Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Sublime-Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Number 31” (1949) Without Wings-Sam Lowell Unchained
By Laura Perkins with Special Guest Sam Lowell
[I have now run several pieces in this on-line publication Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s (and its’ sister and associated publications by arrangement not exactly by syndication but by mutual agreement) about my admittedly amateur although not unformed take on various artworks that have struck my fancy as an avid art museum goer. Usually as will be described below in the main piece taking some flaky tangent which no self-respecting paid press agent, flak-catcher, art curator, art director, art collector or gallery owner protecting their well-trodden turf would even dream of mentioning in public. They would be banished to the netherworld of Norman Rockwell and Velvet Elvis plaques, made to walk the plank without blindfolds or take some fire at the stake rather an upset the applecart. Especially when tarring any and all so-called art work, intentional or not, with the “art” brush guarantees eventually work hyping the “next” movement in art, grabbling luscious assignments curating some mega-exhibit with the added cache of writing some profound three to five thousand word essay to dangle on an unsuspecting world (pity the poor museum press agents having to do with one thousand word and none of them too long), going into the trenches bartering X work for Y work to draw a crowd into an under-utilized facility, foist some precious piece on some hedge fund manager which will not go with the furniture, and worse, worst of all leaving those covetous gallery owners with a bunch of unsaleable stuff that would have to compete with the lovely Velvet Elvis fate of the banished at the local flea market. No best to toe the art cabal line and move on-when commanded to move on.
So the cabal stays in lockstep mainly since who knows maybe some artist who has thrown a few bricks or tiles on the floor intentionally, intentionally the new catch-word between what is art and what is not these days although in the age of the Internet those flimsy barriers are tumbling as I write when the bar had been significantly lowered, the artist will be the subject of some mega-retrospective and nobody wants to crimp the golden goose or be seen as behind the curve when yet another overblown artist’s reputation gets the red-carpet roll-out. I took this assignment from site manager Greg Green with his knowledge (and it turned out delight) that I was not part of the professional artery crowd, what in the old days in places like London and Paris was call the academy where everybody toed the line or else worked in the equivalent of the Uber or Lyft driver profession to keep the wolves from the door of their unheated garrets for their art, and that I would be in high quirky dungeon.
I also took the assignment only after fellow writer Sam Lowell, the logical choice for many reasons including a greater knowledge of art than I will ever have, although I am catching up, turned it down to concentrate on another project which he can describe below if he likes. I planned from the beginning once Leslie Dumont, yes that Leslie Dumont recently retired from her weekly column at Women Today and doing periodic assignments here although not on art but rather film and women’s issues since she along with a coterie of writers here, young and old, male and female have never gotten over the traumas of that elementary school art museum experience and have refused not good-naturedly to tackle the assignment, put the bug in Greg’s ear that I might have got to an art museum once against the cohort of writers here who would rather than go to the bastinado than spent an hour looking at “pictures,” though to pick Sam’s brain for ideas and also to see if what I was proposing to write about had any basis in reality. The first few pieces on Singer Sargent’s Madame X, John White Alexander’s Isabella, Whistler’s The White Girl and Hopper’s works, especially the iconic if overblown Nighthawks of 1942 bear a certain collective input, although I have taken sole responsibility for what has been publicly published.
Maybe as a result of our joint work, maybe seeing that he made a mistake in turning down this projected on-going series or maybe his vaunted theory on the project he was working on, generally speaking why famed 1950s California private investigator Lew Archer never made the big-time after a promising start to his career with the splash he made solving the missing grandson in the Galton case and eventually finding the serial killer in the Hardman case although not before the female murderer had stacked up a pile of bodies, turned out to be significantly less profound that he expected but Sam has increasingly begun to hover around my assignment. Which is okay, and has been okayed by Greg as well, as long as it is understood that this is my “baby.”
Sam has said that he understands that situation having in the past as film editor over at sister publication American Left History for many years had to “eat crow” when some lush assignment came by and another writer, he mentioned old friend and colleague Seth Garth, grabbed the assignment in a moment of his hesitation. We will see but for now what Sam would like to do to “get into the game” is give his take on what has gone on before. Describe in his own words his take on what has been published so far.
Sam and I have agreed that the most general overarching theme we will live and die by is that all serious art in the 20th century, the period which we want to put under our flaky microscope, is concerned with sex and sensuality, eroticism and everything else is “filler,” what earthy-voiced Sam has called bullshit (no quotation marks needed).* Of course like everything sex is not the only driving force or thing to be noted about a work of art and thus far we have also exposed such important information as why Madame X refused to have a frontal portrait painted of her (a hideous bird-beak nose), done a public service expose on Isabella’s opium dream drug coma and membership in an ancient kinky severed head cult, blown the lid off Whistler’s scandalous use of his paintings, especially but not solely The White Girl as primitive personal ads for his select clientele, ah, what shall we call in polite society, escort service using his “muses” as bait. In short a pimp to keep him in booze and laudanum. Probably the most unusual expose was the fact that otherwise solid Edward Hopper beside being a classic dirty old man painting unsuspecting young women in revealing poses, something like pre-Playboy centerfolds, this courtesy of Sam by the way, also had flunked his human face class which explains his universally mopey, my term, faces and not that old chestnut every art critic since Hector Price has used about angst and alienation in modern urban society driving his take on his subject matter. A couple of paid flak-catchers, press agents, or whatever they are from some prestigious museums have been pounding away at us for such blasphemy. That not having a little to with an upcoming Hopper mega-retrospective or on one case holding a fistful of Hoppers waiting to sell at private sale.
Needless to say we, or rather I, have faced a firestorm of criticism from the art establishment who see their protected products wrapped in theories like the search for sublimation, the disassociation of line from form meaning you can throw those bricks and tiles, steel pipes, an odd crate or packing box into the mix and be counted as art, the search for pure abstraction, and the best one of all the one every ho-hum artist and their patron has used since the Greek calends “art for art’s sake” coming under fire from sources with no vested interest in cribbing the truth (what Sam in his again earthy-voiced way has called their “tempests in teapots” adding the classic bullshit with no quotation marks to round things out).
What has gotten Sam to insist on a one-time public airing of his own views is the criticism from lame, Sam’s term, take it as earthy if you like, former Art News critic Clarence Dewar in an article in Art Today. This is somewhat personal as well since in the 1970s Sam had to sack Mr. Dewar (the Mister at Sam’s insistence) from the East Bay Other in California for being nothing but a toady for the various so-called art theories of one Clement Greenberg. Basically, and Sam can go into the matter further if he likes, Mr. Dewar just took whatever Greenberg was hustling in those days, mainly the abstract expressionists, cut off the top of the article (or press release from Sherry LeBlanc Greenberg’s publicity flak) and submit it to Sam for publication. Nobody would have been the wiser, but somebody, maybe Fritz Taylor of all people since he usually only deals with military-related stuff, tipped Sam to the fact that same article published in the Other was in Art News under Greenberg’s name. Sam here is your fifteen minutes of fame. Laura Perkins]
*We believe our sex and sensuality theory extends to the main art of the 21st century Minimalism and its off-shoots you know the tile, mortar and brick, steel girder, plaster of Paris guys, the video cam guys, the dice throwers, the weavers, shawl-makers and the like, but we feel the jury is still out on the matter. Especially in light of what the age of the Internet will do to the direction that art takes (use of digital and other computer technologies already popping up which anecdotally seem asexual) against the overload of low-end pornography and graphic depictions of every kind of sexual experience even some not found in the Kama Sutra which under the new dispensation of intentionality are not art. If this series goes long enough, and it may, we will take a stab at extending our theory to the 21st century. What we have noted, I have noted, is that the work of a Minimalist like Matty Gove, who is not currently a darling of the art curator, art collector, professional art critic, art gallery set and not in danger of becoming an icon after some mega-retrospective reeks of sex, rough sex too, especially his Savage No. 1-6 series which I found myself staring at repeatedly despite myself and feeling kind of “funny” old as I am. Sam has noted that Don Low’s more “refined,” almost Victorian works had the same effect on him. But enough of that for now,
**********
Sam Lowell has his day in the sun:
I might as well explain right from the start that I don’t believe that at the time, in the early fall of 2018, that I was wrong to turn down the assignment from Greg Green to do an on-going series on self- selected art works. His idea stemming from a perceived imbalance skewed against reviewing works of art by the former site manager and now returned from self-imposed exile contributing editor Allan Jackson who had never set foot in an art museum until recently since art was for, well let’s just leave it that he had no abiding interest in art. Now I am not sure that I had made the right decision if only because at that time I expected my project (already mentioned above by Laura in her introduction) to last much longer. To maybe have to do months of research trying to find any last West Coast connections to the man I was interested in finding out about, Lew Archer. A name maybe not a household name back in his heyday but a man who drew front page headlines across the country for his work.
The idea behind the project was to figure out why Lew Archer, the famous 1950s California private investigator, shamus, gumshoe, whatever you want to call a guy (or lately a gal) who snoops for a living and had so much promise back in the late 1940s (after coming out of heroic medal-splashed military service in World War II) solving the Galton kidnap-murder case while the public coppers were sitting in some La Jolla donut shop drinking free coffee and eating crullers never made the P.I. Hall of Fame. That case, the reason for the nation-wide headlines featuring photographs of the handsome maybe heartthrob Lew which would have helped garner in plenty of work and did for a while, was finding the Galton grandson for his worried and fretted grandmother to pass on an inheritance. That Galton name which through the wizardry of the now aging grandson who is a grandfather himself has parlayed the original fortune derived from finding along with a guy named Sternwood from Bay City the oil rich La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles still draws plenty of water although the succeeding generations have kept a low profile after that long-ago scare kidnapping. In those private detective school advertisements you see on cable television they still tout Lew’s name as a text book case in how to do serious and successful private investigation. Guys like Stuart Mills, Jack Devine, William Powell and Sal Diamond, famous P.I.s all studied that case very carefully. (In the old days those private detection schools used to advertise on the inside of matchbook covers but with the serious and welcome decline in cigarette smoking you can’t find a match book anywhere and in any case I have found out that target advertising on cable and on the Internet gets many more responses for much less money that depending on an off-hand view from someone dying to have a few puffs of a cigarette.)
Lew had had backed that early success up by solving what came to be called the American Psycho case, the dangerous Hartman case. That case involved another rich gabacho Southern California family except this time cattle ranchers. The initial problem which the paid off by old man Hardman local police and sheriff’s offices were told to back off from (and presumably like their Bay City brethren grab some free coffee and crullers at the Honey Dew Donut Shoppe) was that young heir Chris was bonkers, had taken a nutty, was a weirdo and maybe much more who believed that he had killed his mother (yeah, the Oedipal incest stuff ). Apparently he had ingested half the drugs in the world and needed to dry out in a funny farm, that is what they called them then, a precursor to the twelve-step mania. Problem was that the bodies kept piling up after Chris was released from the loony bin. Enter Lew, via the old man, who wanted everything kept quiet, very quiet. Problem though was that along the way the old man, his older brother, his sister-in-law, the brother’s sexually overactive wife and a couple of transient bums and drifters were killed. So it was not Chris. It turned out that Chris’ so-called stand by her man wife was really a very resentful working-class wife who wanted it all, was ready to add Chris to her list if she could ever find him. Fortunately Lew grabbed her first and she was sent to the women’s prison forever once the death penalty was vacated in her case.
Two great successes and a few much lesser ones based on people seeing how he worked those two premier cases. Then nada, nothing and the slippery-slope every failed shamus followed to repo work then key-hole peeping finishing up as a go-fer for the next best thing in private detective world.
I had interviewed Lew who was then living in Bay City for the East Bay Other after I got a tip from Josh Breslin (who still writes here on occasion) that Lew was on the West Coast back in the mid-1970s a few years before he passed away. He was working, if you call go-fer work, literally going for those coffees and crullers but also surveillance work, nothing serious maybe staking out a known house for some deadbeat debtor for up and coming Sheila Devine, who did make the Hall of Fame a few years ago after she in her turn retired. In the summer of 2018 when Josh, Seth and I were talking about old-time film noir, film noir detectives, guys like Phil Larkin, Sam Sparrow, Phil Martin, hell, even Miles Riley Sam’s holy goof partner who made the Hall on his second try I thought about Lew’s fate.
My idea was to try to find some way to get him into the Hall, maybe a Life-Time Achievement pass in but I needed a way to get the nominating committee to hear my plea after such a long time when half the committee had never even heard of him. Or if they had heard of him maybe remembered the Galton case or knew he had finished up with Sheila Devine cadging coffees and sleep and wanted no part of rehabilitating him. I tried first to do the old “times they are a-changin’” bit, you know, that hard-boiled guys like Larkin and Sparrow were a throwback to the pre-World War II days when being a P.I. was gun-toting dangerous work with femmes hanging from every arm and Lew represented the newer, 1950s newer psychological profile way to solve some mysterious doings, figure out what made the bad guys and girls tick. No soap. They laughed at me for what one committee member called lame gibberish for that time period when a woman on every arm was still expected of every Hall-worthy P.I. If Lew had been a rising star later, say the 1970s well after he had been exhausted from those donut runs the argument might have played out.
That got me to take a look at the “problem” Lew had, why he wasn’t grabbing every loose “loose” woman within fifty miles of the case after going under the silky sheets with Mrs. Galton’s caregiver Angela. I contacted Sheila after I remembered that she had been Lew’s health proxy before he passed away (and handled his estate after he passed). Lew had been married to Dorothy Blaine, the later famous Hollywood scriptwriter, back in the early 1940s before he went into the Marines and saw hard-ass Pacific warfare and earned a fistful of medals. After the war when he took up private detection again he was grabbing every femme around, grabbling other sweet peas too and Dorothy gave him the door. That was Lew’s most creative and productive period. It was Sheila, after my insistent badgering who opened about what had happened to Lew, who enlightened me at least she gave me many valuable leads. For example, Lew’s psychiatrist’s evaluation about his sexual problems. For example, his taking a ton of drugs to keep himself afloat. For example, the electric shock, a recognized if dangerous therapy at the time, he underwent at the famed Carlo clinic in Big Sur when that was where anybody with dough or a sponsor did their high-wire therapies.
When I asked Sheila what had happened, how did Lew fall down she laughed and looked at me like I was some elementary school kid. (Before she became one of the first serious female private detectives in Northern California, maybe the whole state having earned her Hall honors after taking a couple of slugs in the Barrow murder case when a supposed simple kidnapping went awry she had been an elementary school teacher in Sunnyvale so she had the look down pat.) She then blurted out hadn’t I heard about the “Eighth Glove” case which was the start of Lew’s decline.
I admitted I was clueless, admitted when I questioned Lew about why he though he never made the Hall he never uttered a peep about the case. The way Sheila heard it (not from Lew but from Miles Riley who gloated about what had happened to a fellow P.I. in what must be something like the film review business that I have spent my professional career pursuing always looking over my shoulder for the hungry beasts who want run me down to move up the ladder over my “dead” corpse as he slid his slimy way into the Hall) was that after a series of unsolved homicides, maybe four or five Sheila did not remember which one, in Del Mar where the horses run down north of San Diego Lew had been called in when Stella Bloor, yes, from the still super-rich Bloor family which owns half of Irvine Township, had gone missing. The family worried that she might have been a victim of what was called in the tabloids the Bloody Glove murders. Called that because each of the discovered bodies of the young white women in culverts and arroyos had a black glove over their faces (they had not been strangled though but shot through the hearts).
Lew did catch up to Stella in La Jolla where she was living with some perfect wave surfer. But she acted very strangely, didn’t want to go home. No way. Told Lew she would give him plenty of money to walk away, to let her go on her merry way. Lew though, and even Sheila put this in Lew’s plus column, was dogged in those days on a case. Money was no persuader. The only thing that would break him from the scent was some kind of sexual persuasion. Stella must have sensed that about Lew because as he grew more resistant she went into her “come hither” act. Lew fell, fell hard for a while, kept her company for a couple of weeks in the meantime fending off inquiries from her father Lester Bloor except to say the last people who had seen her thought she was alright (and she was in a strange way at least when Lew was doing his fake reports).
One night though Stella, bringing that perfect surfer into the scene, both high as a kite tied Lew up on the bed. Lew half-drunk though this was going to be some kinky escapade which he knew Stella was certainly capable of having performed some stuff on Lew that was not even in the Kama Sutra it was that off-beat. From there Stella and surfer boy went on a rampage, maybe something suppressed while she was handling Lew, and killed a number of young women in Carlsbad bringing up to the number eight the number of gloves put on their victims. Somebody saw them on number eight though, no, heard them shoot number eight behind a darkened apartment building off Carlsbad Boulevard and had called the police. After a twenty-minute firefight between them and half the public coppers in the county the two were killed. When they went to search Stella and her whacky boyfriend’s temporary digs they found Lew trussed up. He gave some cock and bull story which the Bloors and the coppers found easier to believe than not just to close down the horrible publicity. Lew went down the slippery-slope from there.
It was after hearing Sheila’s story that I started to see the “sexual impotency” angle as a way to sneak him into the Hall today when we are more conscious of various disabilities, maybe sneak in under the Americans withgry to having to pee when such excursions were frowned up even by the Scribe, Markin the “intellectual” in the old neighborhood). Actually Laura’s credentials are broader than Leslie’s description to Greg in that she not only took art appreciation classes but drawing and painting classes and pound for pound is a better artist than I will ever be. No bull either. Moreover she had been in half the art museums here and abroad either taking me or me taking her since I admit to a late-blooming craze for art and art museums.
This is a good place to put to rest the “urban legend” about my pining away for the past fifty years or so for not going to art school when my high school art teacher had paved the way for me. Yes, Mr. Jones-Henry (an Englishmen who proudly asserted his now forgotten by exactly what relationship to Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood member who drove that movement originally started by Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, he of the ruby red lip models looking very much like Botticelli’s dewy-eyed muses, and crowd in its second wave) paved the way, got me that coveted scholarship based on his recommendation, but I had other fish to fry as well. I was as interested in history, government, literature and politics as art and was headed in those directions Disabilities Act, and my argument might have played until even say twenty years ago. I had originally thought about the gay angle but it didn’t figure so I had to build a case around impotency which reading of his later cases and the deep freeze he put between himself and women, except one time which was not even a fluke but done by the manipulation of a tramp, an amateur tramp, married, who thought she was taking a walk on the wild side with a famous detective wound up confessing that Lew fired blanks in bed. Once the medical reports and Sheila’s information came forward though I knew that the project was finished, done. No road forward. Lew was another has-been or might-have-been that was all. Leaving me with some time on my hands.
Of course, everybody now knows since Laura has mentioned it in a couple of her reviews that Leslie Dumont not me had recommended to Greg Green that he reach out to Laura to do the on-going art series. Leslie was basing her recommendation on the knowledge that Laura had taken some art appreciation classes in high school and college and had as she, Leslie said, actually gone to an art museum (unlike the ruffians who write here who avoid such places like the plague surprisingly including Leslie reflecting the attitudes built up from their youth, from that first horrible elementary school experience of viewing a blur of several thousand works of art in about ten minutes while either being hunwhen the draft, Army, Vietnam called. That threw things yet another way.
Probably it is true that my mother’s drumbeat about being the first to go to college in the family no forbears being even close, about already having lived the down and out life she expected of an artist in that unheated cold water flat drawing mist in the air and about me finding a nice civil servant job to make the family proud (and finally upward mobile after a couple of generations on the downside, down in the mud despite the general 1950s golden age of working-class prosperity that kind of missed us) turned the table against art school. But I didn’t wind up a civil servant either and have had what I consider a long successful career as a film reviewer. It is only recently as I have started the process of retirement that I have become somewhat wistful about a “road not taken.” Hardly pining though.
What has jumpstarted me though is Laura’s on-going art works series where she in her usual thorough manner has done a great deal of research and had jumped into the task with all hands. Has taken going to art museums seriously and has taken me along. That started my “role” as her “unofficial” advisor since while I have not pined away about my career choices I have always maintained a heathy interest in art, have written a few articles under various pseudonyms for many publications over the years (the reason for the monikers to keep my place in the dog eat dog film review world where it is hard to even think of writing something not a film review with the wolves ready to pounce about your being a dilettante for going outside the clubhouse). We have had several fruitful talks about the direction to go in and I am proud to say that I have had what I think has been a positive spin on her pieces. (I call them sketches as I have in my own work but will defer to her expression.)
The reason that Laura picked John Singer Sargent’s notorious Portrait of Madame X (everybody knows her married name if not her reputation by now so if anybody doesn’t look it up on Wikipedia) was really an accident, although a fortuitous once since that painting launched a thousand discussion about where Laura, and now with me in tow, wanted to go with the series. We had seen the painting several years ago, maybe more at the Met in New York City but what got us thinking about it as the starter piece, as a surefire firestorm producer was going to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see a Freida Kahlo painting of a couple of peasant women in the American Art section. To get there you had to dodge all the silly Sargent marginalia, especially that poor Boit kids painting that I am sure they were more than happy to unload on the Museum since none of them wanted that albatross hanging around their necks forever just because their parents wanted to show off their well-travelled huge fake Ming vases. (Saying such thoughts in passing while a volunteer guide was touting the paintings virtues to her charges almost gave her a heart attack as she gave me the serious art cabal eye-balling the plebe look. Like what is a rough-hewn derelict doing in the majestic confines of the so-called Brahmin’s stronghold.) I knew that the young pubescent girl in the shadows, Cecelia I think her name was, was pissed off at her parents, Sargent or both since she was supposed to have a “date” with some boy she met on the street and who lost interest when the goof ball (to her) Sargent spent endless time keeping them captive while he fussed around with his paints and smoked horrible cigars, although I am not sure on the cigar part. Rumor had it, and rumor may get things wrong but will contain grains of truth if for no other reason than to get taken seriously that she either attempted to take a kitchen knife to or burn the painting.
That got us thinking of Madame X and sex, no that was after we commented on how the museum should really change its name to the John Singer Sargent Gallery since there is almost no room you can go in the place without stepping in his goo, looking up or down. All those tiresome portraits of those three-name Brahmins (maybe I should not mention that since Laura sees red every time she sees those overblown monikers worse when the women have to have their three-name maiden names put in parentheses in addition to the Mrs. dodge) and their kindred and horses. We both flipped out when we went to the basement where the Native American and Mezo-American art is hidden from prying eyes and in a room where the museum had put together a cheapskate selection of memorabilia from the Summer of Love, 1967 (compared to the real deal at the de Young in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco) which now housed a bunch of dresses used in those three-name (put three maiden name) portraits by the loveless Sargent.
After we simmered over that further insult we honed on the Madame X and the sex angle. Mainly because we were looking for an obvious lead-in to discuss our modern art, our 20th century art thesis and Madame seemed the perfect foil for all that reeked of unspoken sex in the high Victorian era. This was also the cause of our first, although not last, dispute on what to say, how far off the tangent line we, no, Laura wanted to go. Laura who had gone to school with one of the off-shoots of Madame X’s American roots family wanted to go gentle on her obvious sexual allure for the times and to just mention that her bird-like nose, beak really might have struck a chord for professional beauty in the late 1900s but that her beak was hideous by current standards. Had called her Bride of Frankenstein or something like that in the piece and commented that there are no known frontal profile paintings of Madame for good reason that have not been destroyed to show how horrible she really looked in an age that didn’t go in much for cosmetic surgery.
That was before I gave Laura the back story or one of the back stories about Madame, one that would deal more seriously with her sexual adventures moving up in French high society. Of course history, and it hard to have to say it in the #MeToo age, is filled with women who used their looks, their professional beauty as Laura called it, to get ahead in this wicked old world. Madame X had done Sargent’s paint supplier Monsieur LeBlanc of the famous Parisian art suppliers who still are a going concern a great wrong. While she was sleeping her way up the high society food chain getting as far I believe as the Finance Minister (which helped her debt-ridden husband immensely) she was not above a little “slumming” with the plebes. Monsieur LeBlanc maybe not the most discreet guy in the world let everybody know that he had bedded the dear Madame. She denied it and it looked like it was curtains for LeBlanc. Then Madame’s personal maid saved his ass by writing an assisted memoir telling of how Madame, even when her husband was downstairs, would “entertain” half the men of Paris, including LeBlanc bringing them up the backstairs led by that daring “tell all” maid. High society was scandalized but moved on after shunning Madame X, giving her a big freeze. (Leblanc landed on his feet since the fussy, prissy Sargent was particular about his paints and claimed that Leblanc was the only one who knew how to mix the blacks, browns and greys for high society set solemnity and when Sargent fled to London before the mob was ready to do him harm he would have LeBlanc ship his colors over by boat thereafter.)
Laura agreed that she would include the unsavory if nicely sexually gossipy segment of Madame’s saga and we thought that was the start of something big and off-beat. Laura, even I, was not prepared for the bullshit that was to come swirling out of the Internet. It still seems weird even now. Somehow some sexual police, that is the only description that fits, found Laura’s piece which contained as this current piece does, the word “sex” connected with the word “art” in it. This posse of vigilantes, I call them trolls having dealt with the species before although not this particular genus, decided to foul up cyberspace by raining about seven kinds of hell on what she had written. As it turned out this was a network, loose and not organized as far as I could tell, of evangelicals who seem to have plenty of time on their hands fretting that their Johnnies and Janies might actually see the piece and be forever harmed by the connection between some loose woman’s sexual exploits and fine art. Yes, WTF even now. They had called Laura strangely Keil, the devil’s disciple although when we looked up this strange appellation we found it related to a demigod or something in the ancient Zoroastrian religion of what is now Iran. This from people who quoted chapter and verse from the Bible, who claimed high dungeon Christian principles.
That would not be the end of the madness though. The same day we decided to charbroil Sargent I walked by mistake I think, maybe not into. No, wait a minute there is one other thing about Sargent that Laura had to suffer through. Some three-named guy, get this as Laura would say, Arthur Gilmore Doyle, some kind of highbrow descendent of those misbegotten Back Bay bullies who kept the riff-raff out of their temple of culture decided that he had to enter the lists to defend his kindred Sargent from a person who was not an art critic (and never claimed to be). That was not the end of it, far from it this Doyle got up on his high horse about what was my real contribution to the piece, about what John Updike who knew a thing or two about such matters Sargent’s previously unexamined sexual proclivities, maybe an insight into why Sargent painted Madame X so provocatively, ruined her standing and flight up the tough food chain then blew town for safe haven London. Flee to his dear friend Hank James, called Henry by the literary set but not by the sailors down at the Anchor and Chain, a notorious hangout for rough trade aficionados on the Thames.
It was an open secret that Hank and Sargent were more than congenial dinner guests at Lady this or Countess that’s homes and while nobody has had the guts to say so in those hagiographical so-called biographies of either man there is increasing evidence that they shared a “love that dare not speak its name.” I won’t go farther than saying that since those rabid evangelicals are even more worried about homosexuals than about loose high society women when most people these days see it as nobody’s business who you love including Laura and me. Let’s leave it at this for now. W. H. Auden the great English poet and self-acknowledged gay man when that could cause much trouble (witness poor besotted Oscar Wilde and his time in Reading Gaol for proclaiming what he was which broke his spirits) kept pretty close tabs on the gay community in London, and later when he ran away under fire when World War II started, and things heated up in England in splendid exile in America. I am not sure of the genesis of the term but I think he got the idea from Christopher Isherwood of his crowd who was hanging around with Communists, Comintern-ists he called them kept a list of those who he claimed for the “Homintern.” Closeted gay guys (I don’t know about any lesbians maybe Gert Stein kept that list). Near the top of the list of honor in his eyes-Hank and Jack. Enough said.
Okay back to the Museum of Fine Arts that fateful day which clinched our determination to hold out a new way of looking at art, modern art with all that a post-Freudian, post Jungian world can muster. But first another forebear, another artist who pre-dates modern art but whose theme dovetailed directly into the modern. And I don’t mean apples and pears Cezanne and late grain-stack Monet that is all bells and whistles stuff for the mentally crippled art cabal members Laura has already mentioned-the freaking collectors, curators, directors, gallery owners and worst, worst of all the tour guides who merely parrot whatever the party line is for the moment like some old-time Stalinist hacks beaming about socialist realism (or else long lonely nights in Siberia strangely except for the cold the same fate as those who don’t toe the line here and are banished to fight over the Velvet Elvis concession at local flea markets as Laura so aptly do the matter). Jesus.
Furtively looking for that welcome Kahlo addition as I have already mentioned we needed to confront straight up John Singer Sargent and his cabal. Wrongly sensing that we should go right rather than left to the gallery we wound up almost face to face with John White Alexander’s Isabella, and the Pot of Basil (so-called). The minute Laura and I saw the painting we were halted in our steps by some unknown force. Laura said she was struck by the carnality of the model’s pose and affect. As was I but there is more to the story.
Laura ordered me to read the caption that goes with some paintings which I did. According to legend, from the Renaissance this Isabella was the beautiful ethereal daughter of a wealthy landowner who fell in love with her father’s majordomo or whatever the called the slave-driver who kept the peasants looking downward to reap and sow the land-owner’s crops. She had two ne’er-do-well brothers who spent all their time swilling wine, chasing chaste peasant girls and piling up debts at the gambling tables and whorehouses. If she married the majordomo they would have to go to work or start robbing on the dark roads late at night for their kale. So they did what an desperate deadbeats would do-killed him, cut off his head and as was the custom buried it in some unknown spot. They told Isabella that the majordomo had run off with some comely gal from town but she had her doubts. And she was right to have them since one night she overheard the brothers talking to some strange women, gypsies then now Roma, who had heard that they had a severed head and would they sell it. Greedily they sold it, or were about to, when a couple of paid assassins killed them as they digging up the severed head to sell to the waiting gypsies. Isabella had her revenge.
That is the public part of the story. What never got told was that Isabella connected with the Roma women not to sell them her lover’s beloved if severed head but to inquire about their purposes. That was when they told her they were part of an ancient cult, what we today would call a kinky cult no question which revered and swooned, that swooned part important, over severed heads. One of the Roma women said it started with Salome of the seven veils and her wanton lust for beheaded John the Baptist (this before they sainted him up). Isabella later found out once she was knee-deep in cult history and ritual herself that it went back further than that almost back to the Garden. Sometime after Adam had Eve grab the rotten apple and asked to take a hike from lovely Eden which we have beeni paying for ever since, but before the deluge. Whatever or whenever it was the ritual was key. The women, and it was all women, would be doped up, usually some form of opium and in that state would wantonly, sorry for using the same word twice but it the only one that conveys how they became ecstatic, and began caressing their lover’s head remains. Or in Isabella’s case since she was a novice and not born to the cult the jar which contained that beloved head.
Laura originally refused to believe in the cult, in the history or practice. Or in that hard fact that it existed in Alexander’s time and in places like Saudi Arabia, or any place where the lord high executioner cuts off heads for a fee, today. Then I took her for a tour of a few rooms where artists had done various renditions of the sexual ecstasy of women in a trance swooning away. Crazy stuff right. Laura wanted to just let it go, maybe write a couple of things about thwarted romance in the dark ages, stuff like that. That was before I gave her the coup de grace-the back story.
Sure Isabella, or Alexander’s model, mistress if I know that bastard was in ecstatic caress of the jar. But the whole thing about basil and symbol of love stuff was bullshit, was for public consumption for the gullible or sensitive art lover. Was some well-paid press agent’s nuttiness and if I know the bastard it was Alexander himself who put him up to it to fool the Brahmins who would look at the thing sideways if they knew the truth. What struck me first was that the plants in the jar were not basil but poppies, the basic material for opium, and bong opium dreams. I knew something was wrong with the whole scene because I am something of an expert or was on drugs having during the Summer of Love, 1967 period and during my subsequent Vietnam military service ingested every imaginable drug-and combination. I probably only survived Vietnam, maybe the Summer of Love too by being opium high, bong high. That led me to the stuff about the cult and its ancient and current roots. Once I started in on the drug angle Laura was won over almost immediately since she of all people knows I know my drugs. (Funny story Laura when she first smoked marijuana back in college had never smoked anything before and took a huge drag. She almost couldn’t stop coughing what she didn’t know until later was that even guys like me coughed our brains out the first time we did a joint. That experience knocked her out of the drug wars though.)
Here is the kicker though when Laura went public with the knowledge about Isabella and the kinky cult, about Alexander and his mistress model being devotees as well not only did the trolls go crazy with lust and Biblical quotes up the ying-yang but started up on that Keil business again. Something like shoot the messenger if you don’t like the message. That part we were getting used to and stopped even bothering to read their screeds except to have a laugh but when high-brow Arthur Gilmore Doyle entered the lists defending Alexander he was as mean as any Art News professional art critic. Defended his forbears’ class of which Alexander was a consummate member against the charges of kinky sex, opium dreams and unnatural lusts. Apparently he hadn’t read Alexander’s diaries which some thoughtful reader had made mention of where he admitted that he and Ilsa, that dream-infused model, were high as kites at the time he was painting that grand painting. Admitted he had a jones, an opium jones which lasted for many years until he went into what today would be called a twelve-step program. Finally to post-haste vindicate my contention dear sweet Johnny admitted that he looked into joining a kinky cult devoted to worshipping the severed head. Problem: no state was then executing people via the sword and he didn’t have enough dough to go to Paris and see what the action was like there. Case closed.
The firestorm over that was brutal or so Laura thought, poor Laura who has not been through these troll wars now a feature on the Internet as the signs of civil war in America turn from the cold of the last couple of decades to something undefined as yet but hotter. See I knew this evangelical crowd, the base of the trolls on this series although I am still amazed that they caught on to this site. I would have expected them to maybe harass Ralph Nadar or Al Gore about climate change or go after abortion providers aka baby killers in their lexicon. But no they have to pick on someone who is just going off the grid and grind a little about other ways of looking at art, modern art in the post-camera world now post digital camera world that the silly idea of a search for pure abstraction, saying fuck you a la Picasso and friends to the relationship between line and form, and a big raspberry for any form at all, all color all day. Here’s the beauty the one Clement Greenberg, no, Harold Rosenberg lived and died by, art for art’s sake. One of the lamest of the lame arguments for doing the do with art even lamer than that sublime stuff Greenberg was busting at the seams about. All this to lead into the artist, at least the most well-known artist who claimed to be doing his oils for art’s sake. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, you know Whistler’s mother’s son who pieced her off as some symphony in black and white or was it grey. Whistler and his The White Girl the painting that interested Laura when we went to the National Gallery and was mesmerized by that effort.
Of course Whistler’s art for art’s sake was a fraud, a hustle and The White Girl is a case in point. (By the way I dared only used Whistler’s four name pedigree once because Laura probably would go down to DC and burn an effigy before the painting for she sees red every time she sees that strung out name stuff.) Laura got caught up, and correctly if not completely, in looking at the painting of the girl in white who happened to be what were called one of Whistler’s “mistresses” in polite English society, the painting buying segment of polite society where he labored and seeing the struggle between some virginal naivete and the real world represented by that wolf’s head and fur at her feet. As far as she went that was about right and would make a good sales pitch to an ambivalent potential buyer.
But here, as usual with Whistler, is what is also going on in that polite society, the male segment, when they are not buying paintings for whatever evil purpose, the equivalent to 19th century porn for the prissy boys in some cases. Everybody knows, knew Whistler was hard on his women, those so-called mistresses he had on every hand. What is less well known is that he was a notorious if discreet pimp. Pimp pure and simple a bunch of moody misty color-coded paintings were not going to keep him in the lavish lifestyle he longed for. This painting’s other purpose is as an ad for his services, his escort service in modern parlance. This is what Laura missed and many others would too. That wolf’s head has long, has been since the days of the Whore of Babylon been the symbol that the woman, in the old days courtesan was open for business. For a price. Laura at first laughed and then I showed her the translation from Aramaic about the meaning of the combination of posed woman and wolf’s head. She agreed, much to her later sorrow and harassment by those harpy evangelicals who have not been completely burned over yet, to include this revelation in her piece. She got the usual barrage of Keil, servant of the devil bullshit and fearmongering that their kids will see such filth. That my friends is really what art for art’s sake is about.
After the last flurry of troll traffic in the aftermath of the Whistler revelations with its tawdry sexual implications Laura, who is of the two of us the more sensitive and the least use to the uneven battles in the public square when the trolls, crazies and holy goofs get on their high horses, was ready to throw in the towel. (I have her permission to mention this as maybe both a cautionary tale and a way to steel oneself against the current round of civil war-etched madness.) She had taken the assignment with the idea that she would take some off-beat looks at some art works and wind up maybe sparring with some opponents like Arthur Gilmore Doyle who wanted to whitewash the sex and any scandal out of post-Civil War 19th century American anyway. Now she longs for the day that something like Doyle was around, a guy who at least was interested in art as opposed to using art as a stick to beat the drum about the dangers to the young and impressible complete with the standard End Times warnings that the evangelical horde has decided to make a stand on this series about.
Laura at least had enough sense especially as the troll trail snowballed out of control, to not answer any of this traffic, and eventually not even bother to read the messages. (After all how many times can you read the eight million quotes, usually contradictory from the Old and New Testaments in order to “prove” you are Keil the devil’s servant, disciple, henchman, whatever on Earth.) Laura though is particularly sensitive to this religious drumbeat. You see she is, was, one of them, had grown up in “burned over” upstate New York, out in farm country where there still are remnants from the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Her father was strict Mountain Methodist (an off-shoot of the Wesley boys’ movement which split around the question of adult baptism) and her mother pure Brethren of the Common Life (which split from the Monrovian Tabernacle over how long it took God to create the Earth and how many days of rest are needed-yes I know what the reader is thinking). So she knew all the arguments although that Keil business threw her until I looked it and found it was the devil’s servant on Earth in the Zoroastrian religion of ancient Persia-again I know what the reader is thinking).
That religious training, that knowledge of what was being thrown at her provided the solution, her good sense solution. See most of these evangelical (including her parents) live in the modern world, partake of its benefits but in their heads are back in the 19th century, back when sex was not spoken of at least in public and at least not in polite society which meant religious society. That provided what would be the solution, if there was to be one. They had gravitated to the series because they thought Laura was challenging their 19th century concepts of sexual purity, of not talking about it basically (not far different in that regard from my own old neighborhood Catholic upbringing where we learned about sex, mostly erroneously and dangerously, out on the peer streets not at home with uptight parents who did us a great disservice on that score and put some of us at extreme risk with what were then called “shot-gun weddings” or worse of that was not a solution then the poor bedraggled girl having to go see “Aunt Emma” somewhere out on the prairie the poor girl usually to ashamed to come back or more likely the parents too ashamed to have her come back). All Laura did, and I agreed, was move to 20th century art, post-Freudian art since those holy goofs knew from their respective preachers that all such art was filth and degenerate (sound familiar?). That did the trick once she did her piece on Edward Hopper who is anathema to that whole evangelical crowd as nothing but a dirty old man posing as an artist. Not a peep after that. Unfortunately, once she moved on she lost sparring partner Doyle as well. (He too apparently only cared about the 19th century art scene of his forbears and probably heard the same spiel about modern art and blew town once his temperature returned to normal.)
But not to worry there are other, always others to take up the cudgels in the cultural worlds where everything in the final analysis is a matter of opinion, of taste and if not that then some social or financial issue. Enter one Clarence Dewar, now, I think, the chief art critic at Art Today and if not at least a professional gun art critic. It is unfortunate that Clarence decided to tackle the subject of 20th century art because what he didn’t know was the relationship, here the professional relationship between Laura and me as her “unofficial adviser.” See I knew Clarence in the old days, in the days when I worked as de facto editor at the East Bay Other out in California (not paid as an editor but more like a free-lance stringer). Those were the days when Clement Greenberg was the lead dog in the art world. The days when he would go on and on about the search for “the sublime” in modern art and heading toward pure abstraction, stuff like that. Clarence had been his student, an acolyte, really as it turned out his shill on the West Coast. I had to fire one Clarence Dewar for a very simple reason-plagiarism. He would take some article Greenberg had written in one of the trendy art journals, clip off the title and submit it under his name. I would have been none the wiser but my old colleague Sandy Salmon, not Seth Garth as Laura had thought although if Seth had seen the article he would have blew the whistle as well, noticed that one of Dewar’s articles looked very familiar. It turned out that it was an article that Greenberg had written for Art Today. I had egg over my face, but I kicked Clarence’s ass out onto the street with relish.
So now some forty years later having apparently wormed his way up the art world food chain he is back to tell Laura she is no art critic. Which neither she nor I mercifully claim to be. Clarence if you have read Laura’s torching reply to him has never got off that “sublime” theory that he cribbed from his teacher Greenberg. Somehow he saw the sublime, meaning something higher meaning almost undefinable, in Edward Hopper’s unjustly famous Nighthawks of 1942 (others of his works like Morning do deserve fame believe me). Laura and I although we have had a disagreement over the nature of the narrative have agreed that this is centrally about old-fashioned sex, and maybe sexual frustration in line with our take on serious 20th century art. By the way I would check old copies of the various art journals around to see if Clarence once again didn’t crib one of Greenberg’s old articles in responding to Laura’s article.
I mentioned to Laura when Clarence’s article surfaced after telling her what I knew about from the old days with him that we had not seen the last of him now that he had whetted his base appetite at her expense. This before my expose here. Laura and I had gone down to D.C. for a conference, this before the December government shut-down which closed the publicly-funded museums, and is our, really my wont we to the National Gallery of Art on the Mall. Went to see some French paintings from the early 20th century but also wound up seeing an on-going Jackson Pollock exhibition featuring his hightide of his too short career Number 31. Laura was enthralled with the piece and for once was not demur and yelled out to me that the piece “reeked of sex,” her expression. I had thought the same thing but had not had a chance to get my words out. Laura blushed not about what she thought which was true but that she had frightened a couple of old biddies who were viewing the painting without really understanding what the hell the thing was about.
Enter Clarence to not only throw in his two-bit theory about the sublime nature of the work but to cite it as an example of the continuing (and assumedly progressive) trend in modern art toward pure abstraction, toward breaking line from form to put the matter another way. Naturally where Laura saw primordial sexual expression Clarence blasted that as some much ill-conceived hogwash for the struggle for pure abstraction was what Pollock was trying to achieve. Again straight Greenberg although probably not plagiarized this time. This is where the back-story comes in, the part that Clarence either consciously suppressed, was not aware or hadn’t bother to check the Greenberg archives.
Everybody who knows anything about Pollock’s work methods knows that after years of struggling with booze, pills and whatever he could get his hands on that his paramour Lee Krasner, by the way a very good artist in her own right, forced him out of hell-hole New York City where he was drowning artistically. Took him to the Sound where he did his work in a little shed nailing the canvas to the floor and then doing his drip thing. The question particularly around Number 31 is what his idea was, what was he working out subconsciously in his mind, and body. Anybody who seriously looks at the work knows, as Laura and I knew, that Pollock was in some deep sexual mood on this one (not on all his dripping but more on that some other time). The question is was he alone with those cans of Benjamin Moore or doing more than that. Was Lee out there with him on this one or was he alone. The answers to these questions are important on this piece and to our general theory since recent tests through the beauties of the Internet and other technologies have shown not only paints but human bodily fluids-and tiny pieces of condom. That Mister Dewar would make for a very different definition of sublime. Indeed.
Now I can go back into the shadows.
