Art: Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, James Ensor

At first glance, James Ensor's 1891 Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is perhaps a silly take on Halloween imagery. Or an homage to the memento mori ("remember that you [have to] die") traditions of Medieval and Renaissance art that placed skeletons, skulls and other symbols of mortality among the world and activities of the living. Or a metaphor for the last gasps of Impressionism and its emphasis on color and light at the expense of representational accuracy.

While the latter probably has a grain of truth to it—Impressionism in Europe had largely been killed by the emotional distortions and manipulations of Expressionism by 1891 (think of Edvard Munch's 1893 The Scream)—the skeletons and the pickled herring in Ensor's painting were more along the lines of prescient precursors to the illogicalities of Surrealism and the unorthodox silliness of the Avant-Garde.

And they were totally about his pettiness.

Ensor actually painted Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring in response to negative reviews of his work. In his world of distortions, illogicalities and silliness, the art critics are the skeletons (one with a few wisps of hair on his otherwise balding head, the other with an ostentatious hat that's failing to make him look important) and Ensor is the pickled herring. And the whole idea is bizarre and probably lost to everyone to whom it hasn't been explained.

Today, though, Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is a relatively obscure work of dark humor with light-hearted imagery that starts 21st Century viewers down the path toward the increasingly spooky, scary traditions of modern Halloween. So enjoy its silliness now. And be sure to lock your doors and hide your pickled herring before the end of October.

Art: Horizontal Tree

Horizontal Tree
Piet Mondrian
1912

A series of increasingly Cubist tree paintings marked Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s transition from representational and Impressionistic art to the Neoplastic geometries of white, gray and primary colors framed in horizontal and vertical black lines for which he is best known.

 
These later paintings—created in pursuit of a harmonious universal beauty told through a simplified visual vocabulary—were the culmination of the geometric-abstraction De Stijl (The Style) movement he co-founded in 1917.

 
And while these colorful, geometric masterpieces are icons of abstract art and continue to be powerful influences over architecture, graphic design and fashion, I find his tree paintings to be far more thoughtful, evocative, disciplined and noble.

Art: September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter developed an instantly recognizable visual vocabulary of photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb.

His September (2005) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Both abstract and immediately recognizable, it embraces a world of personal perspectives where the candid observations of press photography meet the chaotic energy of Richter's visual signatures.

An original draft of the painting had bright, colorful flames exploding from the left building, but Richter eventually chose to mute the palette, render the enormity in pale, windy smears and create a more meditative experience for viewers.

The painting is in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, where it tells stories and reflects on histories with the giants of contemporary art while occupying the same island ground where its subjects, memories and inspiration once stood.

Happy 135th birthday, Grant Wood!

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with the trendy politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European art and culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color. Though as far as Google and every search term I can think of are concerned, it never had a name. But you can see it in all its shimmery namelessness here:

Fun fact: The model for the Lady of Peace figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in "American Gothic."

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the Great War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The delightfully smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O from a blue plate? It looks very-not-deliciously brown.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting ... like right here on my blog.

My relentlessly horizontal framed print of Daughters of Revolution—which has followed me through six houses, apartments and condos in Cedar Rapids and Chicago—now hangs in our relentlessly long Grant Wood Alley front hallway, and one of my grandmother's Blue Willow teacups sits safely on a tastefully underlit shelf with a small collection of other blue-and-white ceramicware in my bedroom. They are quite literally among my favorite possessions. 

And I am proudly and dutifully as a Cedar Rapidian sharing these works and their stories here so you can enjoy their oft-overlooked brilliance and awesomeness in celebration of Grant Wood's birthday.

Art: Paris Street; Rainy Day

(Original French title: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie)
1877
Gustave Caillebotte
Impressionism (1872-1892)
Art Institute of Chicago

While technically created in the heart of the Impressionist period—which indulged itself in explorations of light, color and brushstroke techniques at the expense of clear representation and plausible perspective—Paris Street; Rainy Day reigns in Impressionism's visual indulgences with cleaner lines, realistic human figures, and vanishing-point perspective that extends almost mathematically from the rectangular cobblestones in the foreground to the ambitiously double confluences of angles at the distant ends of the forked street. To enhance the effect, Gustave Caillebotte paints the figures in gradient levels of focus, creating a photorealistic contrast between the three figures enjoying relative visual clarity in the middle distance, the three (well, two and a half) figures who are too close to stay in complete focus at the front of the painting, and the increasingly-less-defined human shapes receding into the misty distance.

While providing a convenient context for allowing distant figures to fade to gray—along with filling the setting with shimmers of Impressionistic light and reflection—the misty weather in the painting also allows for the curvy shapes of umbrellas and hunched people to provide visual counterpoint to the geometries of the streets and buildings ... plus it gives the figures a range of purposeful movement, whether they're casually dodging raindrops or hurrying to get somewhere dry. The overall effect is a graceful collaboration of shape, energy, atmosphere, physical presence and measured social observation.

Paris Street; Rainy Day greets visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago at the top of the Grand Staircase as they enter the permanent-collection Impressionism galleries. Its rainy ambiance may seem dour, but the choreography of human figures and the multi-directional spatial composition are an apt invitation to explore the museum, intermingle with the other patrons and contemplate even the things that aren't immediately in focus.