Sense and Sensibility

Our Riveting Public Mourning

It was all about the music, we kept hearing.

And maybe it was.

Maybe it wasn’t the queerly androgynous looks. Maybe it wasn’t the chimp, the surgical masks, the glove, the baby dangling or the increasingly Caucasian features. Maybe none of it [---] the child molestations allegations, the freakish court appearances in pajamas, the surreal marital history [Dash] mattered. Listening to the mind-numbing hagiography that preceded yesterday’s orgiastic Michael Jackson memorial tribute, it was easy to believe that Jackson was just another uber-talented American entertainer, chronically misunderstood. It got so bad that even before a single performance, you were grateful for a pre-emptive weather alert that assured you that Tuesday’s severe thundershowers were not a precursor to the Apocalypse.

Yesterday’s mourn-a-thon, which began at dawn and droned on until nearly 4 p.m., was an elegy of epidemic proportions. It featured battalions of performers, preachers and politicians as well as a final, choking sob from his daughter that reminded viewers of the personal anguish of a very public wake.

And yet the whole, lurid, immoderate spectacle, from Mariah Carey’s tentative version of the early Jackson hit “I’ll Be There,” to Jermaine Jackson’s haunting “Smile,” was strangely riveting. At Tuesday’s memorial, Jackson’s real intimates [Dash] not the Jackson sycophants who have stumbled, sputtered, and equivocated through the last 10 days of non-stop coverage [Dash] but his actual friends took the stage. Some of their memories, like those of Motown founder Berry Gordy, of playing on baseball teams and swimming together, were sincerely touching. When Gordy, speaking about the 1983 release of “Billy Jean,” said, “Michael Jackson went into orbit and never came down,” you could dismiss the more sinister undertones of the remark.

The montages of Jackson videos [Dash] cinematic dance masterpieces that drew inspiration from Fred Astaire, through Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse [Dash] were the finest testimony to Jackson’s uncanny choreographic sense and enduring influence on the entertainment world. The memorial was oddly Motown-centric, even though Jackson’s biggest success came after he left that record label and went solo. Perhaps that was in deference to Jackson’s brothers, who sat in the front row wearing black suits, gold ties, sunglasses and a single sequined glove each.

Jackson, memorialized yesterday by people like Stevie Wonder, whose celebrity Jackson’s strangely mirrored and then eclipsed, was hardly the first American entertainer to warrant massive outpourings of public grief. From Rudolph Valentino, through James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, Americans seem to love their celebrities sensitive, child-like and chronically misunderstood. Even the Brits we have embraced [Dash] John Lennon and Princess Diana [Dash] had the kind of impish fragility that the culture simultaneously celebrates and condemns.

A trembling Brooke Shields, fighting off tears, said that Jackson’s “laugh was the sweetest and purest of anyone’s.” It was Jackson’s improbable artlessness [Dash] in an industry that hardens the delicate [Dash] that cemented his fan base and confounded his critics. Cynics found Jackson’s breathy, edge-of-tears ballads a ridiculous camouflage that masked Jackson’s unsettling peccadilloes. Admirers saw in Jackson a vulnerability and innocence that captivated and consoled. When Jackson triumphed [Dash] through boundlessly innovative creativity [Dash] it was a victory for Peter Pans everywhere.

Somehow when Michael Jackson sang and when he danced … we felt he was right there,” said Queen Latifah. “We had him. Whether he knew he was ours or did not know, he was ours, we were his.”

The memorial was not without its clumsy moments. Michael Jackson sold more than 750 million records, but until Tuesday, basketball fans never knew that Jackson was responsible for Magic Johnson’s success as a point guard. Mourners could have done without a representative from the Congressional Black Caucus and “Britain’s Got Talent” 12-year-old wunderkind Shaheen Jafargholi. The memorial should have properly ended with Jermaine Jackson’s stirring “Smile,” but by the second hour, it seemed, like Jackson’s life, to spiral out of control.

The inevitable “We Are The World” finale had its predictable cathartic effect, with Jackson’s children, looking bewildered, taking the stage with the whole Jackson clan. The sobs of Jackson’s daughter Paris, saying that her “daddy has been the best father you can imagine” was a chilling coda to a celebrity circus that, for the Jackson children, is just beginning.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com.

Art Can Be Funny, Can’t It?

Humor hurts.

It stings worthwhile targets – hypocrisy, vanity, licentiousness and pride. But the bite that sends the rest of us into paroxysm of laughter generally comes at someone else’s expense.

Fortunately, they usually deserve it.

“A Touch of Humor,” now on exhibit at the William Benton Museum of Art at the  University of Connecticut-Storrs, is a peculiar assortment of prints and paintings that are, if not rip-roaring funny, at least amusing and occasionally worth a chortle or two. This limited exhibit includes works from the 17^th century to the 20^th and is particularly rich in the work of Adolph Dehn, a print artist whose arch, cutting works appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Not all of Dehn’s work focused on fat nuns and dimwitted priests, but that’s what’s on display here and, in light of recent disclosures of sexual abuse, seems particularly pointed.

The line between satire and humor is a bit like the line between wry and ribald, and the exhibit tends to float clumsily between the two. Its first images ‑17^th century French engravings of a Frecnh woman beating her husband and, its companion, a Frenchman beating his wife, are unsettling enough to underscore the disturbing current that runs through this exhibit and its companion, the more sinister “Punch & Judy: Handpuppets, Politics & Humor.”

Violence is a disquieting companion to humor‑ whether Punch is clobbering Judy to death or a lodger is dumping his chamber pot onto William Hogarth’s disreputable English crowd below. No exhibit on humor would be complete without Hogarth, but his misanthropic perspective is so unyielding that it can be souring. Old biddies sneering superciliously at flamboyantly dressed Frenchmen is one thing. But Hogarth scoffs, too, at the prudish French Hugenots filing soberly out of their humble church as he does the black man fondling a white woman. Even the starving urchins ravaging pie crumbs from the street fall under his censure.

Daumier, with his brilliant, sardonic flair, had a far less damning sense of humor. He was helped in that by his brilliance at caricature – and by the era in which he lived, so flush with flaneurs. He makes great sport of one here, getting smacked in the eye by a snowball, but it’s all in fun. One wishes the exhibit had a bit more of Daumier and a bit less Hogarth and Dehn.

Dehn, at least in this incarnation, saves all of his derision for the Catholic Church. His humor is less ironic than sarcastic. Nuns and priests paint in the outdoors, blind to the beauty of naked women or satyrs around them. Two clerics in the Bois de Boulogne attempt to advise two luscious vixens, steeling themselves for temptation or ready to pounce (with Dehn, these things are unclear).

Outside of religion, the most fertile (ahem) topic for satirists is sex and there are a few good representatives here, including Dane’s image of a lanky, maladroit teenager with an equally gawky girl, with the caption, “You Know My Dad Seems To Know Quite A Lot About Sex.” Today, that’s a caption with a frisson of “American Beauty” attached. But George Hughes’ painting “Company Arrives Early,” is much funnier and less disturbing. Hughes bisects the painting vertically in this image of a split-level at twilight. Downstairs, a boy on a black-and-white tile floor calls up to his parents that company has arrived. From the thick-waisted, staid appearance, it looks like the boss in his wife. Meanwhile, following a black, snake-like banister toward a scarlet red upstairs, a wife in her black garters and a just-showered man in his rather louche bathrobe, react with horror.

This piece, like Frank DiGioia’s “Wedding Feast,” which looks like a still for “My Big, Fat Greek Wedding,” reminds us of the great human appetite for silliness. Camp works.

But not quite as well the gratuitous cruelty of Punch & Judy. Nearly every European country has its version of Punch & Judy, which emerged from the Italian Commedia Dell’ Arte in the 17^th century, which says something about the public’s appetite for impenitent villainy. The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry has lent several dozen gorgeous, colorful Punch & Judy puppets, all vividly creepy. There’s Punch, with the pointed Renaissance hat, crooked nose, jutting chin and hunchback, dropping his baby to his death. There’s his wife, Judy, rapping him about the head for the murder, to which Punch responds the only way he can, by stealing the stick and clubbing his wife to death. He then goes off philandering with his paramour, Miss Polly.

All of that might be iniquitous enough – to say nothing of Scott Peterson-esque ‑  if not for the slew of authority figures who try to penalize Punch. The fact that Punch subverts all of them – the cop, the judge, the devil, death and even the hangman – says something about our vexatious relationship with authority. The fact that Punch & Judy has been making people laugh for more than three centuries says perhaps more than we want to know.

 Contact: Tracey@TraceyOSh.com.

Hudson River School’s Unsung John Frederick Kensett

In the summer of 1872, a feverish sense of possibility infected John Frederick Kensett. In what would, fatefully, be his last summer, the Hudson River School painter seemed to perceive landscapes with a clarity and precision absent in his earlier Hudson River School canvases. His prodigious output that summer– nearly 38 works – glisten with a purity and lucidity that borrows as much from the emerging Barbizon school as it does from his own powerfully unfettered vision.

One of those works “Sunset on the Sea” is as clean, crisp and pellucid a landscape as Kensett produced. It is one of three Kensett works lent to the New Britain Museum of American Art by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while it renovates its American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries. The Met has lent New Britain seven of its prized Hudson River School works and while most eyes will gravitate to Frederick Edwin Church’s “The Parthenon,” it is the late Kensett works that should command attention.

That’s not to deride Church’s grandiloquent achievement. The six-footer “The Parthenon” is a majestic achievement, particularly if you prefer your art at high and xenophobic decibels. New Britain’s own, earlier Church, “West Rock, New Haven ” is a far more compelling and well-balanced work, devoid of Church’s overwrought lionization of the Ancients.

But the most stirring works here belong to Kensett, the Cheshire native long saddled with the moniker “second tier” Hudson River School painter. The distinction is unfortunate, but apt. Kensett never had the bravura of Church or Alfred Bierstadt and he lacked the innovation and sublimity of Thomas Cole. But Kensett possessed a captivating sense of the tranquility, as opposed the muscularity of nature.

Even in his works from the 1850s, like “Hudson River Scene,” (1857), Kensett balances the sense of nature’s power with a Claudean sense of pastoral serenity. The crusty hillocks on the banks of the Hudson become curtains that unveil the still, pewter river sprinkled with sailboats. In the dense, richly textured foreground, lichen-coated rocks secure tall, mottled oaks that lunge thirstily toward the water.

This is a more placid, less brawny work than the works of Durand or Cole, nearby. While Durand was able to give his work a pious potency, Kensett’s luminosity, which grows purer with time, reaching its apex in Kensett’s stirring “Eaton’s Neck, Long Island.”

Inaugurated by Englishman Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School saw in the country’s vast grandeur a sense of divine providence. Wilderness moved from the haven of deviltry to the font of holiness. Artists like Cole, and Asher B. Durand, who believed art was meant to promote “the moral perfection of mankind” invested their landscapes with a sublime sense of providence – the gargantuan icecaps of Frederick Edwin Church and the august benevolence of Kensett’s White Mountains – were signposts for the omnipresence of God.

Of course, with that tacit blessing of the Almighty, came a sense of political sanctity. A country so abundantly blessed could do no wrong.

Except, of course, that it did.

The Civil War brought Americans sense of divine providence to a crushing coda. The bombastic, deified landscape not only did not play in a country bloodied by fratricide; it looked ridiculous. Perhaps realizing the absurdity, Church took off for more consecrated grounds and came bounding back with al sorts of images from the Andes to the Acropolis.

But artists like Kensett, and Winslow Homer, whose magnetic “Harvest Scene” has also been loaned to New Britain, stayed put. Like many Americans, he began to search out a private retreat as a kind of balm for the physical and psychic mayhem the war engendered.

That is what brought him to Contentment Island in 1867. Kensett’s friend, artist Vincent Colyer, had bought land along Long Island Sound the year before. The years spent by the Sound had an almost redemptive effect on Kensett; his paintings grew more luminous and limpid, and his output more prolific. His resplendent “Sunset on the Sea,” a reductive and radiant image of the dimming tangerine sun dissolving into the calm, caressing waters of the Sound epitomizes the still, ruminative peace we seek along the water’s edge. It is one of the 38 images Kensett painted in that productive summer of 1872.

In November of that year, as she was crossing a causeway to Contentment Island, the carriage that carried Colyer’s wife overturned. Her skirts were caught in the wheels of the carriage and she struggled under the weight of her dress in the icy waters. Kensett, who never married, came upon the scene and, horrified, plunged in after her. His efforts were in vain; Colyer’s wife, Mary Lydia, drowned. Exhausted by his efforts, Kensett contracted pneumonia. Recovering enough to return to New York, he set up a studio in the YMCA, and died later that day of heart failure. He was 52.

The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art through 2010.

God, Mammon and the art they wrought

The worst that can be said of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s “Faith and Fortune,” a sprawling survey of 500 years of European art, is that it is too big.

The best that can be said is that that is too bad. Everybody should see it.

“Everybody” in this case, refers to anybody who has never set foot in a museum before as well as those for whom the return of Giovanni Paolo Panini to the Wadsworth walls inspires a devotional pilgrimage. That’s because the pleasures of “Faith and Fortune” are multifarious. It is at once a magnificent primer on art before the modern age, and a sobering reminder of the diminishing role of sacred art, which has been supplanted by the ascendancy of the individual.

For that reason, a pithy sub-title for the exhibit might be “How fortune replaced faith as a manifestation of divine intervention.” Or perhaps, “How I got over my guilt over money and learned to love my dough.”

In the scope of 400 years, the individual has elbowed his way first into the artist canvas and, by the end of the 19^th century, conquered them. In the last gallery, filled with wall-to ceiling life-size portraits, the sitter needs little more than a single prop or icy stare to signify his own steely dominion — over his destiny and that of others.

The Wadsworth doesn’t explore this conquest, for obvious reasons. Instead, it sticks to it’s the art, a splendid assortment of paintings, sculptures and decorative objects, spanning centuries and countries for as rich an compendium of art works that one is likely to see in this state. All of them are drawn from the Wadsworth’s own collection, which should make them feel cheeky. Still, what is fascinating is how humility evolves into hubris. In the 15^th century, when Renaissance rediscovered antiquity and thus the power of the individual, sacred art made way for a new kind of art: genre paintings and landscapes, showing individual pleasures and naturalistic vistas. What’s intriguing is how artists convey the aristocracy in ways that aroughly mirror the way they treat sacred figures. Alessandro Allori’s “Portrait of a Noblewoman and her son,” presents the figures in their luxurious garments but their formalized faces reveal a humility and passivity that roughly mirrors the typical treatment of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus. There are plenty of these in the exhibit, of course, but one of the most moving is the marvelous della Robbia Madonna and child with its blazing ivory white against a cerulean background. This is the type of ornament a middle-class Florentine would have in his home.

Fortunately, the exhibit is flush with eye-popping ornaments no ordinary person could conceivably own. There include pieces of porcelain so fine and delicate that they seem constructed out of some confectionary whim, as well as pieces of silver, including one garlanded silver centerpiece, animated with a center tier set piece of musicians playing as in a gazebo, that is worth the price of admission alone.

Viewers are first greeted with the indulgences of the 16^th and 17^th century – scientific knickknacks from the natural world. The Wadsworth has displayed precious curiosity cabinets, including one formidable ebony and ivory one, in which wealthy patricians would display everything from minerals, fossils, scientific instrument, to the jaws of enormous fish or skeletons of ghoulish sea creatures. These are the Renaissance equivalent of curio cabinets, except that instead of showcasing your fondness for, say Hummels, the Kunst-und Wunderkammer, as they were called, signified your degree of modernity, and therefore enlightenment.

There are so many of these stunning objects throughout the exhaustive exhibit that it’s tempting to wish curator Edward Zafran had relegated decorative objects to a separate room. But the further one goes into the rooms, the more canny the decision becomes. These objects, whether silver candlesticks or fancy new telescopes, not only were ostentatious; possession of these things begin to animate the canvases and the minds of the owners and artists. The Kunst-und Wunderkammer in particular sp

eak to the increasing primacy of empirical evidence, a tendency that begins in the 12^th century with Roger Bacon and continues with Francis Bacon in the 15^th.

The tension between these drives – the desire to know by rational, observable evidence and the inclination to know through faith are the warp and woof of the era. So, too, is the issue of wealth and how it reflects, or dilutes the its bearer’s faith. The Dutch, surprisingly, were among the worst to worry about the effects of too much wealth on burghers desperate for salvation. That may be because the Florentines spent so much of theirs on sacred art and the newly established Dutch Republic was Calvinist and dismissed religious art. But it may have been because the Dutch got so rich so fast.

A work like “Allegory of Worldly Riches,” 1600 captivates with its shimmering pieces of gold, silver goblets and ledger books – until one looks in the corner to see the wealthy owner selling his soul to some amphibious-looking devils. Lots of allegories of the fall of man animate Italian painting, but a Dutch master like Gerard Dou can make the point with such subtlety and sobriety in “Still Life with Ourglass (1647) a small horizontal work of an inkwell sitting on an artist drawing, while a the cinnamon grains from the auburn hourglass sift unremittingly in the corner. Art will stay, says Dou, and writing. But what of the rest of us?

By the 17^th century, not only Luther, but Calvin and others had begun to drain the authority of the Catholic Church, but Rome fought back, with vigorous artistic commissions that insisted on the duality of Jesus’ nature, focusing increasingly on his humanity. The Baroque art it engendered blazed through central Europe with an immediacy, grittiness and ferocious humanity. Leading the charge was Michelangelo da Caravagggio, an artist whose insistence on the earthy, crude, dirty, but ultimately divine spirit of man ushered in a new definition of beauty that continues to resonate today.

The Caravaggio the Wadsworth has here is one of the best, and to get an idea of how revolutionary it is, compare Caravaggio’s “Saint Francis,” (1595) to Francisco Ribalta’s “The Ecstacy of St. Francis: The Vision of the Musical Angel” (1620-25) nearby.

Ribalta’s saint is overstuffed and feathery; his ecstasy is crowded and frothy. Caravaggio’s is spare, bleak and and transcendent. His Saint Francis is all alone and we do not see what he sees; only the Angel, whose arms support the swooning Francis and whose gaze, so rich with compassion and patience, is as close to divinity as an artist could reasonably capture. This is a saint who is ordinary, and yet extraordinary, whose sees visions while we see only inky blankness.

Caravaggio was a murderer and a blackguard, but he painted like an angel. The Fra Angelico “Head of an Angel” on display is beautiful and exotic, but removed. Caravaggio bridged the gap between the sacred and secular, and his influence continued to dominate Europe for centuries. Francisco de Zurbaran’s “Saint Serapion,” in which the martyred saint is shown hanging by his wrists in a Christ-like pose, could not have been possible without Caravaggio. The treatment of the saint’s flopped head, his gnarled hands and the play of light and dark on his creamy linen robe, all suggests Caravaggio.

So, too, with the Dutch painter Michael Sweerts, who appropriates the dynamic interplay between light and dark, the inherent beauty in an ordinary boy, a reductive simplicity of composition- all of that is found on his canvases. So emotive and crepuscular is the Flemish painter’s “The Burial of the Dead,” part of his Seven Acts of Mercy series, that one would swear it was a Caravaggio. But the landscape is too articulated and the faces just slightly too obscure. It remains one of the most haunting works in the collection.

The convenience of dividing up these 400 paintings as Zafran has done allows visitors to pick and choose. Those are interested in Italian Renaissance art are able to make a bee-line to the lucidly painted, gruesome narrative of “The Feast of Herod,” by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Or the balletic grace of Lelio Orsi’s “Noli me Tangere,” whose weird colors and dramatic posing recall El Greco. Dutch masters, porcelain and still life is given its own gallery. For the English landscape enthusiasts, there is a swirling Turner seascape and a small but evocative John Constable. There is even a weird Joseph, Wright of Darby that seems right out of Fuesseli. And there is plenty of breathless, feathery confections of French art, largely from the rococo period that encouraged frivolity, lightheartedness and pleasure.

Increasingly, the spiritual is less literal and more suggestive. We’re aware that Louis Leopold Boilly’s “The Mockery,” a coy seduction scene, is as much titillating as it is cautionary. Neoclassicism replaces the mystic with the mythic, but, in the end, the point is very much the same. It is, all of it, gorgeous art work. Whether divinity is its object or humanity is, the beauty and power to move remain poignantly similar.

c. Republican-American

In Gainsborough’s hands poverty looks good

There is nothing pretty about poverty, but in the capable hands of Thomas Gainsborough it could be beautiful.

That facility has not always worked to Gainsborough’s advantage. His critics – and there are many – have accused Gainsborough of whitewashing the grinding poverty of 18^th century British peasantry for the sentimental divertissement of the rich. Still, on closer inspection, Gainsborough’s urchins look pretty filthy and their living conditions appallingly. Gainsborough’s stunning cottage images have viewed seen as exemplars of the rustic idyll, “Walden” meets Real Simple. His peasants look so pretty! His cottagers look so cute! Who needs asbestos when there’s a thatch alternative?

It’s easy to blame Gainsborough for ushering in the cloying sentimentality of the 19^th century, whose overwrought sensibilities are with us still.

So the Yale Center for British Art’s “Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door’” is a well timed riposte to the antics of schlock-meisters as Thomas Kincaid. Cottage doors, this ambitious exhibit reminds us, were not always employed for such shtick. But why they’ve become so iconic is a tantalizing question that likely says more about us than it does about the artists who invoke them. That is a question the otherwise splendid exhibit, curated by Ann Bermingham of the Huntington Library, is at pains to address.

Gainsborough was the first to coin the cottage door as a cultural motif, but he was hardly the last, as anyone trapped in a Holiday Inn can attest. Whether it is fair to blame him for this unremitting kitsch is not nearly as interesting as why the burgeoning British gentry glommed on to the image when they did. Because at the time that Gainsborough painted his first cottage door piece – 1768– the British were doing all they could to tell the peasants they could go to the devil. A series of public acts, called the Enclosure Acts, were steadily encroaching on agricultural practices the peasantry had taken for granted for centuries. With the rise of the British Empire came the notion of private property, which meant that peasants who had farmed common lands for generations were kicked off what became private estates. What’s surprising is that not only that British could stomach this upending of cultural convention but that they would actually want to buy pictures of the very people whom they are dispossessing.

“Sensation & Sensibility” does a good job of explaining why they did. Conventional wisdom has it that the British assuaged their collective guilt because they bought into Gainsborough’s propaganda – But the peasants are so happy, so hearty, and so cute. The British Museum goes a step farther, tapping into the moral sensibilities of the period, and underlying Gainsborough’s dramatic genius with a diverting sidebar on 18th century theatrics.

Gainsborough undoubtedly was in the right place at the right time, but it’s hard to dismiss his stunning facility with the brush, his luminous color technique and the sheer brio with which he handled paint. Gainsborough was a master of theatricality, a proficiency he employed to lucrative effect in his sumptuous portraits. Despite his success in portraiture, his soul was always in the land, an inconvenient affection for as ambitious a painter as Gainsborough who lived at a time when history painting was esteemed above all else. Gainsborough’s cleverness was in discovering a genre that was his exclusively and that married his love of the land with his exceptional portraiture skills. His genius was allowing his considerable empathy for the poor to germinate on his canvas at a time when it was expedient to do so.

“Sensation and Sensibility” wisely focuses on the intersection of Gainsborough’s career and the rise of a philosophical introspection, which, like cottage doors, is with us still. Passion – its genesis, its development, its cause – was all the rage in the late 18^th century, a time of rococo, gothic novels and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The man of feeling, or sentiment — in the 18^th century lexicon, sensibility – was considered morally virtuous. No stiff upper lip for these Brits. The man seen weeping over Coleridge or swooning under a harvest moon — was esteemed for his empathy. “Nature,” said Lord James “which has designed us for society, has connected us together by a participation in the joys and miseries of our fellow creatures.” David Hume argued that sympathy for others has salubrious civic effects. Gainsborough fused two crucial 18^th century movements, one philosophical and the other scientific. Moral sensibility and advances in optical understanding were two undercurrents in Gainsborough’s oeuvre and in his five cottage door paintings, the two fused to produce a narratively dense and visually bewitching artistry.

“Sensation & Sensibility” is built around what is arguably Gainsborough’s most talismanic piece – his huge 1780 opus “The Cottage Door.” The British Art Center has inventively displayed it as its owner, Sir John Leicester did in 1818, under a circus-like tent, surrounded by mirrors and candlelight. The lights here are electric, of course, and so is the effect. Gainsborough always said that one should look at his paintings both close up and far away. Ensconcing the work in mirrors allows the viewer to make that optical shuttle.

J.M.W. Turner, hardly a softie, was bewitched by the work, calling it a painting of “pure and artless innocence.” Is it innocence or is it indigence? The enormous work, suffused with a leafy green forest that forms a halo around Gainsborough’s women and children, is as stunning for its naturalistic detail as for its compelling narrative. Who are these raggedy children tugging on this stunning but distracted woman? As in so many Gainsborough landscapes, the beefy forest seems to devour the cottage. The cottage does not so much anoint the woods as it is swallowed up by it. In the handsome catalog that accompanies the exhibit, Susan Sloman convincingly argues that the women in these images were likely wet-nurses. The gentry commonly consigned their progeny to country foster-mothers who nursed them until they were brought back home to be educated. So, while it looks like the women of these images were frolicking with their brood, it’s likely they were renting their breasts out, which accounts for their abstracted air. That’s particularly obvious in “The Woodcutter’s Return,” a charming image of three women tending to six children while a man returns from collecting faggots for the hearth.

The women in these cottage door paintings are bewitching, hardly likely under such oppressive circumstances. But Gainsborough loved women and painted them with a sense of awe and delight. Even his arch-rival Joshua Reynolds conceded that Gainsborough’s peasants had “such a grace” and “such an elegance…as are more frequently found in cottages than in courts.” Most of the women sit by the door, babes in arm, an archetype that has done wonders for the women’s movement. Home equals woman, equals nourishment, equals warmth. It’s a simple equation that as Sloman suggests, doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Nevertheless, the women in these images have become as much a cultural icon as the cottages they inhabit.

What’s fascinating is that while Gainsborough endows the women with an ethereal, quasi-religious air, the children in the images are bedraggled and drawn, tattered and grimy. For an artist who loved painting children, the melancholic desperation of the children is a key to his sympathies. Gainsborough was not a political man. He stoped exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1782, four years before his death, and frequently complained about the need to do society portraits. But it’s hard to look at these waifs in such threadbare conditions and not see where Gainsborough’s sympathies lay. If this is the simple life, bring on the progress.

c. Republican-American

Illustrators at war with the canvas

Leonardo da Vinci is said to have held that all art begins with drawing, but he failed to say whether it also ends there. Since the 15^th century, drawing, as the genesis of an artist’s vision, has been an esteemed category of fine art, a position that, alas, defied translation in the New World.

Perhaps if the artists whose works make up “Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators, 1850-1950,” had lived in Renaissance Italy, they would not have suffered so much torment over their often bewitching turns as illustrators.

Illustration is not, of course, drawing, and as the New Britain Museum of American Art makes clear, that is part of the problem. The 38 artists gathered in this engaging exhibit toggled between commercial illustration and fine art, often striking an inelegant balance between idealism and pragmatism. Art had grown less pantheistic since the time of Leonardo, and industrial advances meant that art could be reproduced and disseminated with rapacious zeal. For an artist, that meant their work could be seen by more people than ever before. It also meant that they could be seen as sell-outs.

“The National Academy looked down on these illustrators as pariahs, as hacks,” says Douglas Hyland, executive director of the New Britain Museum of American Art. “They had almost prostituted themselves to commercialism.”

Of course, art has always been prostitution of some sort. In Europe it was called patronage; in the United States it was called capitalism.

The problem with commercialism is its tinge of crassness. If everybody likes something it can no longer be the exclusive privilege of the elite few. That is why Jonathan Franzen balked when Oprah Winfrey anointed his “The Corrections” with her imprimatur. Sure, it meant money. But money, to a few effete holdouts, is bad. Anything subject to the whims of the boorish rabble must be, by definition, pedestrian.

Once he had scored with his evocative anthems to ambiguity Edward Hopper distanced himself from his days as an illustrator. “Illustration didn’t interest me,” he sniffed. “I was forced into it in an effort to make money.”

What makes “Double Lives” so scintillating is that friction. Boyle writes that fine art is to illustration what poetry is to prose. But a better analogy might be that of journalism to literature, two genres inextricably bound to illustration. Illustration grew up with journalism. American literacy grew exponentially in the period “Double Lives” examines, and with it came a deluge of newspapers and magazines, all of which needed artists to enhance their products. For artists, like Winslow Homer, that meant a sure and steady paycheck, but the deal they struck was Faustian.

Homer’s trajectory was typical. He began his career as a Civil War illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, capturing montages of war from domestic duress to battlefield exuberance. Homer was brilliant at capturing the emblematic moment, inaugurating a filmic tradition in American illustration that extends to John Ford. But once Homer’s canvases, like his menacing “Skirmish in the Wilderness,” began to sell, canvases began to sell, he abandoned illustrations. Most artist, from John Sloane to Frederick Remington, did the same. Some, like Childe Hassam, scarcely mentioned their illustrations. One is on view here and its graphic sentimentality – a regrettable hallmark of too many 19^th century illustrations – explains Hassam’s muteness.

While many artists, like Maxfield Parish, Henry Francis Farney and Edwin Austin Abbey moved fluidly between art and illustration, other artists, like N.C. Wyeth, seemed fatally condemned to it. A Wyeth illustration, such as the two striking examples from “The Yearling” and “Treasure Island” could add cachet to a volume, in the same way Wyeth selling it could detract from his reputation.  

The dreadful reality, as Wyeth’s wan “Dying Winter” canvas attests, is that the artist’s oils lack the strapping zeal of his illustrations, like his dynamic illustration for “Treasure Island” on view here.

Most of the artists, from Reginald Marsh, to Thomas Moran, to Frederic Remington to Everett Shinn, create illustrations in keeping with their more celebrated paintings. The real surprises here, are the painters like Robert Frederick Blum. His “Two Idlers,” is so dazzling, with its dabs of primary color hammock fringe accentuating the primal nature of an encounter between dashing roué and indolent victim, that one is surprised he illustrated at all. He seems born for the canvas.

What makes Blum’s resplendent piece stand out is a quality underappreciated in illustration that had a potent effect on painting and, later, film: Its narrative quality. American painters and illustrators tune in to the quintessential depictive moment – the second when the can-can girl lifts her skirt and the base player leers, or when the last bison sheds his first drop of blood on the frozen plane– so that the works have a narrative edginess.

So influential was this dimension on the work of directors John Ford and  Clarence Brown, that Brown used seven of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations from “The Yearling” to frame scenes in his film of the same name. That should have been a signal to Wyeth of the vibrancy of his illustrations, but it did not. He killed himself in 1945, a year before “The Yearling” was released, believing he was a failure as a fine artist.

The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington St., New Britain, through   . For more information, visit www.nbmaa.org.

Alexander Calder’s wild jewelry

Angelica Huston in one of Alexander Calder's creations

Nobody could be a wallflower in a piece of Alexander Calder jewelry.
It was a sure remedy for reticence. Wearing a piece of Calder turned one into a mobile, and often into something more martial and primal, a Masai goddess or Celtic chieftain.
Calder, who spent the bulk of his artistic life in Roxbury, was celebrated for breathing air into sculpture, with his three-dimensional mobiles and stabiles. But his contribution to jewelry has been overlooked and underappreciated. A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hints at why that might be. Culling from the more than 1,000 unique pieces of brass, silver and gold ornaments, the Met has come up with a representative sample of 90, the first time they have been exhibited exclusively.
That is more than enough to convince viewers of Calder’s transgressive approach to fine art. These bent, twisted, coiled spirals of hammered metal say as much about the artist’s fetishistic devotion to primitive art as they do about his own pilgrim spirit. Calder didn’t simply want art to move; he wanted people to move with it.
These are sinuous designs that hypnotize you with their enormity and elasticity. They twist and pivot, suspend and support, twist and swerve. Only a few are gold – including a stunning ring of a spiral curling into a double-helix – most are brass or silver and all are bruised by Calder’s hammer. Most were made for friends; although it’s clear Calder had a broader audience in mind. These works, particularly the gifts, are leavened with Calder’s pun-heavy humor, soldered with his breathtaking manipulation of formal images. (While courting his wife, Louisa, he created a bracelet fashioned out of brass wire that read “Medusa,” a reference to Louisa’ untamed ringlets)
Calder’s puckish sense of humor, vividly displayed here with his fish, pig, lizard and initialized brooches, can sometimes undercut the bravura nature of his art. Strangely, in these smaller, mesmerizing pieces, his broader ambition becomes more evident. Whether in mobiles, drawings or steel sculptures, Calder was blurring distinctions between high and low, primitive and precious, art and craft and even surrealism and modernism, whose concepts he deftly straddled.
To achieve that in the international art scene was but no means a cinch, but to do so in the realm of jewelry heightened the intimacy of his quest. This was a man who created jewelry out of scrap metal during the glittering jazz age and put it on heiresses and socialites. And they wore it – even if it hurt.
Peggy Guggenheim, in particular, was an admirer and a picture of her in her Calder earrings, which are on display nearby, demonstrates how overwhelming (and uncomfortable) the pieces could be. Guggenheim poises delicately, looking a bit like she is about to be impaled by their exuberance.
But Guggenheim loved the earrings, and boasted among her friends, that although they had brooches, bracelets and necklaces, only she had a Calder mobile hanging from her lobes (She also had a Calder headboard for her pied a terre in Venice.)
Calder began creating jewelry out of scrap parts as early as 8, when he cobbled together some electric cables he found to make a ring for his sister’s doll. He began creating jewelry in earnest beginning in 1928 and kept at it throughout his career. Jewelry seemed to give him the opportunity to explore the archetypal power of ancient symbols in a more tangible way. After moving to Paris in 1926, Calder had clearly been influenced by the primitive art he saw at Le Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero (Today Le Musee l’homme). He was particularly captivated by late-Bronze Age Celtic ornamentation, which he

As his grandson, Alexander S.C. Rower said, “The jewelry is an invitation to join him in a utopian view that he had in which you don’t have to wear pearls and jewels. Why not wear brass and ceramic plates?”
Why not indeed? As his friend, the British surrealist Stanley William Hayter said, “In the early days in Paris, everybody was wearing Calder jewelry.”
A Calder collar signaled Bohemianism of the most primitive sort.

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