Lord, Didn't It Rain

Painting in Central Park, 2004, photo by Claudia Bousraou

Landscape painters have many amusing anecdotes to tell about all kinds of bad weather ruining their fun.  Indoor painters in the Northeastern states, on the other hand, complain about endless days of lousy natural light when it is too dark to paint, but wind and rain don’t usually alter our painting plans.  And if you don’t care how much more beautiful things look under natural light, with the dusty air surrounding them, or your studio is in a windowless basement, you can always put in some “daylight” bulbs and paint 24-7 to your heart’s content. 

So when indoor painters go outdoors to paint on occasion, Mother Nature has some special treats in store for them.  Indeed she does.

Over the course of seven summers, four of my old painting buddies and I trekked into Central Park one day a week to paint attractive young girls posing on a rock in our plein air studio near Fifth Avenue and East 72^nd Street.   I was the nominal leader of the group because I booked the models.  I wanted to paint two or three days in a row on each model to get more than just another quick sketch, which we were all doing as regulars at the Saturday morning members painting class at The Art Students League.  I wanted to make a really important outdoor painting with a model, just like Frank Weston Benson did so many times with his beautiful young daughters!  You’d think the other old painters would love to do that.  We’re all old guys.  With the exception of one of the guys who was still working full-time, we had nothing better to do than paint whenever we wanted.  But no, no, no!  “I’ve got to do this tomorrow.  I’ve got to do that tomorrow.  The wife wants to do blah, blah, blah,” and on and on.  

Painting more than one day a week would obviously have exceeded our ability to get organized.  And I wasn’t confident enough to paint from the model by myself in the tourist-congested park.  So it was settled.  We would paint just one morning a week.  And it absolutely had to be in the morning early in the week.  For one thing, the afternoon rush hour traffic would be rough for three of the old boys lugging their painting equipment and wet paintings on a crowded bus, subway and commuter train back home to Queens, Long Island and New Jersey.  And we knew there would be fewer people in the park to ogle us and our fully clad models than there would be on the weekend.  So it was finally settled.  We would paint from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on a Monday or a Tuesday, the exact same schedule we all were used to at the League on Saturdays!  Of course this resulted in ending at high noon when the lovely morning light we began with was now the scorching hot overhead light of the sun, completely altering the light effect on the model at a time when we were just about to put the finishing touches on our masterpieces.  The shadows that began on one side of the model were now on the other, and so on.  What a catastrophe!  But what fun we and our girls had!

Our biggest concern was the unpredictable summer weather.   Every morning at 6 a.m. or so on the Day of Atonement, we all began looking out our windows at the sky to see what Mother Nature had in store for us.  And every day when the sky was clear it rained, and every day it looked like it would rain it didn’t, or so it seemed.  None of us were into computers or the new texting thing, so we were on the phone to each other around 7 a.m. when it seriously looked like rain for the morning.  But not being potato farmers, it was impossible to tell by intuition alone.  So we usually chanced it and were rewarded more often than not with passable weather for painting.  One day our scheduled model was sure it was going to rain, so she rolled over in bed and went back to sleep.  We had to "call 911" to get her out to the park in time for an abbreviated morning painting session, which resulted in one of my favorite sketches.

Courtney F., with our Underpass Shelter in Background,2006

One summer we tried working on the same painting of our models on two successive Mondays.  But the conditions were so different from week to week that it was like painting two separate paintings anyway.  I ruined my best painting because the background foliage had completely changed from one week to the next in late August and it was so cold on that second day that we were all freezing, especially the model and Ken W.  The problems with this arrangement were not all weather related.  For example, my other best painting was ruined on the second day when Courtney F., who had taken an attractive standing pose that I had painted almost to the point of perfection, immediately grew dizzy and fell to the ground, nearly hitting her head on a rock.  I only had the one canvas with me, so when she recovered and resumed in a seated pose, I was forced to continue to work on the background of my original painting while the other boys painted Courtney in her new pose.  I was not amused.   Other models also reported feeling slightly dizzy while posing still as a rock in the heady outdoor atmosphere.  The next year we went back to our usual routine of painting a different pose each week.

Gena Posing in the Rain, 2006

It seemed like we were playing Russian roulette with the weather once a week for seven summers.  We called off our painting beforehand a number of times and had a couple of washouts while painting.  During one of these unanticipated rainy days, the model Gena unfurled her umbrella and continued her pose for a while longer before we all got soaked and called it a day.

Near the end of our seventh summer, we took a chance on another 50-50 weather day.  We set up our easels on the same little knoll we favored most often, a beautiful spot with a couple of big rocks facing each other that we usually posed our seated models on to get either front or back lighting.  This no-name knoll is halfway between the popular Boathouse Restaurant and the Conservatory Pond, where kids sail their model boats and where the famous statues of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice in Wonderland are located.  It was a very convenient spot for us, because the nearby restaurant has public restrooms and the pond has a snack bar with outdoor seating, where we relaxed and ate lunch after painting. 

This little knoll was truly a glorious outdoor painting studio, particularly on a bright sunny day.  When we set up our easels at the beginning of each session, I often said out loud, “upon this rock I will build my church.”  At the end of our morning sessions, I would always look up at the marvelous light streaming through the canopy of trees.  It was a heavenly place on earth for painting our girls. 

Another advantage to this spot was its elevated location.  Tourists walking on the path between the boat lake and the pond wouldn’t see us if they didn’t look up.  If they did, they swarmed over us with their still and video cameras to regale, I presume, their friends back home with the antics of these old painters at their easels, and especially their lovely models posing so attentively.  The young women were not professional models.  They either worked alongside me at my part time job in Visitor Services at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or were friends or family of other staff members.  All were so wonderful that we made sure they were paid well for their trouble.

On this particular morning near the end of our seventh summer, though, the elevated location proved to be our undoing, because we never had a Plan B to escape the rain that eventually came, unwittingly choosing instead the nearest shelter, which proved to be a big mistake.

I felt that I had gotten a terrific start on my painting of Lauren R., who was particularly inspiring in a simple standing pose, leaning against a rock, which seemed to capture her nature so completely.  Al W., a well-seasoned portrait painter, suggested the perfect position for one of her hands and it made the pose work.  I knew this painting was going to be great, maybe my best one of the 40 or so paintings we managed to squeeze out of those seven weather-beaten summers.

Lauren R. Painted Just Before the Flood, 2008

During the first rest break, a few rain drops started to fall.  We thought we could get at least one more 25-minute session in, but it was not to be.  It started to rain heavily, so we all ran for the nearest cover, which was an underpass at the bottom of the knoll, leaving our paintings and all our painting gear to fend for themselves.  The rain turned into one of those impressive summer cloudbursts.  We were huddling in the tunnel with a few others, including a small group of rock musicians from Europe, joking and getting acquainted and hoping to wait out the storm in dry comfort.  But then a torrent of water began pouring off a neighboring knoll, heading straight for the low-lying tunnel.  In the blink of an eye the water was ankle deep.  The downpour was relentless, so we were trapped in the tunnel, with no nearby shelter on higher ground to run to.  The surging water kept rising.  When the rain let up a bit I rushed out of the tunnel and headed up the knoll to see what damage had been done to my painting.  Some of the others decided to wait a little while longer before leaving.  The water kept pouring into the tunnel until our sweet model was standing nearly waist deep in it. 

The rain finally stopped, and my buddies and Lauren went back up the knoll to survey the damage.  Al W. was working in watercolors and his painting was erased completely.  The rest of us had been working with oils, so our unfinished paintings survived pretty much as we left them, but the umbrellas had been knocked over and everything else got a thorough soaking – French easels, rolls of paper towels, equipment bags and ourselves.  The park was a soggy disaster scene.  We paid our courageous, waterlogged model and sat on a couple of wet benches for awhile to discuss the meaning of life, before taking our thoroughly soaked selves out of the park to head homeward. 

After painting one more model in the park that summer, we decided to call it quits.  One of our little band of painters, who was like a cheerleader for these outings, had recently died at the age of 86.  And I got tired of all the weather watching and model scheduling concerns.  But I have never had as much fun in my life as when I was up there on that hallowed knoll painting one of our lovely, considerate girls on a balmy summer day with my old buddies. 

I sang jauntily to myself while rolling my painting gear all the way from my apartment on Broadway and West 75th Street to the bench in the park at Fifth Avenue and East 72nd Street, where we and our models congregated before heading for the knoll.  For seven summers on my way through the park, I enjoyed seeing the same hard-working gardener watering Strawberry Fields, the lawn dedicated to John Lennon's memory just off Central Park West and 72nd Street.  While painting I was positively giddy with delight.   I was no stranger in paradise.  That was where I belonged.

At Our Gallery Exhibition in 2004.  From the left:  Chao-Min Liu, Research Chemist and Painter; Albert H. Wasserman, Portrait Painter; Al Herr, Courtroom Sketch Artist and Painter; Kenneth Wilkinson, Painter, and Me

Quiet, Model Posing

 

Alan Beeton, Artist’s Model Marguerite Kelsey, 1936, Private Collection

Not all artists’ models are created equal.  Those who work at art schools and sketch groups don’t need any prior modeling experience to get a job.  They just have to be willing to disrobe and hold a pose, without moving, for up to 25 minutes at a time in front of a group of rapt artists who consider sketching from the live model an enjoyable and necessary part of their work routine.

The perfect-body police are not allowed in the inner sanctum to muddy the waters for applicants.  Come one, come all, fat or thin, short or tall, beautiful or plain, handsome or ugly, perfectly proportioned or not even a bit--it doesn’t matter to us one whit.  Just be able to inspire us with your posing attributes and you will be accepted gratefully into this slightly offbeat, truly egalitarian alliance of models and artists.  That alone is something to shout about in this culture of ours, which is so insanely obsessed with physical appearance.

Holding a pose for extended periods of time, though, is not easy by any means.  Nor is the ability to maneuver one’s body into artistic poses.  Because of their own disciplined training, dancers and actors tend to make very good models.  Student artists, who know what poses artists like to draw, are generally good at modeling, as well.  Some neophyte models are naturals, and it’s wonderful to see a shy, awkward, novice become an inspiring model in just a few short months.

Other models never inspire artists with their poses no matter how many years they get paid to do it.  The inner radiance of a human soul emanating from the best artists’ models is inexplicably missing.  But the art schools have charitable hearts for the lifeblood of their existence, so they keep booking some of these models, who are dependable and often find it hard to get other work to help pay their bills.

I often speculate that there are deeper issues beyond the modest paycheck that motivate certain people to pose nude for artists.  Some models seem extremely shy about their work, while others are just the opposite.  I’ve drawn and painted quite a number of models, male and female, who are very comfortable “in their own skin,” unlike, I might add, many of the artists who depend on them.  Some male models probably take to the posing stand because they enjoy showing off their muscular physiques.  I’ve also drawn models who take on the work for a few sessions just for the unique experience, including one well-known woman author, who was an excellent model, as a matter of fact.  Whatever the reasons may be, artists who want to continue the ancient tradition of drawing and painting the “human form divine” are forever in debt to our models, without whom we would be forced to copy photographs or concentrate solely on still life and landscape painting.

Today’s artists’ models usually do this work for only a few years to help pay for their college tuition or the rent while they pursue their own passion, be it in dance, theater or some other career.   Modeling jobs are available seven days a week, morning, noon and night, offering plenty of opportunities for models to continue to audition, rehearse, perform and attend college classes.  And popular models are able to get quite a bit of private modeling work from artists who can afford their hourly fees of $20 and up for the many hours it takes to complete a painting or sculpture from life.

Not many artists’ models view the work as a lifelong pursuit, but some ex-dancers, under-employed actors and others take up modeling again later in life as a way to earn extra income. 

 

John Everett Millais, “Ophelia,” Artist’s Model Elizabeth Siddal, 1851

Tate Britain, London

Things were a bit different for the profession in former days.  Artists’ models were divided into two classes – those who worked at the art schools and those who worked only privately for successful society and academic artists, who often shared their favorite models with their fellow artists. The Pre-Raphaelites immediately come to mind.  Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829-1862), for example, was a red-haired model, poet and artist who was painted and drawn extensively by the Brotherhood and became something of a celebrity herself, like a number of other models favored by famous artists throughout history.

In her book titled “Painted Ladies,” Muriel Segal gives a witty but irreverent account of famous models for famous artists, beginning with Phryne, the model for many Venuses in 4^th Century B.C. Athens, and ending with Kiki, the once famous “Venus of Montparnasse,” who died in squalor in 1953 at the age of 51.  An interesting first-person account of modeling for artists appears in “The Naked Civil Servant,” the autobiography of Quentin Crisp, who worked for three decades as an artist’s model in England before gaining fame as a writer, actor and raconteur.

One possible explanation for this caste system in 19^th and mid-20^th Century England and France is there were a lot of famous portrait and figurative painters and sculptors whose lives were considered so interesting that the newspapers wrote stories about them and, sometimes, the models they favored.  The newspapers no longer write about figurative artists, other than Lucien Freud, who died two years ago at the age of 88.

By the way, we all know that there is quite a gender gap in this business of modeling for artists.  The model as muse is a woman.  There are a lot of drawn, painted and sculpted images of men, but they have patiently flexed their muscles for artists in relative obscurity, the self-promoting Quentin Crisp notwithstanding.  It has been my observation that 99 percent of the artists who attend the sketch groups, both men and women, prefer drawing female models.  It’s a bit strange, because the male nude is the centerpiece of many of the Old Master paintings we all revere.  A retired illustrator I knew would walk out of one sketch room at The Art Students League to try his luck in another as soon as a male model walked in.  “I never sold a drawing of a male nude,” Sol would explain defensively.  His drawings always made me laugh, because whether the model was fat or thin, she ended up on his sketch pad looking like an amply proportioned Barbie Doll.

Meredith Frampton, Artist’s Model Marguerite Kelsey, 1928, Tate Modern

One of the very last of the red-hot muses was Marguerite Kelsey (1909-1995), who was very much in demand in London during the 1920s and 1930s.  She would be booked months in advance before the important art shows at the Royal Academy and the Royal Portrait Society.  A former dancer, she could apparently hold her pose for up to four hours at a stretch!  “We’re going to make you tops,” Sargent reportedly said upon first meeting her, telling his friends at his club later that day, “I’ve just met a famous model.”  She became a celebrity model due to her “gracious form,” as one artist said.

Kelsey first began posing at the age of 15, and her enthusiasm for the bohemian art world she was so much a part of remained undiminished throughout her long life, according to those who knew her.  Richard Ormond, Sargent’s biographer, wrote that: “Kelsey's life as a model was a demanding one, requiring her to pose for hours on end in chilly studios, in return for a pittance, but the art world had been her life and she would do anything for those artists for whom she had given her devotion. She was a romantic, a woman of rare warmth and simplicity, who even in old age retained that immutable quality of beauty and radiance which had inspired (Meredith) Frampton and (Alan) Beeton,” both of whom created gorgeous paintings of Kelsey.

Kelsey preferred working with older male artists like Frampton and Beeton.  “She was a friend and confidante of these older painters, with whom she conducted intense, but platonic relationships,” Ormond wrote in the London newspaper, “The Independent.”  But she did eventually marry one of the many artists who painted her.  It was well-known that there were numerous liaisons between successful older male artists and their young models in years gone by.

Kelsey was once quoted as saying: “Alan Beeton was my god.  I was the only model he ever really used – he painted me for ten years, and educated me at the same time.  He taught me how to read and write, took me through the classics, showed me how to use a knife and fork in restaurants.  I owe him everything.”

She continued to attract artists as a model in old age, posing for a seated, full length painting by Peter Edwards that won a top prize in 1994 at the National Portrait Gallery competition in London. 
 
The abbreviated information about her modeling career is gleaned from Ormond’s newspaper obituary and a fascinating exhibition catalogue titled, “The Artist’s Model, from Etty to Spencer,” co-written by Martin Postle and William Vaughn, which traces the profession in England from the early 19^th Century to the late 1930s.

The late Aviva, a Popular NYC Artist's Model
for Many Years

Vaughn writes that models like Kelsey “had a strong sense of their own status.  Kelsey took pains to stress the difference between such stars as herself” and what she referred to as “the art school model.”  That distinction no longer exists.  And generally speaking, artists’ models of today, like the artists who paint them, are well off the radar of public opinion, for better or for worse.

Margaret's Portrait

You don’t get to paint many celebrity portraits from life if your studio is the former bedroom of your one-bedroom apartment and you have to go through the unkempt living room to get to it.  But I did get to paint Margaret Harris there once.

Margaret was a trail-blazing black pianist, who began life as one of those amazing child prodigies who roll out of the crib one morning and start playing the piano.  There is a British Pathe newsreel from 1947 of her playing a Brahms lullaby at the age of 3.

When I painted her 42 years later, she was a powerfully built, striking women with the countenance of an Abyssinian warrior queen, who had achieved a number of notable successes in her career, including becoming the first black woman to conduct such major orchestras as the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Margaret died of a heart attack at the very young age of 56 in 2000.  In a March 23 obituary that year in “The Los Angeles Times,” written by Myrna Oliver, it was recalled that Margaret “played her first recital at age 3 in the Cary Temple Auditorium of her native Chicago. Dressed in a white satin dress, with her favorite doll perched next to the baby grand piano, she enthralled her audience as she played, from memory, 18 works by Bach, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Brahms. She yawned at one point, but never missed a note, and when the concert ended, she picked up her doll and ran to her mother.”  Margaret entered the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at age 10 and by age 12 was in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees.

Among her many career highlights, Margaret was music director of the Broadway rock musical "Hair," for which she played piano and conducted the 7-man orchestra from her keyboard; and music director for “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” first performed in the summer of 1971 at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.

The Times obit neatly summarized her many achievements, stating that Margaret “taught music, played solo recitals from London to New York to San Francisco, conducted the orchestras of 16 American cities and several ballet companies, and composed television scores, two piano concertos, two ballets and an opera.”

When I painted her, I had a strong feeling that, even with so many important achievements behind her, she was feeling a bit sad about life.  She was very proud, though, of having been named Dame of Honor and Merit by the Knights of Malta a couple of years earlier.  And she had some future plans regarding teaching and consulting work that came to fruition.   Five years before her death, she went to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, at the invitation of the U.S. Information Service as cultural specialist for a production of "Porgy and Bess."  And she was looking forward in a couple of months to a new position as associate dean of the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in Lancaster.

Margaret was living with her mother, her guiding light in her precocious early years, in a sprawling apartment complex on West End Avenue, just a short walk away from Juilliard and Lincoln Center.  Most of the tenants were middle- and upper-middle class whites, and she said she and her mother felt somewhat ill-at-ease there from all the inquisitive looks they got from their neighbors.   While I was painting her, she had a lot of interesting things to say about her life and the people she worked with in the music business.


The portrait sitting was arranged through a good friend, Don Learned, a New Hampshire native whose family went back to the Mayflower.  An acquaintance used to call him “The Colonel,” because of his bearing and appearance.  Don was one of the first courtroom sketch artists for television, put to work when he was in the graphics department of CBS-TV.  He later freelanced doing comps and storyboards for the advertising industry and then started his own company supplying slides for TV news operations around the country.

Don met Margaret through a dating service, and they had a relationship for several years.  He knew I loved to paint people and mentioned this to Margaret, who agreed to sit for me informally.  I gave her the portrait in exchange. 

My own natural light studio setup by the two adjacent windows in the room wasn’t suitable for a 30x36, so I turned things around to use the length of the room in order to back up to assess what I was doing.  I painted the picture under the light from an old-fashioned, three-bulb ceiling fixture, which created a pretty nice light effect on Margaret, to be honest, even though I’m generally opposed to any use of artificial light.  I did a couple of other fairly decent portraits under this light, as well, so what do I know.
  
Margaret chose to wear an elaborately designed, custom-made ceremonial gown laced with silver threads that was a bit tricky to paint, especially because of the rectangular shapes around the area of the bosom.  When a friend saw it in progress, he said that area (he used a more precise term) looked “square.”  I later did my best to make it less square, but never did succeed to my satisfaction, having to make adjustments after the fact.  There you go again.  Don’t give it away.  Painters are not supposed to draw attention to troublesome parts of a painting when the work is done.  Everybody knows that!

After the third sitting, I felt I had done as much as I was able to do.  Margaret had posed beautifully throughout the ordeal.  When she took a look at the finished product, she immediately burst into tears and gave me a big, warm hug.  I teared up also.   I wondered later if I had managed to capture just a bit of that shy little piano playing prodigy in this portrait of the strong, independent, accomplished woman that Margaret had grown up to be.

"Santa Baby"

It’s funny how you believe something for so many years and are devastated when the cold, cruel truth of the matter is finally revealed by happenstance, and from the mouth of an artist’s own brother, no less.
 

Anthony Springer, "Manhattan Houses"  16x20" www.mutualart.com

Everybody loved Anthony “Tony” Springer, a former lawyer who earned a well-deserved reputation as the Painter of Greenwich Village until his unexpected death in 1995 at the early age of 67.  Tony was a wonderful, quietly mysterious kind of guy, who played poker all night long, slept until the late morning, and then grabbed his half-box French easel and 16x20 inch stretched linen canvas to go paint the narrow side streets of the Village in the dusty afternoon light, a habit he kept up for 20 years or more.  His plein air work also took him to the nearby streets of Soho and Chinatown, and the markets of Chelsea and Tribeca.  To conserve energy, he took a cab to work, but he walked home after the painting was finished. 

You couldn’t miss him.  He always wore a hat, the same dark gray sharkskin suit jacket, and, if I remember correctly, always had a cigar or a cigarette in his mouth while painting his moody, atmospheric paintings of the old, low-rise buildings and curbside vehicles in the various out-of-the-way cul de sacs he preferred.  His tonalist paintings were all very easy on the eyes, and he made tons of them, selling quite a few through two gallery connections and from his home studio.

Tony, left, and me, about 1983 at the Outdoor Exhibit

Tony lived around the corner from one of the main streets closed off for the venerable Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit in Greenwich Village in the spring and fall.  He would just drag his paintings down to the sidewalk in front of his old pre-war apartment building to get the spillover from the natives and tourists who were looking to buy art.   During one of those outdoor art shows, Tony gave me the key to his one-bedroom apartment so I could take a look at his studio. There was hardly any place to put your feet down.  He had no shelves for his canvases, so he just stacked them one behind the other on the floor and on seating throughout the apartment.  It was an incredible sight, even for this space-challenged painter.  He ordered his pre-stretched canvases, by the gross, it seemed, from a canvas preparer in Brooklyn who was well-known to many New York artists.  A guy in the Bronx now prepares those hand-primed linen and cotton canvases for local artists and a few art stores in the region.

Tony was out painting in all kinds of weather, only taking a break in cold December to enroll in Frank Mason’s class at The Art Students League, where he first began to paint at the age of 40 and learned how to create pictures with a strong atmospheric effect.  He always put a cityscape in the League’s annual Christmas show and sale that month.

While out painting, Tony was unflappable in dealings with those inevitable and annoying sidewalk art superintendents, who say things like, “I have a cousin who paints,”  “I don’t see it that way,” “What colors are you using,” “You should use more red.”  My all-time favorite was directed at the back of my friend Richard B., who was painting in Central Park on a balmy summer day some years ago.  He said a couple was watching him for awhile, and when they turned to leave, he heard the man say, “All the good painters are out of town for the summer.”

But Tony, a native New Yorker and seasoned poker play, took it all in stride, meekly agreeing with all suggestions because he wanted to paint, not argue.  Painting those cityscapes was his passion, although he did occasionally hire models privately.  He sometimes placed a classified ad on the back page of the “Village Voice” newspaper, seeking models to pose for him.  An actress I know, who was Tony’s girlfriend for awhile when she moved to New York from Hollywood, said she posed nude for him once, but only because he agreed to her demand to let her just lie on her stomach for the painting.

I only saw Tony flustered and out of sorts on one occasion.  I was walking with a girl through Washington Square Park in the Village in the early evening, and there was Tony playing speed chess with a loud-mouthed hustler at one of the chess tables.  The hustler was winning, and from the look of annoyance on Tony’s face, I could tell he wasn’t interested in a warm and fuzzy greeting from yours truly.  So we sauntered away, leaving Tony to reflect alone on this particular error of his ways. 

Tony had one other skill that made all his friends proud to know him.  He was a songwriter.  We learned that he had co-written the Christmas classic “Santa Baby,” with his brother Philip, a Los Angeles-based songwriter.  It turns out there was a third co-writer, Joan Javits, the niece of New York’s Sen. Jacob K. Javits.  Every Christmas season for years I sat through endless repetitions of the top 100 Christmas classics on WCBS-FM radio to hear Eartha Kitt sing her iconic version of that famous song.  I’d get all teary-eyed because I personally knew the great guy who had written that song in 1953 when he was still working as a lawyer.

When Tony died he left hundreds of his beautiful, moody gray cityscapes to be dealt with by his mother and sister.  His sister arranged to have Tony’s work shown at the David Findlay Jr. Fine Art Gallery at 41 East 57th Street.  In a press release for the gallery’s third solo exhibition of Tony’s work, which opened on Sept. 2, 1999, the gallery wrote, “A musician as well, Springer wrote and published the song, ‘Santa Baby.’”  So there it was.

Then last year, feeling a bit nostalgic around Christmas time, as I always do, I looked on the Internet to refresh my feelings of pride and joy for Tony’s Yuletide accomplishment.   But to my great surprise, I found instead that the “Tony Springer” credited with co-writing “Santa Baby” was a “legal fiction” created to get the song published.  Tony had no part in writing the song.  His brother Philip explained it all in a fascinating “true confessions” interview in 2008 with the digital sheet music supplier Musicnotes:  http://blog.musicnotes.com/2008/11/26/interview-with-santa-baby-songwriter-philip-springer.

Philip said that he and Joan, who both worked for ASCAP publishing, had checked into the song title with the publishers from a company called Trinity Music, owned by BMI.  At the time, BMI and ASCAP were entrenched in a “war,” as Philip described it, so, in order to get “Santa Baby” published and settle their differences, they had to create a fictional BMI songwriter.  Tony, who was associated with BMI at the time, became that songwriter.   I may be wrong, but I think Tony publicly endorsed his fictional role over the years to aid his brother’s long and difficult struggles over legal and other matters regarding the Christmas classic.

I was astounded by this bizarre, convoluted revelation.  All the added enjoyment I got from hearing Eartha Kitt sing “Santa Baby” over the years was due to a “legal fiction.”  Our good friend Tony was in on this from the beginning to the end.  Well, he was a poker player, so I guess he knew how to play his hand, and nobody ever called his bluff.

Choices

New York City is a terrible place to live if you want to make a living as a painter.  Oh, there are a handful of superstars living in swell style, thanks to a lot of high-end gallery hype swallowed whole by wealthy art investors and collectors.  You read about them far too often.  Everybody else has to teach or work part-time to support their creative habit.

Most career-minded artists want to live off their art income after their student days.  Many quickly understand that will be impossible here, so they marry a fellow artist and move to the hinterlands, where housing is cheap and ordinary people still buy traditional paintings in sufficient quantity to allow them to live modestly off their art income alone.  Some have to advertise their services as painting instructors to make ends meet.   

A few towns that were popular destinations in the early 20^th Century are still swarming with artists, including Taos and Santa Fe, NM, and Rockport and Gloucester, MA.  Now the Internet and mail order art stores are shipping canvas, brushes and paints in large quantities to every state in the union to feed the fast-growing artist population.  It seems most art-school artists choose from the following menu: the New England states for green hills and coastal harbors, the Southeastern states (all those postbellum belles) and Connecticut for portrait painters; the Southwestern states for Cowboys and Indians and deserts, and the Rocky Mountain States for the rocky mountains.  Landscape painters have to decide whether they prefer painting greens or browns in warm or cold, dry or wet climates.  Still life painters can live anywhere.  Having a spouse with a steady income is the general rule of thumb for almost all working artists in America today.  Every year for 30 years or so, I’ve heard gallery owners and artists sing the refrain, “business is slow right now.  People just aren’t buying paintings.”  I wonder if plumbers ever say business is slow.

But New York City is the cultural capital of America, so you choose to stay for a variety of valid reasons, including:  you don’t have to own a car because public transportation is excellent, you are lucky to live in a rent-stabilized apartment, there are plenty of art schools to refresh your skills and you can see great art whenever you choose, except on Mondays, the Art World’s traditional Day of Rest.  

Most likely, though, it’s just inertia.  You are already here and don’t want to risk becoming isolated in unfamiliar territory, where museums are few and the malls rule.  So you wrangle a teaching job at one of the many art schools, senior citizen centers, YMCAs or other community organizations.  Otherwise, you work at art-related or non-art related part-time jobs to help pay the rent.   

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Meeting of Marie de Medici and

Henri IV at Lyons,”1622-25, The Louvre Museum

Jeff Koons,Balloon Dog,Versailles, Stainless Steel,2008

commons.wikimedia.org

Some celebrity artists like Jeff Koons hire dozens of well-trained but financially struggling artists to create the work they sign.  Nothing really wrong with that, is there?  Rubens did the same thing.  On at least one occasion we know about, he had to assure a client in a letter that everything in the promised painting would be done “by my own hand.”  Koons probably has to promise clients that nothing will be done by his own hand, except the signature.  There is plenty of part time work to be had in the city for waiters and waitresses, concert hall ushers and museum security guards; not so much in rural Montana or West Virginia, which you wish were only a short subway ride away so you could paint the scenery on weekends.

Selling your paintings within the city itself is nearly impossible now for the traditional painter.  You can spend a fortune to join a co-op gallery or pay for an exhibition at a “vanity gallery.”  The few sales you make to your friends and relatives at the wine and cheese reception in Chelsea are not nearly enough to live on, but the exhibit serves to pad your resume.  There are a couple of traditional art clubs that have a lot of juried exhibitions, but they are mostly ego-gratifying operations for the members, who pay high annual dues for the privilege and seldom sell any work, although the networking potential is not insignificant. 

The handful of successful commercial galleries that sell some form of traditional art in Manhattan have a certain “look” that they want, tending these days to photo-like realism, which isn’t to every painter’s liking or level of patience.  Besides, they aren’t looking at digital images of the work of thousands of artists who are out there, so don’t waste your time trying, unless you have a well-connected recommendation in hand.  And these galleries pay such high rents for their spaces that they have to take on artists whose work they can sell for thousands of dollars.   It’s “no representation without reputation” for most of the top galleries, especially for well-seasoned painters.   An old friend, Harry B., a retired illustrator who painted and sold quite a few landscapes and Westerns at reasonable prices, said the director of New York’s once-prestigious but now-defunct Grand Central Art Galleries told him, “Harry, we like your work, but we just can’t charge enough for it.”

If you are lucky, you can connect with one or two galleries in the metropolitan region to sell enough of your work to more than cover your expenses so you can identify yourself as an Artist to the world and Uncle Sam. 

As the years slip by, your options become even more limited.  You view New York City as one big assisted living facility.  You never have to mow the grass or shovel snow or fix a flat tire.  And the nearest park bench is waiting for you right around the corner from your apartment building.  Every year you say you are going to spend the summer in the country painting landscapes.  But every year you don’t because you can’t pay rent on two places at once.  Subletting your apartment could get you into trouble with the landlord, and you don’t like trouble in your life.  You also don’t have kindly relatives who own a cottage in the Berkshires that they would let you use for free.  And anyway, you don’t have a credit card to rent the car needed to get from one scenic spot to another in the country, or even to the country itself.  One of your proudest moments was receiving the letter now pinned up next to the telephone on a kitchen wall denying you credit to buy your computer because “no credit report found.”  Now that’s worth celebrating!

You think about relocating, but you can’t decide where.   A little paperback book describing the best small towns in America for artists is an inspirational read, but no more than that. 

Painters don’t usually settle in those little towns unless they have a strong family support system. So, you shrug your shoulders and just keep painting pictures right where you are, wishing the worlds of art and commerce would heed the closing message of the stirring gospel song written and recorded 60 years ago by Sister Wynona Carr: “Life is a ballgame, but you’ve got to play it fair.”

Apples and Pears

Two still life painters who got the picture dealers and art critics squarely behind them were Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Robert Kulicke (1924-2007).  They both had plenty of money, so they painted pictures and sold them just to feed their creative egos.  Not having to worry about money is a very good way to prolong an artist’s career.  It’s an especially good thing if you are a perplexed painter like Cezanne, who jumps from style to style and thinks way too hard about visual theory, but still manages to produce some solid paintings of apples.  It's also a good thing for a painter like Kulicke, who paints pictures of an agreeable pear or two over and over again while in a meditative state.

Cezanne,Still life with Apples,The Fitzwilliam Museum,Cambridge, England

Robert M. Kulicke,Still Life with Pear,1993

www.antiquesimagarchive.com,image courtesy of Pook & Pook

Cezanne was a prosperous banker’s son with a nice inheritance, whose clumsy attempts to reconfigure Mother Nature were either scorned or embraced by his contemporaries, as we all know. The dealer Ambrose Vollard (1866-1939) sensed he had a winner and bought hundreds of Cezanne’s paintings, ultimately leading to his own fortune in the resale of them.  Vollard said he sold his first Cezanne to a blind man, who liked it because the paint was so thick he could feel it.  Impoverished academic artists were soon tearing out their hair and imploring him to take their paintings because they were “much better” than Cézanne’s, but to no avail forever after.  Picture dealers had wrested control of art from the artists themselves.  No longer were the art academies with their annual Salons determining what paintings should look like.  Paintings would henceforth look like whatever the dealers could sell.  

The dealers and their cohorts, the art critics, love innovative artists who can speak and write words without end about their own work, as Cezanne certainly could.  Their words provide the foundation for flowery, hyperbolic sales pitches to wealthy collectors, who treat paintings like other investments, and this, in turn, convinces the generally ignorant public that the work of these artists must be great because, “look at all the important people who have bought it.”

  

Most of the outstanding realist painters of the late 19^th Century, like Sargent, Boldini, Sorolla, the Scandinavians, the Russians and all the Academics, said absolutely nothing interesting at all about their work, except to other artists who wanted to paint like them.  And the public didn’t need words to appreciate their work, it spoke for itself.  But there weren’t that many of these superstars, and there were a lot more painters who had studied alongside them at the academies who knew they couldn’t paint and draw as well, but thought of themselves as more “artistic.”   Like Cezanne, they abandoned realism to explore other ways of depicting nature, no doubt influenced by the growth of photography as a convenient record keeper of the visual world.  Along came Vollard, the Gimpels pere et fils, Roger Fry and Gertrude Stein, and the race was on.  The paternity of famous quotes in the field of art is highly suspect, but Matisse and Picasso are both said to have called Cezanne, “the father of us all.”  That’s the story of modern art in a nutshell.  All the rest is talk.  But be careful if you don’t get the official Cezanne narrative just right in art history academia.

The painter Abel G. Warshawsky (1883-1962), who studied at The Art Students League and painted in France during the early 20^th Century, wrote a long-neglected memoir about his early years through the mid 1930s that was edited and published in 1980 by the Kent State University Press in a book titled “Memories of an American Impressionist.”  For a couple of pages, Warshawsky rails against the hype surrounding the modern art movement.   He writes that one “self-made” critic “solemnly announced that an apple painted by Cezanne had more significance and art value than a canvas by Raphael.”  And he condemns the underhanded sales tactics he personally observed in Paris in the frenzy to promote all the second-rate followers of the Post Impressionists.

Of the movement itself, Warshawsky wrote, “for all its glaring faults and deformities, [Post Impressionism] had brought joy and color into a field of painting that had been degenerating into the cold, pompous and photographic.”  He continues, however, that:  “The tremendous sincerity of Cezanne, which in many cases overcomes his deficiencies of technique, found countless imitators who only copied the defects, without ever being able to acquire the virtues and simplicity which Cezanne aimed at.”  

  

Okay so far, but he goes on to state as fact that Cezanne “suffered from a form of astigmatism that made him see standing objects as if tipped towards him.”  This one is awarded the publisher’s asterisk.  Warshawsky had died 18 years before the book was published, so he couldn’t object to the following publisher’s footnote:  “Warshawsky should not be condemned too harshly for his misunderstanding of the distortions of form in Cezanne’s art.  J.K. Huymans and Emile Bernard were also convinced that Cezanne had faulty eyesight.  Erle Loran has shown, however, that Cezanne purposely distorted objects to accentuate their volumes or to add dynamic tensions to his designs. (‘Cezanne’s Composition’ (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1946)”

Now I should really get around to Kulicke, the other painter I mentioned up front.  While not well-known as a painter, Kulicke was famous for having been a very successful, innovative frame maker and jewelry designer.  But he also carved out an interesting little niche for himself by making paintings of one or two pears on small panels less than 12 inches in either direction.  He also painted peaches and oranges, and sweet little nosegays in glass vases, all in the same format – the objects, alone or in a small group, centered on a flat base with a flat background.  He must have made more paintings of pears than anyone, and maybe even more than the law allows.  I’ll bet he sold just about every one.  I saw plenty of them in photographs of apartments in the glossy shelter magazines in the 1980s and 90s.

I really like Kulicke's pear paintings, with their soft color harmonies, which I first saw at the Davis and Langdale Gallery, located in a brownstone on East 60^th Street. This unique gallery specializes in small works of 19^th and 20^th Century American and British painters, including those of the Bloomsbury crowd.  It was worth visiting occasionally, even though it was a bit too far east to be on my routine inspection tour of several Manhattan galleries along 57^th Street that I kept up for quite a few years.  I remember seeing a wonderful show there of works by the British painter Gwen John, the introverted sister of the extroverted painter Augustus John.   I was surprised to read later that she was obsessed with Rodin, her former lover, and would stand on a hill overlooking his studio to see what was going on inside. 

Gwen John,Nude Girl,1910,17 ½ x11”,Tate Britain,London

When I saw that exhibit of Kulicke’s pear paintings, I felt sure that one or two should have satisfied his creative impulse to paint them.  But he kept painting and selling them.  In a way, they are earlier and far more esthetically pleasing versions of the paintings sold today on the Internet by the “daily painters.”  I think I read somewhere that he painted some of them from out of focus photographs.  Quel horreur!

Now you and I could paint very similar charming little fruit and flower paintings, with a little practice, of course, and go completely unnoticed by the art world.  The big difference is that Kulicke was this world-renowned frame maker, who had his frame business in the basement of the gallery brownstone, and put his little gems in individually created, gorgeous, handmade frames, adding immensely to their attractiveness and marketability.

In a January 1990 interview with Bruce Gherman in "Picture Framing Magazine," Kulicke said, “I am an intimist, still life painter and for 34 years have devoted myself to painting fruits and flowers, often a single fruit. My painting stems from Zen philosophy and medieval art, which is why I have found that 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th century frames are the most sympathetic to some of my work. I decided to experiment making medieval frames as fairly authentic reproductions. To me, the frame is the ultimate presentation, the reward for painting the picture.  I get an enormous amount of enjoyment out of making them.”  I say amen to that.  Unfortunately, framing is the biggest curse of the low-income painter.  The cheap Internet mail-order frames you can afford are so abominable that they destroy the look of any halfway decent painting. 

Kulicke’s exquisite little paintings, with their softly muted, grayed-down colors, were just one of many creative endeavors undertaken successfully by this human whirlwind.  He revolutionized the frame making industry by designing thin, welded aluminum frames and Lucite “plexibox” frames for some famous modern artists and The Museum of Modern Art.  He also is credited with introducing the aluminum sectional frames you put together yourself.  And he crafted reproduction frames for some of the greatest paintings in the country, including Giotto’s “Epiphany” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Not satisfied, he also helped to revive the ancient cloisonné technique of granulation used in the design of gold jewelry, and established a school for jewelry making. Widely knowledgeable in art history, he often supported himself and his businesses by buying and selling medieval art and Coptic textiles.  His many accomplishments were noted in newspaper obituaries upon his passing.

Giorgio Morandi,Still Life,1953

Nonetheless, he reportedly considered himself first and foremost a painter, which he resumed with a passion in 1957 after he framed a number of Giorgio Morandi’s contemplative still life paintings of bunched together bottles, jars, boxes and other shapes, with no surface detail and in pale colors.  Being studio-challenged myself, I got a real kick out of learning that Morandi lived in a house in Bologna with his three sisters and had to walk through one of their bedrooms to get to his room, where he both worked and slept for most of his life.  Morandi (1890-1964) was influenced by Cezanne and Kulicke was influenced by Morandi. That’s the way it goes.
 
I still like the nonsense couplet I composed upon first seeing those precious little pear paintings, so beautifully framed, hanging on the walls of the gallery 25 years ago:  “Paintings are made by fools like me.  But only Kulicke can paint a pear.”