Smart Art (In Over Your Head Edition)

 

I've grown a goiter by dwelling in this den– As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy, Or in what other land they hap to be– Which drives the belly close beneath the chin: My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in, Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin. My loins into my paunch like levers grind: My buttock like a crupper bears my weight; My feet unguided wander to and fro; In front my skin grows loose and long; behind, By bending it becomes more taut and strait; Crosswise I strain me like a Syrian bow: Whence false and quaint, I know, Must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye; For ill can aim the gun that bends awry. Come then, Giovanni, try To succor my dead pictures and my fame; Since foul I fare and painting is my shame.   --Michelangelo, in a letter to a friend, poetically bitching about the physical discomfort he has to put up with while painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Smart Art (Industrial Impressionism Edition)

 

Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, Rainy Weather, 1896

The theme is the bridge near the Place de la Bourse with the effects of rain, crowds of people coming and going, smoke from the boats, quays with cranes, workers in the foreground, and all this in grey colors glistening in the rain...what particularly interests me is the motif off the iron bridge in wet weather with all the vehicles, pedestrians, workers on the embankment, boats, smoke, haze in the distance; it's so spirited, so alive.

--Camille Pissarro, born on this day in 1830

Smart Art (Surf's Down Edition)

 

There ain't no cure for the summertime blues.

Sea Watchers, 1952. Edward Hopper

Smart Art (Remains of the Day Edition)

 

Summer Days, 1936

I know we're well into autumn now, but artist Georgia O'Keeffe was born on this day in 1887, and that's as good excuse as any for me to show you the above painting, one of several she did featuring an animal's skull, in this case one that's floating above a New Mexico landscape. O'Keeffe was already a well-regarded painter living in Manhattan when she went to New Mexico on vacation in 1929. She must have liked what she saw of the state, because she kept returning again and again, on longer and longer vacations, eventually moving there permanently in 1949. By the time she died in 1986 at the age of 98, probably no prominent figure was more prominently associated with the southwestern United States, save Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. However, whereas the coyote can survive everything from falling off a cliff to getting run over with a semi to having a stick of dynamite blow up in his face, O'Keeffe's subjects are... 

Horse with Pink Rose, 1931

...much less permeable. Such as this unfortunate equine whose demise may have resulted from nothing more than natural non-ACME causes.

So just what was it with O'Keeffe and animal skulls anyway? Might as well ask what it was with Monet and water lilies, Hockney and swimming pools, Warhol and consumer products, or Lucien Freud and out-of-shape naked people. Some artists are just inspired, and if they do their jobs well, we buy into their inspirations, when we otherwise may not have given the matter much thought (or looked the other way.)  As for where O'Keeffe found her inspiration, i.e., all those skulls, well, I'm told they can be found here and there in the desert, though she didn't necessary paint them in the desert. As the below photograph by hubby Alfred Stieglitz will attest, O'Keeffe sometimes...

...brought her work home with her.

Smart Art (How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree Edition)

 

I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.

--Grant Wood, on his famous 1930 painting American Gothic, so-called because the window on the top floor of the farmhouse is in the Gothic style, much like you would see on a medieval cathedral in Europe.

The actual house, in Eldon, Iowa. Built in 1881-82, the top floor window is thought to have been purchased through a mail order catalog.

By way of comparison, the pointy arch-shaped windows of a medieval cathedral in Europe, one that very nearly burned to the ground a few years back.

These guys never made it to that Iowa farmhouse. 

Nan Goldin Graham, the artist's sister, and Dr. Byron McKeeby, the artist's dentist.

The artist himself in a 1932 self-portrait, a strapping Midwestern farm boy made good. Too strapping for some. A colleague named Lester Longman at The University of Iowa's School of Art tried to get Wood fired as a teacher, publicly citing the limitations of an artistic movement known as Regionalism, of which American Gothic was a prime example. Yawn. However, the complaints were much less esoteric behind closed doors. Longman complained to university officials about Wood's "personal persuasions", and that he had a "strange relationship" with a man helping him write his autobiography. It didn't help matters any that some of the rural workingmen in Wood's paintings occasionally felt the need to take off their shirts as they toiled under the hot sun. Remember, this was around 80 years ago, and a least a quarter of a century before Stonewall. What for some of us today is another welcome addition to the growing LGBTQ roster of historical figures, and what for the art historian adds another layer of meaning to Wood's work, would have been career-damning at the time, with a possible additional visit to a jail cell or mental ward. Fortunately for the artist, nothing was ever proven, and Wood kept his job. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1942, one day short of his 51st birthday. 

As for the supposed artistic limitations of the Regionalist Movement (which also counted Thomas Hart Benton as a member), the main complaint seems to be that it romanticized rubes, celebrated unsophistication, and in its pursuit of the parochial, ignored the richness of the wider world. But perhaps Grant Wood, an American expatriate in Europe throughout much of the 1920s, appreciated how that wider world could make its way to some Iowan rube's house via a mail order catalog. Multiculturalism on the prairie.

Besides, there are some sophisticates who DO seek out the simplicities of rural living:

Nice homage, but what about the windows?

Arched, but not nearly pointy enough to be Hooterville Gothic, I'm afraid.

 

  

 

  

 

Smart Art (Dutch Selfies Edition)

Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong

I gotta be me, I've gotta be me
What else can I be but what I am

I want to live, not merely survive
And I won't give up this dream
Of life that keeps me alive

I gotta be me, I gotta be me
The dream that I see makes me what I am

That far away prize, a world of success
Is waiting for me if I heed the call

I won't settle down, won't settle for less
As long as there's a chance that I can have it all

 I'll go it alone, that's how it must be
I can't be right for somebody else
If I'm not right for me

I gotta be free, I've gotta be free
Daring to try, to do it or die
I've gotta be me

I'll go it alone, that's how it must be

I can't be right for somebody else
If I'm not right for me

I gotta be free, I just gotta be free
Daring to try, to do it or die

I gotta be me

Old Master painter Rembrandt van Rijn was born on this day in 1606. As you can see, he liked to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror.