So Government Sponsored Art is Necessary?

Here it is early August. Our postman is less burdened because junk mail mailers, knowing from experience that response rates are low during high summer, send out less junk mail. Blog-wise, this is a Friday post and experience has shown me that readership drops off for the weekend right about now and doesn't pick up until well into Sunday.

Doldrums time, in other words.

So I'll take advantage of the situation to write about something hardly anyone will be around to read: government-funded art.

Yesterday morning's Seattle Times editorial page offered this op-ed column titled "Disappearing federal funding for the arts threatens American soul" by a fellow named David Hahn who is identified as "a composer who lives in Seattle."

Hahn begins his piece with a few odd sketches of presumably imaginary just-folks artsy people who are already marginalized in American society. Following that is a riff about how the Roman Catholic Church (not a government, though some states were headed by clergy) funded all kinds of wonderful art-related things in centuries past. Then he comes to the crux of his meandering piece which I quote below to preserve in case the link disappears.

Art is not to be reserved for rich patrons. Somewhere there is a gardener who loves avant-garde jazz, a bus driver who loves opera, a cop who digs ballet and even takes dancing lessons, and a hotel service worker who spends her free evenings at the theater. Art answers questions about our condition, perhaps not directly, but in the way we individually relate and react to it.

Croatia, a country that has a per capita GDP that is half that of South Carolina, is willing and able to support scores of independent artists including actors, musicians, painters and filmmakers. These people are provided a salary on which they can live and in return, they are asked to pursue their arts — adorning the state and providing art for the people.

The United States has different priorities. More often than not, publicly funded art is the object of congressmen's ire and attempts to dissolve the already poorly funded National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA, with a $150 million budget, can use funds for only a very few arts groups, but at least the department is a symbol saying: "America cares for the arts." Given today's radical state of the budget debate in Congress, the NEA will likely soon be dissolved.

With the recent promises of budget cuts, the arts will again be undermined. The power and vital importance of the arts not only for our economy but for our individual and collective soul is being crushed.

While it's nice to be given the impression that artists are owed a living from taxpayers, perhaps a pause is in order to look what we are getting for our generosity. The public art pictured below for the most part probably wasn't funded by the federal government -- not directly, anyway. But it is the sort of public art we seem to get regardless of what level of government funds it.

Gallery

By Paul Horiuchi for 1962 Seattle world's fair

At a new light rail station

Under approach to University Bridge

At Seattle Center (the old world's fair grounds)

On University of Washington campus

Even I, contrarian that I claim to be, do not think all public art is bad; that Augustus Saint-Gaudens fellow cranked out some nice things from time to time.

But most of the public art I see nowadays strikes me as a waste of money. Contra Hahn, if the art shown above had never been created, I doubt that any poor, artsy soul would have been crushed by such non-events. And as for my poor, delicate, artsy soul? It gets crushed daily by the sort of expensive, pointless, publicly funded art that continues to pile up around town.

Nature, Enhanced

The Seattle Art Museum has an exhibit of 19th century paintings of western scenes on view until 11 September. There are Names from the Hudson River School represented, but the featured guy is Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902).

Bierstadt was born in Solingen in what is now Germany and moved to Massachusetts as a child. He returned for art training in Düsseldorf, not far from his native Solingen, but made his career in the United States painting nature scenes. A web site striving to catalog all his paintings is here.

What I found most interesting about the exhibit was that most of the paintings were dramatic exaggerations of what one actually sees when at the various sites depicted. I know those sites because I've spent most of my life on the West Coast and have traveled through many parts of the Mountain West as well as coastal areas.

But the audience for paintings by Bierstadt and the others lived far to the east of the painting sites, had never traveled out west, and therefore was ignorant of its reality. This was more true around 1860 when Bierstadt made his first sojourn; later in the century the west became better documented by photography.

Below is an example of the kind of exaggeration I noticed.

Mount Rainier - Albert Bierstadt - 1890
This painting sold at a recent Coeur d'Alene Art Auction for $2,143,000.

Mount Rainier as seen from Tacoma harbor
Bierstadt probably made his sketches approximately from this angle to the mountain, but a few miles closer to it on a ridge east of Tacoma overlooking the Puyallup River (which empties into Commencement Bay, where this photo was taken).

Suicidal Illustrators

By Gilbert Bundy (1911-55)

By Henry Raleigh (1880-1944)

By Pruett Carter (1891-1955)

Committing suicide must seem like a good idea for people at the time they do it. Depending on the circumstances, others find the reasoning sensible or not. I have nothing profound to say about the matter; this post simply notes that a few well-known (in their day) illustrators ended their lives this way.

Wikipedia, my usual go-to for biographical links, seems lacking when it comes to prominent American illustrators of the 1920-60 era. But why read Wikipedia when I can link to David Apatoff who has deep knowledge of illustrators?

Apatoff treats Gilbert Bundy in this post, describing Bundy's harrowing experience during World War 2 that was probably a major factor in his suicide a decade or so later.

In a recent post Apatoff offers a lighthearted take on Henry Raleigh's interest in the bare shoulders of 1920s and early 1930s women in party dresses at fancy occasions. But an earlier post deals with Raleigh's career, touching on his high living when he was one of America's best-paid illustrators and despair when illustration fashions changed during the later 1930s and he ran out of work and money. His solution was to leap from a window.

Charley Parker has a brief take on Pruett Carter here, but doesn't mention the end of the story. For that, read Fred Taraba's new book on illustrators (that I reviewed here). For unclear reasons, Carter shot and killed his wife and son, then shot himself. I find the first two killings inexcusable and the third one justifiable, given what he had just done.

I think that all of this is sad indeed, in part because I greatly enjoyed the art these illustrators made during their successful years. But top-notch illustrators such as these were as human as the rest of us, and life is seldom a smooth journey. Bundy, Raleigh and Carter seem to have seen both higher heights and lower depths than most of the rest of us.

Molti Ritratti: Lillie Langtry

Lillie Langtry (1853-1929) was free with herself, as her Wikipedia entry describes. At least her favors were distributed in the better social circles, one of her lovers being the Prince of Wales, future King Edward VII.

Given her connections and notoriety, a number of portraits of her were painted and photographs made. Go to Google and Bing to view photographs; below are some of the painted portraits.

Gallery

A reference photo

By John Everett Millais

By Edward John Poynter

By George Frank Miles

By James Sant

By Valentin Prinsep

By George Frederic Watts

Photos of Lillie show no outstanding beauty. I'd rate her as conventionally attractive and have to conclude that her well-documented appeal must have been largely fueled by her personality, including how she carried herself.

As for her looks, it seems that she had a "good side," or thought that she did. Note that there are no views featuring the right side of her face.

Gabriel von Max: A Seattle Sighting

Seattle's Frye Art Museum has had quite a few weird exhibits over the last several years -- postmodern stuff that's far, far removed from what was called Fine Art. All is not lost, because once every year or two they mount a show that plays to the strength of the museum's Founding Collection of mostly late 19th century Bavarian art. Works from that collection are supplemented by paintings from German museums and private collections, giving viewers a look at what was being done around Munich, a major rival to Parisian art of that day.

Last year the Frye had an exhibition of paintings by Albert von Keller which I wrote about here. Keller did good work, but some of it seems odd today thanks to its subject matter; he was deep into the world of spirits and seances.

Since that viewpoint was widespread (if not deep) during the late 19th century, I can't blame it on the water. Must have been one of those zeitgeist thingies. At any rate, the Frye recently opened another exhibit by another painter who worked in Bavaria and, by the way, also was interested in those things. But not quite in the same way.

This artist is Gabriel von Max (1840-1915), who was of a more scientific bent than Keller, being a collector of artifacts and student of primates, which he also collected. According to the exhibit catalog, Max said that he was interested in antecedents of mankind and our future after death. This led him to paint subjects exhibiting spirituality in both occult and traditional religious guises.

Max (he was awarded the "von" later in life) hit the artistic fast track in his late twenties with some skillfully done paintings that were "edgy" circa 1870 (see the first three images below).

One artistic characteristic of his that I found interesting while viewing the exhibit was his reversal of the common advice that it's best to make focus-area details sharp and slightly blur less important parts of the painting. In several of the paintings I saw, faces (the expected focus) were slightly blurred and clothing details were crisp. An example is "The Ecstatic Virgin" below, though it's hard to discern in the small image shown. In person, this was apparent when standing six feet or so from the painting, but from 20 feet away the image looked integrated.

On the other hand, he did the reverse. The last two paintings shown below are done in a feathery style save for the eyes which were have sharp detailing.

Of course the artist is free to do whatever he wishes, barring explicit restrictions imposed by a client or implicit constraints signaled by the art market. The focus directive generally results in more satisfying paintings, in my opinion, though I easily can make a list of exceptions. Regardless, Max clearly knew what he had to do to yield the result he desired.

Gallery

The Christian Martyr - 1867

The Anatomist - 1869

The Vivisectionist - 1883

The Ecstatic Virgin - 1885

Outside the Arena - 1880

Purgatory

Per Aspera! - 1898

He also painted many pictures of primates. I am not at all amused by chimps, apes and the rest so I won't post any of those images. But if you like them, I suggest going to Google or Bing to look up those examples of Max's painting.

Lucian Freud: An Appraisal Upon His Death

I've been dithering and dallying for a long time about writing a post on English painter Lucian Freud (1922-2011), grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Seeing as he upped and died a few days ago, I'm running low on excuses: so here goes.

His Wikipedia entry is here and the Telegraph's obituary here, the latter being quite interesting. The image sites in Google and Bing have plenty examples of Freud's work, though perhaps not many of the gamiest of his "spread shots" of male and female nudes; for those, you'll have to go to a bookstore with a good collection in its art section. The top picture above the text shows him at work on an uncharacteristically smooth painting of a nude, the lower shows a 1981 painting of his daughters Bella that provides a view of how he treated skin during his mature period.

What to make of Freud, the artist?

His career was successful. That's a good thing so far as I'm concerned; posthumous recognition is no comfort to a dead artist. He painted representationally. I find that good, too -- especially in an age when the artistic/cultural establishment dismissed that approach.

So how did this representational painter manage to forge a successful career running against the art fashion grain?

For one thing, his family name must have helped some. It caught the attention of art opinion leaders. It opened doors for commissions.

But what I think really mattered is that, aside from some landscapes, the art he produced is ugly. Modernism, especially in its postmodern guise, loves ugly. Ugliness and its cousin edginess somehow make art more "serious" than that old-fashioned, rather silly pursuit of beauty. And what is beauty but a social construct forged by an evil establishment (not to be confused with our humble, worthy, postmodern art establishment).

So Lucian Freud actually didn't stray all that far from the postmodern corral, cranking out ugliness in spades, painting after painting of overweight, over-aged or sometimes skeletal human figures, often nude with blotchy skin and sex organs the center of attention. On occasion he might feature a more conventional looking female nude in a painting and he most certainly favored such women in his personal life. But if you need to maintain your lifestyle in the age of postmodernism, you have to keep producing what sells.

It would have been interesting if Freud had made a stronger effort to get out of the stylistic rut that gained him his notoriety. To make a beautiful painting, for instance. If he could.

An Unfortunate House

Many American suburbs sprang up shortly after World War 2, with nearly all houses in place by around 1950 as growth spread farther out. Since many houses require major repairs and upgrades to wiring and other infrastructure by the time they're around 40 years old, not to mention expansions, kitchen and bathroom re-dos and so forth, one can see three or four major renovation projects going on every year in these neighborhoods.

Sometimes a house is razed and a new one put in its place. Then there are cases where the work done is legally a renovation yet the scale is such that it might as well have been a completely new house. Here is an example of the latter.

What happened was that all of the old building was ripped out aside from the rear outside wall -- that remaining fragment of the original building legally qualifies it as a renovation of an existing structure. The foundation was extended towards the street. Then new walls, floors and other parts were brought to the site and installed. I assume that many measurements were made and final plans for the prefabricating were done on a computer, with initial fabrication taking place on a smooth, concrete floor somewhere.

So far, that's okay with me. But let's take a look at the result in this particular case:

Note the odd, gray panels covering the exterior (to the right, there's an observation tower clad in green, but it's hard to see in the photo). Then there are windows that don't quite seem to relate to probable interior spaces; their placement seems designed from an exterior point of view. Even sillier are those light blue faux half-shutters.

The close-up shot of the entry area shows the metal posts and chain-link fence decor around the tiny porch.

The homeowner of course bears ultimate responsibility for the result because he had to okay the project. But did the architect (I'm assuming there was one if the owner didn't do the design work himself) convince the owner to accept a line of trendy archi-blather filled with terms such as "integrity to materials," "eco-friendly," "in synch with industrial-chic" and whatever other nonsense architectural theoreticians are throwing around these days?

Regardless of its architectural pedigree, I consider the house an unfortunate intrusion to its neighborhood.