It seems America has voted.  Audiences no longer care about (or even recognize) bad drawing.  

The excellent comic strip artists who continue to uphold the dignity of good drawing seem to do it for the sake of their own conscience; it doesn't appear that they are particularly rewarded for it.  Comic strips are smaller, of course, so the images must be simplified.  Today quick, sloppy drawing-- even stick figures-- will do. Repetition of the same drawing in multiple panels is another common time saver.  Today it's the text that matters.