Dedication Does Not a Genius Make: John Taylor Arms At the National Gallery

"The Gothic Spirit of John Taylor Arms"
At the National Gallery
Through November 27th

I started the following review in an email to the painter/etcher Bill Murphy, with whom I share an enthusiasm for printmakers past and present.  Over the years, he and I have compared notes on artists we like and dislike.  In times past, our dialogues were just that: phone conversations that were cheerily without beginning or end.  Nowadays, we reserve our reflections for the screens at which the vast majority of the population stares for a certain portion of each day.  The subject is a John Taylor Arms exhibit at the National Gallery, which I attended on August 14th, 2011.

Dear Bill:

After I finished with the first, and most comfortable, leg of a run yesterday, I popped into the National Gallery where I saw that a John Taylor Arms exhibit was in progress.  An image I had never seen before was enlarged and served as an emblem of what Arms could do.  It's called "Cobwebs" and shows the Brooklyn Bridge rising over the Lower Manhattan of 1920.  What was most striking about it, to me, was the sweep of the thing; it encompassed a wide-angled view of an uphill street, down which you, the viewer, could walk toward the bridge.  On either side was the vernacular architecture city planners have dedicated themselves to obliterating (and done a pretty good job.)  Its spatial integrity was a thing to behold.  I practically ran the length of the West Building to see it.

As it turned out, no image, in my opinion, surpassed Cobwebs - though I liked most of 'em well enough.  Have you seen many of his etchings - I mean, in the raw, in situ, in plain sight?  I hadn't, and it was an eye-opener.  They're a lot more pedestrian than I would have thought: and they were conceived in the most plodding sort of way - though I understand Arms was an architect before he became an etcher and that would account for the severely linear drawings that became "blueprints" for his etchings.  His subjects are extremely conventional.  He breaks away from them only now and then.  Yet even when he doesn't, he's able to pull off occasionally spectacular results.  But I was, for the most part, disappointed. 

The curator had decided to trot out etchings of friends and contemporaries, including Kerr Eby - whom I've always liked - and Samuel Chamberlain, who's work is congenially accomplished.  Gerald Geerling's work was included the final guest etcher, with a piece that was vaguely reminiscent in its somewhat idealized monumentality to the work of Hugh Ferries.  Geerlings was also an architect and lived for a hundred years. 
All in all, I think Arms' American section was best.  He did a corking view of 42nd Street looking from the northern flank of the Public Library toward the West side.  At the time, an elevated train - encased in one of those magnificent sidings - ran along Sixth Avenue.  I could live with that etching.  (He did the same view at night.  Ditto.)

(After sending these reflections off to Bill, I finished my little review, as I have all the others, with a sort of imaginary (or no) audience in mind.)

Of special interest were the visitor catalogues which Arms' friends and colleagues enriched with drawings and doggerel.  Painter Louis Mora sketched Rembrandt sitting at an easel.  Samuel Chamberlain drew an enticing tableau that expressed the virtues of his adopted homeland while stressing that a vacation there was absolutely essential.  (Chamberlain was a lifelong Francophile and bon vivant.  If you ever want to come back and be somebody other than yourself - assuming you are allowed such a choice - you could do worse than Samuel Chamberlain.)  Other, equally compelling sketches by artists whose names I don't remember grace its many pages - which cannot be seen unless you have the book in hand.  Even Helen Keller signed - with the overlarge script that is possibly common to sightless people. 

I don't know about you, O elusive reader of these pages, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the genteel bohemia between the war years.  At the time, illustration work was plentiful, the choicest assignments were in New York, and all sorts of people clustered around the agencies and art editors who would provide it.  From that fertile ground sprang, not only a collective effort such as we see now in the movies, but a camaraderie based on shared objectives and somewhat outre livelihoods.  It would be naive to say that artists, or artist-types, have a monolopy on bonhomie, but these folk seemed to be as genuinely convivial as one, in a sanguine mood, might want them to be.  Of course, a certain measure of prosperity was partly responsible for this generosity of spirit.  After the boom years of the Twenties, a lot of illustrators fell on hard times.  Those who managed, however, were not going to let an economic depression get them down and partied, with a calculated frenzy, throughout it. 

Such guest-books are artifacts of that period - and of that spirit - which I have no doubt sentimentalized. 

John Taylor Arms believed in craftsmanship, which he replicated in his own work.  At times, he narrowed his focus to a single artifact and produced strikingly elegant imagery.  Gargoyles were made to function, on a cathedral's facade, as water-spouts.  Arms felt they needed a portfolio of their own and made one.  Few architectural elements have been so obsessively rendered.  In Arms' hands, they are starkly beautiful.  If someone ever asks me what a gargoyle looks like, I'll try to find one of these pictures; they show the surface appearance of these ghoulish creatures as definitively as binocular vision can.  However, compare Charles Meryon's darkly sinister interpretation of the same subject and you'll see the difference between poetry and replication.

With the cathedrals themselves, Arms outdid himself - though I can't say that I was moved by any of them.  I think Monet's Chartres is vastly overrated - or at least overexposed - but its detail-dissolving, light-filled volumes say as much about old ragged stone as Arms ever did.  A somewhat less celebrated, but  mercurically gifted, English printmaker, Muirhead Bone, gets at the underlying structure of a cathedral (or railway station) and makes us see the whole thing rather than so many parts squeaking around, as Arms does.  If I may be so harsh, visually illiterate people enjoy the clustering of so-called detail, which impresses them - as everything that involves painstakingly, but often gratuitous, industry does.  But art is about isolating certain ingredients and making them hold up a wall, keep a sullen arch from caving in, give a pediment an absolute authority over subordinate things.  Arms just gives you everything and hopes you can sort it all out yourself.  His is not an artist's point of view; it's an inclusivist's.  Or, rather, archivist's.  Arms is the fanatical zookeeper who knows every tadpole in the pond and has a name for each one.

Ultimately Arms will answer for his plodding industry, which doesn't work nearly as well as Stow Wegenroth's, for example.  Or, more obviously, Andrew Wyeth's.  Arms was an architectural ecstatic whose major contribution was to replicate the pious dedication and enduring craftsmanship of the anyonymous folk who raised the cathedrals that are among the world's most spectacular monuments to the simple faith of a community.  That's nothing to sneeze at, but it doesn't go far enough.  One may be endlessly dedicated without producing much of any value.  Basements and attics are full of such stuff.  Arms and some of his colleagues, including Samuel Chamberlain, remind us of a heritage that must always accompany us through whatever social or political upheavals we temporarily endure.  They reflect and embody our capacity for transcendance - which is no small thing.  Arms was genuinely enthralled by what the human race can do when it reaches beyond itself.   And while his imagery shows what man, when synthesizing matter and spirit, can do, he rarely "gets there" himself.  If nothing else, Arms' dedication demonstrates that dedication, while admirable in and of itself, isn't enough.

Go the National Gallery webiste (http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/) for more information.

Re: "To Make a World: George Ault and 1940's America"

"To Make a World: George Ault and 1940's America"
American Museum
Through September 5th

Part One

In some cases, it isn't necessary to see work that is not likely to look better in the third dimension than it does in the second, so I'm going to commit the hersesy of reviewing a show entirely from photographs and standing by it.  I acknowledge the possible wrongheadedness of such an approach.  At worst, it is hubristic, somewhat lazy, and arrogantly self-assured; it best, it's a very neat little shot in the dark that could very well hit home. 

I allude to the Russell's Corner's paintings of George Ault, a little-known lyricist/precisionist/primitive who moved to the town of Woodstock, New York to be with pretty much everybody else on the New York art scene of that day.  Edward Hopper wasn't there, but he had a sweet little setup on Washington Square and, during the summer months, Truro, Massachusetts.  Apparently one of his paintings is included in the show.  Goody.

Ault's paintings may be, as Washington Post critic-in-residence, Philip Kennicott claimed, more interesting than Norman Rockwell's; if not, they're so conceptually different that they might as well represent opposing sides of the moon.  Or Mercury.  Rockwell's work we know - and I'll get to it in a minute.  Ault's doesn't show rosy realities, indulge in can-do propaganda, or preach about anything.  That most certainly separates it from Rockwell, whose pictorial bromides stroked American's heartstrings as they trafficked, first in commercial satisfaction and, during the war years, in bellicose sentiment.  To say they're more interesting is to be boldly preferential.  I'm not sure they're more interesting at all.  But, yes, Ault's paintings are different and they certainly don't attempt to sell anything.

The conceit of the exhibit, curated by Alexander Nemerov, a passionate art-ideologue who's very big on subtext, is to show war-era and post-World War II America as a sinister place, seething with dark urges no country village can possibly address.  Its communities were metaphorically connected by a single strip of roadway and, for every soldier who went off to war and came back, that roadway wasn't just a place to drive; it was a way to get the hell out.  Given the rather bland look of the work itself - in which Kennicott manages to discover formal qualities that are lost on me - this is a tall order.  If you want to find subtext, Hopper, for example, is your man.  Before the advent of computers, writers wore out quill pens, typewriter ribbons, foolscap, and all sorts of other stationary store accountrements trying to get at Hopper's very plausible alienation.  Hopper painted a city that crushed as often as it enlarged; he was a rather
 impenetrable fellow himself; and he lived long enough to see the world torn apart at the seams not once, but two times.  As a young man, he created a poster called "Smash the Hun," which stands comfortably among WWI's efflorescence of motivational imagery.  We encourage you to kill, young soldier - preferably with something that'll do it quick and easy.

I can understand the moony excesses the Hopper oeuvre has inspired over the years - and will continue to inspire for some time.  He was a willing explorer of the side of the street that, while it caught sun-rays galore, was anything but sunny.

With Ault - whose pasted-on volumes do not speak volumes to me - the case is a bit harder to make, though let's put aside our skepticism and examine a series of paintings of a rural crossroads and see if they stack up.

As Kennicott suggests, Russell's Corners isn't a far cry from Grover's Corners - the mythical village of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which woke the dead and showed everybody's affinity to everybody else.  I'll give him that.  Perhaps the imaginary Grover's Corners had a little bend in the road, with a white-washed building on one side and a low-lying barn on the other.  Why not?  There were thousands of such places during, and after, the war years.  And enough nowadays for Americans who happen to be on a two-lane road to have a viable frame of reference.

I don't particularly care for Ault's minimalist approach.  It sacrifices spatial dimension as well as perceptual reality.  Not all lines - even if they describe a cinderblock house - should be as hard as Ault's.  Or Sheeler's, for that matter.  (A Sheeler picture is included in the show.)  As edges move into the distance, they get softer.  Ault's artificial geometrics make it hard for his atmospheres - which are supposed to be his strong suit - to get going.  When I look down his road, I can't go very far.  His night scenes are somewhat more effective, but they're still pasted-on rather than realized.  Hopper worked the entirety of a scene rather than from little play-toys that happened to be in the glare of a street-lamp.  Ault's reality looks staged, as if he assembled his little village in miniature and painted from that.  There's no air, no illusion: just hard lines and constipated forms.  If I ran across one of Ault's paintings in a garage sale, I would buy it.  It is more or less garage sale material.  A miraculously undiscovered Hopper - unsigned, of course - would give me sweaty palms, an urge to upchuck, and a moist twenty-dollar bill.  Hopper doesn't look any more like garage sale material than a Faberge egg.

This is what Kennicott has to say about Ault's formal approach, which is interesting, but, in my view, mislaid.  More talented artists have tackled similar things (see Part Two of this essay) and done better.  You could agree with what Kennicott is saying about them, but not Ault.  Ault's soul is that of a primitive and - at least in the paintings on view at the American Museum - he was committed to that vision.  Forgive me, but no primitive artist is capable of "powerful chiaroscuro contrasts" that lead to "rhetorical power" of any kind.  It is possible that he was influenced by cinematic lighting, but who wasn't?  Movies came of age during the 1930's, when they provided escapist entertainment, narratives about urban myths and, occasionally, David and Goliath struggles with a capitalist giant.  By the time America entered the war, however, movies became a part of the war machine.  No powerful chiaroscuro in them, unless it helped defeat "our enemies".

Like other painters on view in the show, Ault was clearly interested in how the poetry of the 19th-century landscape was fading fast, halfway into the new century, which may explain the compelling mix of wooden architecture and electric light. The formal order and clarity, especially the strikingly lit telephone wires that break the image into angular planes, may be a nod to the formal tendencies of avant-garde art that were otherwise of little interest to Ault. The powerful chiaroscuro contrasts of light and dark that give the paintings their rhetorical power may also be Ault’s exploration of how cinematic lighting techniques were changing our vision of what night looked and felt like.

I'd like to suggest that Nemerov and Kennicott - both extraordinarily intelligent men whose intellectual resources are somewhat wasted on such work - look around for better artists.  We all should. 

Meanwhile, here's a shortlist (I mean it to be one word) of compelling image-makers who were very much active during the 1940's and were able to salt a picture down with "chiaroscuro" to beat the band.  They possibly lacked rhetorical power, but who needs that when you can make an image that rivets you to the spot and keeps you there for a while?  Please note that I am ommitting that era's "heavy hitters", whose shorter list might include Reginald Marsh, Grant Wood, Charles Burchfield, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, and even John Sloan.  I've already mentioned Edward Hopper.  One might, with good reason, wish to include Raphael Soyer, who was predmoninantly a humanist for whom the landscape was secondary.  I've put him in with these others for that reason.  From what I know of the man, he wouldn't have taken umbrage.  

Francis Speight
Aaron Bohrod
Raphael Soyer
*Harry Leith-Ross
Nicolai Cikovsky
Martin Lewis
Emil Kosa
John Noble
Alexander Brook
Louis Lozowick
Ross Dickinson
Francis Coburn
Joseph Hirsch

*included in the show


Part Two

I just went to see the exhibit, not to get a "second look" at Ault's work - though I was able to do that - but to see, for the first time, a distinguished collection of American imagery that is not widely known.

Among these were the aforementioned Harry Leith-Ross' Flag Station, a tone poem that is far better managed than any of Ault's work - though the show's curator may have been exercised by its narrative element, as exemplified by a solitary figure who is waiting for a lover, boyfriend, or doting father.  It doesn't go out of its way to evoke a wartime mood; that mood is embedded in the moment. 

Anton Grot's production drawings for the movie, Mildred Pierce - a canny inclusion - are operatic gems that anticipate, in feeling, the stormy progress of an American success story.  And while they are tied to a narrative structure, they, like so many drawings of their kind, have a fulsome life of their own and can be considered independent works of art.

Paul Sample's Movies, Center Island, is gently satiric, but effectively contains the bottled-up energies of soldiers who might be under fire the next day.  It is nothing other than what it is - no subtext here, Mr. Nemerov - but what it's more than good enough as it is.

Louis Bouche's Summer of '45, Woodstock, New York is a colorful paean to country leisure and is characteristic of his mature, but good-hearted, vision.  It's a pleasure to follow his spirited brushstrokes around and through an outdoor space, in which a cabin's siding, pulled-up chairs, the patterns of shirts and blouses, as well as a benign-seeming natural world, joyfully collide. 

The exhibit's most striking picture - hung to great advantage among lesser things - is Edward Biberman's Tear Gas and Water Hoses.  It shows the still-upright victim of a gas-attack, which has already laid colleagues low.  He is holding his ground amidst the barn-like shape of a production facility, which is half-dissolved by columns of water, plumes of smoke, and such people as have been caught in between them.  It has a sombre presence that is lacking in the more stridently political (but equally effective) pictorial diatribes of William Gropper and Ben Shahn.  It can also rest on its artistic merits, which are considerable.  The figure Biberman has singled out is reminiscent of Homer's seamen, who are aware of what they're getting into, but keep readying the boat.  Under the circsumstances, what else can they do?

Getting back to the mainstage, as it were, I was brought up short by Nemerov's biographical prose.  He insists on Ault's "radiant light" - such as he appears to see in one of Ault's night scenes.  Having finally seen this light, I cannot credit the radiance at all.  It is schematic light seen in passing and not understood, except in a symbolic, stick-man sort of way.  Nemerov's prose gets loopier still.  "In his paintings, night poises on wires and eaves."  Sorry, old boy.  Night does all sorts of things, but it doesn't poise, even in a picture.  "Posing's" the better word, but I still don't believe night can do, or has ever done, that.  Perhaps we should wait for The Apocalypse and check it out then.  Nemerov also claims that Ault's work is always "tipping and dropping to strangeness and sadness."  Why stop there?  Why not add "lilting and lofting?"  Or "beeping and bumping?"  I'll admit that Ault's work can be "strange" and "sad", but must we alliterate it so much?  I haven't seen the video of Nemerov talking about the exhibit.  Perhaps he comes off as a plausible curator there.  But he sho' don't in his prose-writing.  Some entries are even illiterate, as when one attempts to describe Paul Sample's painting.  Its caption says that the "makeshift screen anticipate (my italics) the frolics" of a Broadway musical.  Somebody should have remembered that subject and tense have to agree.  Otherwise you don't sound like a curator anymore.  You sound like one of them grunts who can't think of nothin' but them coconuts.  And I mean the one's that ain't on the trees.

All in all, I would recommend the exhibit - largely because the chorus carries it pretty well and does it convincingly.  Of Ault's sadness and strangeness, there is scarcely enough to go around.  The modest dimensions of his work reflect the scale of his talent.  He was a moderately interesting chap who found the tenets of minimalism to his taste and, while he didn't live very long, he had time enough to establish an artistic personality.  Which he did.  I just don't think it worthy of such interpretive excess.  Or the real estate of a major American museum.    
       
For more information, go to the American Museum's website at: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2011/ault/

Stealing Is Good If the Goods Can't Be Better

Many years ago, I saw a painting I instantly coveted.  It was hanging in the hallway of a tony Memphis high school and anybody who might wish to grab the thing and run off with it probably could have.  Upon a cursory inspection, I established who the artist was and what the painting was probably worth.  In current values, I'd put it at $150,000.00, though, given the auction prices of similar work, I think I'm being a little coy.  But a hundred and fifty grand is still a nice piece of change and, because of the time and place, I could have snatched the painting for myself and, like anybody who'll see an opportunity and take it, found the appropriate channels and disposed of it.  Or tried to, failed, and ended up with a fast-appreciating objet d'art I could neither sell nor show to anybody.  

I don't regret having left the painting to such colorful and conniving people who might conceive of a similar plan and actually go ahead with it.  I "chickened out" because, while I fully endorse artistic brigandage, whereby one painter will "steal" from another, I can't quite square the practice of taking something that isn't mine with a moral-seeming worldview.  And while I hardly subscribe to the Ten Commandments in its entirety, it isn't a bad place to start.  And lest I sound like a Sunday school teacher here, I should add that, after the high-cholesterol thrill of making off with something, there's really nowhere to go with it.  When an honest person steals, there's a "What now?" feeling that compels the honest person to undo his transgression.  Allow me to acknowledge that I sound like a Sunday school teacher still; indeed, I may have imbibed the mealy-mouthed morality that comes of having too little pleasure in life - or way too much time of a Sunday morning.  I grew up with people who wore Biblical pronouncements on their sleeves.  I occasionally wonder whether they rolled these sleeves up - or just put on a different shirt now and then.  From the look and sound of the people who still occupy the mean-looking little houses I grew up in, I can rest assured that few wardrobe changes have occurred.   

Whatever the case, you ought not steal because of the ensuing complications.  And because what you steal isn't really yours.  And: because the thrill is over much too quickly.  People say that about sex - which is also true - but it's even more so when you get your paintings (or whatever) on the run.  (Unless coerced, sex is enjoyed by mutual agreement, in which case it can be thrilling for a short while.  And everybody seems to think that's quite enough.) 

How do I know stealing isn't good for you?  Well, a long, long time ago, I fell into a watermelon patch that was rife with luscious globes that beckoned to me as if I were family.  So I took a few, dragged them off to a secure location, and had my way with them.  Sure enough, when I was done, I had that "What now?" sensation, which led to feelings of self-persecution, moral degradation, and, as the watermelon ceased to bloat my stomach, a rubyfruit-voiding episode I will leave to your imaginations.  I do believe that crime in general pays excellent dividends, but only to people who can keep that watermelon down.

I knew such a person when I was growing up.  Whereas most of us are endowed with screening devices that prompt us to back away from danger, this person embraced it.  Shakespeare described a reckless man as someone who would gladly look into a cannon's mouth.  This guy would not only have looked there, he would have scrambled to be first in line so that, he could have stuffed something explosive into it.  And then got in.  I used to marvel at this guy's special combination of steely nerves and absentee ethics.  Where I would fear to tread, he would go with all cylinders running.  When I screwed up the courage to follow, he was already onto something more dangerous.  Eventually, I had to step aside and watch.  There's no following such people.  They make their own rules.

Nor did this guy ever get caught, even as the daring of his escapades increased.  He just didn't seem to care.  Or, rather, as he accomplished the impossible, the impossible became commonplace to him.  When you tread such waters, there's nothing to do but find increasingly more perilous rapids and shoot 'em for all they're worth.  Then what?  Eventually, you're going to go under.

He didn't.  As the water got faster, he slowed himself down and was able to glide on through.  Or something.  Whatever the case, he did what he did and got away with all of it.

Such people should stand as cautionary tales, waving us away - rather than inviting us - to the edge of the abyss.  They are the exceptions that prove the rule whereby there are certain rules we shouldn't violate because, when we do, we're going to have heap of trouble.  And if the thrill of doing something "bad" is quickly gone, the aftermath has a way of sticking to you. 

As to bigger heists, however, I'm in favor of them.  I think twenty-million dollar paintings should be stolen.  Again and again and again!  For one thing, there shouldn't be twenty-million dollar paintings.  They're just sticks and a canvas, with a little - or big - smear on top.  Amidst the second wave of Impressionist fever, the now-unsung Thomas Craven said anybody who wanted a little box of light on his wall shouldn't have to pay more than twenty-five dollars.  And he was right.  In a slightly more perfect world, paintings would be cheap.  Or bartered.  Or tossed in a community chest, then released. . .to the community.  People should not starve when grainaries are full - or words to that effect.

In any case, I would consider stealing a twenty-million dollar painting, in part because the dynamics of stealing would not apply.  What a potential thief must do in this case is challenge an inflated value by removing its physical embodiment from man (and woman's) sight.  Then the thief, having worked his chops a bit, should move up to a 50-million dollar painting and take it.  After an indecent waiting-period, he - or his agent - should re-sell it for a hundred thousand on the open market.  That would have the effect of re-setting values.  Those fair-minded souls who subscribe to the stick-and-smear philosophy, as I do, would come away with a more ecumenical sense of "How much?"  Then they might abandon trophy-hunting and, as it were, buy local.  There are so many inexpensive paintings that the field is limitless.  Just get something good and wait around.  Or stop waiting and just enjoy it.

The people who stole the Leger were probably hardened criminals whose philosophical orientation to their job might be described as developmental.  They knew they could get a lot of money and went with that.  And why not?  Wouldn't we all go for the money if we thought we could have it?  Furthermore, with a greater mission (re-setting values and whatnot) fueling us, how easily we might overcome such paltry obstacles as guards, security systems, and a moral sense that is tripped by a fear of exposure?  Besides, no Leger has much intrinsic value, so if we happened to damage or lose it, the world as the ordinary person knows it would keep to its petty pace around the sun and make room for more ordinary people who would very likely never give Leger a thought.  When truly great paintings are stolen, we don't think about the money.  We just want them back.  If the Mona Lisa went missing, for example, a few of us would think of the bottom line, but it would re-consider it.  They're unintentionally mirroring the fact that their beachfront properties have lost value. (Their stock portfolios might be withering too.)  In a quandary of "What to do?", these folk might even send checks to the Louvre.  Generally speaking, however, emotional connections amount to a whole lot more than abstract monetary values.  Therefore, we should devote our idle hours to stealing Legers and leaving the good stuff alone.  There will always be a market for Leger's because we can't stop ourselves from creating top-heavy value systems.  That's another good reason to steal Leger's.  When such things go missing, people who are otherwise invulnerable feel like crap.  For my money, that's the best possible reason for the removal of any precious object.  It does my heart good to think that the over-endowed among us might be looking over their shoulders.  It gives me an acute sense of satisfaction to think of them sitting in front of their next-favorite painting and wondering whether they should put it in the vault for a while.  And it tickles me no end to believe that an insuperable confidence has gone by the board and been replaced by the enduring discomfort most of us can't help feeling every day of our lives.

May daring people always slip past guards, break a few windows, and laugh as they find the low road and stay on it.  It gives us little folk something to cheer about.  And, as I said, it takes us back to what we really value - which has nothing to do with cash.

Lucien Freud's Studio Couches

Spelling is not necessarily an intelligence indicator.  Herman Melville was so lousy at it that his wife, then Ralph Waldo Emerson, had to go through various manuscripts and make words out of the messes he provided them.  But. . .what words!  Anybody who can write like that doesn't need to do anything but tap into whatever teeming well he is privy to and let her rip.  Let the literary technicians come back and clean everything up.

However, non-geniuses ought to look at the letters they often, rather casually, spill across the page.  It seems like a great many of them have either just learned of Lucien Freud's existence or have Melville's eye for letter sequence, but lack his protean gifts for expression.

If I've seen Lucien spelled "Lucian" once, I've seen it five times.  Get the name right, people!  It's your last bloody chance.

And so I segue into a fully expected turnaround in the life and art of our times.  Yes, Lucien Freud, another protean voice, has died and is reaping the rewards, in well-ordered prose and infantile sputtering, he richly deserves.  He almost singlehandedly brought figure painting back into the consciousness of art-lovers who were not only steering clear of human flesh, but of human incident and reality of any kind.  Freud - who is a grandson of the Grand Master of the Unconscious - is now considered the gold standard by which other painters of the figure are measured.  And, as such, it ain't a bad one.

Of course, there were deniers all along.  When the big show at the Metropolitan Museum introduced America to the breadth of Freud's genius, the curators were reluctant to call him a realist - as if realism were the baddest of bad words and no self-respecting curator might traffic in such language and retain the esteem of his or her fellows.

Art is long, but the art world moves slowly.

Yet Freud - a famously reclusive fellow - thrived in his work from the very beginning.

After studying at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School Of Painting and Drawing, he broke off into a surprising direction - as an egg tempera artist whose strangely biomorphic distortions made Francis Bacon's head, for example, look even bigger than it actually was.  Other victims of Freud's obsessive brush don't come off any better.  As Andrew Wyeth came of age through his father and the oil paint he was instructed to utilize, so Freud came into his own inside of a medium that was essentially hostile to his gifts.

But no matter.  It was important for him to get started.  And get started he did.

After having discovered oil, he quickly came into his own personality: the sooty palette of his tempera years came back, but it was slathered with texture.  The people were there, but they had a context: a bed, chair, or empty room.  Once Freud settled upon these very simple ingredients, he never looked back.  If anything, Freud looked fiercely forward.  And worked as hard as the guys who were carrying hods down the road.  No, harder: he could've quit anytime he wanted to.  Nor did he have any taskmaster besides himself.  Yet he could spend months on a single painting and realize that it was done only after it started to look like somebody else's.

Over the next fifty years, he amassed a body of work like no other - a oeuvre that fed on his reclusive energy, which addressed the conundrums and comforts of solitude.  Some might say he accumulated a freak's gallery of people and personalities.  And, to an extent, they're right.  His people are often scary-looking.  Who sits in a chair like that?  Somebody Freud summoned to his studio and said: "Don't move!"  Unlike Diane Arbus, who wanted to photograph freaks, Freud took a pop eye or withered flesh and distilled their humanity.  He wasn't afraid of what he might discover inside of a person as he or she sat and waited.  Or drifted off to sleep.  Or daydreamed audibly.

He managed to get at the soul's captivity inside of a body that has grown out of proportion and become a smothering presence.  He presumed to suggest that people need each other in spite of how difficult relationships can be.  He looked deeply within, but was also able to create a dazzling color-scape that was not gratuitously postmodern.  The bumps, bruises, and sores of the flesh have, in Freud, a formal counterpart.  He pushes the paint into wavy channels that dive into the hollows and perch defiantly on the raised areas, which has a tactile presence even in reproduction.

Much has been made of the 33.6 million sale.  I'm glad such a monstrously delightful thing happened during Freud's lifetime.  It lays to rest the notion that poor artists toil - without reumneration - in solitude.  Freud was most certainly alone, but he chose to be - and he was paid bloody well for it, thank you very much.

I'm not saying that Freud got all of this money.  Perhaps he got very little of it.  But he was very much alive when the sale occurred, and nobody will ever take that away from him.  Or from the rest of us, who do a fair amount of unremunerative toiling, but are no more fatalistic about it than we ought to be.

I have not seen Freud's work since 1994, when the Met brought him here while cautioning us against liking him for what he was.  Not a realist?  What was he then?  Were his figures just an excuse for a great backwash of formal proclivities?  If so, why didn't he just eliminate the figure and go with what the brush might do on its own?  Why was Freud insistent upon a human context when the market for his work was vigorous enough to snatch up everything he did?  When he was commissioned to paint Queen Elizabeth, it didn't really matter what he made of her - though what eventually became The Official Portrait disappointed almost everyone.  She was old, ugly, without royal gravitas, the works.  But what did people expect?  Did they think that Freud would actually do an official portrait?  Hadn't they ever looked at his work?

I don't think the portrait's much good.  It's uncharacteristically flat, psychologically neutral, and dullish in color, in spite of the queenly gewgaws that make a Van Dyck or Velasquez sing.  (On the other hand, it is a Lucien Freud and possesses many of his virtues - though they seem to be cut in half.)  Freud needed to pick his own models while staying out of the public spotlight.  He apparently had several studios, to which he would commute surreptitiously.  He had a phone somewhere, but not in any of these places.  Or only in one at a time.  If he wanted somebody to find him, he or she would.  Otherwise, the man kept to himself in order to achieve perfection-in-solitude - or as much perfection as any mortal creature has ever dared to want.

Cy Twombly Is Dead - and So Will We All Be

Cy Twombly, who passed away this week, is the last lion (if you wish to lionize him) in the dynastic succession of abstract painting from squiggles, smears, and the monster-exegeses that legitimized them, to the deeply personal shorthand that was, as it were, his signature.

Of course, I want to pooh-pooh the man.  I find today, and have always found, Abstract Expressionism to be oxymoronic.  In my view, the least you attempt to express in a painting, while remaining faithful to a vision or aesthetic approach, the more "expression" is likely to get in there.  To name an entire school after something that may well the end result of a creative process, but shouldn't (again, in my view) be consciously attempted, is hubris in the extreme.  In fact, I think we should capitalize Hubris here.  That begs the question, however: when shouldn't it be in caps?

I will let my miniscule readership wrestle with that question.

Twombly was, in the context of Abstract Expressionism, something of a pioneer.  After meeting Kline et al at Black Mountain, he went to New York and, I would imagine, hung out at the Cedar Bar.  But then: he vamoosed.  Let me credit him with a sort of aloof independence.  He could have battened on the half-baked theorizing of his colleagues almost indefinitely, but chose not to.  If he did it at all, he did it from across the pond, where all the words got scrambled - not unlike the words in his paintings.

In Rome, he began to "paint" graffiti-esque canvases that drew upon street painting, classic literature and mythology, a sexuality that dared not speak its name (at least in the U. S.), and all sorts of other things that moved him.  In these early works, he deviated from the Abstract Expressionist playbook and named names.  Scrawling themes and titles across a canvas not only earned him points for bravery, but purisitic condemnation.  I tend to be of the latter camp.  Tell me a joke, but don't tell me you've told it.

From then on, his work morphed into a kind of ecstatic randomness, though it was always tied to a theme-presumptive, though I would like to suggest that you can call a doughnut an aircraft carrier.  That doesn't mean it's so.  That just means that you have a certain audacity.  So, when Twombly chose his themes and matched them up with a smear or something that would pass for one, he insited that we regard this smear as relating to, explicating, or enriching his title.  Just because he launched his small craft into the water doesn't mean that it had to float.  But it does provoke discussion and that is largely what Twombly and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues are about.

In fact, nonobjective painting - even when the "painter" admits to a theme or possible imagery - is ambiguous enough to light the fires of innumerable interpretations.  It's why all those rough-tough guys who splattered paint on unstretched canvases had to pink-slip themselves at five in the afternoon and rush over to the bar.  As their buckets had spilled paint, their mouths needed to spew interpretive jitterbugs.

This is not to say that other painters are silent.  But I will have to say that none of them talk as much as that Cedar Bar crowd did.  Or need to.

And so Twombly evolved.  At first, a lot of critics didn't like him.  But most eventually caved in.  I'm sure he was regarded initially as a turncoat.  How dare he forsake the nerve center of painting and high-tail it to dead-as-a-doornail Rome?  Well, he did and it was probably the smartest thing he ever did.  Removing oneself is the first step to myth-creation.  If you're not in a room, people will talk about you.  Failure to show up ad infinitum will induce forgetfulness - or a stronger pull than ever.  Twombly was somehow able to excite the latter reaction.

Yet I still can't see much to rave about in his work.  He'll throw a forkball, but he'll telegraph it.  Where's the mystery in that?  He can co-opt an authority symbol - in his case, a blackboard - and scrawl all sorts of gibberish on it, but does it really challenge that authority?  (Furthermore, is challenging authority what painting is supposed to be about?)  Seems to me that, rather than tearing authority down, Twombly's canvases became a kind of authority unto themselves.  Standing before one of his blackboard paintings, I'm sure naive collectors have consulted it, as their Greek counterparts once consulted the Oracle at Delphi.  ("How much will you be worth in 2050?  And could you please tell me: why don't you scribble something I can read?  I'll admit that it sometimes makes me crazy.")

Once image-making relinquishes its original premises, as it did with the Abstract Expressionists, one can make a case for almost anything so long as he or she obeys the tenets of the New Painting he or she wishes to both honor and corrupt.  John Mitchell's oeuvre is a case in point.  Much of it is nothing more than whiffs of pure color dashed across a white surface, but she and her critics have tied them in with Monet.  So they have their cake (gravitas) and they eat it too (first, and even second, tier Abstract Expressionist have made a lot of money.  And don't preach to me about Pollock.  He just didn't live long enough to be box-office boffo.  If he'd hung on for another ten years, he would have had been able to match estates with anybody in Southamptom.)

I think I've adequately acknowledged Twombly's personal contribution to the Abstract - or, rather, Post Abstract - Expressionist canon.  But let's go onto other things.

Painting today, while it can be stodgy and self-referential, is getting back to where it came from.  Painters are looking AT things again and thereby getting to who, or whom, they are.  They are inspecting old-timey realities and finding them good.  Most are making cliches, but those who are not have re-invented painting and that's all the to the good.  Twombly represents, I hope, the final gasp in self-laudation disguised as loyalty to First Causes.  He grabs a few things from the past, says that's what his paintings are about, and mows down any sort of critical appreciation of the how and why.  He just does it, people say.  That's his genius.  If Twombly had a genius, it was for co-opting a possible last gasp in an aesthetic paroxysm that could never sustain itself.  Nobody except certain painters, certain critics, and certain arts professionals likes Abstract Expressionism.  The person who will mostly likely respond to a painting of Something rejects the overpowering narcissism of a painting that's about Itself.  "I can do that," says the person.  And whether he can or not, he's getting at something that gripes the hell out of him.  He wants to be spoken to.  He wants for art - or even Art - to reveal its meaning as it illuminates something deeply personal.  He wants to walk hand in hand with it rather than study it from the vast remove of a museum setting and think he's been hornswaggled.  He wants the same thing he generally gets from a movie or sporting event.  Transcendence.  An understanding of limitless possibilities.  A way into a world that seems utterly bewildering even as it flashes moments of grace. 

This is not to say that we need a populist art.  We know the road that goes down and I'd, for one, wish to pull it up and make a jogging-trail out of it.  But we should attempt to re-examine what art is about.  I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and say it should be about communicating universal experiences in a formal vocabulary that is sharp and vigorous, but not so goddamned arcane that it requires reams of explication for us to "get it."

Twombly was of the ilk that plays to the critics - who eventually adopted him; the curators, who put together his shows; the collectors, who were daunted by his "energy" or whatever; and the museums, which always follow the money. 

Goodbye, old fellow.  I'm sure I would have enjoyed sitting down with you and gazing wistfully over the Tiber as you waxed nostalgic about your native Virginia.  A lot of people are likeable outside of their workplaces - or even in them.  But that doesn't mean I'm going to cheer for the result. 

Yes, goodbye old man.  May you be the last in your line.

Get These Dead People Outta Here: a Good Hard Look At Institutional Nearsightedness

It is always a pity when a influential institution decides to keep sticking its head in the sand, but it a common occurrence and not worth getting upset about.  Institutions are sand-seeking by their very nature and should be tweaked for it only because, in doing so, they waste valuable resources, manpower, and wall-space.  These things are all very dear and should have a more dynamic function.

I allude to the Virginia Museum's acquisition of more dead artists to supplement a collection that has more than enough of them. 

Before I go any farther, I want to talk about the necessity of the dead, even as the living clamor at the gates.

I grew up on dead people and am glad they were "around."  They honed my appetite for the sort of living experiences without which painting and sculpture cannot be made.  Furthermore, they made sense.  If you start with dead people, you'll be curious about folk who walk around and make funny noises.  They get your feet wet, give you a little heads-up on things, and high-five you into the future.  People who value artwork as a living expression of human needs and aspirations are nourished by the dead - at least for a while.  But the dead must eventually be put away - though, like any keepsake, we should trot them out now and then and see that they look all right in their coffins and don't get ghoulish on us.  A reliance on the dead - which is endemic to most institutions - smacks of necrophilia.  In art, necrophilia takes on a strictly academic form, in which the qualities of ancestor worship and scholarly gravitas are deftly (if dumbly) mingled.  Fortunately for worshippers of the dead, the dead are already encased in mausoleums, which favor such kinkiness.  Yet living impulses cannot be contained - even in a police state.  They will come out along the edges, surface in the cracks, and insist for their right to be heard no matter how many bayonets are pointed at them - or jail-cell pillows plumped and no doubt scented against the arrival of renegade heads.

Not to say that prisons and art institutions are synonymous.  Museums make me queasy whereas prisons can provoke the gag response in its entirety.

I grew up on the greatest dead people imaginable.  I had Titian, I had Rembrandt, I had Rubens, and I had Michaelangelo.  Pretty good company for a nerdy kid who liked nothing better than to sift through art-books and wonder about the people in them.  Eventually, I got to see the occasional painting by these heroic personages and it was, to quote a far better text, good.  I would even risk saying that works by these dead, but still-powerful, creators was a heady experience from which I have yet to recover.  (I except Michaelangelo, who's played "hard-to-get" to a greater extent than these others.  But we all know that and have learned to accept his meagre presence here in the U.S.)

Through the work of The Dead, I was able to tap into transcendental experiences that would have otherwise been denied me.  I remember first encounters with paintings as a prurient teenager, thinking of more lustful events, remembers. . .well, never mind that.  They're both vivid experiences neither of us are willing to relinquish.  There was a Tintoretto at the Brooks Museum.  It was big and full of swirling, pre-Baroque energy.  Everything in it was alive - after nearly five centuries.  I couldn't get over the fact that something so old could have such a grip on me.  And yet it did.  And I wanted more.  Fortunately, the Brooks had enough depth in its collection to allow for greater ephiphanies and continuous grace.

Since that time, dead people have been my spirit guides and reality counselors.  If I'd thought of it before now, I could have posed this WWVD? ("What Would Velasquez Do?") question with a straight and searching face.  Dead people are indispensable.  They were not only there before us all, they confronted similar challenges, met obstacles head on - or at least sideways - and got on with the business of doing their work amidst constraints and limitations we, the living, don't have to fool with.  They're the role models that step in when parents and mentors fail.

And the work they did!  We need to see it again and again, initially because we need its clamors and comforts, but ultimately because we have to learn to be done with it and make - or at least appreciate - our own.  If you grant that life is a circle - which, by its nature, is always coming back on itself - the dead fail to complete it; they dangle a piece of it out to us, who have to keep it going.

But back to "them" for a moment; I can't be done just yet. 

I remember seeing my first Rembrandt, and then another.  And, finally, a whole slew of 'em.  There were so damned many, I had to keep going back in order to do justice to them all.

I started with the great sombre artifice of "Artistotle Contemplating a Bust Of Homer."  Its dazzling richness was not showy.  Its behind-the-figure depths could not be plumbed.  Its overall dignity was so crushing that everything else seemed trivial.  And that was just the first. 

How could one measure up?  And is that even a valid question?  With Rembrant behind you, you can be cheerfully mediocre and not worry about it.  Why torment yourself with the burning, if doomed-to-fail, need to walk in the footsteps of greatness?  Just do some nice little pictures, make some money, and die without having ever experienced the negative capabilities that were Rembrandt's soul-elevating companions.  If what you think you ought to have is unattainable, it frees you to be yourself.  And, in the face of greatness, we all have to scatter and assume our secondary roles in its shadow.  It's just "what is."

It's hard to understand greatness in the living.  We know these people and see their flaws too closely.  We know what they have for dinner and wish they'd stop eating meat.  Greatness in the dead, however, can hit you like a bolt of lightning.  In a sense, we need for our great artists to be dead, so that we may revere them without any opposition from them or anybody who happens to sit on the wrong side of history.  They pose no obstacles for us.  They can eat meat if they care to; we are not watching them.  All we see is what they've left behind.

Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Michaelangelo.  It's good to have these guys steading you.  Without them, you might see the glass ceiling too often, slip through a squishy spot on the floor, confront a sea of mediocrity and have no frame of reference.  Without them, that sea of mediocrity crashes just as hard against the shore, gobbles up as many ships, and throws temper-tantrums that prompt spontaneous evacuations and pantheistic wonder.  With them, that sea is just an oversized pond tended by frogs and dragonflies.  And it doesn't heave against anything; it just sits there and reflects the sky - a passive role if there ever was one.

But what about the average "deadie", the shade inadequate, the moonbeam, as it were, that doesn't carry far enough.  Well, there's a lot of that.  And the Virginia Museum went out and decided to get some of it.
And why?  Well, there's that thing I already said about institutions.  They just don't get it.  They lag behind because they're listening to a langorous beat and sultrier rhythms.  And because the people who run them don't care much for living anything, in which case dead artists - so long as they have a pedigree - don't have to perform Rembrandt's function.  All they've got to do is reflect the short-sighted agendas of the institution itself.

I allude specifically to the Virginia Museum's recent purchases: of a Tissot, a Bouguereau, and a few other doggie-treats.  I happened to be browsing the museum's minutes one day and came across a board meeting in which the Bouguereau was discussed in a seemingly desultory fashion - and purchased, for the tidy sum of a million dollars.  (And if they didn't end up paying that million, whatever they paid, beyond fifteen bucks and shipping charges, was too much.)  I think almost anybody who cares for 19th-century painting would not choose Bouguereau to represent that restless and tormented period in art and politics.  After his popularity waned, he went into the basement, where he has been mouldering for the past seventy-five years.  He belongs there, along with his fellow academicians, and should not be disturbed - particularly to the tune of one friggin' million bucks!  Bouguereau and his minions are cautionary tales.  They tell us to step back, there are pretty naked people here that don't resemble the tawdrier naked people in real life.  Furthermore, these naked people are in Greece impersonating gods, nymphs, and satyrs.  I'll grant you the women look pretty good.  Their breasts are perky, their come-hither looks can that little thing a-goin', and they seem to dance pretty well too.  And for gay guys, there's some beefcake that probably won't settle their hash, but might remind them of the sort of hash they're after.  There's also the sappy stories - but who cares about them?  What we want to see is T & A, as the snickering Salon boys wanted us to see it.  (T & A should be plural, but it doesn't sound right, does it?)

Too bad the 19th-century didn't have real pornography.  There would have been no need for the likes of Bouguereau, Dagnan-Bouveret, Cabanel, and slews of others who titillated the appetites of the haute-bougeoisie and made a nice piece of change into the bargain.  What we need to do to with Bouguereau is to keep him where he belongs.  Among the dead.  I mean, the dead/dead.  Who should never rise again. 
Tissot is another cutesy sort of painter who titillated with domestic bliss, particularly as it involved over-corseted women who had nothing to do except sit around and be ogled.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it might have an affect on women today, who do stuff besides wanting to be parlor-furniture.  Even if "women of today", upon seeing such fluff, don't give a damn about it, there are far more compelling images of 19th-century women.  Bouguereau - in spite of what *Winslow Homer said about him - could paint reasonably well.  Tissot doesn't measure up in this regard.  His is a fussy realism that fails to understand the big shapes, upon which one may embroider.  Compare his pictures of bourgeois comfort with Eakins' and you'll see what I mean. 

I don't know how much the Virginia Museum paid for the Tissot, but any amount of money is too much.  It's dead painting by a dead person - which is the very worst kind.  Great painting by dead people, as I was attempting to explain earlier, sustains the spirit and is capable of launching revolutions in one's mind and heart.  If you can't see the difference between this kind of crap and a Rembrandt - who is admittedly out of most small museums' price range - you might as well poke your eyes out.  Or just go to the museum cafe and talk about what everybody's wearing.

In embracing the dead/dead - the dead who are beyond our ken and cannot help us - The Virginia Museum sends a message about what is culturally desirable and it is deadly.  If the curators haven't looked - as they probably haven't - there's a new generation of figure (I loathe the word "figurative" and won't use it except to say I'm not using it) painters any museum might scarf up for a bargain, considering the price tag on the VA's Bouguereau.  Lordy, people!  You could fill the whole museum with vital specimens of the human figure and have money left over for a swell bash.  But, no, you are interested in pedigree.  You are also lazy and will not go out and find these "vital specimens" because you're not aware that they exist.  And if you were aware of it, it probably would do nothing for you.  You not only traffic in dead people, you've grown accustomed to their faces and would not care to see any live ones if you could possibly help it.

Yet in Richmond alone, there are a handful of figure painters who deserve to be seen alongside of the prosperous and life-giving dead.  And you could get them for a song - though it would be fairly good money for them.  Money they'd used to enrich a culture you're not even aware of.

It is beyond shameful for an institution that presumably represents The State (the State of Virginia in this case) does not have the best interests of its charges in mind.  It buys what it wants, hangs its favorites, votes its aesthetics, and says to hell with other possibilities.  The fiscal mismanagement is appalling enough.  Even if the museum passed on the "vital specimens" I was talking about, it could spend the money on public programs that could bring people in instead of keeping them out.  Who would want to see a Bouguereau with all the great pornography we've got?  If the curators want to argue that such a painting represents the apex of academic stylization, they most certainly can.  But it's a rather crappy argument.  Did anyone express a need for such a thing?  Is it essential to have this expensive ornament about so that, if anybody started complaining about a lack of academic stylization, a docent could point that person to the Bougeureau and say: "Don't worry. It's here!"  (I confess to sexism.  I have never seen a male docent at the Virginia Museum of anyplace else.)  We can all do without smirky pornography, academic stylization, and all sorts of other "luxuries" just about anytime.  And yet the Virginia Museum insists that we not only acknowledge them, but consider them appropriate in a museum setting - which is to say, among a lot of good dead people who might well be turning in their graves.

Of course, they're right.  They've made a museum that does not reflect life as the ordinary person knows it.  He/she gets high-falutin' stuff from the 19th-century and are told it's shinola.  He/she gets hogwash from the 20th and, because it was purchased by local businesspeople, it gets a pass because you shouldn't speak ill of the monied.  And he/she are beginning to get skunked here in the 21st century with overblown Picasso-style exhibits because the museum can't contain its delight over being one of two or three places that gets - and pays dearly for - them.

At the very least, the Virginia Museum should re-brand itself as the sort of institution that reflects the dead-zone mentality of all institutions and not even pretend to serve the public - about whose needs and wants it cares not at all. 

The difference between somebody in Carver who's never heard of Bougeureau and somebody in the West End who is correspondingly ignorant consists in the West Ender's willingness to go along.  Carver people would look at the Bouguereau and wonder who was kidding whom. 

Which is what we should all wonder about The Viginia Museum.


*Winslow Homer said he wouldn't walk across the street to see a Bouguereau.  And this guy lived in a pair of hiking-shoes.

Linear Minds, Hands Full Of Charcoal Dust: Tribute To My Mother, Part Five

An astute cultural analyst once observed that writers who are artistically gifted work chiefly in line.  Their literary intelligence seems to connect with the hatchings of a pen or pencil, but they rarely, according to this analyst, go much beyond that.  I have, in my casual search for inconsistencies, found this theory to be sound.  The fellow was right.  Line people, as in linear, can write stories, but tonal people cannot. 

I seem to be the exception - though talent, in my case, might be considered a moot point.  I am, however, a practictioner, and I'm happy to say that I have breached the linear/tonal paradigm to become at least a tolerable painter and, on occasion, passable scribe.

I attribute this success - if you wish to call it that - to the influence of my mother. 

When she was seventeen, she had a life-changing operation.  (There are photos of her with a head-scarf on.  The hospital folk had shaved her noggin for this operation and, while she wanted to be among, and of, her fellow creatures, she did not want to show them her denuded skull.  This may represent the extent of her concern for social approval.)

The operation targeted a bit of her brain, which it attempted to outsmart or overrule.  Apparently it was successful in this regard.  But unsuccessful as a jumping-off point for a functional human being.  It had, in fact, disabled her right hand, forcing her to learn everything she had already learned with her left.  She fell to the task, however, with the eagerness of the reprieved.  She had at least walked away from the operating table and wasn't blathering - something other brain operations caused so many other people to do.  (Lobotomy was a viable preference at the time - just to put things into perspective.  It enabled Mrs. Venable to insist that staff psychiatrists cut that "evil thing" out of her niece's brain.  Rather scary, to think that otherwise-sensible people endorsed the circumvention of dangerous thoughts by means of a pick and hammer.)

I rarely saw my mother take a pass because she couldn't grip things with both hands.  She simply used the "bad" one as best she could.  When it was time to applaud actors at a theatre, she geared up for a vigorous appreciation, clapping both hands - the strong and the withered - to produce a satisfying conjunction.  When she needed to hold something down for a signature, she'd take her right hand and make it mash on a thing that might otherwise slip away.  And when somebody wanted to shake her right hand, she offered it and let the person shake it.  It was not a virile encounter, but all the more courageous because it was all she could do.  As with other handicaps that do not necessarily foster - but fail to interfere with - social efficacy, people forgot about it.  She couldn't because functioning with a handicap always requires strategy.  But she didn't let on and allowed everybody see what else she had to offer.

She had been a gifted draftsman with her right hand, so, as she learned to write again, she took her drawing skills along with her.  As I have said elsewhere, I enlisted her as a sort of procurer, beseeching her to draw pictures of pretty girls for me.  And of a particular pretty girl with flowing brown hair.  (Such girls move me to this day.)  But before she fell under my employ, she was drawing all sorts of things.  And while none of these drawings survive, I remember the sturdiness of a nanny-goat's flank as she was about to rare back and kick something.  I remember a horse that, with rearing head and field-annihilating foreleg, couldn't wait to get going.  And two small children walking hand in hand, not as sentimental idealizations, but like kids who might get separated when one of them fell down. 

So many women at that time gave up on dreams that seemed plausible and necessary before they had children.  When I came along - and, then, my brother - my mother adopted the self-same strategy, with my father's implicit approbation.  He didn't like women to do "funny" things - though he was not untalented in this way himself.  He was merely applying the double standard that had been good enough for his father, and his father before him.  He had not, in relocating from the Midwest to the Delta, come upon an enlightened enclave.  Few of the fathers in our Memphis neighborhood would have given him much of a fight. 

In those days, mothers stayed home.  And went defiantly, if unostentatiously, mad.  Or found handicraft projects, like the lady across the street.  Who made "ceramics."  These ghastly creations were crammed inside of a house that was not much improved by them.  There was a boutiquey look to her kitchen and livingroom, and no comfortable place to sit.  But if you were there long enough, she'd give you a tour of her inner life - which had taken such an appalling form. 

I talked to a neighbor who had left her husband, with three kids in tow.  He seized the house for himself, but she waited him out and has lived in it, now, for over forty years.  But she never went back to her singing.

As I've said, my mother encouraged me, not necessarily to become an artist, but to see like one.  She thought "the life" was, while cruel in the short run ("You'll have to get used to being recognized after you're dead"), a glorious adventure while it was happening.  She talked about Van Gogh, who was to become - with the help of a somewhat ridiculous movie - poster-boy for the stereotypical artiste.  The Life (as opposed to The Work) wasn't quite as important in those days - though people got around to over-appreciating it.  Everybody knew about the ear thing - with which this incomparable creator has become embarrassingly synonymous.  My mother emphasized Van Gogh's struggle and sacrifice - which had led, in his case, to beautiful things.  She must have been thinking of all the people whose struggles and sacrifices amounted to almost nothing.  In her years as a teacher, she saw them often enough. 

"He had a very difficult life, but you can tell he understood that in other people.  Remember 'The Potato Eaters'?"

I did.  Chunky-looking people in a forest-dark room, with plumes of smoke coming up around them.  They looked cramped and miserable, but somehow charged with dignity.  Even then, I was attracted to the strokes, which had formed not only faces, but characters.  These were the kinds of people who would have understood the struggles of our sanitation workers, which would come to a head a few years later.  Or maybe not.  When you're in a bad situation, you can't always think of other people.  You have energy enough to help yourself, but nothing is left over.  It is why the super-fortunate take an interest - when they do - in downtrodden things.  They've got the commitment the lost people or animals they wish to rescue have had to abandon.

"People didn't understand him," she said, almost self-referentially.  "If you're an artist, that's what happens sometimes.  You just have to keep your mind on what you're doing.  People will come around.  You just wait and see," she said, with a little less certainty than she may have intended. 

One day, I was experimenting with a black crayon, whose velvety textures began to engross me.  Making them required a "touch", if little else: I flattened the body of the crayon out on a piece of paper and let it slide around.  Or bore down hard, then eased up.  When I did that, I got a dark patch, followed by a more delicate one, with a grainy look to it.  I studied it with an idiot's delight - having stumbled on a fundamental truth that made so many things fall into place.  I began to see these gradations in the hooked rug, on which I settled when I was drawing.  But, when I looked around, they were everywhere else too.

"Look, Mom!" I exclaimed, pointing at the paper.  "Look at this!"

She complied with an initial sense of weariness.  I was always asking her to look at something.  She was entitled to a momentary detachment.  Her  attention-craving son could at least theoretically hold his horses.  But as she looked at these exciting new swatches, she understood their implications. 

"I've been wanting to tell you about this, but I didn't want to make you do something you weren't ready for yet.  But look!  You've managed to do it all by yourself."

It was among my first instance of artistic exploration leading, without detours or byways, to an unqualified success.  If this was the sort of instant gratification an artist got, it was worth looking into.  Besides, noodling around with crayons was fun and it didn't involve the kind of strenuous effort that was synonymous, then as now, with "hard work."  I knew I was onto something and was fatally encouraged to keep it going.

And the triumphs did come, as well as the delightful immunity privileged persons get just because they can do something nobody else can.  From my earliest years in school, I was assigned to do the class murals - which were not as conceptually oversized as they were on the board.  Yet my artistic sensibility was strained.  Even as I discovered those gradations of tone without which one's grey areas will be lost, I couldn't apply them on a grand scale.  My pilgrims struggled to emerge from pumpkin patches that were too big for them.  And, after Giotto (though I can't say I was thinking of him at the time), I enlarged their flintlock muskets past what the laws of proportion would allow.  Guns were essential, not only to American history, but to my personal aesthetic.  They were shiny, they looked good from a holster or stirrup, and, most importantly, they killed things.  The urge to represent often comes after the need to murder.  Yards of war-celebrating canvases cannot be ignored - though many are in various basements, where they should emphatically remain.  Yet because they come from who we are, we should not deny them - even as we, with a reasonable revulsion, sock them away.

At the time, my mother had not yet become a teacher.  These were the "lost" years of her marriage - years of financial privation and emotional servitude.  Aside from keeping my brother and me amused - and, as she pointed out in a personal memoir, protected - she was dedicated, at least mentally, to the eventuality of freedom.  Pictures of the family seem, in this context, rather generic: the four of us (the photographer is unknown) squeeze together on the only couch or have a little shindig in front or backyard.  In one of them, my brother is being stood up, as if to raise him personally above the muck of family angst; I am infected by a bit of raillery and am laughing; my father looks warmly present; my mother seems to imbibe the native humor of the event and go along with it.  But the reality was more complicated.

Yet amidst all of her yearning for a way out, my mother upheld a private vow to keep me in paper and crayons.  Personal vision can occur at any time.  When it happens too early, the subject (or victim) is likely to burn out.  Child prodigies become plodding adults - or forget genius and go for the cash.  I wasn't one, but such vision as I have was already forming.  A lot of talented kids make - after that sublimely delirious phase of color exploration - cartoons.  Then they want to do "real" pictures, which are based on photography.  I never did either.  I was interested in physical realities that could be touched by the hand and transferred, by that touch, to paper.  I was, in fact, more invigorated by the "space between things" than with the linear enclosures by which children and adults codify physical boundaries.  For me, nature was becoming a holistic thing that found synergies in pulse and
 movement; shape and color; in the effects of sunlight, and the miseries of weather-systems that have recently gone off their nut and will very likely continue. 

Then as now, Memphis abounds in weedy things - things that are not taken seriously, but flourish because people are too lazy, or unconsciously admiring, to cut or mow them.  Some of these nameless entities bear tiny flowers; others spike out of the ground; still others laze in beds of pseudo-clover.  Luxuriant strains of grass-seed become water-eaters householders most willingly oblige.  Translucent carpeting proliferates along the margins of a house.  And between the warped members of an old fence, honeysuckle twines disastrously, but exudes a wildly seductive fragrance.  Upon contact, a fence-mender will re-think his mission and go somewhere else.  Amidst these polymorphous things, ants and grasshoppers wander.  Dig down and you'll run into the usual earthworms, followed by squishy grubs and the occasional ant-farm that can go ballistic, depending on how provoked it is.  (Open-air ants are more peaceable.  All they want is to march in queues and raise small hill-creations out of the dirt.) 

I came into the house one day with a handful of flowers and tried to draw them - unsuccessfully, but with good intentions.  I asked my mother why they were so hard to do.  Rather than explain it, she drew a little flower herself, adding others.  Finally, there it was: my bastard clump, now wilted, but triumphantly preserved.

"How did you do that?" I asked, pitying myself first and admiring her second - if at all.  Tears of frustration were beginning to well.  She could see that and was meeting them head-on, though she also knew to let them fall if they had to.

"You just look."

"I did!"

"The hard part is to choose one of them and do it."

"Just one?"

"Try drawing just one flower and then go onto the next."

"Okay," I said, with renewed vigor and a sense of hope.

And so it happened.  As I drew one, then another, the whole thing began to fall into place.  I'm sure it wasn't a very good drawing, but people attach too much to the look of something.  If some seed of progress can be discerned, the drawing is a success.  It doesn't need to be exhibited, though it can be studied for its small, but quantifiable excellences. 

Suddenly, the world existed, not in pieces - though piecing things together is something even the most holistic painters must do - but, again, as a single unit governed by laws that could not, at that time, be known.  I had come into a very rudimentary understanding: if you take something in, you take it in the all-together.  Just as that black crayon moved quirkily along the surface of the paper, putting down hard lines and/or blanchy-looking tones, your eye must move across and around things in order to get a kind of global feeling without which you really can't make a picture.  My mother was the first person to alert me to this phenomenon: this holistic unity, this scannable universe, this block-and-tackle for the eye and mind.  It is a sophisticated concept to which the average businessman - to puncture a familiar target - does not naturally gravitate.  It upsets his sense of the grand design, which is multi-linear and dependent upon the suppression of good instincts.  It also takes irreconcilable things and forces them to interact.  In reality, a holistic design is unified by a webwork of ingredients from which the designer must, in the service of his or her vision, choose.  That's why everybody's pictures are different.  The wonderful Richard Dadd got into the nameless grasses of his native England and peopled them, not with ants and grasshoppers, but with living, if somewhat over-panoplied, human beings.  He saw lots of things within his unity, but it is a unity still.  The best of the Impressionists saw light as an all-enveloping force and that unified their pictures.  Durer saw the enigma of personality drawn down by fate and mortal feeling.  Rembrandt saw a divine order made of light-beams that aren't entirely optical, but resonate more spectacularly than the light we can see.  He saw spirit in matter, but put matter first.  No one has made "brick and straw" more tactile - even though he probably ceased calling things by their names.  A holistic vision doesn't require them.

In the form of secondhand pictures, these artists traipsed across the small livingroom with its hooked rug and constipated television set.  As did the vision of those flowers, which my mother had drawn individually in order to show me how they all hung together, as all living things must.  As I occupy the space she knew better than any other, I feel daunted by the task of remembering bits and pieces from her life and unifying them with my own, which will be without her from now on.  Yet those early lessons were invaluable.  They taught me to keep tabs on the register while the store minded itself.  She never told me how she knew this.  It was acquired by hand and eye through an initial process few of us remember; then re-acquired more consciously after certain neural connections had been severed.  Perhaps that unity was established this second time, as she struggled to see and write again, long after these skills were, in others, second nature.  That was her triumph: as she jumped through familiar hoops with palsied reflexes, she got a better idea of how it was all done.  And when she was making words on the page again - and combing, with a crayon, a horse's mane - she began to make connections the ordinarily skillful person could not.  And passed them gently on to me - who did not have to struggle for them, but received them as most unconscious people do: with a sense of gratitude tempered by a sense of the gift's inevitability.

It has taken me fifty years to acknowledge that I haven't been entirely responsible for my fate, destiny, or what have you.  I got a sort of push early on and will, for the rest of my life, remember it.  A push from a hand that found its own force and, for better or worse, kept pushing.