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Seven Various Ways To Do World Famous Paintings | World Famous Paintings
Some of Europe’s best accepted art museums are reopening afterwards closing in March for the Covid-19 communicable but it will be far from business as usual.
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For best of these museums and galleries, it will be a amount of attached company numbers, accumulative charwoman procedures and insisting all tickets be bought online in advance.
Normally at this time of year Amsterdam’s huge and world-famous Rijksmuseum would accept up to 12,000 visitors daily.
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From this anniversary that cardinal will be anxiously bound to 2,000 a day. But afterwards weeks of exceptionable cease the museum’s administrator Taco Dibbits is captivated to be reopening alike on a bound scale.
Several above accessible galleries about Europe accept absitively the accession of June is the appropriate time if not to cast accessible the doors at atomic to accessible them actual carefully.
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Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Building and the Rembrandt House additionally reopen this week. Dibbits says the accommodation to accessible Dutch museums is a amount of government policy.
“But I anticipate we all acquainted this was the time to accord the bodies of the Netherlands their museums back, which are so abundant loved. The Rijksmuseum is accessible with our accustomed hours although I anticipate for now there will not be abounding tourists.
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“Every case is different, not aloof in the Netherlands, and we all accept to acquisition our own way to accommodate a safe acquaintance for visitors. I anticipate about all museums will assert visitors buy
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27 October 2022; 10:02pm | Hotel Room Desk Collage Laboratory: Sauk City; Sauk County, Wisconsin
Thought about starting with the Poplars in the Thames Valley by Alfred Parsons, but it was too big for the tiny format intended to do, so figured maybe go with one of three 6x9 boards pre-cut, but then heck why not all three? Paged through World Famous Paintings by Rockwell Kent and then there were three.
#hotelroomdeskcollagelab#creative process#collage#handmade collage#analog collage#andthentherewerethree#and then there were three#Alfred parsons#rockwell kent#world famous#worldfamouspaintings
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17 Features Of World Famous Paintings That Make Everyone Love It | World Famous Paintings
Some of Europe’s best accepted art museums are reopening afterwards closing in March for the Covid-19 communicable but it will be far from business as usual.
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For best of these museums and galleries, it will be a amount of attached company numbers, aculative charwoman procedures and insisting all tickets be bought online in advance.
Normally at this time of year Amsterdam’s huge and world-famous Rijksmuseum would accept up to 12,000 visitors daily.
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From this anniversary that cardinal will be anxiously bound to 2,000 a day. But afterwards weeks of exceptionable cease the museum’s administrator Taco Dibbits is captivated to be reopening alike on a bound scale.
Several above accessible galleries about Europe accept absitively the accession of June is the appropriate time if not to cast accessible the doors at atomic to accessible them actual carefully.
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Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Building and the Rembrandt House additionally reopen this week. Dibbits says the accommodation to accessible Dutch museums is a amount of government policy.
“But I anticipate we all acquainted this was the time to accord the bodies of the Netherlands their museums back, which are so abundant loved. The Rijksmuseum is accessible with our accustomed hours although I anticipate for now there will not be abounding tourists.
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“Every case is different, not aloof in the Netherlands, and we all accept to acquisition our own way to accommodate a safe acquaintance for visitors. I anticipate about all museums will ert visitors buy
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Rockwell Kent: Interior Decorator??
Sherwin-Williams wallpaper patterns .
Rockwell Kent is famous as an early American modernist painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor and adventurer. Like many artists he did commercial and decorative work in order to earn money and pay the bills. The Cooper Hewitt Library has some examples of this commercial work – designing dinnerware, murals, bookplates, and this interior design and color guide, illustrated with watercolors and photographs. The booklet is ultimately about selling and buying Sherwin-Williams paint and wallcoverings, but the narrative text reflects his philosophy on furnishing and decorating in a humorous anecdotal style. He built or fixed up houses to live in with his family all over the world and his goal was always to “First own a house. Then make that house be HOME.” Good architecture, good taste in decoration is what makes an honest, comfortable, and peaceful atmosphere. Having traveled extensively and seen all kinds of habitations- tents, caves, mansions and palaces, having slept in the King of Bulgaria’s bed in his many travels, style and period did not impress him, and he disdained modernism (chrome and steel).
Sherwin-Williams paint color chart.
The Cooper Hewitt Museum Drawings & Prints Department has drawings for interiors by Rockwell Kent (Drawing, Wall Elevation Design for Bedroom or Dressing Room, 1920s) and the Textiles Department has in its collection Rockwell Kent designed fabric (Textile, Harvest Time, 1949–50).
In this home decorator’s guide, Kent states that “Being a painter by profession and one in who in his work employs color for effect, I have shown a few color schemes that might, in their right place, be good to live with.” In a small abandoned house in Newfoundland: “Old lilac bushes stood around the house; their background was the bay; lilac and blue. The house pure white! The doors I painted peacock green all except one which, for the fun of it, I painted pink.”
L: Paint color schemes for home exteriors. P.17. R: Color schemes and design for living room interiors. P.6
This booklet offers color schemes for both interiors and exteriors, with paint color guides, and includes wallpapers produced by Sherwin Williams.
“The houses shown in this book may help a little, the color charts will help a lot, while the painting instructions printed on the last page of this book may be accepted, kept, and followed as the gospel of good practice in painting.”
Elizabeth Broman is a Reference Librarian at the Cooper Hewitt Design Library.
from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum https://ift.tt/2ujN9xK via IFTTT
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How World Famous Paintings Is Going To Change Your Business Strategies | World Famous Paintings
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June Historical Happenings in New York State
June 1, 1778—Cobleskill, NY destroyed by Joseph Brant, a Mohawk military leader, during the American Revolution.
June 1, 1797 – Convention between the State of New York and the Oneida Indians.
June 1, 1889—General Electric’s famous electrical engineer, Charles Steinmetz, arrives in US from Germany
June 2, 1980—Two-time Olympic gold medalists soccer player Abby Wambach is born in Rochester, NY.
June 2, 1935—Babe Ruth retires
June 3, 1621—The Dutch West India Company received a charter for New Netherland (now New York).
June 3, 1925—Actor Tony Curtis was born in the Bronx, NY.
June 3, 1968 --Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol in his studio, known as The Factory.
June 4, 1876—An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, California, via the First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after having left new York City.
June 5, 19689—New York Senator Robert Kennedy is assassinated
June 6, 1946—The Basketball Association of America is formed in New York City.
June 7, 1905—James Braddock, the boxer of Irish heritage known as “Cinderella Man”, is born in New York City.
June 7, 1939 – Macy’s Department Store retail workers strike, Herald Square.
June 8, 1786—In New York City, commercial ice cream was manufactured for the first time.
June 8, 1925—Former First Lady of the United States Barbara Bush was born in New York City
June 8, 1969—The New York Yankees retired Mickey Mantle's number (7).
June 8, 2001—Marc Chagall's painting "Study for 'Over Vitebsk" was stolen from the Jewish Museum in New York City. The 8x10 painting was valued at about $1 million. A group called the International Committee for Art and Peace later announced that they would return the painting after the Israelis and Palestinians made peace.
June 9, 1909—Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, becomes the first woman to drive across the United States. With three female companions, none of whom could drive a car, in fifty-nine days she drove a Maxwell automobile the 3,800 miles from Manhattan, New York, to San Francisco, California.
June 9, 1942—New York Senator Neil Breslin is born in Albany, NY.
June 10, 1822—John Jacob Astor III, businessman and philanthropist, is born in New York City
June 10, 1915—The first showing of a 3-D film before a paying audience takes place at the Astor Theater in NYC
June 10, 1959—54th New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is born in the Bronx, NY.
June 11, 1785—The first Catholic Church in NYC is incorporated, becomes St. Peter’s.
June 11, 1825—The first cornerstone is laid for Fort Hamilton in New York City.
June 12, 1665—England installs a municipal government in New York City (the former Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam).
June 12, 1939—Baseball Hall of Fame is dedicated at Cooperstown
June 12, 1943 – A little before midnight, a German submarine lands off Amagansett, Long Island [see June 13, 1943]
June 13, 1927—Charles Lindbergh was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
June 13, 1942—The Six Nations of the Iroquois declare war on the Axis powers, asserting its right as an independent sovereign nation to do so. This proclamation authoritatively allowed Iroquois men to enlist and fight in World War II on the side of the Allied powers.
June 13, 1943—German spies landed on Long Island, New York. They were soon captured.
June 13, 1963—Actress Lisa Vidal, known for her roles in “The Division” and “ER” was born in New York City.
June 13, 1971—The New York Times began publishing the "Pentagon Papers". The articles were a secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam.
June 14, 1994—The New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup by defeating the Vancouver Canucks. It was the first time the Rangers had won the cup in 54 years.
June 15, 1863—Secretary of War Edwin Stanton telegraphed New York Governor Horatio Seymour requesting state militia troops to repel the foreseen Confederate invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania.
June 15, 1904—General Slocum disaster claims 1,200 lives.
June 15, 1951—First episode of I Love Lucy airs
June 15, 1932—Mario Cuomo, 52nd Governor of New York,, is born in Queens, NY.
June 16, 1857—New York City Police Riot occurred between the recently dissolved New York Municipal Police and the newly formed Metropolitan Police.
June 16, 1911—Incorporation of the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, forerunner of IBM, in Endicott
June 17, 1778—Springfield (in Otsego County, NY) is destroyed by Joseph Brant, a Mohawk military leader.
June 17, 1885—The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York City aboard the French ship Isere.
June 17, 1941--WNBT-TV in New York City, NY, was granted the first construction permit to operate a commercial TV station in the U.S.
June 17, 1916 -- official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection in Brooklyn, NY. 2,000 deaths in NYC that year.
June 18, 1861—The first American fly-casting tournament was held in Utica, NY.
June 19, 1754—Albany Congress meets to form a plan of union
June 19, 1903—Baseball great Henry Louis “Lou” Gehrig of the New York Yankees is born in Yorkville, New York City.
June 19, 1940—Shirley Muldowney, the first female drag racer, was born in Burlington, VT but grew up in Schenectady, NY. She was the first female to receive a license from the National Hot Rod Association to drive a Top Fuel dragster. She won the NHRA Top Fuel championship in 1977, 1980 and 1982, becoming the first person to win two and three Top Fuel titles. She has won a total of 18 NHRA national events.
June 19, 1949—Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenburg at Sing Sing Prison in NY.
June 20, 2012 – Fur District strike, NYC.
June 21, 1882—Artist Rockwell Kent is born in Tarrytown.
June 22, 1611—English explorer Henry Hudson, his son and several other people were set adrift in present-day Hudson Bay by mutineers.
June 22, 1939—The first U.S. water-ski tournament was held at Jones Beach, on Long Island, New York.
June 23, 1819—Washington Irving publishes “Rip Van Winkle”
June 24, 1954—53rd Governor of New York George Pataki is born in Peekskill, NY.
June 24, 1962—The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 9-7, after 22 innings.
June 24, 2004—The death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in New York.
June 25, 1887—George Abbott, acclaimed theater producer, director, playwright, screenwriter, film director, and film producer was born in Forestville, NY
June 25, 1906—Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, the son of coal and railroad baron William Thaw, shot and killed Stanford White. White, a prominent architect, had a tryst with Florence Evelyn Nesbit before she married Thaw. The shooting took place at the premiere of Mamzelle Champagne in New York. The ensuing trial was called “Trial of the Century.”
June 25, 1951—In New York, the first regular commercial color TV transmissions were presented on CBS using the FCC-approved CBS Color System. The public did not own color TVs at the time.
June 25, 1954—Sonia Sotomayor, the third woman and the first Hispanic to sit on the bench of the United States Supreme Court is born in the Bronx.
June 25, 1985—New York Yankees officials enacted the rule that mandated that the team’s bat boys were to wear protective helmets during all games.
June 26, 1819—Abner Doubleday is born in Ballston Spa, NY.
June 26, 1819—WK Clarkson Jr. of New York obtained a patent for the first velocipede (bicycle).
June 26, 1880 – New York State Agricultural Experiment Station (in Geneva NY) was established in law.
April 23, 1933 – Formation of the Chinese Hand-Laundry Alliance, Mott St.
June 26, 1959—St. Lawrence Seaway opens
June 26, 1880 – New York State Agricultural Experiment Station (in Geneva NY) was established in law.June 27, 1847—New York and Boston were linked by telegraph wires
June 27, 1893—The New York stock market crashed; by the end of the year, 600 banks and 74 railroads had gone out of business
June 27, 1929—Scientists at Bell Laboratories in New York revealed a system for transmitting television pictures
June 27, 1942—The FBI announced the capture of eight Nazi saboteurs who had been put ashore from a submarine off the coast of Long Island, NY
June 27, 1949—Fashion designer Vera Wang is born in NYC.
June 27, 1959—The play “West Side Story” with music by Leonard Bernstein, closed after 734 performances on Broadway.
June 27, 1967—200 people were arrested during a race riot in Buffalo, NY
June 28, 1920—The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY is officially established as a Roman Catholic college for women with a liberal arts curriculum.
June 26-28, 1928—Al Smith becomes the first Roman Catholic to be nominated by a major political party for US President
June 28, 1926—Film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer, Mel Brooks, known for “History of the World: Part One” and “Blazing Saddles”, is born in Brooklyn, NY.
June 28, 1969—The Stonewall Riots, a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, occurs.
June 28, 1969—Actress Tichina Arnold, known for her roles in the TV sitcom “Martin” and the CW show “Everybody Hates Chris” is born in Queens, NY.
June 29, 1987—The Yankees blow 11-4 lead but trailing 14-11 Dave Winfield's 8th inning grand slammer beats Toronto 15-14; Don Mattingly also grand slams
June 30, 1859—The “Great Blondin,” Jean Francois Gravelot, is the first tightrope walker to cross Niagara Falls
June 30, 1959—Actor Vincent D’Onofrio, known for many roles including his role as Detective Robert Goren in “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, is born in Brooklyn, NY.
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Hyperallergic: Marsden Hartley’s Maine: His Own Private Germany
Marsden Hartley, “Log Jam, Penobscot Bay” (1940–41), oil on hardboard (masonite), 30 1/16 x 40 15/16 inches, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Robert H. Tannahill (all images courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Marsden Hartley’s Maine, accompanying an exhibition at the Met Breuer, is as tantalizing for what it omits as for the insights it offers into Hartley’s creative intelligence. Focusing almost exclusively on works made in Maine — early and late land- and seascapes and some figure paintings, with few works from the intervening decades — the show offers a mainline dose of Hartley’s characteristic landscape motifs — most importantly, mountains — and approach to composition.
Whether employing the vibrant “stitched” brushwork of the early paintings or the interlocking, blocky and sinuous forms of the later works, Hartley layers elements to lock in the mass of a mountainside, a logjam pileup, or crashing waves between more or less narrow registers of sky above a rocky shore, lake, or valley below. There is a sense of compression, of barely contained energy, in many of his best works, both landscapes and figures, though he is also able to convey serenity, if only that of a sleeping volcano.
The exhibition most obviously neglects the paintings Hartley made between early 1913 and the end of 1915 while he was visiting and living in Germany. Those works culminate with the remarkable “war motif” paintings done in Berlin, which include the Metropolitan Museum’s masterpiece, “Portrait of a German Officer” (1914), a memorial to Hartley’s beloved friend, possibly lover, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, killed in battle in October 1914. These powerful and original syntheses of Synthetic Cubism and Expressionism — enlivened by his encounters with Robert Delaunay, in Paris, and, with the Blaue Reiter group in and around Munich, including Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, August Macke, and Franz Marc — founded Hartley’s reputation as a modernist innovator. But they also cast into the shadows Hartley’s notionally more traditional mountain and ocean views, as they dominated assessments of his achievement from shortly after his death, in 1943, until the 1980 Whitney Museum retrospective that reignited interest in his wider career.
Marsden Hartley, “The Wave” (1940-1941), oil on masonite-type hardboard 30 1/4 x 40 7/8 inches, Worcester Art Museum
The exhibition’s publication, Marsden Hartley’s Maine, is effectively an extension of the catalogue accompanying Hartley’s 2003 retrospective at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, organized by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser. Two of the present book’s three principal essayists, art historian Donna M. Cassidy and Met curator Randall R. Griffey, contributed to the Wadsworth catalogue, in which the late Maine landscapes are represented sparsely, though their importance is noted. Kornhauser might have been commissioning the present book when she wrote, “One of the most prolific and successful periods of [Hartley’s] career, his last eight years in Maine, requires focused attention and new thinking. Little concern has been paid to his working methods and materials despite the fact that he is acknowledged to have been a brilliant colorist and an adroit painter.” Besides examining in-depth both the early and late Maine periods, the present book includes a fine essay on materials and techniques, based on careful examination of a dozen works, which shows a surprising continuity in composition and methods across Hartley’s career.
The show feels like a regional museum production, and it is a collaboration between the Met and the art museum at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. But the book also is redolent of regionalism of a different sort, the type that dominated American art in the later 1930s, in response to which Hartley promoted himself, in 1937, as “the painter from Maine.” Visitors to the exhibition are likely to come away with the uncomplicated idea that Hartley was what he advertised himself to be, and the book in part promotes this, opening with a chronology which mentions little about Hartley’s career aside from Maine-related aspects.
Marsden Hartley, “The Silence of High Noon–Midsummer” (ca. 1907–08), oil on canvas, 30 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches, collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to The Vilcek Foundation
Yet, like its hero, the book is conflicted about the identification of the artist with Maine. Following the chronology, there is an unusual three-author “Introduction” by the book’s main essayists, Cassidy, Griffey, and Colby Museum curator Elizabeth Finch. On the one hand, they buy into Hartley’s late career metamorphosis into a Maine native; on the other — in a more muted voice — they acknowledge the ambition and careerism that prompted Hartley, with a blithe disregard of his own history, to embrace a state where he never established a home, actually or emotionally, after abandoning the place as a young artist. Griffey is most forthcoming in his critical assessment of Hartley. The “reassuring narrative” of the artist fulfilling his destiny by returning to his native Maine woods in the shadow of Mt. Katahdin, Griffey writes, “has served as a frame through which many have interpreted Hartley’s late career as coming full circle” from his early Maine work. “However, a more critical assessment of his public identity as the painter from Maine reveals it to have been a gradual, indirect, even strategic process marked by contradiction and ambivalence as much as by profound connection and spiritual revelation.”
The intertwined issues of “authentic” American culture, homosexuality, and primitivism play out spectacularly during Hartley’s halcyon years in Berlin and they return in the 1930s. Besides nativism, that era is known for a resurgence of homosexual repression. (Thomas Hart Benton, the leading Regionalist, was notorious for his anti-gay diatribes.) It was a period of tremendous tension in the art world. Hartley’s supporter William Carlos Williams witnessed it and wrote, “two cultural elements were left battling for supremacy, one looking toward Europe, necessitous but retrograde in its tendency — though not wholly so by any means — and the other forward-looking but under a shadow from the first. They constituted two great bands of effort, which it would take a Titan to bring together and weld into one again.”
Marsden Hartley, “Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy” (1940), oil on hardboard (masonite), 40 x 30 inches, the Art Institute of Chicago. Bequest of A. James Speyer, 1987.249
Champion of “the American grain,” Williams means “forward-looking” toward America, but the footloose, cosmopolitan, homosexual Hartley had to be a Janus, looking both ways, and he needed to assume multiple masks to fit the role of the hardy, hyper-masculine Maine painter. Setting aside careerist calculation, Hartley did also subscribe to some degree (as did Williams and their friend Ezra Pound) to the racist and populist impulses behind the Regionalism.
Hartley was enthralled by Germany when he first visited — Berlin was then famous for its liberal attitude toward homosexuality, which was widespread in the military and the court of pageantry-loving Kaiser Wilhelm, who is thought to have been bisexual. Hartley wrote his financial backer and dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, that he “lived rather gayly in the Berlin fashion — with all that implies.” Germany felt like home — perhaps the only place in his adult life that could make that claim. In 1933, while staying in Bavaria, he wrote an autobiography, unpublished until 1996, in which he stated, “A week in Berlin made me feel that one had come home — and it is easy to see what four years of constant living there has done. I always feel I am coming home when I get into Germany, quite as I used to feel when I crossed the line of the State of Maine at South Berwick — I always knew I was in New England.”
Hartley was smitten from the first. Accordingly, this critically acute artist could be willfully blind to the political implications of situations he encountered, for example, German militarism. “Of course the military system is accountable for many things,” he wrote in a letter to Rockwell Kent, “and to some this military element is objectionable—but it stimulates my child’s love for the public spectacle — and such wonderful specimens of health these men are — thousands all so blond and radiant.”
In the 1920s Hartley spent considerable time in Europe; in the 1933 text he recalls a 1922 visit to Florence. “But I knew nothing of Fascismo then — and little about it now — save that being in Germany or Bavaria at the moment and seeming somehow to look like a native — is it my fine green plush hat — I bought in Paris in 1913 — and never found a real place to wear it until this year? Or is it my mountain cape, or is it both? But I get the N.S.D.A.P. salute” — the Hitler salute —“very often and never know quite what to do — because in quite the same way I never can cross myself in a Catholic Church and I frequently go in them — especially in Europe.” Art historian Gail Levin, in the catalogue for a show of Hartley’s Bavarian work, reports that at one point, the artist had the idea of asking a Nazi friend to introduce him to Hitler, who, according to Hartley, was “from all accounts” a “nice person, and, of course having wanted to be an artist, he likes artists.”
Marsden Hartley, “City Point, Vinalhaven” (1937–38), oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board), 18 1/4 x 24 3/8 inches, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation, 2008.214
Hartley’s strange combination of ambition, vanity, erotic attraction, and childlike naiveté underlies his response to Dürer’s famous self-portrait at the age of 28, painted in 1500, which Hartley saw in 1933, descending from the mountains to visit Munich’s Alte Pinakothek. He said of Dürer that he seemed “to have all that the eye can have, he saw things exactly as they were, he knew how to convey that impression. … I would like to make a painting of a mountain and have it have all that this portrait has ….”
His comments on the Dürer suggest that he understood the late landscapes to be conceptual self-portraits, with landscape elements standing in for personal qualities, just as the insignia, banners, helmet, and initials of the painting “Portrait of a German Officer” stand in for his lost lover. But he took the idea of symbolic portraits (a concept he shared with the circle of artists he knew in the teens, including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Charles Demuth) and naturalized it, rooting the symbolic portrait in his own memory and experience, not in publicly shared motifs.
Like his regionalist sentiments, the bold primitivism of Hartley’s work is largely a construction. In his first German period, he was already signifying “nativeness” in an embarrassingly flatfooted way, drawing on clichéd American Indian motifs for his odd Amerika series, painted in Berlin at a time when he had never encountered Native Americans. In later work he graduates to styles signifying primitiveness and authenticity, assimilated from artists as different as the untutored John Kane, Georges Rouault, and perhaps Max Beckmann. But as in his German masterpieces, he always had a powerful ability to synthesize style, technique, politics, and desire, subordinating them to a unique vision, his own private Maine. Or Germany.
Marsden Hartley’s Maine continues at the Met Breuer (945 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through June 18.
The exhibition’s catalogue is published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
The post Marsden Hartley’s Maine: His Own Private Germany appeared first on Hyperallergic.
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Image: Courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Book Summary by John Crowley:
The Man Who Designed the Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth-Century America [Author:] B. Alexander Szerlip Melville House, $22.39 (cloth)
Inside every utopia is a dystopia striving to get out. World-changing plans to bring all human life and activity under beneficent control devolve inevitably into regimentation and compulsion. Edenic life-affirming communes descend into chaos and waste. Our presently evolving techutopia has barely reached its peak, and yet in it this horror-movie process has already begun: information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate; common human connections are degraded; limits on power and self-dealing erode. Inequality increases with differential access. And all this in less than a single generation.
The utopian promises of the mid-twentieth century (modernism, broadly understood) stayed alive for longer, largely because its projects, which depended on design, manufacturing processes, materials, and city planning, took years or decades to be fully realized, while the world seemed to stay much the same. In 1939 the greater part of America was still a land of Toonerville trolleys, boarding houses, balky mules, door-to-door salesmen, pump handles, iceboxes, A&P’s, nerve tonics, kerosene, two-bit haircuts, hand-rolled cigarettes, incurable diseases, and patched inner-tubes, even as the idea of the future was brought closer with every newsreel and skyscraper and issue of Life or Look.
While older utopias often were predicated on returning to the virtues of an imagined past, a key figure behind this utopia of the new was Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre designer turned industrial designer. Bel Geddes is best known for designing the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a huge and hugely celebrated vision of the world of 1960, full of towering modernist skyscrapers in new cities and lots and lots of cars.
The World's Fair assumed that the future would simply remake us as it came into being.
In a rich, swift, and entrancing new biography, The Man Who Designed the Future, Barbara Alexander Szerlip goes so far as to credit Bel Geddes with the invention of twentieth century America. Credit for that is more commonly ascribed to Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, but Szerlip’s claim is justified if by the twentieth century we mean the things, the look, the places, and the occasions of the new. Bel Geddes, as Szerlip shows, invented the new not once but again and again, superficially and radically, in theater and stage design, in the windows of department stores, in appliances, public spaces, tools, and spectacles.
All that kept his projects from wholly burdening the future with the utopian condition of corruption was that many were imaginary, ephemeral, unbuilt or destroyed; the simplest and smallest (a gas range, an electric typewriter, a dance floor) can still inspire the common American nostalgia for the new.
How did he become who he would be? Szerlip’s first chapters recount an 1890s Midwestern upbringing reminiscent of Orson Welles’s depiction of The Magnificent Ambersons: a huge Victorian house with broad lawns and deep porches, and prize-winning horses with silver-plated harnesses that would soon be replaced by large cars. The Geddes family was ruled by a grandfather, the judge, and cared for by several servants, including a Native American man named Will de Haw who served as the young Norman’s teacher, groom, handler, and coachman for years. Norman grew up fascinated with Indians: his first major theater spectacle would be a pageant-play about Native American lore.
Norman’s father also seems drawn from a novel of the period: a charming, careless and restless man who after the judge’s death invested the family money unwisely, losing the big house and the prize horses, and who left his family in bad straits to go recoup in businesses elsewhere. He failed and died young, perhaps by suicide.
That is the origin story, and the right one for the work the young Norman set out upon. As a penniless striving illustrator and adman, dreamer of vast theater projects, tinkerer and toymaker, he was so sure of himself that he traveled to New York to pitch his radical idea for stage lighting to the great impresario David Belasco. Instead of flat overhead lights and footlights, he said, theatres ought to use thousand-watt spotlights, dimmable and in any color, to pick out which part of the stage the audience’s attention should be drawn to; side-lighting should be used to model and heighten actor’s faces. Belasco dismissed the 24-year old novice and his plans and then adopted the idea, advertising it as his own. But do we guess that Norman will be sidelined, driven back to the provinces for good? We do not.
Back in Ohio he meets Helen Belle Schneider, aka Bel, a young school teacher who graduated second in her class at Smith College. Her passions were music and poetry, Szerlip tells us, and more enchanting, she was a master of bird calls. The afternoon they met he kissed her. She was a Methodist (as was his family) and a teetotaler. They were soon partners in the advertising and art business in Toledo, and he added her nickname to his own, becoming Norman Bel Geddes. They married and had two daughters (the youngest, Barbara, became an actress and is likely better known today than her father).
The invention of twentieth century America can be ascribed to Norman Bel Geddes, alongside Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.
Lifted by his talents and the times, Bel Geddes leaves the wife and kids and family business in Toledo and goes back to New York, that cosmopolitan realm of endless possibility. The late ‘20s were when his greatest theater successes were made. Szerlip recounts the epic story of Bel Geddes’s work on the pageant-play The Miracle, produced and directed by Max Reinhardt, for which he turned a large Broadway theater into a Gothic cathedral. Theater-goers entered what appeared to be a “dim, towering 110-foot church, their footsteps echoing on the stone-slabbed aisles (an asbestos composition).”
As they looked for their seats (pews for 3,100 people), priests, sacristans and the occasional worshiper would be moving about lighting candles or counting their beads. The smell of incense would mix with the smell of melting wax. The only illumination, beyond the candles (more than 800) and faux candles (834), would be brilliant shafts of artificial sunlight, punctuating the sacred gloom through three dozen Bel Geddes-designed stained glass windows—ranging from 40 to 80 feet in height, made of thin 10,000-square-foot sheets of muslin stretched and painted to appear semitransparent when lit from behind.
The numbers are impressive even now. Costs exceeded a half-million in 1928 dollars, or some five million in today’s. And it was a vast, long-lasting, wildly-praised, continent-touring hit. From then on producers interested in high-risk innovative spectacles counted on Bel Geddes to bring them in successfully.
Keeping up with Bel Geddes’s meteoric rise tests Szerlip’s considerable storytelling skills; the sensational anecdotes and sidebars come so fast that they clamber over one another, sometimes falling out of order. Often she has to backtrack from Bel Geddes designing a car or a stove to Bel Geddes in the theater or remaking a corporate boardroom. The book is crowded with detail and managed seemingly on the fly, as the man’s projects often were. It is dizzying and highly accomplished fun.
Bel Geddes triumphed with innovative designs even for forgettable or trivial plays; every opening night was packed with the worlds of art and wit and money. Szerlip carries her subject through 1920s Manhattan with so many famous names dropped that the reader risks a slip-and-fall. “In the course of an afternoon,” Szerlip tells us, “he met William and Lucius Beebe, Nelson Doubleday, Alva Johnston, cartoonists Don Marquis and Rube Goldberg, photographer Arnold Genthe, Broadway producer Gilbert Miller, conductor Walter Damrosch, painter Rockwell Kent and the Prime Minister of Australia.” She makes time for a thrilling recap of Bel Geddes’s minutes-long affair with the diarist Anais Nin after a night in the Harlem nightclubs he loved. (He was a great dancer.)
It is all swift and smart and charming, and by the time it turns darker with the Depression, Bel Geddes has not yet thought about inventing the future. That would come when he put aside the immense career he had built in theater and popular art and turned instead to designing places and things of use to the new world coming to be: things and places that would themselves be that new world.
What would come to be called industrial design was chiefly the province of engineers and architects, and Bel Geddes was neither. He certainly engineered things that he needed for his projects, and he designed spaces and places, but he was forced to add a line to his contracts stating that he and his firm were not architects. His talent was imagination—not only imagining how something should look, but why, and for what purpose, and how it could be made to serve that purpose.
Bel Geddes designed the places and things that would themselves constitute the new world.
One of Szerlip’s most revealing stories is of the remake of the Standard Gas Equipment company’s household gas range in 1930. Bel Geddes refused to simply remake the look of their stodgy product. He started from the beginning, sending out a team of investigators to ask people, especially women, what they would like to see in a new stove and what their complaints were about the old one. The result was what we still think of as a stove. SGE ranges had fixed oven racks; Bel Geddes made them slide out, for obvious reasons. He saw that the floor beneath a black enameled cabinet standing on legs like a bureau would get filthy and could be cleaned only on hands and knees; his would be flush with the floor, as they all are now. His design was white, with gleaming curved sides and bands of chrome that signified new, sleek, and fast—streamlined, in other words.
Streamlining, which would forever be associated with the industrial and commercial design of the period, began as a set of guidelines meant to reduce air and water resistance (drag on planes and cars and ships). It also imparted to objects an inherent yet gratuitous beauty that entranced people and designers alike, the very essence of new. The style rarely achieved the goals set for it (1930s cars and trains did not travel fast enough to be affected very much by air resistance), but it persisted as pure style, as signifier. And the look could be applied to anything. “Before long,” Szerlip notes, “there were streamlined radios, typewriters, and Chippewa potatoes (the ‘absence of deep eyes reduces waste in peeling and also speeds up the job for the housewife’), streamlined financial cutbacks, weight loss programs, inkwells and coffins.” We now had a word we did not know we needed, for uses we did not expect would arise. But the greatest efflorescence of applications for it came in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the site of Bel Geddes’s best-known triumph.
The 1939 fair was conceived by what might be called practical utopians. That is, it was an enclosed space where new and better modes of life could be shown to be possible and workable. It was as much prescription as prediction. Social theorists, businessmen, and academics were recruited to educate the public in the industrialized, communitarian, engineered world that was sure to come—the world of tomorrow, as the slogans promised. They urged exhibitors not to simply show their goods and services, but to show the processes by which they were made, the worldwide trade in commodities they depended on, and the advances in cybernetics and administration they would bring about.
This got international businesses excited, and a lot of exhibitors not only invested hugely in educational displays—it was effectually the start of the modern audio-visual instruction mode—but also looked into the future, showing robots, simulated voyages to the moon, flying cars, streamlined everything. Bel Geddes’s Futurama within the General Motors exhibit hall (which he also designed) was the culmination. GM was set to redo the show they had built for the 1933 Chicago fair: an animated diorama of an assembly line, showing Chevys being put together. But—as in a scene from a movie of the period—Bel Geddes took a night flight to Detroit to meet with GM’s management and argue for something much grander. “What if the goal,” Szerlip recounts, “was to have the public wedded to GM’s ‘vision,’ and to make that vision so attractive and accessible that the average Jack and Jill would have a hard time imagining a future apart from it?” It is made more cinematic by Szerlip’s visual effects, with stuffy executives from central casting and the Old Man (in this case Alfred Sloan, chairman of the board) arising at last to anoint the brash optimist. Who’s to say it didn’t happen exactly as Bel Geddes, and Szerlip, tell it?
The Futurama not only talked about the future, it was the future. Bel Geddes, like a mad father setting up the world’s biggest train set for his kids, let people see the year 1960 in busy moving detail. Some 50,000 miniature streamlined cars traveled on miniature multilane highways like none that had then been built (buses and trains were, for obvious reasons, not emphasized). In that future America, the past had been scrubbed away. Not even farms and orchards were the same, and Bel Geddes’s towers and ports and highways arose without any reference to the past. It posed, without actually asking, the great question that utopias are never quite able to solve: how do we get from this flawed and hurtful world we live in, and the flawed and confused people we are, to the rational and cooperative world we want? The Futurama and the fair assumed that the future would simply remake us as it came into being, so that we could profit from its wonders—that the wonders would make the people, rather than the other way around.
The utopian visions of the World’s Fair were deliberately conceived in opposition not only to the wounded and weary America of the Depression, but to alternative utopian visions that were then making great strides around the world. Nazi Germany had no pavilion at the fair, though it was very much present in spirit. Lewis Mumford, author of The City in History and one of the initial planners of the fair, had envisioned the World of Tomorrow as a school for democracy, an education for visitors in taking charge of their world and their future. The new sciences and technologies, manufacturing processes, communications and social organization had to be understood, he argued, in order to be useful and successful for all, or for as many as possible.
But Mumford ended up disappointed in the fair as built. It simply asserted the “completely tedious and unconvincing belief” in the triumph of modern industry. “The less said about that today, the better,” he wrote at the time. The fair was still receiving millions of visitors when the German army invaded Poland, initiating a new world war only twenty-five years after the first began. The world had not only failed to learn the right lessons, it seemed to have internalized the wrong ones.
Bel Geddes should perhaps be included with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles as 'a kind of magnificent failure.'
Bel Geddes spent the war years working on projects for the military, both ones they asked him for, such as better camouflage, and his own ideas, like a remote-controlled Television Bombing Plane (early television had been a big draw at the 1939 fair). But his great interest was the car. In a glamorous 1940 photo-book, Magic Motorways, he envisioned the American highway system, complete with multiple lanes and on-and-off ramps. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened its first stretch that very year, but it wasn’t until 1956 that the Interstate Highway System was officially established. When it was, it was as much the offspring of Bel Geddes’s Futurama and the dominance of the car as it was a result of the bomb and the need for a rapid-response national defense.
Of course, the unintended ramifications of that long project include large components of air pollution and climate change, the slow death of public transportation, the erosion of cities and Main Street, and the sprawling expansion of a peacetime military. The challenge of changing the dystopia we find ourselves in now, again, is stupefying.
But just because a utopia is unattainable in practice—“unattainable” is almost part of the definition—that doesn’t mean the utopian impulse can’t have great power along a different parameter. In an important way it is not different from the general impulse to create imagined worlds that have no larger purpose than to be seen and experienced, in theater, in fiction, on film, in the model-train landscape of tunnels, bridges and stations running endlessly for its own sake.
In this respect it is interesting that in 1964, when a World’s Fair was again held in New York City, General Motors largely recycled the Bel Geddes future it had promised would already be in place by then. The point turned out not to be the future after all, except in the power it granted to the imagination to see it all as possible. The 1939 fair might have been conceived as a training course in living under late capitalism, but time has vacated that purpose and in a sense restored its innocence. It affords now not false promises of easy social progress but—in Vladimir Nabokov’s terms—aesthetic bliss: “that is, a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
Szerlip’s book has only reached the two-thirds mark when the Futurama is behind her. The last hundred pages are as full as the first two hundred, with new projects, new love affairs, Barbara’s stardom and retreat, more famous names, a plan to put The Miracle on film starring Katherine Hepburn or maybe Greta Garbo—but fewer real accomplishments. When he died, in 1958, on a New York street of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five, Bel Geddes was pretty much broke and on his way to being forgotten. Szerlip, who obviously loves the man, tags him as oxymoronic: “a pacifist fascinated by war, a naturalist who loved technology, a serious prankster, a pragmatic futurist, a private man who was rarely alone.”
Bel Geddes was a practical man. He was an engineer and a maker who worked in the real world of mechanical stresses and materials and mass production and financing. It is impossible to distinguish between what he did to please his paying clients and what he did just because he wanted to see if he could—which is a fair definition of a popular artist—and often enough he could convince magnates and manufacturers that what he wanted to do was exactly what they needed.
Yet his most inspiring projects might be the impossible ones, the gratuitous acts of the imagination: the absurdly vast airliner with ballroom and orchestra, the unrealized theater projects, the flying car and the aerial restaurant. Szerlip wonders if Bel Geddes should be included with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles as “a kind of magnificent failure.” His standing ratio of conceptions realized to those unrealized, after all, was about 50-50. But the gorgeous only-imagined ones defy time and perversion. They obey perforce the greatest single prescription ever laid down for human action: first do no harm.
[Entire article — click on the title link to read it at The Boston Review.]
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