As the Semester Ends...

I've said it before, and my opinion hasn't changed: I've had very good students this semester. They write pretty well, most of them have some idea how to analyze what they're looking at, and all in all they've been a pleasure.
This does not, of course, alleviate the mingled pain and amusement that comes from the strange things I encounter on final exams. Even some of my best students have gotten certain things alarmingly wrong.
I am getting used to the fact that a certain number of people each semester come to the conclusion that René Magritte was a woman and that therefore I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest must be a feminist work.
I was not really expecting, however, to get an intelligent but wrong analysis of Sylvia Sleigh's Turkish Bath as being set in a gay bathhouse.
It is not okay to call collages, sculptures, and photographs "painting."
Frida Kahlo was not a Social Realist, and Alfred Stieglitz was not a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Surely I can cover more than one movement per week without this sort of confusion?
I am a bit disturbed at the number of people who have classified Vera Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Worker (they are holding hammer and sickle) as Nazi art. It appears that even many students who correctly identified it as a Soviet-made sculpture are not familiar with the symbolism of the hammer and sickle, despite the fact that I am sure I talked about this in class. Seeing the sickle referred to as a "chisel" was also rather surprising. I don't think today's youth are using enough hand tools. Even the hammer wasn't always correctly identified as such.
In somewhat the same vein, everyone does a pretty good job discussing Grant Wood's American Gothic, but please, can we call a pitchfork a pitchfork? If I keep reading about how the man holds his tool tightly or grips his tool firmly, I may be unable to continue grading.
I realize that by mentioning these things, I run the risk of making my students look bad, but in a class of about 40, the miracle is that there isn't really all that much to complain of. Overall, I think nearly all of them have learned a lot and I am sorry to say goodbye to them.

The Return from Manchester and the AAH

The AAH conference was satisfactorily interesting, although as my session took up both days, I didn't feel as though I could roam around investigating papers on all sorts of topics as I normally do at conferences. The only time I ventured out of my own session was to hear a paper on Toyen's collaboration with Radovan Ivšić, which was quite interesting in its discussion of the relationship of image to text. Otherwise, I was ensconced in the surrealist and surrealist-legacy camp, where we had a fair amount of Toyen already. (But there can never be too much Toyen, or at least not unless she becomes a figure of adulation like Frida Kahlo, and it may be that Kahlo's astounding celebrity is passing, given how few of my students have heard of her.)
Manchester looks like a place worth visiting, especially given that I didn't really have time to look around the museums where the various receptions were held. The town hall, where we were welcomed by the Lord Mayor (who has bright green hair and exhorted us repeatedly to sample the local nightlife), is an impressive gothic-revival building with a fine set of murals by Ford Madox Brown. I was hoping to see his Work, given that I had just shown it in class, but that was elsewhere and I was too tired to hunt it down.
The Intro to Modern papers have been duly turned in (most of them) and I have begun grading them. Thus far they're excellent and I feel vastly pleased. No one has gotten less than an A. Of course, that will not hold true for the entire class, but it would be nice if only it could.

Papers and More Papers

As I prepare to leave town for the AAH conference in Manchester (that's the original British Manchester, not one of those upstart Manchesters that seem to exist in every eastern state here), my Intro to Modern students are in the throes of preparing their class papers.
They have the option of doing either an article comparison, which is intended to hone their analytical skills, or a research paper on a topic to be approved by me. The first time I taught this class, there were quite a few research papers, some of them remarkably good. Last semester there were not very many and some of those were evidently by students who needed further guidance on just what a research paper is, but there were also some outstanding papers. This semester the research papers will again be rather few, but I think they will be good. I will be getting one on Czech cubism, one on Croatian naive painting, one on the relationship of gay sexuality to the work of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, one on Picasso's Blue Period (this is an alluring topic for students, I have noticed), one on Magritte and philosophy, one on Magritte and Dali (I wait to see exactly where this goes), one on Abstract Expressionism, and one on Malevich and Suprematism.
A few papers will be coming in tomorrow to give me something to read on the plane, but most of them, I am sure, will be appearing in my box next Tuesday.
My Realism and Impressionism students have already done all their papers, while the Czech Modernism seminar has just turned in their rough drafts, which I have not had any time to examine. I suppose I might read those on the plane too.

Baudelaire and Clark

I may complain a bit from time to time about infelicitous things in my students' exams and the like, but really I do have a very satisfactory group (well, three groups since I teach three classes) this semester.
While the number of things I need to get done (prep, grading, journal articles, etc.) tends to prompt feelings of alarm and angst, actually sitting down to grade the second batch of Realism and Impressionism papers has been quite pleasant. Nearly the entire class writes pretty well, and nearly all of them think through the material with admirable ability. In fact, nobody is having any serious problems, although I daresay some of them would like to get a somewhat better grade than they are earning. Thus, while I was a bit perturbed to find that the first two papers I read (examining Baudelaire's "The Painting of Modern Life" in conjunction with two chapters by T. J. Clark) failed to mention Baudelaire at all, those papers were generally all right in other respects. And the best papers in the class are really enjoyable, combining well-chosen quotations from Baudelaire and Clark with pertinent images and supple analysis of art and texts.
This makes me feel, temporarily, content.

The Joy of Exams

While generally speaking, I think it's incumbent upon me to encourage my students, and while on the whole they are doing pretty well, there are always times when they invite their own doom and even (dare I say it?) some ridicule.
I always do a section of term definitions on my Intro to Modern midterm. Define twelve terms that relate to modern art, for one point each--given that these are all terms covered in class and that the book has a glossary defining most of them, how hard can this really be? Yet somehow this is a thing even my best students tend to have some trouble with. I think only one person thus far this semester has gotten full points.
I thought, for instance, that this semester I had really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Japonisme, because the majority of students define Orientalism incorrectly. But apparently I really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Primitivism (also a problem area), so while no one this semester is confusing that pair, most of the definitions for Orientalism are really definitions of Japonisme. This would not be so odd if it weren't that Orientalism is such a major theme in the academic world these days and I would have thought my students (unlike me) might have imbibed the works of Edward Said with their mothers' milk. I guess Orientalism is more the province of graduate students than of undergrads. I will, thus, keep trying to make clear that Orientalism generally involves eroticization of "exotic" foreign cultures, particularly Muslim cultures but also potentially Hindu and Far Eastern cultures. At least, that's Orientalism in 19th and early 20th century art. And it's not as though we haven't looked at a good many examples.
The very term Avantgarde is, for some reason, also problematic. A certain number of people always do get this right without the slightest difficulty, but a strangely large number always suppose it's a specific movement, or that it's "a new country's art movement" or some other odd thing.
And again, despite my continued efforts to clarify the meaning of Nonobjective art, students continue to define it as "art without a focus" and art that can mean different things to different people. I think some of them probably understand the term better than they are able to define it, but very few seem to state that it's art that doesn't depict something you can see out there in the real world. They don't seem to connect it with Malevich's Black Square (which they reserve for their definitions of Suprematism) or with Kandinsky's later work. Maybe I should make them define Nonobjective later in the semester, when they've seen more examples.
Of course, there are always some definitions that are simply humorous.
"Supermatism--It was an art movement that would just use simple geographic shapes to depict their work." I actually gave partial credit for this because despite the wording, it's clear the writer has some idea what Suprematism is. Anyone (myself included) might accidentally write "geographic" instead of "geometric." All the same, I'm envisioning Malevich attempting to depict the Black Square by means of a map of Moscow or Novosibirsk.
I guess Malevich will keep us amused. And so will all that fuzzy-looking subjective Nonobjective art. At least everyone seems clear on what Pointillism is, and nearly everyone can say something reasonable about Fauvism, despite the paucity of references to the term meaning "wild beast-ism".

Diligence Isn't Enough

I have mostly spent my weekend on things I didn't think I could put off much longer: Saturday I prepared a batch of job applications (at least in terms of writing the letters and doing some online applications) and Sunday I put together most of the Powerpoint for a talk I'll be giving soon on women artists and the male nude.
The topic of the talk is one I once researched in considerable detail, but unfortunately that was before scanners were really affordable, so I had almost no images at hand. On the plus side, several of the artists I'll talk about have put up websites of their own (see, for example, Sylvia Sleigh, Martha Edelheit, Eunice Golden, and Diana Kurz). On the minus side, quite a few artists are ridiculously hard to find. I thought Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would be easy given that she did found a major museum, but evidently no one cares about her own sculptures. It's true she wasn't one of the 20th century's best sculptors, but she was quite competent and did her share of monuments and such.
It was this uncertainty about how easily I'd be able to find images that made me feel I could not possibly put this project off any longer despite the fact that there are other presentations I have to have done sooner. So, after spending awhile putting together material on the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London, I abandoned wondering just which Japanese art to add to my discussion of early Japonisme (Lotusgreen of Japonisme showed me some lovely books on the subject over the holidays but there remains work to do) and went hunting the nudes.
Just as I temporarily felt good about getting out some more job applications, for at least five minutes I felt good about getting most of the male-nude presentation done. Then the awareness of everything else returned. About ten more papers to grade. Two exams to prepare. Five Powerpoints to finish for the week's classes (they may be nearly ready but they are not done). A book proposal to complete. Why on earth did I waste time vacuuming the living room floor today? The fur was not quite covering the entire surface of the carpet yet...

Sylvia Sleigh, Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, 1977

You Can Rely on Malevich's Black Square...

... to prompt controversy in every Intro to Modern class. Students generally find Cubist, Fauvist, Expressionist, and Futurist works palatable, but the minute Black Square goes up, a sense of outrage inevitably erupts. How can a plain black square be art, several people always demand to know. What kind of perversity is this and what kind of drugs was Malevich taking that he gave up doing odd but somewhat intelligible paintings of peasants and knife grinders in favor of the Black Square?
That's not to say that there aren't always other students who think the Black Square is a perfectly reasonable thing to paint, or who at least express a curiosity about what Malevich was trying to get across. But the Black Square is invariably the work that prompts a period of confusion and dismay that generally continues with Duchamp's Fountain and does not dissipate when we move into Dada. Things usually calm down by the time we get to Jackson Pollock, whether because everyone is acclimated or because we've had a break in the form of Regionalism, Social and Socialist Realism, and Nazi art. Judy Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom, however, is usually good for stirring up the crowd again.

Busy or Just Wasting Time?

Regular readers might be wondering whether I've become lazy, overwhelmed, or have been taken into computerless custody by irritated rabbits. I am not entirely sure which except that the rabbits have not actually gotten me away from the computer. In fact, at the moment they are comfortably reclining under a chair, having extracted extra petting because I spent the entire day at home.
But it's true I've been spending quite a bit of time doing this-that-and-the-other thing related to teaching, and one of those things has been the lengthy process of making what must be well over 2000 reproductions of Czech art readily available to my students and other interested persons. One of these pictures is in fact now illustrating a post over at A Journey Round My Skull, in case anyone wants to see an early (cubist) Otto Gutfreund sketch.
It has also been my intention, for the past several days, to post the list several of my colleagues have compiled relating to the things tables are used for, but I keep not having the list on me at the moments when I think about blogging. My apologies to Robert and Aaron for my sluggish ways, as no doubt they have been anxiously waiting for this to go online. Art historians have to occupy their minds with strange conceptual matters from time to time in order to prevent becoming too preoccupied with actual art objects.
And there you have it.

UPS Comes Through

Orion examines an eagerly awaited item that arrived for his human today and suggests that its frame might be considered edible. His human says no. Oil paintings are not edible. Paintings are not the province of the lapine community. Especially paintings by and of people we've known.

Portraits--Brief Thoughts

More thoughts on who to have do one's portrait.
Cathy, whom I have known since junior high, suggests:

"I'd say Dali. Melting clocks, autistic outlook, has a museum in Miami where it's always sunny. My kind of guy."

Salvador Dalí, Mae West

Frank, who once co-chaired NWU Local 3 with me, says:

"I've always thought that the men in Bruegel's paintings looked like me, but I don't think he did portraits. (I'm reading Michael Frayn's novel, Headlong, and I think he mentions that.) But anyway, someone Flemish. Rembrandt?
I wouldn't want to be painted by Francis Bacon just because, jeez, think of what I'd have to be doing ... "

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Peasant Wedding, 1568

We still have some responses in line to post...

Portraits--More Art Historians Speak Up

Now that I have a moment free (having turned in the paperwork for graduation and graded 20 of the 70 exams), I suppose it is time to return to the Portrait Question, which has been of ongoing interest to both the art historians and the other interested parties.

Saskia says:

"Here's my contribution to your project. I'm basing this totally on aesthetic preferences, and not on some deep psychological sense of self fashioning.

I have to admit that part of me would love to have a portrait done by Tamara Lempicka - I love the style of her women; they are somehow both supremely feminine and coldly angular. In a similar sort of way, I would also love to imagine myself as an Erte, though that's more about the fabulous and ludicrous clothes. (I blame it on having had these paper dolls as a kid. Or what about the Italian futurists? DId they ever do portraits? I'm guessing no, since they were all about modernism and technology and movement, but I would be fascinated to see what someone like Boccione would do with a human subject. Besides, his color sense is so spectacular. I also like that none of these are what people would expect me to pick. I hate being predictable! I bet everyone would assume I'd say Judith Leyster, who would also do a wonderful portrait. Her self portrait painting is so joyful that who could resist?

I completely veto the following: Cranach (helllo, body dismorphia!), Brancusi (too minimalist), and de Kooning (too untidy)."

Tamara de Lempicka, Young Woman in Green, 1927

Judith Leyster, Self Portrait, 1635

Sarah B leaves medieval art out of the question for once and says:

"I would like either Matisse or Diebenkorn to paint my portrait.

Matisse: I love the way he juxtaposes many patterns or intense hues of colors in his interior spaces which surround his figures. (Though I don't love his odalisques)

Diebenkorn: Extraordinary color! And a wonderful simplification of complex forms with carefully placed brushstrokes of thick paint."

Henri Matisse, Madame Matisse: Madras Rouge, 1907

Richard Diebenkorn, Woman in Profile, 1958

And we're not done yet!

Portraits and Odd Awards

Dr. Zaius, who discusses his portrait choices further here, has also seen fit to give me the somewhat mysterious Marie Antoinette Award. I have no idea what this award was originally intended to connote, but Dr. Zaius claims it is just another award one gives to blogs one likes. I'm a bit suspicious of this--Marie Antoinette?! This is a woman who was beheaded for her frivolity and general bad PR, after all.
I guess I could pass it on to a select few people who might be able to think up political or other useful rationales, like Geoff, Mildly Annoyed Rabbit, and Bikerbar. I mean, you can't exactly give a Marie Antoinette Award to just any blog you like, can you?
Marie Antoinette did commission some fine portraits of herself, however.

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marie Antoinette and Her Children, 1787

Portraits--Cartoon Choices

Shawn, who spends his days contemplating the political lives of the Czech avant-garde, says:

"Interesting idea. Obviously this is not such a simple question, as so few questions are. What am I looking for out of this portrait? Obviously, to have one's portrait from an Italian master would be amazing, and amazingly valuable, but then it would mean either that A) you'd be long since dead or B) some weird x-files shit has been going on. I don't know, if I could just dodge the complexities of the question, and of course dodging complexities are never so easy, I would pick Adolf Hoffmeister to do my portrait. On the one hand, I feel like picking Dali or Picasso would be too stereotypical and easy. After all, I don't want my portrait to be some visual kitsch; it would need some novelty to it. On the other hand, I feel drawn to someone like Kandinsky or maybe even Francis Bacon, but then again, I feel like some visual likeness would be important to me. After all, if it's my "portrait" I would want it to portray a visual likeness.

In fact, that's precisely why I'd pick Hoffmeister. I want the most essential, simple visual likeness possible. Hoffmeister, as you know, had a penchant for reducing his subjects to the most simple traits; depicting individuals with a few, sometimes a single, line. This is what fascinates me most: How could an artist summarize my visual likeness, my caricature, my being, in the most simple, essential matter? What are those one or two visual traits that essentially define me in some recognizable way? I would guess my glasses, maybe my brow, but is that really what defines me? A mere "resemblence" does not necessarily excite me; I have drawn enough
self-portraits to know what I look like in pencil etchings. But I want to see myself with as little baggage as possible, an ur-"I" if you will. That interests me alot."

Adolf Hoffmeister, The Avant-garde, 1930
L-R: Karel Teige, Vítězslav Nezval (Shawn's very favorite avant-gardist because of the beachball-torso effect), Jindřich Honzl, Jan Werich, Jiří Voskovec

Dr. Zaius states:

"I would like to have my portrait done by the wildly imaginative comic book artist Jack Kirby because of his great talent at drawing alien landscapes, outlandish machines and deliciously evil supervillians, especially Dr. Doom."

And still more weird and wonderful choices to come!

Portraits--Writers and Suchlike

Moving right along with our Who Should Do Your Portrait inquiry, Dirk (who actually reads my fiction as well as this blog) suggests:

"Holbein. You can’t beat him for portraits. His people look so
intensely themselves. Piero Della Francesca would be acceptable too.

Two I don’t want are Watteau and Goya. I like Watteau, but all his people simper, and I love and admire Goya, but most of Goya’s people look crazed."

Hans Holbein the Younger, Boniface Amerbach, 1519

Piero della Francesca, Sigismondo Malatesta, 1451

Dirk's friend Larry (we have not met but I think we have both heard various stories about one another over the years) says:

"Absolutely Holbein. His Thomas More (at the Frick) is the finest portrait I believe I have ever seen, apart from the Rembrandt self-portraits, a class of their own. There also is an extraordinary painting at the Met of a young man by an Italian Renaissance artist, and I can't remember which one. It could be Piero della Francesca. On the other hand, the question is about my own portrait, and in that case I might prefer the painterly depth of the great Rembrandts. Whistler would be acceptable, too."

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More, 1527

James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Carlyle, 1872-3

Larry continues:

"At the other end of the stylistic spectrum is the extraordinarily talented Paul Helleu, a high-fashion artist of the turn of the century and one of Proust's models for the painter Elstir. As a side note, I was one of the actor/models in Eleanor Antin's Angel of Mercy, a performance piece about the life of Florence Nightingale. One aspect of the piece was a sequence of very beautiful photographs, mostly composed after famous paintings of the nineteenth century. I was a friend of the family in these photographs and was seen playing croquet, listening at a window as Florence played the piano, and leaning back to back with a painter named Patricia Patterson (widow of the recently deceased Manny Farber). In that photo, taken in the open, I was wearing a straw hat and painting on a canvas propped against a rowboat. Only much later, when a friend in St. Louis spotted this photograph in an article in Arts magazine, did I learn that the couple in the original painting by John Singer Sargent (at Brooklyn Museum) were Paul Helleu and his wife. When I asked Eleanor why she didn't tell me I was momentarily Paul Helleu, she replied that I would have ruined the shot had I known, and she probably was right. I loved the nineteenth century clothing, though I wouldn't want to wear it every day.

As to painters one would rather avoid, include Goya's idiots and Bosch and Daumier and all the great German Expressionists and Neue Sachlichkeit artists -- Nolde, Kirchner, Marc, Beckmann, Grosz, Dix, etc., etc. Also Ensor, Soutine, Giacometti -- in fact, most of the modern canon."

Paul Helleu, Portrait of Clara Weil

Geoff, who is a friend of both mine and Dirk's, says:

"Francis Bacon, because he'd paint me the way he sees me and not the way I see me. And because the result would very likely be uglier than the original even in other people's eyes. But if Francis isn't available (after all, he died 16 years ago), then maybe Daumier. In fact, I think he already did depict me pretty accurately, early one morning before my first cup of coffee:

But if I have to sit (or stand) for a portrait for hours on end, I think I'd rather subject myself to Artemisia Gentileschi.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Portrait of a Condottiero, 1622

This is me after that first cup of coffee, when I've finally got my hair combed.

Thanks for posing this question. The more I think about it, the surer I am that I'd be happy to have any artists use me as a subject, just to see all the variations possible and as an insight into how each artist treats a common subject differently. The artists I would avoid (or put low down on the list) would include Irving Penn and others likely to create a too-glamorous look. Georg Grosz or Ben Shahn would be good, though -- rough and bristly."

And, of course, more to come!

Portraits--Is van Gogh High on the List or Ultimately Not?

In today's installment of Who Should Do Your Portrait, our respondents started off with strangely similar lists but ultimately they diverged a fair amount.

Paul K of BibliOdyssey responds:

"This is all rather silly in so far as me myself and I hardly come into the rationale for my response.

Watteau is because of the white chalk (and I have just spent a godawful amount of time not finding the right example) and because I like the 'study' aspect.

The engravers [Dürer, Hopfer, and Cranach] are (kind of) interchangeable and I like them for their ability to capture detail: photographers, one and all, of the 16th c.

Lautrec because we all want the exuberance within to be made manifest.

And van Gogh to capture (?imprison) all of me. And so I can shimmer."

After further thought:

"It's much more about [van Gogh's] ability to render a character, whichever character (although maybe selfportraits are where my ideas derive from) in toto, the communicate not only their likeness and personality but to imbue the picture with that 'shimmering' factor -- it gives the subject a kind of 3rd dimensional life.

And I guess re: engravers, I think of the Landsknechte-types eg. bold, daring, man's man, cavalier. As I said, they are the photographers (with a bit of editorial input no doubt) of the 16th c. They're stylistic character renderings."

Daniel Hopfer, Soldier and Woman

Toulouse-Lautrec, Aristide Bruant, 1893

Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait, 1889

Todd states:

Not wishing to frighten the rabbits, I am inclined to avoid too realistic an approach to this particular subject. My first instinct is therefore to suggest Jackson Pollock or perhaps Kazimir Malevich. [Editor's note: The rabbits have never thought Todd looked at all frightening--George used to hop forward to greet him--but we don't know how they would react to Pollock or Malevich.]
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913

Among artists better known for actual portraiture, however, Rembrandt would surely have done something instructive, for he tended to concentrate on some interesting aspect of character rather than on how good-looking the sitter was.

Rembrandt, Matthew and the Angel

For similar reasons, I could imagine something appealing by Bohumil Kubišta, though preferably from his early, more impressionist phase rather than from his later, cubist one.

Bohumil Kubišta, Self Portrait, 1908

While Van Gogh and Kokoschka are also possibilities, I'm inclined to think there is too much risk they would make me look crazy -- which might be okay if they were obscure artists, but since a work by Van Gogh in particular would inevitably immortalize the sitter, one would prefer not to look even more peculiar than dictated by nature.

Finally, I must admit to being tempted by Hans Holbein the Younger. For some reason I think the garb of an early sixteenth-century northern European merchant might suit me.

Hans Holbein, Georg Gisze, a German merchant in London, 1532

More responses coming shortly!

Portraits--More Art Historians Weigh In

Shalmit says:

"After our talk the other day, I recalled that Kathy Linduff gave us once in a seminar a similar task: it was a seminar about the 'other', and we were to talk about how we would like to be portrayed. this turned of course into a discussion about identity, and how people choose to show themselves to the world. It would probably be interesting to ask her of her impressions.

I remember that at that time I simply could not see myself being frozen in time for the sake of next generations. For some reason, any suggestion of 'posing' gives me such a strong feeling of crippling artificiality. For this reason, I guess I would have chosen Rembrandt for his strong psychological depth, and perhaps Lucian Freud for not trying to beautify his objects. A naked portrait of me by Freud (I guess that in his case I should not use the word nude), would probably drive away from my living-room all the boring guests..."

Rembrandt, Portrait of his wife Saskia

Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995


Kristen says:

"Probably Zinaida Serebriakova because she does amazing treatments of the 'fuller' female body. Though Natan Altman's portrait of Anna Akhmatova is pretty amazing."

Zinaida Serebriakova, Self Portrait

Natan Altman, Anna Akhmatova, 1914

I didn't really have any Serebriakova portraits of women with fuller figures handy, but I think the Lucian Freud more than makes up for any excessive slenderness in the Serebriakova.

Portraits--Two Photographic Responses

Here are two of the early responses to my query about which artist(s) people would like to have do their portrait.

Travis says:

"I would choose to be painted by the Chicago Portrait Company. I think that there is a certain straightforwardness to what they did. Paintings from photos. How modern. And I also like their dishonesty. The company hired a bazillion people across America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to go door to door selling painted 'portraits in colors' made from 'small photographs.' And the results were quite beautiful. (I am writing about one in my dissertation.) The salesmen sent the small photos to Chicago, where a fleet of artists copied them in oil or reverse glass. The salesman returned a few months later to deliver the masterpiece. Some shadiness comes with delivery, as you were not told the prices of frames when you bought the portrait. Surprise! A frame costs just as much as the painting. But you pay anyway. And now you have something to hang over your mantle."

Alex O. says:

"I always thought I'd want Richard Avedon to do my portrait. His searing portraits of Americans of all walks of life in The American West and, on the other side of the professional photographic spectrum, his work with Gianni Versace in the '90s, inspired me to take up photography and pretty soon I was obsessed.

Photographs who embrace human subjects have to be enormously charismatic, persuasive or trustworthy. 'Collaboration' was a fashionable term, the notion of a symbiotic harmonious relationship between sitter and photographer carried a comfortably romantic connotation. But Avedon took an antagonistic view, claiming that the portrait was a 'contest' between photographer and subject, and that excellence was produced only when the photographer won. He had an amazing ability to reduce people to their barest selves, isolated against that empty white background, and a reputation that apparently prompted Henry Kissinger to ask of the photographer, 'Have mercy on me.' Avedon's images were clear and cruel and so, so compelling.

I always wanted to know what I would look like as an Avedon; I even began to fantasize that I might understand something better about myself if I could see myself through his eyes. And then others, too, could look at that version of me, and see, finally, my depressive, destructive self-loathing. The black truth, brought up from the depth of my soul, a depth much deeper than the size of my body, could come to reside on the visible level of my skin. It would make me ugly, and then people could see how close I was living to death.

Incidentally, one of my favourite portraits is of Avedon himself. It's intense and haunting. He was quite charming and handsome when he was young, working for Harper's Bazaar and revolutionizing fashion photography."

More responses to come!

Who Should Do Your Portrait?

Some days ago, several of us art historical types got onto the topic of who, in the entire known history of art, we might like to have do our portraits. This is a fairly complex question since it isn't really about which artists we like, although that comes into it to some extent. It's possible to admire an artist considerably without having any real desire to have that person do one's portrait; it's also possible to think a given artist would do an interesting portrait but not think one would really care to put such portraits on the top of the wish-list. The initial group of us tended, for example, to think that Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, George Grosz, and Otto Dix were not exactly high on our lists even though we would not turn them down should they ask to portray us.
Alice Neel, Portrait of Joe Gould, 1933

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1967

George Grosz, The Engineer Heartfield, 1920

Otto Dix, Sylvia von Harden, 1920s
I'll be posting some responses on artists people would like to be portrayed by, but in the meantime I think we will start close to home.

Calypso Spots thinks she would like to be painted by Beatrix Potter despite the fact that Potter doesn't seem to have done any lops or spotted rabbits.

Orion thinks he would be better served by Albrecht Dürer.

Architecture, Film, Posters, and More!

Getting back to the more academic side of things, now that Mr. English Spot has recovered from his sniffles (though still has to be medicated, causing him to look at me with great loathing and struggle wildly as I attempt to get the syringe near his mouth)...
Er, yes. Academic sorts of things. Intellectual matters. All that.
Well, my advisor looked cheerful when I ran across her on Wednesday and claimed that since the election had been a certainty, she had been reading my dissertation rather than watching the returns. I was impressed at her managing to pull herself away from counting up electoral college votes to think about Toyen, surrealism, and interwar Czech sex-reformism.
And I wrote up a proposal for a conference paper.
And I am busily preparing next semester's courses, as despite my strenuous efforts over the summer, they weren't actually finished up. This was partly, but only partly, because 1) the syllabus I was basing my Realism & Impressionism syllabus on has to be altered significantly because everyone tells me that undergrads hate the textbook it used, so I'm switching textbooks and adding lots of short primary texts that have given me the chance to learn how entertainingly Stendhal wrote about the Salon of 1824 (I was sitting at my library carrel going over it and thought truly, I had no idea of Stendhal's gift for comedy; he trashes Classicism right and left); and 2) my syllabus for the Czech Modernism class has to be properly tailored to it being a seminar that focuses on teaching upper-div majors how to write a research paper. Um, yes, I will be placing every Czech modernist text the library owns on Reserve for the whole of next semester! And (sigh) a gigantic part of my personal library, weighing no doubt several hundred pounds. On the one hand, I plan to give the students whatever Czech scans I have created for my own use, to keep them from wreaking too much damage on the spines, but even with the help of our diligent interim VR director and her minions, only a certain amount can be scanned. And besides, they're supposed to (all seven of them) learn to research so I don't want to spoon-feed them. (But I can't expect them to perform research miracles either. I'll be lucky if any of them can read French or German, let alone Czech.)
Well, before I betake myself off to deal with the likes of laundry and then settle down to slave over the syllabi and presentations some more, I will direct my readers' attention to my British colleague Owen Hatherley's blog Sit Down, Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy, which deals with modernist (and sometimes postmodernist) architecture, film, design, posters, and other excitements of that sort.

Modernism is Hard

Having finally gotten through the American Art exams--which were very satisfactory other than that many students have trouble getting the ID portions--I turned my attention to the Modern exams.
While I'm sure that things will improve, thus far (I have graded the term definition section) I am rather disturbed.
I think almost everyone has been able to define Pointillism reasonably well, but after that it can be quite the train wreck. I am reminded that last time I taught Intro to Modern, students also tended to think Orientalism mean Japonisme. It is true I talk more about Japanese influence on western art, but considering that Orientalism is such a big topic in other disciplines, you would think people would have heard about it there. Oh well, I will have to stress the difference next time I teach the class.
And I'm unsure why "non-objective" art is a stumbling block for almost everyone, because I know that I specified how it is different from "abstraction" (which has some sort of subject matter out there in the world, whether it is an apple or St. George). I'm especially unsure why several people seem to think it simply hasn't got a focus, or a technique, or a meaning. Still, maybe it's just hard to get used to the idea that a work can be "about" color or form or feeling, although 2008 seems a little late to find this new and surprising since non-objective art is all over the place.
Still, while many people gave reasonable definitions for most terms, I am surprised by some of what I'm reading. A few of the more peculiar definitions proffered by my students this semester are:
AVANT-GARDE: upper crust society
FAUVISM: 'false' movement; artwork focusing on the surreal.
SUPREMATISM: focusing on avant-garde/high society
MANIFESTO: The story and philosophies of a person (or "artificially decorating on the natural image")
PRIMITIVISM: Characterized by indistinct brushstrokes
PLEIN-AIRE PAINTING: a style of painting that uses everyday subject matter
ORIENTALISM: Oath of the Horatii (or, as another person suggests, "Orientation of the picture/painting, lay out)
THE ACADEMY: Liberal art
I had been under the impression that more people understood the material better. Were these people not listening at all? Did they not read the textbook at all? (Where do some of these definitions come from, outer space?) Is it that the class begins at dinner-time? Are people malnourished during class?
I do think that Intro to Modern is intrinsically harder to get a grip on for most people. American Art is, for most of its history, about recognizable subjects. Most people quickly recognize portraits of George Washington, and a significant amount of American art up to 1910 or so deals with national themes. Modernism, on the other hand, involves a bewildering cavalcade of artists and movements, most of whom do their best to make the subject matter a bit baffling.
Ah well. I believe I will do a few other things before returning to the exams.