One Zorn is More Than Enough

Anders Zorn, Samuel Untermeyer, 1901, oil on canvas, 102 x 77 cm., New-York Historical Society

The New York Historical Society a couple of blocks away from me currently has a wonderful exhibit in honor of the 100th anniversary of the provocative 1913 New York Armory Show that introduced Americans to Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and showcased their American contemporaries who were also challenging the hierarchy of traditional realism in the art world of the time.  The Society’s exhibit includes 100 of the more than 1,000 artworks that were in the 1913 show, as well as a lot of related historical material to put the exhibit in context.  “This exhibition is an exploration of how the Armory Show inspired seismic shifts in American culture, politics, and society,” the museum proclaims. The 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art” was on view from February 17 until March 15 at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. 

George Bellows, The Circus, 1912, Oil on canvas, 33-7/8 x 44 in.
The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA

One of the small group of American painters who helped organize the Armory Show was George Bellows, who has a couple of paintings in the current exhibit, including his 1912 work, The Circus, a large painting that attracted me for what might seem like an odd reason to most people.  The reason is that above the broadly painted performers and spectators is a large expanse of murky gray that is palpably atmospheric.  It is an absolutely beautiful patch of murk.

Bellows was a terrific bravura painter in his early years, despite basing some compositions on a precise geometric formula concocted by Hardesty Maratta, a painter who thought he had rediscovered the Greek science of proportion through the multiplication and division of geometric shapes like equilateral triangles.  That’s what they say, anyway.  Bellows apparently organized his spectator’s view of the circus performers under the Big Top by driving small pins into the canvas to create a geometric grid.  The subject was a charity circus organized by his wife, Emma, which proved to be a financial flop, according to the Historical Society notes.  “George got more out if it than anyone else,” she said, as he was inspired to create two more circus paintings of the event.  All three paintings are in the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts.

Edward Willis Redfield (1869–1965), Overlooking the Valley, 1911, Oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 39 5/16 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

After the Armory Show portion of the exhibit there is a gallery full of wonderful paintings done by other artists of that period, including a gorgeous landscape by Edward Willis Redfield (1869-1965), a giant figure in the world of plein air painting.  Redfield was a miracle worker.  He took his huge canvases (up to 50 inches) outdoors in every kind of weather and completed his powerful, impressionistic landscapes on the spot in a few hours with thick, juicy brushstrokes and brilliant color.  What expressive feeling his works convey.  In 1947, Elise, his wife of 54 years, died, and shortly thereafter, when he was 78 years old, he burned a lot of his canvases that weren’t up to his high standards.  And from that point on he painted a lot less often into the 1950s and took to making furniture and other crafts in his last years.  He made it to 96.

The New York Historical Society, founded in 1804, is the oldest museum in the city.  It has changed greatly since the early 1980s, when I frequently roamed the dusty and unpopulated galleries to look at its impressive collection of Hudson River School paintings, Audubon watercolors and the 19th Century plaster sculptures of Civil War scenes and daily life executed by John Rogers, who was hugely popular in his day.  The museum is now a greatly enhanced, modern museum with a fine store, a fancy restaurant and other modern conveniences, including a slickly produced website.  And there’s now a hefty $14 entrance fee.  I think it used to be free or a dollar or two to get in.  I can’t remember.

Théobald Chartran (French, 1849 –1907), James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), 1901, Oil on canvas. New York Historical  Society

Before I left the museum on a recent Sunday afternoon I went to a long gallery on the first floor to look at yet another magnificent exhibit, especially for this old lapsed portrait painter, a treasure trove of portraits from the Gilded Age in the Historical Society’s collection done by artists such as John Singer Sargent, James Carroll Beckwith, their teacher Carolus-Duran, George Peter Alexander (G.P.A.) Healy, Daniel Huntington, Eastman Johnson, Léon Bonnat, Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, and Théobald Chartran.  The Sargent wasn’t one of his best, but still a pleasure to see. 

George Peter Alexander Healy (1813 –1894), Emma Cecilia Thursby (1845-1931), 1879. Oil on canvas. New York Historical Society

Some years ago, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the biography of the prodigious G.P.A. Healy, written by a granddaughter. He enjoyed enormous fame as a portrait painter, supported a large family, and endured many trials and tribulations along the way.  He painted just about everybody you ever heard of in the mid-19th Century, both in Europe and America.  Well, that’s not quite true, but he produced more portraits than any other artist of his day -- over 600.  His last recorded words, uttered when his eldest daughter asked him if he was comfortable as he lay dying, were, “Yes, and happy -- so happy!”

And so was I, all by myself on a recent Sunday afternoon at the New York Historical Society, finishing off my visit in grand style by spending a lot of time with these superb portraits.  But the best was yet to come.

As I made my usual way around the long gallery, from left to right, and was nearing the end of the exhibit, I came across the star of all the paintings on any floor of the Historical Society that day.  It was a breathtakingly lifelike portrait by the incomparable Anders Zorn.  His portrait of the lawyer Samuel Untermeyer was absolutely brimming with life.  I took a seat on the bench opposite for 10 to 15 minutes or more, transfixed by the magical power of oil paint in the hands of a preeminent master of the medium.  Of course other visitors to the exhibit walked right by the Zorn with barely a glance at the label on the wall.  How could they be expected to know what was signified here if they hadn't created at least a tiny bit of this same magic themselves?

Yes, one Zorn was definitely more than enough!

The Insignificance Blues

Is there anything more insignificant on God’s green earth than the life of an old painter who can’t sell his paintings?  What possible excuse can he give for his existence?  Many of my painter friends, who are in the same boat as I am, say with conviction that they don’t care if they sell their paintings or not.  “I’m painting for myself,” they chorus.  Aren’t we a selfish, self-involved lot!

The truth is we simply can’t sell our paintings, and can’t even give them away to our relatives because nobody wants paintings from a painter who can’t sell his paintings.   Don’t you just love reading those incredible stories in the art magazines about all the 20-something painters who sell everything hanging on the gallery walls at their very first solo exhibitions? How do they manage that?  How many rich uncles do they have?  I sold quite a few paintings at my first solo exhibit, but it was far from a sold out show.  It was at a startup gallery in New Jersey run by a prickly woman of means who closed shop in a couple of years after she had exhausted the goodwill art purchases of all her friends in the area.  As a matter of fact, the only galleries I approached that I could get into at the beginning were startups that didn’t last long, because a gallery owner’s life is not so attractive when sales dwindle after the first few exhilarating months in business.  Now my friends and I are hoping for someone on a white horse to do the marketing for us.  That just isn’t going to happen. 

People still like to be entertained by hand-made art and artists, though, despite living in a digital world, so the art market is fertile ground for the few entrepreneurs who know how to promote their creative enterprises in outrageous fashion.  I was walking on East 23rd Street the other day when a huge crowd of excited onlookers was gathered in front of the storefront window of a Housing Works thrift shop around 3 p.m.  Mostly made up of young people, the assemblage was deliriously happy about something.  Many were taking pictures of the window display with their cellphones and digital cameras.  I couldn’t see any reason for this activity, so I asked one of the onlookers at the back of the crowd what was going on.  He said, “Banksy.”  I said, “What?”  He said, “Banksy.”  I said, “Oh, yeah,” vaguely remembering that this temporarily notorious British street artist was creating quite a stir in New York at the time.  I continued walking, not knowing or caring what Banksy had perpetrated in that window display and feeling quite smug and superior to that idiotic mob’s reverence for celebrity.  But I discovered later while viewing a hastily constructed Banksy website called “Better Out than In” that he had actually done something quite funny with this particular prank in his October “artists street residency” invasion of the city, which included placing high-profile graffiti on various buildings and wrangling an Op-Ed piece in the eagerly complicit New York Times that disclosed his negative opinion of the new World Trade Center building. Wasn’t everybody simply dying to get his opinion on the matter?  The Times certainly thought so.  Attention must be paid, boys and girls.

A thrift store painting vandalized then re-donated to the thrift store. 

Banksy, 'The banality of the banality of evil ' Oil on oil on canvas, 2013

One World Trade Center

For the more traditional approach to fame and fortune in the art world, it helps greatly to be young and full of yourself if you are going to attempt to sell your oil paintings on your own.  Most gallery owners in New York are wealthy and full of themselves also, so they respond positively to those artists who are a lot like they themselves.  Otherwise, it helps to be wealthy or a Yale graduate to begin with.  That usually opens a lot of gallery doors for your paintings.  Teachers of art sometimes get recommendations to galleries in the hinterlands from their well-heeled students who buy into their confident approach to picture-making.  I don’t know of a single contemporary artist who would be in a well-known gallery in New York City on the obvious strength of his work alone if it were to be adjudicated by a panel of his peers.  And that’s the truth!

The route to a gallery connection in this great city of financial greed incarnate is littered with the bones of artists at all skill levels who are routinely tossed aside for a number of reasons, including the undeniable fact that most gallery owners find you incredibly boring and your work impossible to hype.  The quality of the painting is a secondary consideration for most gallery owners, who approach the business like a branch of the home decorating industry.  Very few gallery owners are able to stay in business selling paintings that they themselves truly love and choose to show on their walls, whether they sell like hotcakes or not.  I did know one gallery owner like that myself.  What a shame, for me, that he’s no longer in business.

There are a lot of ways to sell paintings on your own without some of the aforementioned improper credentials, but as you get older, the auxiliary work gets harder and you just want to spend your remaining time painting.  It takes great stamina to drive for hours in a van loaded with paintings to sell one or two at a weekend outdoor art show that cost you $400 to enter, especially if you don’t own a van.  And who wants to vacuum the apartment and set out crudités and wine just to have a home show to sell one or two paintings?  Who wants to pack and ship paintings you sell for a few bucks on eBay?  Who wants to email digital images to 1,000 art galleries in America that show similar work, because, if by some chance they might be interested, you would have to carefully pack and ship paintings to them at your own considerable expense and effort, with no guarantee your paintings will sell in the first place?  Who wants to move to some little touristy town where you don’t know anybody in order to open up your own storefront gallery at considerable cost of time and money?  Who wants to take time from painting when you are finally getting to understand a little bit about how it’s done?  Remember Renoir’s last recorded words, “I think I learned something today.”  That’s what painting boils down to for many of us old-timers who refused to pander to the art market in our younger days. 

But like everything else in this American life, youth must be served.   Whenever my mind drifts to this subject, I recall Noel Coward’s great song lyric, “Why sit and fret, daily regret, things that have gone before.  There’s a younger generation, knock, knock, knocking at the door.”

We take some dubious comfort from knowing that the brains of most artists are not hard-wired to the business of business.  We are reminded of this every time sympathetic friends kindly praise our paintings to the skies.  “Your work is so good, you should have a show,” they say.  And we say, “Yeah, sure, but who’s going to make that happen for us?”

What Sargent Exhibit!?

John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Hugh Jackson, 1907, Oil on Canvas, 58 x 39 in., Private Collection

I recently saw many examples of the best work of John Singer Sargent, my favorite painter, in an exhibition in New York City that hardly anybody knows about.  More than 40 oil paintings, watercolors and drawings are currently on view in an elegant brownstone on East 70^th Street just a few doors down from the Frick.   Usually, crowds are lined up around the block to view a Sargent exhibit, but when I walked up the steps to the first-floor gallery on opening day I was the only visitor to the exhibition.  I was greeted very warmly by several staff members, including one attractive young woman who shared some information with me about Sargent and the unheralded exhibit itself.  Almost all of the works are in private collections and about a third of them are available for purchase.  

At first I thought the staff might have incredulously mistaken me for the client they were expecting to arrive shortly, until I learned that the same warm reception was afforded to all the starving artists I later told about the exhibit.  “Tell all your friends.” I was advised.  And I was happy to be the bearer of such good tidings to all I encountered in the following days.  It was the first decent scoop I’ve had since my journalism days 35 years ago.  Not only was the reception uncharacteristically welcoming for a New York City gallery, all visitors of no account, financially speaking, are gifted with the gallery’s beautiful hardcover exhibit catalogue!  Incredible!

I learned about the exhibit while perusing one of those glossy art magazines at the local Barnes and Noble.  The magazine featured the exhibit in a cover story that told you all you wanted to know about the exhibit except the address of the gallery, which I was unfamiliar with.   I confirmed this fact with a fellow browser, a tall, lanky, long-haired, globe-trotting plein-air artist from the Netherlands by the name of George America.  Mr. America was as puzzled as I was.  But at least the gallery listed its website address on its two-page ad in the magazine, which I eagerly looked up when I got home.

So there you are.   A little serendipity cheers the cloudy existence of this woebegone New York City painter.

Oh, and by the way, the magnanimous gallery that is spreading such low-key goodwill among my fellow urban artists is Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, LLC.  You could look it up.

Young Girl Wearing a White Muslin Blouse, 1885, Oil on Canvas, 19 ½ x 15 in., Private Collection

Charlotte Cram, 1900, Oil on Canvas, 34 ¾ x 24 in., Private Collection

John Ridgely Carter, 1901, Oil on Canvas, 33½ x 26½ in., Private Collection

Venetian Wineshop, 1902, Oil on Canvas, 21x27½ in., Private Collection

Edwin Booth, 1890, Oil on Canvas, 87½ x 61¾ in, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Siesta (Group with Parasols), 1905, Oil on Canvas, 22 3/8 x 28 5/8 in., Private Collection

The Siesta, Watercolor, 1905, 14 x 20 in., Private Collection

Venetian Interior (A Spanish Interior, The Wine Shop), 1902-03, Watercolor, 22 ½ x 18 in., Private Collection

Peter Harrison Asleep, 1905, Watercolor, 12 x 18 in., Private Collection

To Arms!

Edmund Blair Leighton, To Arms!, Oil on Canvas, 1888, 60 x 41½ in., Private Collection

The outstanding medievalist painting shown above by the lesser known of the two Leightons, Edmund Blair Leighton, just sold for $485,000 at Christie’s auction of 19th Century Art this week in New York.  I thought this exquisitely crafted painting was executed by Frederic, Lord Leighton when I saw it on the wall at Christie’s on Sunday.  So did my painter friend, Michelle, until she checked the name more closely.   I wonder if I’ve always thought works of this quality, featuring handsome knights and beautiful damsels, were done by the extremely well-known Lord Leighton, neglecting to see beyond the last name.  I should know better, I guess.  But you know, years ago I might have been exposed to that distinction.  And it’s important to point out that I don’t remember everything I once thought I knew.  Very little has been retained, as a matter of fact.

This confusion over the two Leightons is not that uncommon today, since little biographical information is available about Blair Leighton.  Lord Leighton, on the other hand, was a President of the Royal Academy and received a lot of public attention as the leading Victorian academic painter of his day.  He associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and lived in a grand manner.  Blair Leighton, however, was also a big hit with the public in his lifetime, and reproductions of his romantic, anecdotal paintings of medieval life entered countless households.  A Christie’s expert cleared up some of our confusion and told us the two Leightons were not related.  The rest is Google history.  Blair Leighton was never made a Royal Academician, despite exhibiting 66 paintings at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions for 42 years, including some of the most popular paintings of the day.  That’s the way it goes sometimes.

Michelle and I both had great fun poring over the exquisite details of this painting, To Arms!” Sweet bridal hymn, that issuing through the porch is rudely challenged with the cry 'to arms!’  What a bummer!  The wedding day was grand, we can imagine, but there will be no wedding night for this handsome couple.  Truthfully, the lovely, flaxen-haired bride doesn’t look as downhearted as the groom does.  There’s no doubt that he is pretty distressed by this inopportune intrusion on his nuptial day.  The young couple’s parents pictured behind them are also quite concerned, although in a “stiff upper lip” British manner, it seems to me.  That knight in armor bearing the marching orders is definitely psyched for battle.  All the details in this painting are extremely well drawn and painted, from the flowers strewn in the foreground to the onlookers peering from their windows across the way in the background.  The story is clear to any viewer of this painting, which is a genre masterpiece. 
  

Edmund Blair Leighton, The End of the Song, Oil on Canvas, 1902, 50.6 x 58 in., Private Collection

Edmund Blair Leighton

Frederic, Lord Leighton

Frederic, Lord Leighton, Flaming June, 1895, Oil on Canvas, 47 3/8 x 47 3/8 in., Museum of Art of Ponce (Puerto Rico)

Neither of the Leightons left diaries for later generations to explore.  Edmund Blair Leighton (1852-1922), the son of a painter, was married and had a son and a daughter.  The son also became a painter.  Blair Leighton trained in London, where he lived all his life, it seems, and apparently was a normal sort of guy.  That’s one of the reasons fame tilted greatly in the direction of Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896).  But Lord Leighton’s treatments of often similar historical themes are less anecdotal and detail oriented, and consequently more aesthetically pleasing, in the long run, it seems to me, now that I’m paying attention. 

Lord Leighton (1830-1896), who was also an excellent sculptor, was a cosmopolitan bachelor who trained on the continent and hobnobbed with a lot of celebrity artists in his day.  He might have had an illegitimate child with one of his models, and was a suspected but unproven homosexual, having a long relationship of some sort with an older poet, Henry William Greville.  Par for the course in Victorian England, one is led to believe.  Lord Leighton, who was knighted in 1878, was created a baronet in 1896 and died the day after of a heart attack.  He thus has the two uncommon distinctions of being the first painter to be granted a peerage as well as being the bearer of the shortest-lived one in history.  That’s the kind of stuff the public likes to read about in the papers.