Shark Attack at The National Gallery of Art, Washington

Watson and the Shark (1778)
John Singleton Copley
Oil on Canvas | 71 11/16 in. x 90 7/16 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington

As we fight the sweltering heat of summer and dream of cooling off in the refreshing waters of the ocean, I can't help but hear the dramatic music from the movie, "Jaws." Before each shark attack, that ominous sound begins to stir, knowing something evil is about to happen. When visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington, you should seek out the painting, "Watson and the Shark." At nearly 6 feet high and 8 feet long, this giant depiction of a real-life event will make you squirm.

In 1749, 14-year-old Brook Watson, an orphan, had unwisely decided to take a dip from a skiff while the ship on which he was crewing docked in Havana Harbor. A shark attacked him, biting his right leg and pulling him under. The boy surfaced briefly before the shark dragged him under a second time, severing his right foot. By the time Watson surfaced again, his mates had nearly reached him. The painting depicts the boy’s climactic rescue: just as the shark zeroed in for its third strike, a determined crewmate armed with a boat hook drove it away. John Singleton Copley’s dramatic rendering of the shark attacking Watson caused a sensation when it was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1778.

Copley, an American artist who moved to London amid the tensions of the Revolutionary War, here takes the pictorial representation of terror to new heights. The injured Watson’s deathly pale body rises from the depths, naked and vulnerable, with blood swirling around his leg. As the huge shark’s gaping jaws close in, Watson looks back in shock and grasps futilely for the lifeline cast by a West African crewman, whose prominent position in the picture and sympathetic rendering were extraordinary for the time. Two shipmates stretch desperately to reach the boy flailing in the turbulent waters.

Watson went on to have a successful business and political career and very likely commissioned the painting. He eventually bequeathed the painting of his adolescent triumph over adversity to a London school for disadvantaged youth, believing it would offer moral inspiration.

Source:  National Gallery of Art, Washington

Mary Cassatt | A Woman Among the Impressionists

Mary Cassatt was born into an affluent family in Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, one of the country's leading art schools. In addition to having regular exhibitions of European and American art, the faculty at the Academy encouraged students to study abroad. In 1865 Cassatt approached her parents with the idea of studying in Paris. Despite their initial objections, Cassatt's parents relented and allowed her to go.

In Paris, Cassatt attended classes in the studios of the academic artists Jean Léon Gérôme and Thomas Couture. She also traveled extensively in Europe studying and copying old master paintings. In 1874 she settled permanently in Paris, where her work was regularly shown at the Salon, the annual government-sponsored exhibition. The following year she saw the pastel work of Edgar Degas, one of the leaders of the Impressionist movement, in a gallery window. Years later, Cassatt described the importance of this experience, "I used to go and flatten my nose against the window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it." Degas and Cassatt were close friends until his death in 1917.

Cassatt was one of a relatively small number of American women to become professional artists in the nineteenth century when most women, particularly wealthy ones, did not pursue a career. Her decision to study abroad reflects the strong character she displayed throughout her career. When Cassatt settled in Paris, an artistic revolution was already underway in France. Changes were occurring in the way that artists showed their work to the public, and in the freedom artists had to choose their own subjects and styles. Cassatt's career developed against the backdrop of these changes.

Mary Cassatt Self-Portrait (1880)
Gouache and watercolor over graphite on paper | 12 7/8 in. x 9 11/16 in.
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

The Loge (c. 1878-1880)
Oil on canvas | 31 7/16 in. x 25 1/8 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878)
Oil on canvas | 35 1/4 in. x 51 1/8 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Sources:  National Gallery of Art, Washington, Washington, DC

              Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Walter Ellison's Train Station

Train Station | 1935
Walter Ellison
Oil on Cardboard | 8 in. x 14 in.
The Art Institute of Chicago

Walter Ellison’s Train Station depicts white and black travelers departing from a central terminal, bound for different cities. The composition reflects the social values of the time, which prevented members of the two races from mixing. On the left, white passengers board trains for vacations in the South, while on the right, African American passengers head for trains going to northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit. In those cities, black travelers hoped to find better jobs and living conditions.

The sign reading "colored" above the platform doorway on the right emphasizes the degrading conditions that African Americans in the South faced at the time. In the center section, black porters aid white passengers, yet black travelers are not offered any help.

Ellison himself boarded a train heading north from Macon, Georgia, joining the more than six million blacks who left their rural southern homes after World War I and during the Great Migration. Ellison traveled to Chicago, the nation’s industrial center, where migrants could find potential jobs in meatpacking and at rail and steel mills. Although discrimination was inescapable, the city offered acceptable schools, voting rights, and leisure activities. Once in Chicago, Ellison studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During the 1940s, he was active in the South Side Community Art Center, which was sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project.

Source:  The Art Institute of Chicago

Dutch Marine Paintings at National Gallery of Art

The Dutch rose to greatness from the riches of the sea.  During the seventeenth century they became leaders in marine travel, transport, commerce, and security as their massive cargo carriers and warships traversed oceans and their small vessels and fishing boats navigated inland and coastal waterways.  Water was central to their economic and naval successes, but was also a source of pleasure and enjoyment.  In the warm summer months, dune-covered beaches offered scenic vistas, while in the winter, frozen canals provided a place for people of all ages to skate, play, and enjoy the outdoors.

In a nation of sailors and skaters, it is no wonder that marine subjects became a favorite of seventeenth-century collectors and artists alike.  Some painters delighted in capturing the marine environs in and around the Dutch coast.  Others turned their attention to the activity of frozen canals on a wintry day.  Many artists also depicted the open seas, including some who often sailed the seas themselves, rendered every imaginable vessel, from fishing boats and major transport ships to the great warships of the Dutch naval fleet, each formulating his compositions with extraordinary accuracy and attention to detail.  At the same time, they also introduced atmospheric light effects and various weather conditions to bring life and drama to their scenes.

From quiet harbor scenes and frozen canals to fierce naval battles and wicked weather, water had an extraordinary impact on art of the Dutch Golden Age.

Skating on the Frozen Amstel River (1611) 

Adam van Breen 

Oil on Panel | 17 7/16 in. × 26 3/16 in. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast (1667) 

Ludolf Backhuysen 

Oil on Canvas | 45 in. x 65 7/8 in. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington

Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue by Elaine de Kooning

For a major show of her portraits at Graham Gallery in April 1963, Elaine de Kooning created this enormous group portrait, seven feet high and fourteen feet long, painted with thin washes and bold strokes of bright color. It depicts nine young men, sitting and standing in a variety of poses, each with a distinct expression—quizzical, contemplative, resigned. 

The painting references both Rodin’s bronze sculpture The Burghers of Calais (1884–89) (seen below) and seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, such as Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642) (also seen below). The title is a witty reference to the Netherlands and to Amsterdam Avenue in New York City. 

Elaine found the subjects through her friend Sherman Drexler, who was teaching art at an experimental treatment center connected with Riverside Hospital for youths with drug addiction and psychological problems. Two of the men who appear in the portrait, suffering from addiction, had worked for Elaine as assistants in her studio. She told a friend that she had terrible fights with one of them because he stole jewelry from her. Ultimately, he died a horrible junkie's death in a flophouse a few years later.

When Elaine finished her painting, she started packing it up to take home, but the school principal, concerned about the privacy of the underage subjects, refused to let her take it. In a cunning move, she covered the students’ faces in the painting with acrylic to appease the principal, and when she got home, she simply wiped it off.

Rodin's The Burghers of Calais (1884–89)

Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642)

Sources: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC and "A Generous Vision: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning" by Cathy Curtis

Keith Haring and The White House Easter Egg Roll

In 1988, the Reagan's invited artist Keith Haring to paint a mural at the Easter Egg Roll held annually on Easter Monday on the White House South Lawn. The final piece, measuring 8' x 16', was then donated to Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC. A photographer capturing the event whispered to Haring, "what are you doing here?" He whispered back, "same thing you are"—a reference to getting paid for being there. Sadly, the Reagan Administration never fully responded to the AIDS crisis, and Haring died two years later from AIDS-related complications.

Easter Monday by Willem de Kooning

Easter Monday, named for the day on which the painting was completed in 1956, is the largest of ten grandly scaled paintings de Kooning exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery that spring. In his review of the exhibition in Artnews, critic Thomas Hess likened the works to "abstract urban landscapes;" indeed, in its highly textured surface, swooping lines of paint, and glimpses of newspaper transfers, Easter Monday seems to reference the whirling pace and gritty detritus of the modern city. The transferred newsprint, particularly visible at the bottom and top right, remains aligned with the canvas's edges, enforcing the tenuously grid-like structure of the painting. Shot through with Rubensian flesh-like pinks and vivid blues and yellow, Easter Monday is a tour de force of de Kooning's 1950s style.

Easter Monday (1955 – 56)
Willem de Kooning
Oil and newspaper transfer on canvas | 96 in. x 74 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Source:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Olympic Medals for Art

In the early days of the modern Olympics, artists battled for gold, silver, and bronze medals in architecture, sculpture, paintings and graphic arts, literature, and music. Art competitions were held at the Olympic games from 1912 to 1948. Winners of the art competitions were awarded medals, similar to the winners of the athletic competitions. The events were championed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who felt that in order to recreate the events in modern times, it would be incomplete to not include some aspect of the arts.

At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, American Walter Winans took the podium and waved proudly to the crowd. He had already won two Olympic medals—a gold for sharpshooting at the 1908 London Games and a silver for the same event in 1912. However, the gold he won at Stockholm wasn’t for sharpshooting, but instead for a small piece of bronze he cast earlier that same year, a horse pulling a small chariot. For his work, An American Trotter, Winans won the first ever Olympic gold medal for sculpture.

Over the next several years, local audiences came out in numbers to see the sports-themed artworks. At the the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, nearly 400,000 people visited the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art to see the works entered, with some recognizable names in the competitions. John Russell Pope, the architect of the Jefferson Memorial, won a silver that year for his design of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, constructed at Yale University. Italian sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, American illustrator Percy Crosby, Irish author Oliver St. John Gogarty, and Dutch painter Isaac Israëls were other prominent entrants.

In 1940 and 1944, the Olympics were put on hold as nearly all participating countries became embroiled in World War II. Resuming in 1948, John Copley of Britain won one of the final medals awarded, a silver for his engraving, Polo Players. He was 73 years old at the time, and would be the oldest medalist in Olympic history (if his victory still counted). The 151 art medals awarded were officially stricken from the Olympic record and currently do not count toward official current medal counts.

Gertrude Stein on Comforts of the Past

In a 1934 interview, Gertrude Stein lamented that "people today like contemporary comforts, but they take their literature and art from the past. They are not interested in what the present generation is thinking or painting if it doesn't fit the enclosure of their personal comprehension. Present day geniuses can no more help doing what they are doing than you can help not understanding it, but if you think we do it for effect and to make a sensation, you're crazy. It's not our idea of fun to work for thirty or forty years on a medium of expression and have ourselves ridiculed."

Gertrude Stein (1922)

By Jo Davidson

Terra Cotta

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

Peggy Guggenheim's Jackson Pollock Mural

When Jackson Pollock received the commission to create a mural for the entry to Peggy Guggenheim's new townhouse, she was eager to present in her home a symbol of support for the new American brand of art she was beginning to champion in her gallery. The choice of subject was to be his, and the size, immense—8' 1 1/4" x 19' 10", meant to cover an entire wall. At the suggestion of Guggenheim's friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp, it was painted on canvas, not the wall itself, so it would be portable. Pollock wrote of his commission that it was:

"...with no strings as to what or how I paint it. I am going to paint it in oil on canvas. They are giving me a show November 16 and I want to have the painting finished for the show. I've had to tear out the partition between the front and middle room to get the damned thing up. I have it stretched now. It looks pretty big, but exciting as all hell."

Pollock signed a gallery contract with Guggenheim in July 1943. The terms were $150 a month and a settlement at the end of the year if his paintings sold. He intended to have the mural done by the time of his show in November. However, as the time approached, the canvas for the mural was untouched. Guggenheim began to pressure him. Pollock spent weeks staring at the blank canvas, complaining to friends that he was "blocked," and seeming to become both obsessed and depressed. Finally, he painted the entire canvas in one frenetic burst of energy around New Year's Day of 1944—although the painting bears the date 1943. Pollock told a friend years afterward that he had had a vision: 

"It was a stampede...[of] every animal in the American West, cows and horses and antelopes and buffaloes. Everything is charging across the surface." 

Pollock's "vision" may have been a memory from his childhood in the American West. While there is some suggestion of figuration within Mural, its overall impact is that of abstraction and freedom from the restrictions imposed by figures.

A special installation in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building features Pollock's Mural, on loan from the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Also on view are paintings and works on paper by Pollock from the Gallery’s collection, including Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (1950). The installation marks the debut of Mural in Washington, DC.

Sources:  National Gallery of Art, Washington

              University of Iowa Museum of Art

American Prints of Urban Life | 1920–1950

American artists of the early twentieth century sought to interpret the beauty, power, and anxiety of the modern age in diverse ways. Some turned to abstraction borrowed from European modernism, but those represented in this exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Urban Scene: 1920–1950, took a realistic approach, manipulating light and shadow to create scenes imbued with vitality and imagination. These artists employed precise detail and descriptive clarity to characterize experience, suggest meanings, and convey a narrative. 

The representation of twentieth-century urban life provided them endless opportunities to probe the modern human condition. The urban panorama offered unprecedented vistas. Skyscrapers, bridges, and other technological marvels projected wealth and opportunity, while the city’s towering forms invoked the sublime. Simultaneously, the streets and dwellings of the metropolis hosted life’s theater. Depictions of harmonious communities and workers suggest a utopian vision, whereas scenes of crowding, poverty, and hunger point to society’s ills and failures. The same buildings glorified from one perspective could be interpreted from another as blocking light, deepening shadows, and heightening a sense of enclosure and confinement.

The artists represented here chose their subjects, arranged their compositions, and scrutinized details to convey particular aspects of urban life. They used line to capture the specific features of a face or the unique character of a building, and tone to mimic the play of light — from great shafts of morning sunshine spilling onto avenues to the poetry of the city’s riverside at night with reflections in the water. By selectively emphasizing certain elements and minimizing others, images were distilled to their atmospheric or narrative essence. The best artists balanced specificity with ambiguity, drawing our attention to the fundamental while leaving open to interpretation the implied, the hidden, and the undefined. 

During the past decade, the National Gallery of Art has added extraordinary collections of prints and drawings to its holdings, from the Reba and Dave Williams Collection to the Corcoran Collection and works donated and promised by Bob Stana and Tom Judy. This exhibition highlights some of these acquisitions and reveals how the Gallery’s American print holdings continue to develop, incorporating new artists as well as works that expand its view of printmakers already represented in the collection.

This exhibition is on view at the National Gallery of Art through Sunday, August 6.

The People Work - Evening (1937)

Benton Spruance

Lithograph | 13 5/8 in. x 19 in.

Quiet Hour (1947)

Stow Wengenroth

Lithograph | 8 3/4 in. x 15 in.

Source and Images:  National Gallery of Art, Washington

The Light of Truth | A New Museum on the National Mall

To say that the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture takes you on a journey is a masterpiece of understatement. It is one that is far overdue for all of us and best traveled alone. Although this museum encourages a national conversation, the contemplative nature of its architecture, art, exhibitions, and the incredible quotations pushing out from its stone walls makes you think about your own responsibility to the future, being on the right side of history. Stepping into this majestic space for the first time, filled with people in the soaring atrium, I did not feel dwarfed or intimidated or awkward. The vibrations of the room were like the activity in the main hall of Grand Central Station, with travelers to destinations unknown.

The winding staircase down to where the exhibition space begins is a visual extravaganza of sweeping arcs, steep angles, and ironwork patterns overhead with as much significance as the historical exhibitions even deeper below. On an enormous elevator, above the decibel of conversations within the crowd, a woman near me said, "Oh, my God. This is like a time machine." Everyone fell silent, as we looked to our right and left out the glass sides of the elevator time machine to watch the dates tick backwards on the cement walls as we descended. We came to a halt at the year 1400 and exited into an undeniable history lesson. Suffice it to say, the rest of this journey was filled with reverence.

At times, I admit I was overcome with emotion. I ascended the museum's ramp system from one exhibition to another, moving through history that was not sanitized. Images and text outlined in red came with a warning about its suitability for children. Make no mistake though, this museum is not merely a retrospective of an abhorrent past, but it excitingly celebrates brilliance in art, literature, music, science, entertainment, sports, and politics. The best part is how it shines a light on people doing extraordinary things and changing the course of history.

The shear volume of items in the collection, video installations, and narrative that leads you through will take years of return visits to consume it all. The most poignant moment came when I was at the top of the ramp and I looked behind me. I could see images being cast simultaneously on the walls from illustrations of slavery, to the civil rights movement, to President Barack Obama being sworn into office. Off to the left, high upon a wall, was a quote from early civil rights activist, Ida B. Wells, "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." 

Photos by Cary Knox

The President's Neighborhood Exhibition

Yesterday, I visited a small exhibition at the Decatur House about the buildings and statues surrounding the White House and Lafayette Square—The President's Neighborhood.

Since the White House was first occupied by President John Adams in 1800, influential people and organizations—or those who hoped to have influence—have bought property and built homes and offices along the streets surrounding the White House. In front of the White House, across Pennsylvania Avenue, is Lafayette Square and its park, the centerpiece of many of Washington’s and the nation’s most historic sites.

That these structures have survived today is owed to a first lady and the modern preservation movement. In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy intervened to block a congressional plan that would have replaced the historic structures with modernist government office buildings. This effort, among many, led to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. 

The key sites within Lafayette Square featured in this exhibition include Blair House, Dolley Madison House, Decatur House, Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Hay-Adams Hotel, St. John’s Church, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and U.S. Treasury Department. Note the beautifully illustrated cut-outs of these various structures lining the exhibition space, images created by a local artist, then blown up large scale by the White House Historical Association.

The exhibition runs through September 27, 2016.

Source:  The White House Historical Association

Beach Umbrellas at Blue Point

William Glackens's buoyant view of well-to-do vacationers at the beach at Blue Point on Long Island's south shore, recalls the work of the French impressionists, especially Renoir.  The cheerful white and orange striped umbrellas punctuate the sun-washed sand fronting an elegant resort hotel.  Feathery brushwork contributes to the festive quality of the scene as we observe it from out on the water.  The joyous color and light describe a world far removed from the realities of World War I, then raging in Europe, or even from New York's alleys and elevated railways, which Glackens illustrated early in his career.

The sense of immediacy that animates this summer spectacle stems from the artist's familiarity with his subject.  He and his family summered in nearby Bellport, then becoming an artists' and writers' colony.  Their presence signaled the burgeoning pursuit of leisure on the part of America's growing middle class.  The 1880s had witnessed a boom in tourism; by 1915, the beaches were already crowded.

Beach Umbrellas at Blue Point | 1915
William Glackens
Oil on Canvas | 66.1 cm x 81.3 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Source:  "Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum"

The Art and Controversy of Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) is recognized as one of the first contemporary artists to chronicle gay life. Pushing the envelope with his depictions of naked and muscled male physiques, museums consistently rejected his work because of its gay themes. 

In the 1930s, Cadmus worked for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first of the federal art programs conceived as part of the New Deal during the Great Depression. He created paintings for a planned PWAP exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. One of these works, The Fleet’s In, is a provocative depiction of U.S. Navy personnel carousing with women dressed like prostitutes. It includes a subtle homoerotic image of a sailor flirting with a civilian man offering him a cigarette, while another sailor lies draped across them. The painting generated controversy, causing the Navy to remove it from the exhibition. The scandal brought the artist national attention.

At the Smithsonian's American Art Museum hangs the striking Night in Bologna, a dark comedy of sexual tensions played out on a stage of shadowy arcades. In the foreground, a soldier on leave throws off a visible heat that suffuses the air around him with a red glow. He casts an appraising look at a worldly woman nearby, who gauges the interest of a man seated at a café table. The gawky tourist is unaware of her attentions, and looks longingly at the man in uniform. Cadmus left the outcome unclear because he was more interested in the tangle of human instincts than in tidy resolutions.

In a lengthy oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Cadmus said that after 50 years as a painter, he was happy with the trajectory of his career, though he had never achieved lasting fame or a consensus of critical appreciation. He quoted a line from one of his favorite painters, the French neoclassicist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. "'People say my paintings are not right for the times' or something like that," Cadmus recalled. "But then he says, 'Can I help it if the times are wrong? If I'm the only one that's right, it's all right.'"

Sources:  Smithsonian American Art Museum and Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Carnegie Library of Washington

At lunchtime today, I took an opportunity to tour Washington, D.C.'s Carnegie Library. The Historical Society of Washington, D.C. currently occupies what was the central public library for the City of Washington for nearly 70 years. It's location at Mount Vernon Square was part of Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 plan for the District of Columbia, which included more than a dozen open spaces for parks or memorials throughout the city. Mount Vernon Square sits on a plot where seven different streets converge in the northwest quadrant of Washington. The square is located where Massachusetts Avenue, New York Avenue, K Street, and 8th Street would intersect, and further bounded by 7th Street, 9th Street, and Mount Vernon Place.

In 1899, industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was visiting the White House when he heard about the need for a library building in Washington. His contribution to Washington totaled $375,000, making it one of the largest of the Carnegie libraries built. In the end, Carnegie funded the building of 1,679 libraries around the United States.

The building was designed by Albert Randolph Ross of the New York architectural firm Ackerman and Ross, who had studied at the influential École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Ross designed it in the Beaux-Art style that became popular at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and its "White City." The lead architect of the World's Fair was Daniel Burnham, designer of another Washington Beaux-Art building, Union Station, completed in 1908. 

Dedicated on January 7, 1903, the ceremony was attended by President Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie. During that time, Washington was a heavily segregated town, except for the federal government. One of Carnegie's requirements for his donation included that the building could not be segregated. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson and his Administration, resegregated federal workers. With oversight of the Carnegie Library falling to the hands of the federal government, the library staff were segregated, but the citizens of Washington who used it were not. That policy remained in effect until Wilson left office in 1917.  Heavily used and short on space, the central public library was moved to the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in 1970.

The Historical Society leads 45-minute free tours of the beautiful Carnegie Library on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1:00 p.m. Visit www.dchistory.org to register and for more information.

Photos by Cary Knox

Kindred Spirits | The Poet and the Artist

Ten days after his 47th birthday, Thomas Cole—America’s first important landscape painter—died of pneumonia on February 11, 1848. At the time of his death, he was the acknowledged leader of the loosely knit group of American landscape painters that would become known as the Hudson River School.

In New York, he was honored with a memorial exhibition of his works and a service highlighted by a
eulogy delivered by William Cullen Bryant, one of Cole's closest friends and a successful American nature poet. Among the tributes Bryant offered, one was especially prescient: “I say within myself, this man will be reverenced in future years as a great master in art.” 

In appreciation of Bryant’s role in celebrating Cole’s memory and in recognition of the friendship between the poet and the painter, the New York collector Jonathan Sturges commissioned Asher B. Durand to paint a work that would depict Cole and Bryant as “kindred spirits.” Durand, several years older than Cole and a successful engraver, had been inspired by Cole in the 1830s to take up landscape painting and was soon a leading practitioner in his own right. 

Sturges’ request that the two men be shown as kindred spirits was inspired by the words of English poet John Keats, whose Sonnet to Solitude celebrates the ameliorative aspects of nature and concludes:

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and sure it must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

Durand’s Kindred Spirits was completed in 1849 and delivered as a gift to Bryant. It shows the poet and Cole standing on a ledge in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where both had been inspired to create some of their finest works. Although executed in the detailed and realistic style that Durand championed for American landscape painting, its composition brings together several sites—including the Clove of the Catskills and Kaaterskill Falls—that could not be seen from a single vantage point. As such, it was intended as an idealized tribute to American nature and to the two men whose art had extolled its special beauties.

Kindred Spirits | 1849
Asher B. Durand
Oil on Canvas | 44 in. x 36 in.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Source:  National Gallery of Art, Washington

The Poet, His Muse, and the Artist

Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born actress and dancer of mixed French and black African ancestry, was the undeniable muse of French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. Duval met Baudelaire in 1842, after he saw her in a cabaret show in Paris and became obsessed with her. They maintained a turbulent and passionate relationship for the next two decades. Duval is said to have been the woman whom Baudelaire loved most, in his life, after his mother. 

Baudelaire paid homage to Duval in numerous poems, naming her the "mistress of mistresses" and calling her his Vénus Noire (Black Venus). Duval invoked in him feelings of pity, despair, lust, and betrayal—the commanding themes of his masterwork of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal. That slim volume of 140 poems, which was seized and destroyed on the grounds of obscenity when first published in 1857, is now recognized as the finest poetry in the French language and the first modern poetry in any language.

In every other respect Duval was the poet’s ruination. They quarreled constantly. She continually begged for money and sold his possessions when he failed to provide. She took lovers, including many of his friends. Baudelaire suspected that sometimes she sold herself on the streets to raise money.

Artist Édouard Manet, a friend of Baudelaire, depicted Duval in his 1862 painting Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining.  By this time, Duval was going blind and dying from syphilis.  Five years later, Baudelaire would be dead from the same affliction.

Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining | 1862
Édouard Manet
Oil on Canvas | 35.43 in. x 44.49 in.
Szepmuveszeti Museum | Budapest, Hungary

Picasso, Apollinaire, and the Saltimbanques

The theme of the circus and the circus performer has a long tradition in art and in literature, especially prominent in French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A more immediate inspiration for Pablo Picasso came from performances of the Cirque Médrano, a circus that the artist attended frequently near his residence and studio in Montmartre.

Circus performers were regarded as social outsiders. They provided a telling symbol for the alienation of the avant-garde artists and poets of their time. Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques (1905) is perhaps an autobiographical statement, a group portrait of him and his circle. The red clown figure is said to be modeled after his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire similarly wrote a poem titled, Saltimbanque in 1913, an English translation is below.

In a funny twist to their friendship, Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be burnt down, came under suspicion, was arrested, and imprisoned for the 1911 theft of the famous Mona Lisa. Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who was then brought in for questioning. The event created somewhat of a media circus, but both men were later exonerated.

Saltimbanque

(The "Traveling Entertainers" or "Acrobats")

The strollers in the plain

walk the length of gardens

before the doors of grey inns

through villages without churches

And the children gone before

The others follow dreaming

Each fruit tree resigns itself

When they signal from afar

They have burdens round or square

drums and golden tambourines

Apes and bears wise animals

gather coins as they progress

Family of Saltimbanques | 1905
Pablo Picasso
Oil on Canvas | 83 3/4 in. x 90 3/8 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington

Lana Turner Has Collapsed! By Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner Has Collapsed! is one of Frank O’Hara’s funniest and best-loved poems. With its campy treatment of a tabloid headline in February 1962 about a glamorous celebrity facing adversity, it’s often cited as an example of O’Hara’s embrace of pop culture and his affection for the cinema and its stars. O'Hara would use his lunch hour to compose poetry, often dropping into the Olivetti typewriter showroom to tap them out.  This is one of my favorites.

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

From Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara

© 1964

City Lights Books

There is a wonderful audio recording of O'Hara reading this poem in late 1964 on the frankohara.org website linked here. While O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, they read more like a diary, and tend to be based on his observations of New York life rather than exploring his past. In his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Donald Allen says "that Frank O’Hara tended to think of his poems as a record of his life is apparent in much of his work.”

In the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, O'Hara was struck by a jeep on a Fire Island beach, after the beach taxi in which he had been riding with a group of friends broke down in the dark. He died the next day of a ruptured liver. O'Hara was only 40 years old.

Portrait and Poem Painting | 1961
Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara
Oil on Canvas | 36 in. x 36 in.