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 uninformed 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 pieces and none of them with too long words), going into
the trenches with distance relative members of the art cabal 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 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. That is 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 turned Greg down. She along with a coterie of writers
here, young and old, male and female have never gotten over the traumas of that
yellow brick road school bus 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 gone 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,” 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 between us, although I have taken sole
responsibility for what has been publicly published.
Maybe as a result of our
joint work, maybe seeing that Sam made a mistake in turning down this projected
on-going series. 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. As a result, 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 the 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 him, 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 exactly 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 well-regarded 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 in order 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 than depending on an off-hand view of the inside
of a matchbook cover 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 (a
mania which helped me dry out from drugs and alcohol although it was, is a
close thing. 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 two 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. It was thus 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 ransom 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. This profession 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 Miles 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 with 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 hungry to having
to pee when such cultural 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 when 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 painting’s 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 all 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 into 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 highly organized like a lot of these off-the-wall
bizarre cohorts funded by who knows who for what reason 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. (Despite
our “take,” the Whole of Babylon factor branding Madame with that infamous X
and that very revealing point about that horrible nose in an age when nose jobs
were unavailable the painting like most of Sargent’s work is excellently done.)
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 on Huntington Avenue with long knives and tough Irish
cops not the bored security personnel texting away today 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 were, maybe offering an
insight into why, despite its excellence as art, 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 and moody church, oops
cathedral, 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 (who faced long lonely nights
in Siberia strangely enough 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 put 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. 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 were 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, some little rich girl princess who went
slumming for a while at the local dime a dance halls 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 were by asked his father to take a hike from lovely
Eden a decision by the deadbeat Adam which we have been 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 John White Alexander’s time at the end of the 19th
century 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, or his gallery owner sponsor looking to increase the value of the
piece 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 (which I know all about and which saved my love
even if a close thing). 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, he came up with the search for the
sublime grift to hustle his Abstract Expressionist notion, 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 of dank
Thames waterfront nights or even some Mother’s Day grift 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 been, has
been since the days of the Whore of Babylon 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 art 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 who can and cannot be saved ) 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). Laura knew all the arguments although that Keil
business threw her until I looked it up 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 if
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 too 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.” 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 (in those threadbare times 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 blown 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 all 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 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 2018 government
shut-down which closed the publicly-funded museums, and is our, really my wont,
we went 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 pain-killer 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 drippings 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.
