ART REVOLUTIONS ON THE STAIRS

Behold two art revolutions on a staircase:

Marcel Duchamp (1912)                                   Walt Disney Studios (1936)

Marcel Duchamp painted his revolutionary Nude Descending a Staircase to convey motion in a still picture.  24 years later, Disney transformed still pictures of Snow White ascending a staircase into images that moved. 

Duchamp explained the era: "The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air" and the old static pictures seemed inadequate.  

In previous years, a picture stood still while the viewer's mind moved.  For example, James Avati's figures on the stairs (below) didn't move, yet viewers mentally moved up the stairs and envisioned what was about to take place in the room above the bar:

James Avati (1959)

Duchamp, like Muybridge before him and the Futurists after him, was an early, stuttering response to the way the world was changing.  Disney was equally revolutionary but more commercially successful.  

Neither Duchamp nor Disney could fully appreciate how their world was unraveling.  The old Newtonian universe was coming apart like wet tissue paper in the wake of relativity and quantum physics; longstanding political empires were imploding and geopolitical alliances were fraying; the first World War developed horrific new weapons which were only a stepping stone to worse weapons.  The sun was setting on the Age of Reason, and the arts stepped up to try to make sense of the new order.  

In times of disintegration, artists have to decide which paths offer new promise and which paths have become obsolete.  An era of experimentation and confusion was perfectly suited for Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.  The Baroness performed for audiences by rubbing a photograph of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase over her naked body while reciting a love poem to Duchamp: “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel.”

The baroness was born Elsa Plotz in Germany in 1874.  Before coming to America she studied art in Dachau, future home of the infamous Nazi death camp.  She became an artist, poet, actress and model.  Elsa and her husband had many colorful adventures before they faked her husband's suicide to escape creditors and fled to the United States in 1909.  

Throwing off the chains of the old world, Elsa aggressively pushed sexual and artistic boundaries, rejecting traditional male and female gender norms.  Several affairs and marriages later, after an unsuccessful effort at becoming a farmer in Kentucky, she married Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York where she worked making sculptures out of discarded objects and writing poetry.  

She became the star of a Dada film, "Elsa, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven Shaving Her Pubic Hair."  She invented new words such as "phalluspistol" to replace the old world vocabulary.  Critics agree that one of her greatest contributions to the arts was her use of the em dash (a punctuation mark longer than either the "en dash" or the minus sign) in her poetry. 

The example of the Baroness raises an important question for artists working in times, like now, of great social change: How do we remain meaningful by embracing the new, while at the same time not looking like a nitwit?

Today we find ourselves in another period of disintegration, this time driven by world-ending AI cognitive power.  Centuries ago we sharpened our focus on objective reality by the invention of the magnetic compass and the mechanical clock, which gave us a more concrete sense of space and time.  Photographs and videos became arbiters of objective, verifiable reality.  They encouraged the rise of science and rationality.  But now our grip is loosening once again as "objective truth" has become the plaything of algorithms, deepfakes and bots. 

Some of art's greatest moments, the ones that delivered the reward of enhanced perceptions, arose when society seemed to be spinning out of control.  Art helped to work out an era's conflicts and grapple for values.  But can it still serve that role?  For millennia art has been a source of excitement but today it can barely compete with algorithms that have been fine tuned to keep viewers in a constant state of excitement and agitation. 

Wherever the eye looks in the desert of fine art, one sees little more than puerile responses to this emerging world-- certainly nothing to rival the great artistic responses of the past.  Can illustration, because of its more direct nexus to the engines of change and its economic restraints on silliness, possibly do any better?

VIVACIOUS WOMEN

 

In the years before Google searches, stock images and photo banks, every illustrator compiled their own personal collection of reference pictures.  They'd clip images they found useful or inspiring from magazines, newspapers and books-- good examples of hands or childrens' faces or dry brush technique or architectural perspective. 

Old timers lovingly collected tens of thousands of these pictures. They loaned them to friends for assignments.  Sometimes they left preliminary pencil sketches in the margins, or jotted down phone numbers on the back, or used the paper to blot excess casein from a paint brush.  These hard working images often ended up tattered, yellowed and crumbling. 

These collections were already obsolete by the time I came along.  Nobody had any use for the clippings anymore.  Nobody had much use for the retired illustrators either.  

But I met illustrators who couldn't bear to throw their collections in a dumpster before moving into a hospice. Their art careers were done but they remained fond of the files they'd curated over a lifetime.  Personally, I was curious about what these artists saw in the pictures they selected and how the pictures were used.  For example, below we see how cartoonist Leonard Starr borrowed an interior from an illustration by Robert Fawcett:

These artists were grateful they could extend the useful life of their clippings by handing them off to a younger person who still cared.  

When I opened the large boxes they shipped to me, clouds of studio dust and paper chips emerged, along with the intoxicating aroma of old paper.   Skimming through the pictures, decades of art flew by-- old Saturday Evening Post covers, art deco pictures, horribly racist illustrations, World War II pictures, 1950s glamour illustrations, 1960s bursts of psychedelic colors... it was like being in a time machine:

  

I encountered all kinds of micro trends or styles reflecting the popular taste of their time.  For example,  In the 1940s and early 1950s, there seemed to be a fashion where women were portrayed with insanely animated expressions on their faces-- their eyebrows raised, their eyes popping out of their heads.

  

To modern audiences this woman might seem like a psychopath who would slip rat poison
in your butter pecan ice cream, but 1940s audiences loved this look.

Norman Rockwell said one of his favorite models during this time was Mary Whalen, who “could... raise her eyebrows until they almost jumped over her head.”  He was known to apply tape to raise the eyebrows on other models.

These women were often portrayed in the throes of ecstasy over a new product such as a girdle or a Kelvinator appliance.

The art history books are silent on why 1940s audiences found raised eyebrows so appealing.  It's part of the cultural record that might go undetected by anyone who didn't happen to be sifting through an illustrator's clipping file and suddenly encounter the geological layer where women (never the men) all had raised eyebrows.

These pictures of vivacious women are just one among dozens of stylistic eccentricities that come and go in the historical clipping files of old illustrators.  Why did people like this style?  I can't explain it.  That's a chore for future art historians.

NEW FROM CARTER GOODRICH

 Carter Goodrich earned fame as a top character designer working on animated films such as Finding Nemo, Despicable Me, Ratatouille, Brave and Coco.  As someone noted when Goodrich was working on Prince of Egypt, he "designs characters from the inside out."  

Because the preliminary character designs for major motion pictures are often confidential and proprietary, much of the work seen by the general public has been his published magazine illustrations.  But now Goodrich has released two books of his animation characters in conjunction with an exhibition in Paris at the Daniel Maghen Gallery. One is a book of new works on the theme of the old west.  The other is a book of animation characters that he describes as "bad actors and ne'er do wells" who never made it into a final movie.                                                                                                                                                             

I get a big kick out of these drawings.

Note how Goodrich squeezes as much character into this tiny little wisp of a girl...

The crossed arms holding her books, the hunched posture of a prepubescent self-conscious girl shielding herself with her shoulders, the overbite, the spindly coltish legs, the tilt of her head, the thick glasses, goofy smile, the total absence of a chin... marvelous observations!

... as he puts into this immense wall of a character:

The characters that made their way into these two books are not the cutesy characters that might become profitable plush toys in the Disney stores.  Goodrich writes: "I have a tendency to skew a bit dark.... flawed characters are more true to me.  More interesting and relatable."

   

It's a delight to see excellent work, usually cloaked behind nondisclosure agreements with movie studios, set loose in the free air to be openly enjoyed.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 78

I love this illustration of Eurystheus being frightened by creatures from Hades.  It was drawn over 3,000 years ago by a Greek artist from a workshop in Caere.  

When have you seen a better illustration of "Yikes!" ?

I love the abstract conglomeration of snapping jaws and hissing snakes.  I love that Eurystheus has pathetically tried to find safety in a large urn. His eyes are popped wide, his arms thrown up in fright (notice how sensitively the ancient artist drew that vulnerable hand, menaced by that serpent), and his mouth is curled back in fear. 

The flesh tones are as modern as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon or Jenny Saville

3,000 years ago artists already understood the importance of design, apparently better than many professional artists working today:

The subsequent 3,000 years brought all the advantages this artist never had: vastly improved art tools,  digital or analog, delivered to his door; his global choice of art teachers accessible 24/7 through the internet; artificial light to expand his work day, air conditioning and a soft chair to enable him to work in comfort; a vast library of high resolution images to help him find inspiration in 3,000 years of precedents; regular meals to keep his belly full; glasses for when his eyes weakened and health care for when his hand began to shake. 

Yet, look at illustrations in today's publications and tell me what those 3,000 years of progress have added to the quality of our pictures.