Another Sanford Gifford

Done in 1866 -- the same year as the "Morning in the Hudson" shown in the last post -- "Hunter Mountain" looks more like a reclining woman than a mountain -- at least to me. The pink breasts -- the full belly -- the pubic bush -- peacefully sleeping with a warm little cabin at her heart -- and a skinny young man driving the cows home as the sun sets behind her head and the moon and planets (Venus ?) rise in the sky. This was a disappointing week for the
Chinese gallery -- as mediocre paintings took over the display cases -- but this is the best Chinese painting I can imagine -- Heaven/mountain/valley --- it's like a trigram from the I Ching.

Early 19th C. American Sculpture

Ship's figure-head -- I know a badly near-sighted, very intelligent woman who looks just like this -- eyes half blind but they don't miss a thing -- just like the eyes of a ship should be -- on dark, misty, moonless nights in treacherous waters half way around the world. And you'll notice that since she's now in a museum, she brought her crew home safely with her.




Preacher, c 1830 -- a medieval old-testament prophet --
re-imagined by some back-woods dreamer -- severe but gentle,his mind far, far away in the words of scripture - bound to the service of the lord - I wish the sculptor had carved an entire cathedral - or - maybe he didn't need to.



Hiram Powers (1805-1873) is an Ohio boy who ended up carving
marble in Italy. He's classical -- but you'd never mistake him for Greek, Roman,or Renaissance Italian. - the sensuality is only on the surface -- underneath, he's hard as iron. He's a tough but vulnerable American - and I don't really like him - but he has the determination and the skill to do anything.





Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) is another American who moved to Italy -- and he's got that dreamy, airy idealism that feels more British than American to me. This figure is not human, it's a mathematical formula, ornate, complete, and fully proven -- and it seems to be made out of sugar.







Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) I first heard about Harriet while vacationing in the Mississippi river town of Lansing, Iowa -- where a local bluff was given her name after she won a footrace to the top back in good old steamboat days. A tough little woman, she moved to Italy, where there's a cute photograph of her diminutive self surrounded by a dozen, brawny Italian stone cutters. Then later, I heard about this piece when it was discovered in a dump in my current home town of Forest Park Illinois. A hundred years ago, my town
had a race track where this monumental bust of Queen Zenobia was on display -- but when the race track was demolished (and replaced by a WWII torpedo factory (!)) , Queen Zenobia went into a stone dump in the adjacent cemetary. Ten years ago she got fished out -- cleaned up -- and put on display at the Art Institute. So the old girl has quite a colorful history -- but I still think she belongs in some kind of amusement park -- maybe a casino in Vegas ? or a museum of contemporary art ? Harriet Hosmer was an early conceptualist.








Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) The "dean of American sculptors" - and I suppose the most fluid practitioner of the beaux arts style in America -- buoyant, dramatic,important -- but not quite profound -- again, just a little too much like mannekins on a stage instead of sculpture in a temple -- witness his "Lincoln" (1916), which just comes off to me as puppetry for a parade -- rather than the dignity that a sculptor like Houdon could give to George Washington. The center of this piece is emptiness -- which would not be a problem if it were only intended as a float for Mardi Gras.






Look at the detail of Lincoln's head -- if ever nature made a head for dramatic sculpture, ugly old Lincoln had one. But French has normalized and aestheticized it -- I suppose so as not to frighten school children and their matronly teachers.







Frederick MacMonnies ( 1863-1937) -- After 1860, American sculptors adopted the naturalism and dramatic surface of the Beaux Arts program, but Nathan Hale (1890) is less like mythology and more like an editorial cartoon found on an op-ed page of a newspaper. Compare this bound-victim with Rodin's "Burghers of Calais" . Whatever else might be said, this one is certainly more sexy : The cute face, pouting lips, bare chest, dischevelled frillery, innocent look, and the arms helplessly tied to his side.








Laredo Taft (1860-1936) - I'm sweet on Laredo Taft because legend has it that his students are responsible for beginning my art club, the Palette and Chisel. He's down-home kind of guy -- Illinois native born to free-thinking parents with a penchant for colorful names. He went to Paris and became
a beaux-arts sculptor. But what's wrong with that school is what's wrong with him: he makes tableaux, not sculpture -- so all the dramatic elements are there and the actors are well made and dramatically posed --- but the inner life of form has eluded him. Maybe formal resolution is innappropriate to the subject here --"Solitude of the Soul" - where each actor -- and each form -- should be lonely and apart. Maybe this makes him another early conceptualist -- but compare this piece with George Gray Bernard's contemporary monumental marble at the Met -- and I'm afraid we see why Taft's reputation has not traveled far from the 'second city'.

18th C. Decorative arts

Why are these things called decorative arts instead of art arts ? Who knows. These rooms at the Art Institute are mostly a desert for me -- but these are the exceptions:




My retouched backgrounds make these resemble soft porn -- and maybe that's a good description for them anyway. Clodion takes me into the kind of erotic Classical world where I could live forever -- at least, until I fall asleep.



Why is Houdon in a room of "decorative arts"? Why is
Houdon's George Washington the periodic ojbect of conceptual abuse (now incorporated into someone's postmodern masterpiece) Maybe it's because his portraits embody civilized rationalism like no one else before or since. Maybe the sitter was a dolt - but here he looks like he could serve as chancellor to the Sun king.






O.K., I have no idea why I picked this piece -- it's
off the chart goofy --- guess that's why I picked it --- but I can't tell who
was more responsible for that celestial conditon; the modeler or the glazer at the
Meissen factory ? I see this piece and I feel like putting on the silver suit of the Rosenkavalier.





Here's my favorite detail of the above -- something about those colors --- I feel like I want to take a spoon and start eating it.

Chinese sculpture

Here's a compilation of my favorite items from the genres on permanent display at the Art Institute. Some of these things are in the place where I saw them on my first visit -- about 40 years ago -- but some are more recent - and I've painfully learned that nothing is on permanent display. So I thought I'd take a moment to document what I like the most.


This Tang Boddisatva is my favorite piece in the museum -- and given it's prominent location -- I don't think I'm alone in my admiration for it.


Front view of the same sculpture (taken with my new "image stabilized" camera)







Cute little doggie, isn't he ? Found in a Han tomb - but it seems like it would also work as a roof-top decoration.










This jovial fellow was found in a 6th C. AD tomb -- thought to be an entertainer.






A Han dynasty tomb figure - with an especially thoughtful expression, don't you think ?





I'm not a big fan of jade -- I think it's so hard to work, the issue of design is
made secondary. But this Ming era chalice with dragons is one of the nicer pieces. Can you imagine actually sipping from it ?





This is my favorite Tang vase in the collection -- those white splotches are more than just splotches -- they're alive -- like an airborn flock of geese.









These delightful, rainbow-colored girls have always pulled me into their private little boudoirs. They're about the right age for the pavillions in "Dream of Red Chamber", but they lived 1,000 years earlier.




For whatever reason, China doesn't seem to have portrait sculpture of ancestors --
I'm guessing that's because the power of the head-of-family is so absolute, everyone is relieved when he's finally gone. But monastaries are the exception - where maybe those lonely guys really did miss those who have died. This is an 11th Century
piece -- hollow with a lacquer surface.







Another one of my 40-year favorites - see how even an unusual vantage point offers a delightful view. So soft -- so gentle -- so stately -- the happy, idyllic world
of Tang. Why couldn't it last forever ?








I've never been able to imagine myself in a social event that would use these architectural wine jars from the Zhou dynasty (1050 - 770 BC )






They have whimsy and power, don't they ? As if they contained something more important than wine. They seem to belong in a room into which no one is allowed to enter.

Keith Achepohl collection of African pottery

Born in 1934, Keith Achepohl is currently the head of the printmaking Dept. at the University of Iowa -- and somewhere along the way he collected a lot of African pottery.







As he tells it, he began his collection while traveling through Africa.
Dealers would pull up their trucks at the markets and he would go through their stuff -- looking for the unusual, the extraordinary. That's the kind of collection it is -- based less on historical authenticity and more on what looks interesting. So the museum's official title of this exhibit, "For Hearth and Altar", is somewhat misleading. It should be called "For fun viewing".




There's a good-natured, swinging goofiness about many of these things -- like those
neighborhood brass bands that proliferate in some not-yet-industrialized countries around the world -- and I can understand why Mr. Archepohl says he sold his collection of contemporary American pottery when he discovered these engaging objects, most (but not all) of which also contemporary, i.e. mid to late 20th Century.




I'd like to put some of the large jars side-by-side with the 16th Century Japanese jars (also in the Art Institute) that are so similar in size/shape/color -- but feel so different -- as they reflect an intellectual choice to be simple/natural that goes back to the Taoist philosphers of the 4th century BCE.


It's also interesting to see Mr. Achepohl's own graphics -- as they reflect the disastrous consequence of academic modernism on the European pictorial tradition: - failing as both design, picture, and engaging expression -- even if pleasant enough for a dentist's waiting room.

I'd also like to note that although the musuem's brochure tells us that these "often surprising ceramic vessels have been created for domestic and ritual uses" -- there's
no documentation to that effect -- and it's quite likely that since most of them are less than 50 years old, many of them were made for the collector's market -- which would, of course, in the twisted art-philosophy of the art museum, disqualify them as art objects worthy of their collection. One may also note that not a single potter is identified by name -- although if it really counted - i.e. -- if name were important to value like it is in the post Renaissance European tradition, inquiries could have been made -- the artists, or at least their children/grandchildren are still living -- and some artists could have been identified. But that would have removed them from their mythic state of anonymity - and probably revealed that the artist did, occasionally, make things for sale to dealers. (who wouldn't jump at the chance of making some money?)

So the contemporary tribal artist is honored as such only as long as he remains
anonymous. Once known -- he's no longer an artist at all -- he's just a manufacturer of trinkets for tourists and street fairs in places like Chicago or Atlanta.

Bamboo leaves in the Rain

Xia Chang (1388-1470)Bamboo Bordered Stream in Spring Rain --1441

This is a 12" section (about 2 feet from the left edge) of a 50 foot scroll.

What's suckering me here is the delicious sense of space that depends on the varying darkness/lightness of the brush strokes. Xia was apparently a scholar/official who was in charge of scholar/officials --- so I'm guessing that his ability was well recognized by his peers. This painting apparently was made a year after his retirement -- accompanied by a poem dedicated to a friend whose estate offered a similar spot for retreat -- the sense of the poem being "isn't it nice to get away from everything and look at the bamboo in the rain.



This shows the last of the 8 feet of the 50 foot scroll that is currently on display --- and you can see how the delicacy of the leaves is giving way to the heavier volumes of a tree trunk -- and a very different kind of space develops.







This is near the left-most edge -- the trip to the garden beginning with the flat space of crackling silhouettes of leaves against the page , set off, just occasionally, by lighter brush strokes that indicate a deeper space. I can stare at this part over-and-over again. It's so refreshing - envigorating.



Here's a detail -- shot with my new Panasonic FX8 camera with
"optical image stabilizer" to compensate for my shaky hand.

Two Luminist painters

I was on my mission to complete the tour of 19th C. American sculpture at the A.I.C.-- but I couldn't help noticing some of the paintings in the gallery that day -- and -- well -- maybe -- these appealed to me more.

John Kensett (1816-1872) Almy Pond, Newport , 1857


I don't remember any of this genre from Cincinnati -- but I do remember being stopped by Kensett at the Met -- and stopping viewers at the Met is the most that any painter can aspire for. There's the glowing -- there's the minimalism --there's, let's face it -- Puritan art -- a bit more geometric and a bit less sensual than its Dutch counterparts. And lack of sensuality provokes sensuality -- at least in me.

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay, 1866



I don't remember ever seeing Gifford before -- but I like him just as much - maybe more -- because the severe geometry begins to feel mystical: i.e. that big boat in the middle of all those triangles should be boring, but it's not. It turns out that late in their careers, Kensett and Gifford traveled together to view the wild west. Ahh --those were the days. I wonder if they ever made it into an episode of "Maverick" or "Gunsmoke". In Cincinnati, I grew up with the French landscape painters of that day (Daubigny, Rousseau, Corot etc)-- but now I guess I like their American peers as much if not more. These painters are the worthy compatriots of Hawthorne and Melville.

(Note: these two paintings are on loan from the Terra Foundation -- and a sad reminder of what the Terra Museum was -- and could have been if it's board of directors had not pulled the plug.)