On this day in 1858, Julia Archibold Holmes became the first woman to reach the top of Pikes Peak. For a sketch and a story, please see Mountain Woman.
Tag: Comix
Under the Big Top
(Click on it twice to see this larger.)
For a view of the Teaparty folks in childhood, please see the comic Li’l Patriots.
Valerie
Magic Puzzle Boxes
I dislike shopping, unless it is for, say, dinner party ingredients, or perhaps used books at the library’s twice-yearly sale. Generally I try to purchase everything possible online. However, this is tough with shoes, so I agreed to take my daughter into a Sears store to acquire for her a pair of coveted Converse sneakers.
I remember when this meant sitting down in a chair, being fitted by a chatty salesman, and having boxes fetched from a secret room. What a surprise! no chairs, no salesman, no secret room. (This is probably the result of so many folks shopping online. Uh-oh.) Instead, we had a lengthy and baffling search through fifty boxes in order to find two matching shoes in the correct size. Like a treasure hunt. Or a bizarre dream sequence. We were eventually successful.
Father Madden
A Wee Pause
Fatty Tuesday
Action Jackson Part 2
Continued from Action Jackson Part 1
So how did a guy born in Cody, Wyoming who grew up mostly in Arizona and California and studied under Thomas Hart Benton (of all people!) end up as a leading New York figure in Abstract Expressionism, the first major made-in-America artistic movement? Well, that is one of the Mysteries of Art. Perhaps it required a sensitive, moody, depressed, violent, tormented, socially inept alcoholic—someone connected by the thinnest of threads to all that stuff so important to the rest of us—to throw off the last vestiges of representation and rip the painting from the easel (actually, right off the wall altogether) for its completely non-referential expression, to be fully about itself. (At least in its final state. Pollock himself acknowledged that he began a painting with representational imagery, albeit skeletal, which eventually became obscured in the process.)
Also, timing is everything. History is full of sensitive moody depressed people who never launched an art movement, or anything else, and if one of them had started flinging paint around he would have been institutionalized rather than invited to give a one-man exhibit at the Guggenheim.
A Pollock in reproduction is a mere footnote to the actual work. Personal experience of its scale and physicality are critical to appreciation and understanding of its active surface and sense of immense depth. If full understanding is actually possible. Standing before it is an odd experience, at once overwhelming, intimate, and liberating. The powerful presence of the paint, presumably devoid of pictorial illusion, nevertheless sucks the viewer in, at once baldly honest (it’s only paint) and limitlessly suggestive (of raw energy, recklessness, fury, joy, the starry firmament, the birth of the universe!). Its material immediacy combined with its non-objectivity transforms the viewer into a participant who simultaneously sees and re-creates the painting. It’s interactive art.
Pollock was at his most stable and exalted (I can’t say “happiest”) while painting. Between phases of work he was tormented, despairing, self-destructive to the point that his sad end in an automobile accident may actually have been an act of suicide. But his work, which a therapist had once suggested might help relieve his pain, had probably extended his life.
Reflect on the geniuses you know. Aren’t they famously troubled, eccentric, even downright unpleasant? Ah, and yet we forgive them, because they have opened a door to a new way of perceiving, when we hadn’t even realized there was a wall blocking our view.
Adam
Jane
Action Jackson Part 1
Throughout the 19th century, Europe remained indisputably the center of the Western art world. By the early 20th century, however, a conjunction of circumstances led to a significant non-European artistic development.
A devastating world war, followed only a decade later by widespread economic depression, the rapid decay and displacement of antique regimes, the alarming ascent of megalomaniacs to power, the ominous signs of another imminent war—all resulted in immense disruption and the repudiation of conventions and belief systems in every facet of society, including the arts, on both sides of the Atlantic. Another result of this disturbance was the arrival on U.S. shores of emigrating European intellectuals, scientists, writers, musicians—and artists.
American artists were already actively familiar with what was happening on European easels. Some had spent time studying and working abroad. Others had attempted a departure from Old World movements to pursue more locally relevant directions based on indigenous traditions and subject matter. In the 1930s this was encouraged by WPA funding of new, large-scale public art.
If you like to think of the United States as a giant compost heap (I do), you can see that this blend of rich organic matter and seed varieties would result in some interesting hybrids. Modern American painting experiments reflected diverse influences: the flattening abstraction of Cubism, the fluid intensity of Expressionism, the subconscious/dream imagery of Surrealism, the spontaneity and iconoclasm of Dada, the scale and power of Mexican mural-painting.
But someone came along whose work simultaneously drew upon, melded, and broke the boundaries of all these, with the birth of Abstract Expressionism—a purely materialist expressive form that seems somehow appropriate for the United States, the ultimate “materialist” nation. This was Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), whose birthday it is today. (Please see Action Jackson Part 2.)
For the story of another artist born on this day, please see It’s an Oldenburg.
Alexander
March On
Hmm, you may be saying. Isn’t this a DECEMBER post?
But no, today is a January double anniversary. On this day in 1870, caricaturist Thomas Nast first used the donkey as a symbol for the Democratic party.
A donkey had been used decades earlier in the 1830s during the campaign of Andrew Jackson. When his political opponents labeled him a “jackass” for his stubbornness, Jackson took advantage of the insult and used the animal on his campaign posters to represent instead his unyielding tenacity of purpose.
Nast, however, in his cartoon, “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” intended his depiction to rebuke the Democratic party for its disrespectful treatment of the recently deceased Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s controversial Secretary of War. Nast went on to use the Democratic donkey in later, similarly admonishing cartoons, and the association eventually became permanent. The donkey symbol has the advantage of interpretation by the viewer as representing either 1. (if you are anti-Democratic) foolish obstinacy, or 2. (if you are pro-Democratic) humble determination.
Both the names and the respective goals of American political parties have evolved over the years. It was, after all, Republican Abraham Lincoln who authored the Emancipation Proclamation, after the newly formed Republican party split off from the slavery-supporting Whigs. But, over the last century, the Democratic donkey has become a symbol, both respected and derided, of progressive values. At times it seems the Democratic party is mired in confusion, lacking direction, and anything but resolute. But if we take the veeerry looong view, we can see, beyond party affiliation, the ultimate triumph of progressive goals.
Which brings us to our second anniversary, the birthday on January 15th of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), whose dedication, passion, eloquence and non-violent means effected tremendous change in attitudes and legislation. King is now such a heroic cultural icon that it might even surprise some of today’s schoolchildren to learn of the bitterness and vile tactics of his enemies, the assaults and death threats directed against him and his followers, the fierce opposition to what strikes us today as self-evident fairness and justice.
With his lifelong struggle for desegregation and civil rights, his goal to end poverty and compensate descendants of slaves, his protest against United States support of Latin American dictators, his encouragement to redirect government funds from the Vietnam War toward healing of social ills, he was clearly a man way ahead of many of his small-minded fellow citizens. And in this he seemed, sadly, destined for martyrdom.
Today the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March On Washington, and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are the stuff of history textbooks. And, thanks to the Internet and YouTube, we can celebrate Martin Luther King Day by listening to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in recognition of the progress we have made. So far.
Poetic Journey of the Magi
In honor of Carl Sandburg (1878-1967).
For another take on Epiphany, please see The Three Wise Women.
Nathan
Season of Waiting
