Saturday, August 03, 2019

From The Archives Of Second Change Cat Rescue- Frida Kahlo And Jasper Johns




By Laura Perkins

Sometimes it is nice to be vindicated especially when some professional calls your bluff. Of late I have become an art critic, an amateur art critic proud to say,  in this space based on my love of art, my having studied it in my youth and because I still haunt art museums (and a less worthy reason that nobody else in this philistine operation would dare go within ten blocks of a museum having been “wised up” in about sixth grade on that fateful field trip to some art museum and they
have never gotten over it.) Along the way I have gathered what amounts to things called trolls according to my fellow writers here who have ranged from spiteful evangelicals to people with axes to grind without purpose and a few professional art critics like Clarence Dewar. That last troll is what today’s archival caption is about.

Dewar, a professional art critic for Art Today, has apparently made it his life’s mission to rid the field of what he considers, get this, citizen critics, people who would mess up his well-oiled art theories by exposing them as no less subjective than their poor offerings. He has made me the “poster child” for his wrath having replied and commented on every single article that I have pushed out the door the past several months. He went crazy when I exposed Edward Hopper, holy of holies, as organically incapable of drawing anything but mud faces. Took a nutty when I mentioned that Jackson Pollock’s drippings had plenty of material embedded in the work which indicated that he had been a sexual dervish, with who I don’t know on at least a few of the early productions. (Of course, such “madness” his term required him to defend his mentor Clement Greenberg who was the max daddy of critics hailing abstract expressionist art in general and Pollock’s semen drippings in particular. Leaving later generations to have to try to break free of that stigmata). There have been a million other controversies as well but that gives the tenor of the so-called “duel” between us.       

I thought we were going to have to send an hospital emergency room squad specializing in bilious behavior after my most recent “discover” about modern artist, abstract and maybe pop artist thrown in, Jasper Johns and the route he took to define his own working life. Let me lay out the story as I heard it first. Early in his career he had been like all young artists awash in representational painting (even mad Surrealists and Dadaists started out “by the numbers”). The Johns’ household was something like a sanctuary for second chance cats, kittens really, you know rescue cats from animal shelters.

One cat named Jasper was always around when Johns was doing his artwork. One day dear Jasper spilled a bucket of paint from the worktable, color charcoal grey, onto a painting of some scene Johns was working on. At first furious at the frisky cat after picking up the “damaged” goods he noticed that the results looked extraordinary like a AAA map of Augusta, Georgia (where he had been born in 1930). This would be the lesser known Piping Number 4 dedicated to Jasper, most art critics, most professional art critics including the villain Dewar when I researched the matter, assumed that he was referring to himself. From there Johns made a career, a lucrative career out of such common symbols as maps, flags, numbers, using various materials, not all paints as such.

Enter Dewar our esteemed professional art critic to counter my so-called story with the usual blather about Johns being influenced by Pollock, Rudy Zane, Billy Bligh, Christ even Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali. Dismissed, as usual, any idea that an accident by a beloved animal might have influenced him. Of course if the average art lover knew anything about Johns it is the multitude of American flags he created out of many materials and with many variations. These flags have sold for many millions, many, many millions. That is the standard a guy like Dewar measures works by. What Dewar did not know is on this one I was able to get the “skinny” on the cat story by the grandson of Johns’ late art dealer and the person who put him on the New York art world map. He confirmed the story (and moreover has the painting given to him by his grandfather when he was young). Touché.

Touché for a minute because as the reader will note the headline includes the name of famed (maybe more famed than Johns now) Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Now Frida and Johns have little in common other than being well-deserved famous artists whose works sell for mucho dinero but a reader enthralled by the Johns cat story wrote that cats played a significant role in Kahlo’s early career.

No question that Frida was influences by her husband Diego Rivera and his circle of muralists and by what today is called Arte Mexico, an appreciation of the indigenous cultures of her country. But according to my reader, and I have begun to see that she is right, Frida also was influenced by a cat, or cats. Had been sometime after the horrible injuries received on a runaway tram been frightened almost to death by a cat who ran across her chest several different times while she was recovery and had not way to stop the beast. That is the genesis of the many cats (and other animals as well) in her works. Go figure. Go figure as well Clarence Dewar will have to say on this one.                      
 

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