Surplus Industrial Wealth Transformed into Baroque Paintings

Francesco Stringa
Allegorical Still-life with Portrait bust of 
Francesco I d'Este, Duke of Modena, by Gianlorenzo Bernini
ca. 1680
oil on canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Gabriël Metsu
Portrait of Lucia Wijbrants
1667
oil on panel
Minneapolis Institute of Art

These beautifully-preserved and florid 17th-century paintings are reproduced from museum collections in the one-time hugely prosperous industrial cities dotted around the Great Lakes in the middle of the U.S. – namely, Minneapolis, Toledo, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Tycoons imported European canvases from the prestigious past to decorate their late-19th and early-20th century mansions, eventually bequeathing many very good pictures to the new public culture-palaces that had risen to ornament and substantiate their cities.

Anthony van Dyck
Betrayal of Christ
ca. 1630
oil on canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Peter Paul Rubens
Union of England and Scotland
1633-34
oil on panel
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Peter Paul Rubens
Crowning of St Catherine
1631
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art

Mattia Preti
Feast of Herod
ca. 1656-61
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art

Jan Miense Molenaer
Allegory of Vanity
1633
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art

Jan Miense Molenaer
Battle between Carnival and Lent
ca. 1633-34
oil on panel
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Jusepe de Ribera
Aristotle
1632
oil on canvas
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli
Finding of Moses
1656-67
oil on canvas
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Frans Pourbus the Younger
Portrait of Giovanni Battista Marino,
poet and early patron of Nicolas Poussin
ca. 1621
oil on canvas
Detroit Institute of Arts

Anthony van Dyck
Portrait of a military commander of the Spinola family
ca. 1621-27
oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum

Rembrandt
Old man wearing a gold chain
1631
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Cecco del Caravaggio
The Resurrection
ca. 1619-20
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Friedlaender

Dance to the Music of Time
c. 1633-34

In 1966 Abrams was the leading New York publisher of art books. They were the natural ones at that time in that place to find a wide public for Walter Friedlaender's ambitious and important book, Nicolas Poussin : A New Approach. It is a book I am presently rereading. Current-days people might be put off by the fact that all reproductions within the text are black-and-white. However, there is a thick section of tipped-in plates at the back printed and mounted on special papers and done to a quite high standard of color (by the standards that prevailed fifty years ago). The writing also seems a little old-fashioned, tending more than any art writing at present toward an ideal of gentlemanly connoisseurship. It is a familiar tone of voice to me – the benign, inviting tone I first encountered as a child when I began reading the fat art books at the Rock Island Public Library on my own, long before dreaming of owning any.

Diana and Endymion
c. 1630

Arcadian Shepherds
c. 1627-28 

Death of Germanicus
1628

Finding of Moses
1638

Inspiration of the Poet (detail)
c. 1630

Landscape with Two Nymphs
1659

Landscape with Three Men
1648-50

Hagar and the Angel
c. 1660-65

Apollo and Daphne (unfinished)
1664

Cruzvillegas

The page devoted to conceptual artist Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968) at the Walker Art Center summarizes his work in these words –

"Informed by the sociopolitical contexts of Latin America, Cruzvillegas has garnered much attention for his dynamic assemblage sculptures made of found objects. Interested in improvised building materials and techniques, he roots his sculptural practice within the urban landscape of his childhood home in Ajusco, a district in the south of Mexico City." 

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis mounted an exhibition in 2013 –

"Featuring 30 to 35 individual sculptures and installations, along with his recent experiments in video, film, and performance, Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites is the first major presentation to shed light on the artist’s unique vision and multifaceted practice."

Pictures & Prose

Pauline Boty
The Only Blonde in the World

1963

oil on canvas 

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"In truth, every man's body is an announcement of a future disappearance. ... If we ever need to know what will go away, we need only look at a person. Anyone."

– Ben Marcus 

Leaving the Sea

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Richard Hamilton
My Marilyn

1965

screenprint 

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"Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses": Oh! Is it possible just to set about paraphrasing these two sentences –  the burning-seething complex of the dreadful realities and hallucinations of suffering and ethos? Give our daily bread today – so you are aware that many is the time you do not? Is it necessary for you to draw our attention to yourself with the refined Inquisitional levers of misery, illness, and death? Again making us aware of the distance: do you have such a strong wish that patients on operating tables feel in the nauseating totality of their fear how much they are not God, just rags; that Jesus Christ on the cross should feel that you had deserted him – do you want that so badly? Can the infinite being want such danses macabres of finitude? Is it a particular favor for you to give bread?" 

– Miklos Szentkuthy 

Towards the One & Only Metaphor 

translated by Tim Wilkinson

When Miklos Szentkuthy wrote his anti-Christian essay in 1935 in Hungary, my mother was three years old, the grandchild of Swedish immigrant farmers and laborers living in the American Midwest. Less than twenty years later she gave birth to me, the great-grandchild of Swedish immigrant farmers and laborers living in the American Midwest. As I came to consciousness during the 1950s, then, I was enveloped in an aggressive, isolated, absolutist medieval-Scandinavian-Christian worldview, quite untouched by the corrosive doubts that had dominated mainstream Europe over the past several centuries. 

An Island

The Rock Island Arsenal was built on a large island in the Mississippi River located between the states of Illinois and Iowa. As a Korean War veteran, my father was buried in the military cemetery on this island in 1953. When I was a teenager in the 1960s my stepfather worked on this island every day. A veteran of World War II in Europe, he had been given a job as turret-lathe operator in a complex of 19th century stone buildings owned by the U.S. government and still in use as factories for military equipment. The Vietnam War guaranteed plenty of local employment. It seems odd now to realize that the three biggest American wars of the mid 20th century all played active roles in creating my childhood circumstances. And this missile-shaped island was the focus of that involvement. Adults would sometimes take me there (along with my little brother, as below, in autumn 1954) to visit my father's grave.

Adults would also take me to the island on other occasions. I remember employee picnics on the lawns. I remember tours of the antiquated industrial spaces where my stepfather worked.

My mother was an adolescent during World War II, living within sight of Arsenal Island. According to her, some of the buildings were in use then as prisons for captured Nazis. My mother believed the German soldiers had been treated with outrageous kindness. "THEY got bananas to eat every day, when WE couldn't find bananas in the stores at any price!"

Even at a young age I tended to doubt my mother's stories.
 

Mikey and Nicky

Mike Nichols and Elaine May invented and performed their brand of improvisational comedy together for just four years, 1957-1961. In a 2013 Vanity Fair interview the two of them seemed to believe their creative relationship broke up at the height of success mainly because Elaine May got bored and wanted to move on.

When I was in high school (1966-1970) in the rural Midwest, one of the adults I knew owned a copy of the long-playing vinyl recording seen above (front and back), with several of Nichols & May's most famous sketches. In that media-poor age, I must have listened to it dozens of times. Chunks of preserved Nichols & May dialogue still bang around inside a few of the more remote memory chambers.    

Yet not until recently did I watch the only film Elaine May both wrote and directed – Mikey and Nicky, released in 1976. Peter Falk and John Cassavetes seemed able to double each other's significance, working within May's magic zone of freedom. Success that she was with her actors, by all accounts her relationship with the studio was gruesome, scaling up to a lawsuit and then initial release of the movie in the studio's cut rather than the director's. A cut approved by May did not become available until the 1980s. 

The best stills I could find came from Asian sites. I get the impression this product of Elaine May's art is famous among film students, but that few (Western) non-specialists have seen it. Evidently it has mass appeal in Asia.

Over the years I've watched several of the (relatively) improvised, (relatively) low budget, post-Method, New York movies of this era – almost a genre unto itself. Mikey and Nicky is a good one not to miss. Even more than John Cassavetes (the seeming owner of this short-lived, risk-taking school of "body acting" & non-linear, independent movie-making), Elaine May pushed every creative project beyond its apparent boundaries. That is the core reason, I suspect, that she completed so few.