From The Archives Of Edward Hopper's Art World Before He Was Edward Hopper

From The Archives Of Edward Hopper's Art World Before He Was Edward Hopper -Once Again In Defense Of Art Critic Laura Perkins

By Eric Saint James

This will not be an expose of one Clarence Dewar, art critic, oops make that professional art critic for Art Today as I have had to do on two previous occasions when he slung mud at a fellow art critic, an amateur art critic as Laura Perkins proudly calls herself.  I will be defending Ms. Perkins against Dewar’s latest tirade but at least this time despite his contemptuous attitude toward Ms. Perkins and so-called amateur art critics in general it is a matter of legitimate controversy around the nature of the artwork of one Edward Hopper one of the most beloved and saleable artists of the 20^th century.          

For those who need the slightest background to all of what well-known art critic, also professional, Sam Lowell has on many occasions and under many circumstances called the art world’s tempests in teapots here is a short summary.

Recently I had to go down in the mud twice with one Clarence Dewar, art critic, I love to say this, professional art critic for Art Today to “save the honor” of amateur art critic Laura Perkins when he cut her with the remark that she should take up crocheting or some such silly sport and leave the heavy lifting criticism to the big boys and girls, basically him. I made a few pithy remarks about knowing him and his ilk back in the day and that I knew where the bodies were buried. If some snooty snide words from me are all Clarence has had to endure in his seedy baggy pants little life he has gotten off pretty easy.      

In those commentaries I challenged Clarence to come at me with his two-bit noise and back off from Laura Perkins. Well, as expected he has yet to said peep one about my slashings but he nevertheless decided to take on a “soft” target first by pointing out a very common mistake about the modern artist Franz Golder placing his exquisite work back to the time of his Dutch and Flemish forebears. I had to ruffle his feathers on that one with my knowledge that he had claimed somebody from the 16^th century Van Brick school had painted from nature when that was impossible given that the flowers painted bloomed at different times of the year (and I subsequently learned that half the flowers were not   survivable in Netherland’s weather).

Despite my warning that I would expose his little two-bit shady back alley Dewar went back on the case with Laura over her commentary about the late 19^th century German artist Frieda Kane (the sister of Gustav Klimt, or maybe step-sister). Ms. Perkins made what seemed to me the unremarkable but astute comment that Ms. Kane in her attempts to connect with common culture, peasant culture at least as it existed in Germany tended to spend too much effort on rural landscapes and fauna and flora. She seemed kind of repetitive and imitative despite the welcome uncovering of her work. Clarence had a fit, went crazy saying that Ms. Kane was breathe of fresh air in the overstuffed urban-oriented and urban critical German (and Austrian) art world.          

What Clarence probably did not count on and Ms. Perkins I assume was unaware of was the real motivation for Mr. Dewar’s brittle if fervent defense of Ms. Kane’s output. That brings use directly to the nub of the problem. The role, the perfidious role of the art gallery owners. The wormy art gallery owners are strictly in the business of moving artworks and making kale, nothing else really. They have unbelievable influence on art buyers by their hungry huntings for new works to “discover.” That was the case with Larry Larsen at the Nova Galleries in New York City. Along the way Larry “discovered” Freida Kane and grabbed a bunch of her paintings at a decent price in order to make a killing. Whether art good or bad should be treated as a commodity like steel or rubber balls I won’t go into right now.      

Enter Clarence Dewar, oh yeah, profession art critic and general shill for whoever had enough dough to whet his degenerate appetite for cocaine I believe it is these days. Clarence started in the old days working his ass off, pedaling it really, for professional art critic Clement Greenberg when he was touting, successfully touting for a while abstract expressionism. I will admit Clement really did make the market for that genre, pushed more now dissolving or discarded high-priced works, including everything Jackson Pollack ever produced, than anybody. This is how it works though for professional art critics for glossy art publications who get paid starvation money to grind out their pablum.

Enter art gallery owners and in Clarence’s case Larry Larsen. To make some money and get invited to various gala events almost every art critic “sells” him or herself to some gallery owner to act as a press agent, a flak-catcher if necessary. To push the merchandise really, especially the overstocked stuff like most of Freida Kane’s which despite a big gala and fanfare including the inevitable glowing article by Dewar did not, has not sold well. Hence Clarence’s tirade and insults against Ms. Perkins who is only stating the obvious and commenting on what the least discerning collectors know- Kane’s stuff is boring.   

The latest from Dewar, who still carries water among New York art gallery owners and their circles although I don’t know why but which means something in the art world is a five thousand word “essay” in Art Today about how wrong Ms. Perkins was in her estimation of angst and alienation in Mr. Hopper’s work. What got Clarence’s hackles up was the statement she made that no matter how desolate his flower and building non-human work was that seemed positively giddy (my word not hers) compared to the monotone faces of those who graced his people-centered works. Clarence totally flipped out when Laura provided documentation from Hopper’s own mentor, William Merritt Chase, that he had flunked the “faces” class and probably never would do more than less than average on human faces.        

Like I said this question is legitimately the subject of debate in the art world, and beyond and so no expose of Dewar’s handling of some Hopper works for the New Dawn Gallery (since gone under) is necessary to cut off his legs. That despite his cruel and abusive language about Ms. Perkins lacking any insight in Hopper’s extraordinary sense of the modern world, of that angst and alienation that he learned by rote at the feet of one Clement Greenberg when that gentleman was riding high in the art world. Enough said except for the new obligatory “hands off” Clarence or you will find that one Sam Lowell knows something about you that should make you a piranha in the New York art world.  

Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20th Century Art Is About Sex-The “King Of The Mopes” Edward Hopper Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Nighthawks” (1942) Without Wings

Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-The “King Of The Mopes” Edward Hopper Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Nighthawks” (1942) Without Wings

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes you just can’t talk to Sam Lowell about art. Sam is my longtime companion meaning for those who feel they need to know that as one wag put the situation in the case of Whistler and one of his mistresses we are living together “without benefit of clergy.”  Meaning as well that after five, three him, two her, collective failed marriages we decided to cut out the middleman. Result: we have been together longer than any of the five, three he, two she failed marriages and a lot longer than a couple of them combined. That does not mean that Sam cannot get ornery, can’t be a pain in the ass especially about art. See he never really got over the idea that he should have followed his youthful instincts and gone to art school which his high school art teacher had paved the way for him as an alumnus of Massachusetts School of Art with a scholarship. Sam’s mother, an old Irish Catholic cross to bear whom I never met, wanted him to move up in the world by being the first in the family to go to college and to get a nice white-collar civil servant job that would have satisfied her own youthful busted dreams. Sam finally bought into her argument that life in a cold-water garret as a struggling artist would actually be a step down from the utter poverty they had already lived in the Acre section of North Adamsville.

But Sam never as long as I have known him fully accepted his path, his fate and as he has reached retirement age it has only galled him more. That said, as is well known, or should be, Sam didn’t do that civil servant bit but became over the years starting at the now defunct East Bay Other (California) and going through American Film Gazette and now American Left History and associated publications become an award-winning film critic. What is less well known is that along the way he would write, sometimes under his own name, sometimes under the name Charles Skyler, for Art Today and Art News especially if a film had an art theme like say The Thomas Crowne Affair or more famously The Girl With The Pearl Earring. Which sets up why Sam is sometimes hard to talk to about art and can get ornery about his takes on various pieces of art like the one to be discussed today Edward Hopper’s iconic if somewhat overblown Nighthawks from 1942.

By rights this assignment to traipse through the arts, art museums to select some works for commentary should be Sam’s providence. Unfortunately when site manager Greg Green originally approached him he turned down the assignment since Sam wanted to play out his hand, his term, and track down the reasons a famous California private investigator Lew Archer whom he had known, had interviewed a couple of times before he passed away had never made the P.I. Hall of Fame. Sam had chalked it up to sexual impotence which left Lew less than eager to bed whatever femme was around at a time when guys like Phil Larkin, Sam Spade, and Phil Marlowe were setting the standard for hard-boiled detectives taking a walk on the wild side while solving some bang-bang case. Sometimes Sam can stubbornly go after every possible lead and he did in the Archer case so with some decent results but to my mind not enough to not have taken his natural choice reviewing art works, especially American art works.

Sam’s pass on the assignment was my good fortune although it was Leslie Dumont not Sam who suggested to Greg when he was looking in-house for somebody to take the on-going art work assignment who clued him in that I had taken some art classes and at least had gone to an art museum once in the last fifty years. The bar thus was pretty low, and I almost did not take the assignment either except I got assurances from Greg that he would have my back if I decided to go off on a few tangents. Which I have and he has backed me up despite the hellfire and damnation from a bunch of troll evangelicals who have objected to my talking about sex and sensuality in regard to some pretty hot 19^th century art like Sargent’s Madame X and Whistler’s The White Girl. As it turned out, although they are still claiming me as Keil the devil’s servant and bound for the lake of fires, they don’t really give a damn about art one way or another but about talking about sex and art together just in case their young folk decide they want to look at some on the Internet. Yeah, as Sam, and half the guys here would be quick to say, WTF.

Sam Lowell does care about art and that is where this whole thing is heading now. Two things have come together, have collided really. Sam has basically exhausted the Lew Archer impotency bit thus having some time to think about art and when I took on the assignment I knew that I would be consulting him as I went through my paces. He would not be so foolish as to try to usurp the assignment (nor would Greg let him since he is happy to have a quirky look at the arts by me where Sam would go chapter and verse). But he has definite opinions which he thinks I should incorporate int my pieces (what he forever had called “sketches” even that 10, 000-word Archer medical report, or what amounted to a medical report). That came up a bit in Sargent, Alexander and Whistler pieces but hit hard when we discussed Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks where we have two very different takes on what was going on in that midnight hour at that funky New York diner. (By the way Sam insists on calling him Eddie this, Eddie that but I have never seen even the most democratic reference ever call him anything but Edward and so Edward it is.)     

       

Here’s the general framework Sam and I have total agreement on-all serious 20^th century art (and now reaching into the 21^st century) is about sex, erotism, sensuality. Period. The jury may still be out on the Minimalists although there are some pieces by Matty Gove that reek to high heaven of sex, rough sex too. You can’t think of a school post-Impressionist, Ashcan, Realist, Regionalist, Abstract Expressionist without being overwhelmed by the Freudian deluge. Don’t even mentioned about Action painting, Pop and Op-Art schools which are drenched with primal sexual urges and dreams. (Only some silly school boy or girl would for example fail to see the mix of sperm and womanly fluids in the drippings of Max Daddy Jackson Pollack.) Where Sam and I differed or have a difference now with Hopper’s masterpiece is interpreting the narrative. I will get to that in a minute but let me tell of a couple of controversies we had on the earlier works I have presented to set up the battle lines.

When we discussed Sargent’s Madame X Sam wanted to go knee-deep into Madame reputation as a professional beauty and as an up and coming new age courtesan where I wanted to deal with the ideal of beauty then with that hideous birdlike nose of hers which by today’s standards would place her in the wallflower category, except maybe among nerdy guys. (On the side I wanted to discuss Sargent’s devious homosexual urges to make Madame X out as a tramp, a whore I think I called her but we decided to tamp that down since while there is plenty of anecdotal material that he and his dear friend Henry James were bedmates the hard evidence through biographers is not there yet.) We took a stab at both themes since this was my first piece, but unlike Sam I was a little uneasy about casting Madame out of high society once those denizens saw how she was advertising her “wares” via the Sargent portrait.                  

Alexander’s Isabella provided a mutual agreement when two things happened- Sam “sniffed out,” his term, that the jar in which an aroused Isabella kept the severed head of her lover done in by her jealous and grabbing brothers was filled with poppies, with the stuff of opium not silly basil and she was high as a kite when she did her ceremonial caress of her doomed lover. Once Sam showed me the photograph of a poppy crop I was won over. More importantly Sam dragged me, not literally he is not like that at all even when ornery, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see not the Isabella although we did view that fine work of art but the plethora of paintings throughout history going back at least to John the Baptist, maybe before with Mendon the wanderer where some woman is swooning over the severed head in a fit of ecstatic reverie. Very enlightening and also the cause of more random troll activity responses than even poor Madame X faced.  

Whistler’s The White Girl (we both agree that the later Symphony in White designation is malarkey, nothing but show and the work of some two-bit prissy art curator ) put us at some odds since I believed, still believe that Whistler was attempting to show some age of innocence idea so he could sell the damn thing and pay his back rent and have some dough left over for wine and partying. I refused to believe that a friend of the virginal Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood would be surreptitiously advertising his then girlfriend, mistress, whatever arrangement she had while they lived together “without benefit of clergy” was a latter-day Whore of Babylon. Then Sam showed me the scholarship on what that strangely out of place wolf’s head and fur meant going back to ancient times- the age old “open for business.” Damn. I didn’t like it, was furious at Whistler who by all accounts was hard on his mistresses and models but I had to concede the point.

On the Hopper Nighthawks narrative on those denizens of the deep night I think I am right. I’ll give Sam’s take first and then my own. Sam sees Hopper as strictly a voyeur, frankly a dirty old man, literally and this will not be the last time Hopper lets his sexual fantasies and dreams spill out on canvas. The key question for Sam is why he is so interested all of a sudden in the “night people,” deep night when nothing but stuff that had better not see the light of day goes on when most of his stuff is strictly daytime mopery, my expression. Sam has claimed here a certain amount of “nighttime” expertise having ended an evening more than once winding up at Joe and Nemo’s which is really Hopper’s template here. Sam is thinking of the one on Stuart Street in Boston adjacent to the Combat Zone, no further description necessary, but they were all over many Eastern urban cities including New York and he remembers one somewhere Seventh Avenues. Come a certain hour after the bars close and remember they close later in New York City and the night people come up, among them what used to be called “ladies of the evening” according to Sam. What is going on here is nothing but a “hotel, motel, no tell” between the man and the woman we can see. The distance between them tells that they are not lovers and her looking at her fingernails while he decides whether to take a chance with such a brazen hussy. (If not him then the guy with his back to the viewer is the next in line.) The pair are negotiating the fare and the location, that Hotel Deluxe just beyond the shadows on the left to be their resting place after the evening’s exertions. I at least got Sam to back off on the short order cook who is just some rum-dum who couldn’t get a day job as the “pimp” here. He might have been getting a rake-off from her  to use the diner as a business address but that is all. Christ Sam can get weird, would any woman have that jamoka do anything but serve dish-water coffee and grease-laden burgers-at an hour.         

 

Yes, sure sex is involved in this muted scene although frankly itdoes not depend on Hopper’s being a dirty old man although Sam pointed to a couple of later paintings that might make that argument. My take is that these two are lovers, disenchanted lovers. But lovers, nevertheless. They had been at Club Nana up the street, a hot spot of sorts before the war but now filled with guys either too old for military service or 4-F laggards. The Nana in those days had Earl “Fatha” Hines holding forth (this before he headed to Boston and the High Hat Café) and the evening had started out pretty well before our grumpy Gus laid up too much liquor, too many whiskeys. Got ticked off that some sailor made a pass or two at his woman and now after they closed the joint down they were doing their inevitable stop at the diner to have him sober up a bit before he heads back to his rooming house up the street and she grabs a cab to her place further downtown. Not happy campers, a not usual scene in a Hopper but not the sullen creepiness that a dirty old man like Sam suspects.            

Traipsing Through The Arts -In Cold Civil War Times-The Benumbed Will Always Be With Us-In Lieu Of The Inside Scoop On Sex And Sensibility In The Artistry Of Edward Hopper-Down And Dirty With The Holy Goofs

Traipsing Through The Arts -In Cold Civil War Times-The Benumbed Will Always Be With Us-In Lieu Of The Inside Scoop On Sex And Sensibility In The Artistry Of Edward Hopper-Down And Dirty With The Holy Goofs

By Laura Perkins –

But, first… (originally an introduction but now its own piece) 

[I often wondered, questioned him about it too, why Sam Lowell, my long-time companion and fellow writer at American Left History as well as associated and connected publications, on occasion used brackets to introduce an idea, maybe get something off his mind when what he wanted to write about went into the other direction. What he would answer, and did recently when I inquired again, is that sometimes you don’t want to mess up the thread of what your main topic is with a lot of bilious ramblings. That notion struck right to the heart of why I asked the question. Through default, basically Sam being hung up on another project, site manager Greg Green asked me to start out a series on various pieces of art, American art for now, in order to correct what he saw as an on-going imbalance in the subjects covered at publications under his direction. Art getting short shrift against politics, literature and music. After giving him the obligatory “I am no art critic” which he countered with “Hell, you are the only one left standing who will admit to having gone to an art museum,” getting an assurance that Greg would have my back if I went a little sideways in my pieces I agreed.           

Fair enough and I thought that would be that. Although Sam, through many years of experience, especially on-line knows that you never know who is going to get their hackles raised by anything put on the Internet. Who will discover quite by chance when Googling something totally different that he or she has found a nice little home to throw grenades from-and that at least metaphorically not too far off the mark. Not to belabor the point unnecessarily Sam pointed out that one time when he was writing a big piece for Allan Jackson, the previous site manager, on the history of rock and roll he was waylaid by an irate clot of what he assumed were older women who had not gotten off the notion that “rock and roll was the devil’s music” and that he ought to ashamed to even be talking about the subject. Here is the ouch part, that lasted unendingly right up to the very last piece in the series. So you see what can happen almost by accident. (By the way an 2018 encore presentation of that history edited by Allan drew no fire from that quarter either they have passed from the scene or are holding forth elsewhere.)

That being dogged by holy goofs and lonely hearts had been the case with the first three artists, 19^th century artists, who I covered. My common theme, consciously pursued, was to highlight the off-hand sexuality of the three pieces under review (Sargent’s The Portrait of Madame X, Alexander’s Isabella, and the Pot Of Basil and Whistler’s The White Girl so the knowledgeable art devotee will know where I was heading). Two things happened as a result. The first is that I got into a running battle with a three-named Boston Brahmin progeny attempting to whitewash any thought of sex or sensuality in high society painting back then. The thorn in the side’s name was Arthur Gilmore Doyle and he was relentless for a while stating the obvious- “I am no art critic.” Fortunately, with a little help from Sam and his vast experience with these people who apparently have plenty of time on their hands I finally got him off my ass, yes, I said that to him directly, by a cute little devise, or rather two, one was to head to the 20^th century where every artist almost by definition is going on and on about sex and sensuality and by NOT saying anything at all about the “s” words in my fourth piece, my overview of some of Edward Hopper’s works.

That seemingly was the easy part. The hard part still with me is what Sam calls the “trolls,” those unlike say Doyle who at least was trying to make an argument, an art argument, just go on and on about whatever drove them to this publication in the first place. What I have gathered in though is a clot, cohort of born-agains, evangelicals, some kind of Christian cultists. Not all from the same denomination, not all with the same theology by any means but all with that tell-tale readiness to smite anything that is not some straight-forward homage to the Christian god. They have on occasion formed what Frank Jackman would call an unholy united front to denounce not my views on art, heavens no, they could care less about that but that I have talked about sex and sensuality in the public square. Worried themselves sick that any susceptible young person might see these reviews and do, do, do I don’t know what except maybe rapidly go back to texting or something (this worry courtesy of one woman who signed her name Irate Christian mother). WTF.

Now, and talking to Sam bears this out, normally this publication is far removed from any interest such types might have, left-wing politics, culture war stuff, literary things which are far removed from the salvation trips they like to pursue. In any case from early on, from that first piece about the whorish ways of Madame X (who everybody now knows was the wannabe courtesan Madame Guiteau who climbed her way up the high society ladder an old-fashioned way not acceptable today, not in the wake of the #MeToo movement certainly.) Here is the odd thing, the very odd thing about the collective troll response-there was not an ounce of Christian pity or sorrow for what Madame had to do to get ahead in a world where a woman’s profession beauty was her calling card. I don’t like it, don’t like that woman had to do it to get ahead in a narrow world but I don’t condemn her for eternity These holy goofs obviously have forgotten the streetwalker Mary Magdalene who had to ply her trade to keep herself ducats or whatever the coin of the realm was back then in their vaunted Jesus story. She may, or may not, have slept with him before becoming a follower, although most certainly with at least one of the apostles. Not all of them were closet homosexuals or asexual by any means the jury is still out on Jesus’ sexual orientation. Yet if I am not mistaken MM became a saint, at least in the Catholic Church so you never can tell. 

What is outrageous for me to hear and see is these good Christians who apparently in their theology don’t have room for post-mortem salvation threw mud at Madame X’s name, called her whore, slut, lesbian (never proven as far as a I know and beside the point since sleeping your way to the top in those days, in the 19^th century, was as much a co-ed sport as in modern times), defamer, slattern and a whole bunch more that do not bear repeating here. What made this craziness hard for me to hear was that say a guy like David Trout, an evangelical preacher of some note who slept with half his congregation, male and female, or like Reverend Ben Devine who was charged under the Mann Act drew a pass from these same people, get “redemption” just because they said they were sorry and asked the “Lord’s forgiveness.” Bullshit.

[Weirdly, apparently the trolls only salivate at the “s” words, nobody high-born or low challenged my insight about Madame X’s hideous bird-like nose forcing her to never allow a frontal portrait which would have at least given us a common theme around concepts of beauty in various ages, you know artistic ideas.] 

It didn’t get any better with Alexander’s Isabella, where I mentioned that Isabella way back in the 1500s was obviously involved in some dark satanic lustful severed head cult which has been going on since about John the Baptist and maybe before and that the plants, on good authority, were not basil but poppies, the stuff of opium and heroin dreams. They went wild on that one talking about pagan worship and Keil the devil’s servant, Keil being me as the messenger. Me, making it okay for them to blaspheme beloved Johnny who if I am not mistaken believed that only adults who have Jesus within should be baptized naked as jaybirds in a river running north to south and all others should wait until they meet those conditions. Yeah, Johnny was a weird dude as Salome or whoever had their insatiable desires granted with that severed head to while away her sweaty nights. Frankly I had never heard of Keil, assumed they were taking their lead from the Bible, from Scripture and when I looked it up I was shocked to find that there was a Keil who had indeed been the devil’s earthly servant but that from the Zoroaster religion, the religion of ancient Iran.     

Although if I am not mistaken were are in modern times many of the respondents gave their dire warnings of the approaching End Times (they always capitalize so I will follow their lead and maybe avoid a couple of Punch and Judy rabbit punches by a guy named Oswald who has been particularly adamant that I was maybe more than Keil the devil’s servant but maybe the big man himself in woman’s clothing, it would not be the first time that a woman had led the candid world astray according to reliable sources). What the hell End Times has to do with analyzing a private severed head community of  aficionados is beside me unless of course that is their way to warn me off where I have been heading. Of course it goes downhill from there once they get up to speed (really once somebody, somebody other than me since I refuse to get involved in the back and forth which would waste my time, time I could be spending looking at art works for future “sketches,” that’s Sam’s term for what we do, I prefer in general “piece” signifying a chunk of something, a nugget in the mother lode). 

They, really Wanda from Wabash on this tidbit, went on and on about the sanctity of blood ever since Christ pored it for a foreboding world and that some secret cult involving of all people Johnny the B, was beyond the pale, was outre. Funny nobody in this day in age involved as we are in the epidemic opioid crisis gave a rat’s ass about that discovery that the plants were serious opium producers even if Bella did pine away for her Johnny Cakes without a care in the world after handling the product.         

As I mentioned once this clot, no, Laura, be respectful, cohort, got on a roll, started to get into that ecstatic funk they brew up once they get holy rolling and moaning about E.T., about salvation about the redemption of the blood (making me wonder if they were really serious about being down on that cultish severed head worship) they kept accumulating brethren until it got rather maddening-I was getting a thousand hits a day of people reading and responding to each new twist on stuff that basically was an art-lover’s opinion. Here is where it really got weird when I started in on Whistler’s The White Girl and through much more research than I thought I would ever need discovered that what Brother Whistler was really paying homage to was not his live-in girlfriend at the time (mistress or whatever he was telling the landlady who was starting to worry that her freaking cold water flats were becoming the homesteads for “immoral” purposes, maybe low-end bordellos) but the sanctified whore of Babylon. The key: that wolf’s head which has been the “sign” of the courtesan, the ad that tells everyone who wants to know that she was open for business. I thought nothing of it but if you thought I took a beating with the pagan severed head cult take on Isabella’s fetish you should have seen how crazy they were to denounce the whore of Babylon, the poor gal who decided to model for and play house with old Whistler. I swear if I had said Jezebel I couldn’t have gotten a more rabid response from these yahoos.

The last piece though, the one that got Doyle off my ass was like a feast for this evangelical crowd once I said not one word about sex or sensuality. They were all in ready to fill in the blanks for me. That is when I finally figured out none of this had anything to do with art, which I kind of knew anyway but with giving them essentially a free whipping girl to proselytize around their fringes, grab people, maybe the young and dissolute who needed some saving, maybe some who need to work out some simple theology, need to spent all day Sunday not at some art museum or on the golf links but sweating in some backwater uncooled church listening to some reprobates going on and on about say E.T. Here was the key-“and everybody knows, every art lover knows, that once you get into the 20^th century (and now beyond) everything from abstract expressionism to color field work is all about sex.” Which of course is true and allowed me to skip having to mention anything about it when I dealt with staid old Hopper. It broke Doyle but only inflamed the, uh, cohort.

Basically, the crowd took on every piece of modern art possible except of course the Velvet Elvis stuff that adorns their trailer living rooms and perhaps the famous painting of dogs playing poker. Not to critique it but to cast it to the ash heap. I finally found out what it must have been like when Hitler and the boys called for burning books and destroying “degenerate” art. Found out how nasty some people can be when the hammer comes down and there are no known limits to their depravity. I will give one example which should suffuse because despite the Promethean uphill battle I am facing just to avoid all their hateful bullshit I will be discussing below in the real part of this piece sex and sensuality in Hopper, dirty old man. In Hopper’s most recognized work Nighthawks there are three customers, two, a man and a woman, whom you can see and a third, a man with his back to the viewer and of course the fourth is the rum-dum wino night short order cook serving up the goo. Serving the washed-out coffee and the steamed unto death midnight special calculated so since the clientele at the midnight hour have passed beyond caring about quality food have drunken the whiskey sills dry. Out of this devil’s work scene Wanda was able to see that the woman, “the fallen woman,” Wanda’s term so you know where this is going already, what was she called a modern day whore of Babylon (with the accompanying twelve million citations from Scripture about her, our your doom without J.C. which need not detain us just check the Bible at your local library), and was ready to “go to work” on the poor jamoka beside her. Get this though the rum-dum night cook was pimping her off (with another Wanda twelve million quotes along the same line about abetting and begetting sin, the eternal same line that I have been dealing with for weeks). This about par for the course.

[Again nobody gave a damn about the true revelation on Hopper, that he had flunked drawing people’s faces where they had to show something more than an ironic world-wary smile in what passed for art class in his day. An interesting real art tidbit which goes a long way to explaining his “king of the mopes” reputation.]   

There you have in a nutshell about why I have followed Sam Lowell’s advice and put the bullshit, the publicity flak hand-outs and press agent noise here where any self-respecting reader can totally ignore the noise but I just had to vent a little-Laura Perkins]               

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong   

By Laura Perkins  

I really wish that one Arthur Gilmore Doyle hereafter Doyle since I refuse to play his three- name monte game like he was some Brahmin grandee out of the 19th century swilling us with his robber baron Heritage, pedigree some kenneled championship dog would get a life, would get some gainful employment other than clipping coupons or whatever the progeny of the robber barons does these days. Apparently after he arose out of his dead faint when I explained that James Abbott McNeill Whistler (four-name Montes are okay as long as you are an artist, once) was paying homage to the Whore of Babylon when he had his girlfriend of the time standing in a white dress with a sexually suggestive wolf’s head under her feet in painting variously titled The White Girl, Symphony In White and Homage To My Current Whore, well maybe not the last one. You would have thought that I had committed something like a mortal sin for having pretended that this great artist was not above some very risqué symbolism back in the days when such signs had to be submerged in polite society to sell to those self-same robber barons by the American ex-patriate (and other artists as well) The gist of Doyle’s argument beyond the now usual hosanna to the saintliness of every artist who put paint to brush back in the 19th century when his robber baron forbears started buying artworks to move into high culture was that I am no art critic. A fact. Real fact which I have been at pains to declare. Doyle then went through some litany of names Johns Ruskin, Clement Devine, Erasmus Land and a few others none of them who I knew from Adam. Nor need to know since what I am about here in this series is showing there are more than two ways to at look ta works of art-sublime and more sublime. Some of them, those other ways while not sublime a word that Doyle used repeatedly to describe what I find more erotic than anything else. In that sense I have staked out some territory that has included sex in the equation when it has been called for whatever prissy Doyle may think. Especially with a guy like Whistler who slept with every one of his models, every woman who crossed his path as far as I have been able to discover. He was sex-addled, I had to smirk to myself when one critic mentioned that Brother Whistler had a heathy interest in woman, oh really, as well as probably was high half the time, it would be interesting to see what kind of drugs he was doing let’s say when he was painting the so-called Symphony in Gray and Black or Etude in Beige and Chartreuse. Here, and this is only speculation not hard evidence, I think from that low-rent paint he was using so no wonder he had strange ideas about women, had called poor Johanna, his Whole of Babylon a lot worse than I have tagged him with. Once the medics revive Doyle again I may have a solution to our impasse.  Here is my plan though which I think might be foolproof. I am moving on to 20th century artists specifically to Edward Hopper in this piece. Since Hopper did not have or use three names for his moniker, and everybody knows once you hit the 20th century even the most pristine abstract expressionists and advanced colorists know that it is all about sex and the unconscious desire to throw it on canvas I should be home free. So that should throw our man off the sense, get him off my ass.

[Originally this is what I had to say about my plan which I have now scaled back. “So I have had enough of this. I have a plan, have been forced to devise a plan I think will work to keep Doyle off my ass. I have decided after three consecutive articles on 19^th century painters which has caused me nothing but grief Doyle only being the most high-brow of the lot. You would not believe what vile things proper evangelicals full to the brim with Bible quotations and the like will utter in the anonymous cyberspace where troll-like they call home. For people who believe in repentance and forgiveness I have been shocked by the language and the vitriolic blasts I have had to endure for simply stating that even Renaissance guys, Leonardo, Fra this and that, definitely Botticelli when he was in his cups, Raphael when the turpentine high was on him only cared about subliminal ecstasy and rapture, ah, sex, when the deal went down. For that I am exiled from the Garden, forced to spend the time until End Times being flogged by dimwits-L.P.]  

Now to Hopper the eternal mope-the guy who pictured alienation in about seven different ways. Really more since every freaking painting is like stab to the heart of modernity like we don’t already have enough nonsense going on without a guy endlessly painting bummers and having real critics like Alice Faye, Clem Devine, Lance Little and a fistful of others yakking about the man and moment meeting in about 1925 when Hopper was in his prime, before he started taking up with womenfolk and seeing where that led. Here is the kick though later on in life after he graced his canvases with alienated and angst-ridden folk he started to think about morality about the great arch of life from birth to death as he reached the age when men and women start to think about their own mortality. No big deal just had a country scene, a big old white house near some forest put an older woman, frail, what did Alice Faye call her, yes, matronly and then a younger woman dressed for the season, summer season and all that means. Beautiful-life and death. Along that same line had  a self-conscious woman young in a summer dress looking cool as a cucumber except for an outsized hat which dwarfed her face looking like some latter-day Genghis Khan, ready to do battle with all to keep her place in the sum. But that was latter stuff, stuff I will detail more in another piece or two for today I want to get that Doyle off my case and need to stay with this alienation and angst business to get him to stop his cyber-madness. (I have no expectations on those troll-like angel pinheads calling End Times on me for we all have our collective crosses to bear, Christian or not).           

That is later stuff when he got into the swing of things, when he had already made a name for himself as the master of the alienated and angst-ridden modern set. Who can forget that famous, maybe too famous, Nighthawks at the Diner where some Joe and Nemo’s crowd is waiting for Godot or somebody after the bars closed for the night and they need a saucer full of coffee and grease-laden hamburgers to set their world right. They might as well have been at the Automat for all the interaction between the lonely people. How about that great dimly lit drugstore with the Ex-Lax (or is it Ex-Lac) saying more about the world than any people-populated piece even though that whole scene is filled with more menace than if he had put a jack-roller over in the back behind that searchlight-like street light. One more to draw my point. How about that famous, or infamous, painting down at the National Gallery, now mercifully reopened, with the two people looking for all the world like they were ready for divorce court and the dog looking like the happiest one of the lot since at least he will land on his feet. I could go on and on, but I think I have made my point about Hopper being the king of alienation and angst in the post-Freudian world.     

Naturally as I have done with the previous three artists looked at in this on-going series I have a special presentation, a scoop if you will about the why of Hopper’s mopery, why his people don’t smile. I have had access from the archives to his art school or whatever training he had and have found a very interesting discovery looking over some of his early facial drawings. Hopper, hold onto your hats, never learned to draw faces with people smiling, except maybe ironic closed-mouth smiles. Never could quite get the hang of people opening up their lips in order to smile, hell, or look like they were capable of talking. I thought I was dreaming but then I showed the specimens to Sam Lowell and he agreed that the closest Hopper got to a smile, to an open mouth was some early tooth-decayed grotesque done when he was an illustrator, something hideous which would not reflect modern life, modern angst.      

I am sure that Doyle could care less about such niceties and so I think I am home free, finally got him off my back. Without using the “s” word once in reference to Hopper. Still… 

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check -The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night- The Music Of Tom Waits

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days, attending writers’ conferences that is instead of taking pen to paper or rather fingers to word processor keyboard, when I heard Tom Wolfe had cashed his check. “Cashed his check” a term (along with synonymous “cashed his ticket”) grabbed from memory bank as a term used when I was “on the bum” hanging out in hobo jungle camps and the whole trail of flop houses and Salvation Army digs to signify that a kindred had passed to the great beyond. Was now resting in some better place that a stinking stew-bitten, flea –bitten, foul-aired and foul-person place. No more worries about the next flop, the next jug of cheapjack wine, the next run-in with vicious coppers and railroad bulls, and the next guy who was ready to rip whatever you had off to feed his own sullen addiction.

By the way this is not Thomas Wolfe of You Can’t Go Home Again, Look Homeward, Angels, etc. but the writer, maybe journalist is a better way to put the matter of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s hanging with Ken Kesey and his various tribes of merry pranksters, the Hell’s Angels, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, to marveled space flights in the 1970s to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back who had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” mentioned above was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion without knowing his fate that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories about the restless California tribes, you know those Hell’s Angels, Valley hot-rod freaks and the like who parents had migrated west from dustbowl Okies and Arkies to start a new life out in Eden. These next generation though lost in a thousand angsts and alienation not having to fight for every breath of fresh air (with the exception of the Angels who might as well have stayed in the Okies and McAllister Prison which would have been their fate.   

I don’t know how Tom Wolfe did at the end as a writer, or toward the end, when things seemed to glaze over and became very homogenized, lacked the verve of hard ass 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s times. Although I do note that he did a very although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina in a book of essays around the theme of hooking up. That hooking up angle a sign that social cohesiveness in the age of the Internet was creating some strange rituals. Know this those pound for pound in his prime he along with Hunter Thompson could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy, me, flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.  

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night- The Music Of Tom Waits

CD Reviews


Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Tom Waits, Electra/Asylum Records, 1975


The inner lives of the denizens of that late night diner in the famous painting by the American realist artist Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks” (1942). The scorching literary sketches of the rich and famous and the skid row bums provided by the late “Gonzo” journalist Doctor Hunter Thompson, accompanied by the renderings of the artist Ralph Steadman. The jingle-jangle high side lyrics of the legendary folk musician Bob Dylan of the “Blood On The Tracks” period. The reach into the far side of the part of the psyche exhibited by those down at the base of American society in an earlier period by the novelist Nelson Algren in “Walk On The Wild Side”. And that same reach later by the man of the “mean” Los Angeles streets, Charles Bukowski. Wrap them all up in a whiskey-soaked, cigarette-scarred, gravelly, rasping voice and you have the idiosyncratic musician Tom Waits. Placed in that same company as above? Yes, by all means. Not a bad place to be, right?

Although I have been listening to the music of one Tom Waits for decades, every since I heard Jerry Jeff Walker do a cover of his classic song of loneliness, longing and reaching for the elusive promise of Saturday night dreams in “Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night”, I am not familiar with his biography. All I know is that aside from his own far-reaching musical endeavors, as expressed in numerous albums over the years, he has acted in some motion pictures, most notably as a skid row philosopher of sorts in the movie version of William Kennedy’s “Ironweed” (a natural, right?) and has provided the soundtrack music to many movies, most notably the Al Pacino-starring “Sea Of Love”. That Waits soundtrack version of the late 1950’s, early 1960’s classic teenage anthem to longing and love is just the right example of what Brother Waits means musically to this reviewer. Taking that simple song of teenage longing, Waits’ husky-voiced rendition reaches back and turns it into something almost primordial, something that goes back beyond time to our first understandings that we are ‘alone’ in the universe. Enough said.

But so much for all of that because what I really want to mention is the “Waits effect”. Every once in a while I ‘need’ to listen to words and sounds that express the dark, misbegotten side of the human experience. You know, sagas of Gun Street girls, guys talking “Spanish in the halls’, people lost out there on the edge of society and the like. Is there anyone today who can musically put it better? If you need to hear about hope, dope, the rope. Wine, women and song or no wine, no women or no song. About whiskey-caked barroom floors, floozies, boozies, flotsam, jetsam, stale motel rooms, cigarette-infested hotels, wrong gees, jokers, smokers and ten-cent croakers. Drifters, grifters, no good midnight sifters. Life on the fast lane, nowhere lane, some back street alley, perhaps, out in the valley. This, my friends is you address. Listen up. Professor Waits is at the lectern.

"(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"

Well you gassed her up
Behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrelin' down the boulevard
You're looking for the heart of Saturday night

And you got paid on Friday
And your pockets are jinglin'
And you see the lights
You get all tinglin' cause you're cruisin' with a 6
And you're looking for the heart of Saturday night

Then you comb your hair
Shave your face
Tryin' to wipe out ev'ry trace
All the other days
In the week you know that this'll be the Saturday
You're reachin' your peak

Stoppin' on the red
You're goin' on the green
'Cause tonight'll be like nothin'
You've ever seen
And you're barrelin' down the boulevard
Lookin' for the heart of Saturday night

Tell me is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
Is it the barmaid that's smilin' from the corner of her eye?
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.

Makes it kind of quiver down in the core
'Cause you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
And now you're stumblin'
You're stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night

Well you gassed her up
And you're behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrellin' down the boulevard,
You're lookin' for the heart of Saturday night

Is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
And the barmaid is smilin' from the corner of her eye
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.

Makes it kind of special down in the core
And you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
It's found you stumblin'
Stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night
And you're stumblin'
Stumblin onto the heart of Saturday night

***Artist's Corner- "Nighthawks " -The Work Of Edward Hopper

Click below to link to site that has information about the famous American realist (?) artist Edward Hooper. Tom Waits lyrics and Edward Hopper's art (at least his famous "Nighthawks At The Diner") definitely fit together.