The National Gallery of Art
October 1 – December 31, 2006

At the risk of philistinism, let me say that John Constable has always been one of my “main men.” How could you not like somebody who once wrote about “slimy things” making a painter of him? Nor was the man being sensational. What he meant is that, as things decompose, losing their original shape and smell (while taking on shapes and smells that most definitely attract your attention), they are more arresting to a painter’s eye. Thus, a “slimy thing” is something that’s been under water for a time, but has recently emerged into the light of day as a piece of wharfage, for example; its skin of algae has transformed it into a sort of memento mori, which reminds us that we’re all caught up in a web of life that both nurtures and sinks us to the bottom.

Everybody follow that?

Constable was misunderstood in his day because, for one, he painted both spirit and substance, but not all of their particulars. This was a new thing in about 1820, when a lot of people wanted an inventory – a precise and wearisome recapitulation of natural phenomena - and not a landscape painting, which is now understood to be unified by light and atmosphere. (Constable tried to tell people about this sort of thing, but they never listened. And meanwhile kept complaining.) His contemporaries kept telling him to put in more; Constable, who knew better, was going for a more intense reality than they were willing to deal with. For old John, nature had both a spiritual and visual essence – something he and another contemporary, Joseph Mallard William Turner, were trying to get at in spite of all the nay-sayers around them.

Born the year our country started to break away from England, Constable died in 1837; a reassessment period got underway shortly afterwards, which has changed his “profile” for the better. He is now considered not only a great pioneer in the field of perception, but perhaps the most important precursor to Impressionism, which everybody loves to death, can’t get enough of, and will queue up before major exhibits of the stuff nineteen to the dozen.

It is strange to think of the controversy that raged around his work during his lifetime, yet it hasn’t actually let up today. It pits the fussy literalist against the impulsive romantic; crabbed effort vis-a-vis open-air spontaneity; cold rationality versus freewheeling emotion.

You can see Constable at his very best in “The Six Foot Paintings” now on exhibit at the East Wing of the National Gallery till December 31st. The curators came up with the long-overdue notion that Constable’s most famous finished paintings ought to be seen spang up against his six-foot sketches. And they’ve done one helluva job. They were also careful in showing us some of the “keystone” paintings that led up to Constable’s leap to his larger format.

Aside from their technical bravura, the sketches show us a Constable who waded right up to his subject – in this case, his father’s mill; the River Stour that flowed alongside of it and was useful for trade; the hard-working people (and animals) manning the barges; and the glorious, sun-struck Suffolk countryside that was called “Constable’s country” even while the man himself was still alive. Constable’s most famous painting, “The Hay Wain”, preens as a finished product, with all of its proverbial ducks in a row. In the sketch, you see Constable really putting his heart into realizing a spatial unity and it’s one of the most thrilling experiences I’ve ever had. Equally captivating is the fabulous “Leaping Horse”, whose flashing highlights and stand of murky tree-forms show us, insofar as one painting can, what landscape painting will become in the next fifty years. The finished product is, for me, a disappointment – though it’s a more-than-competent “version” of the sketch. It is too bad Constable had to play to his market. Today, his sketches alone would be admired, not only for their racing audacity, but for their spiritual exactitude as well. If a man ever had perfect spiritual pitch, it was John Constable.

Sprinkled throughout the exhibit are small drawings and sketches, which further illuminate Constable’s process. There isn’t a dull one among them.

So: if you ever see an exhibit of Impressionist paintings, you’ll know who started Monet and Pissarro off on the long road they followed. Constable was the original Impressionist – though I think he loved his little village of East Bergholt more than any Impressionist would love the small piece of earth he would convert into a vibrating unity of his own.

Again, the show runs through December 31st. If there’s any art exhibit you absolutely must see in the City of Washington, this is the one – particularly if you have ever considered any landscape painter among the “main men” in your life.

Peter Ustinov said that one of the advantages of history is that it's so adaptable. And for those of us who wish boundaries separating fact from fiction to be more flexible, these are words to live by! If you can't monkey with dead people a little, what fun is there?

On that note, I thought I would, just a week or so before I left for the continent, ask Mozart what sort of place Vienna was for him, as he is as much indentified with the city as anybody and therefore ought to know. I hear he's pretty accessible. Well, let's see.

By the way, I'm doing something called "sympathetic channelling," which I've just made up for the sake of this story. In time, there will be better ways to get at people, but this isn't a bad one because if he or she is there, they'll come right to you.

(MOZART comes right into my small, shabby room. He exudes, not a blinding sort of radiance, but certainly a well-burnished sort of grandeur. It is partly the
clothes: knee-breeches, a ruffled shirt, waistcoat and buckled shoes. He carries what may either be a punch-list or note-pad, on which he'll scribble something from time to time, then stuff into a side-pocket. He is a short fellow and moves jerkily about. Not handsome either, though he is appealingly energetic - one might even say neurotically restless.
If you ran into him in the aisle of a grocery store, you'd want to tell him to get the hell out of the way; you wouldn't because he looks like the sort of guy who might go to pieces in front of the Boca burgers.)

ME: Is this Wolfgang Amadeus. . .

MOZART: Who's this?

ME: I'm a citizen of the 21st century and I'd like to get your take on your adopted city.

MOZART: Oh. Well, let me tell you: they didn't like me.

ME: History says otherwise.

MOZART: Are you gonna listen to "history" in the abstract or somebody who IS history?

ME: Go ahead.

MOZART: That's all. I just thought I'd clarify that for you.

ME: Why don't you think Vienna liked you?

MOZART: It didn't pay, for one. Do you realize how much it costs to produce an opera?

ME: Sort of.

MOZART: That was a rhetorical question.

ME: Didn't sound like one.

MOZART: All right. Maybe it wasn't. But I'll tell you how much it costs: it cost gazillions to produce an opera. You've got your sets, you've got your singers - ay yi yi! - and, finally, you've got your musicians whom you can never rehearse enough. And who grumble all the way. If I could have played everything myself, I would have done so. There were never more than a handful of good musicians in all Vienna, and none of them wanted to play my work. "Too fast!" they'd say. When I premiered my beloved 39th, the first violin player refused to play. Absolutely refused. I told him I would play it myself. You know what he said to me?

ME: Can't imagine.

MOZART: He said that if I played the violin like I played the piano, nobody would hear anything else.

ME: A subtle message there?

MOZART: If you consider "subtle" the act of somebody banging you over the head with a blunt instrument.

ME: Now, now. Maybe he couldn't adapt to your style.

MOZART: You have already created a bit of a classic
yourself: a classic understatement! That whiny little pigeon-hearted weasel could never understand my work and this was his way of deflecting attention from it.

ME: I think you're mixing metaphors. Pigeon-hearted weasel?

MOZART: I choose my epithets very carefully. His temperament was a combination of two very disagreeable creatures.

ME: Guess you had to be there.

MOZART: That is, alas, correct.

ME: So who won?

MOZART: We both did. I used somebody else.

ME: How'd it go?

MOZART: I just tuned his part out.

ME: Can you do that?

MOZART: Can I, Mozart, tune out a teeny violin? Why not ask Jove himself whether He can build a mountain, cleave the forest with a laughing stream; make the oceans roar; induce the fertile valleys offer up their ruby grape to thirsty lips?

ME: Forgive me.

MOZART: Look, I'm sorry. I'm just used to people doubting me. You're a good listener.

ME: Thanks.

MOZART: Are you being ironic?

ME: I don't think so.

MOZART: Just promise me to do no irony. They loved irony in Vienna. In Salzburg, there is no irony. A post is a post, a shadow a shadow. There was no "context." In many ways, I prefered my hometown.

ME: But you couldn't work there.

MOZART: Not for money. I could've stood out on any street-corner the livelong day, however. . .perhaps I should have done so.

ME: No. . .may I call you. . .what should I call you?

MOZART: That always depended on people's relationship to me. Creditors called me a sleazebag, which is a very long word even in the German language. If you say that word, you really have a need to say it. What was I saying?

ME: People called you things according to their relationship. . .

MOZART: How could I forget? My landlady, well, she was with the creditors, mostly. Cosima called me "little Mozart", after a little thing I. . .never mind. What was your question again?

ME: What should I call you? Do you have a title you would prefer me to use?

MOZART: I WISH! Hell, I'm just a commoner. I couldn't piss in any royal chamber-pot for love or money. Though I did it anyway - and for both! (With a surge of merriment that is somewhat startling.) I really am a character. If nothing else, I am indeed that. Shall we drink some wine?

ME: How's your health?

MOZART: Could be better. But what can you do? With my schedule, I was bound to pop off when I did. But do you know something? If I had it to do over again, I'd get more exercise.

ME: Really?

MOZART: Yes, I really would. I've begun to think that sitting around is the very cornerstone of our ills.
And, boy, did I do that! You don't compose standing on your head. I did that, actually. But it's really not good for the noggin. Put a wig on first.

ME: Good idea.

MOZART: I think I really was a genius, but you know the problem? The problem was that it came too easily for me. Yep. I never struggled. I'd sit down and the music came so fast, my hands flew across the score-sheet just getting it all down. And when I'd look, it came out just as it should. Oh, I'd change a note now and then, but it was for the most part ready-made. I think that's why I didn't make a lot of money with it because it came so easily to me. Hey, why don't I write something now?

ME: Really?

MOZART: Sure. I get bored here easily.

ME: How wonderful. Do you need a theme or something?

MOZART: Me? A theme? How perfectly absurd! All I need is a sheet of paper and a little wine. Got any?

ME: Uh. . .no. To either.

MOZART: Oh, that's too bad because I think I could really do something. Why don't I just hum it for you?

ME: Mozart. Humming. An original creation.

MOZART: It is magnificent, isn't it?

ME: Yes.

MOZART: You say all the right things. Oh, but. . .

ME: What?

MOZART: We've GOT to write it down. I write everything down. My father drummed that into me from an early age. He said, "If you take no other lesson from your father, you will take this." And then he'd force a big pencil into my hand and make me write something. He was always standing over me, whether he was there or not. A mixed blessing, fathers. Dads.
Kings. Popes. God. The Devil. That's the great patriarchal ladder and one's father is always on it somewhere. Some occupy several places, depending on their psychological complexity, though I'm not quite sure what psychology is. But I hear it was developed in Vienna

ME: Psychiatry, actually, but what the hell.

MOZART: I try to keep up.

ME: I'm sorry he. . .

MOZART: No need to be sorry. Because of him, I have an enormmous catalogue of posthumous works. Enormous!
Compared to what I did down there, it's like the city of Rome to an ant-hill.

ME: Really? You have all that stuff?

MOZART: Stuff, eh?

ME: Sorry.

MOZART: No, I'm sorry. You're being very good to me.
I like you. I shouldn't. . .can you tell what I'm thinking?

ME: I'm not that good.

MOZART: I'm thinking that we should change outfits.
You wear mine and I'll wear yours. Come on. It'll be fun. And then I'll compose something. That'll be my theme. Cross-dressing.

ME: Uh. Cross-dressing, in later years, became something different.

MOZART: But it isn't now. So let's cross-dress!

ME: Are you sure?

MOZART: I've never been surer!

(We undress and hand one another our respective outfits. He gets into mine quickly and struts around for a moment, ulimately deciding that he doesn't like it much. I struggle from the git-go. In this regard, Mozart is an excellent sport, a team player par
excellence.)

MOZART: Here. Let me help you with that. Now hold up your arms. Put them down. Now the leg. Now the other one. Turn around.

(He kicks me.)

ME: What was that for?

MOZART: My initiation fee. You don't get Mozart to dress you for nothing, you know.

ME: Could you, uh, finish?

MOZART: Oh, yes. Now just relax. I think it's a wrap. Ha-ha! I've made a pun. I know what a wrap is because we have movies and they have these little segments in which movie people talk about the business. And when they're finished with something, they say: "It's a wrap!" Don't they?

ME: I think so, yes.

MOZART: These clothes only look uncomfortable, when in reality they fit like an old shoe. Yours, however, don't offer much either in the way of style or comfort.

ME: I come from a more casual age.

MOZART. No doubt. Well, let's look at one another in the mirror.

(They go over to a large mirror and gaze into it. I start to giggle.)

MOZART: What's so funny?

ME: Nothing. . .everything.

MOZART: Well, pardon ME then!

ME: There's nothing wrong with funny. Funny's good.
Funny's. . .funny. I thought you were a mirthful spirit, a guardian imp.

MOZART: Not when the joke's on me.

ME: Frankly, I don't know who the joke's on. These clothes just sort of crack me up. I wonder what Sally would think.

MOZART: And who is Sally?

ME: My girlfriend. Sally. I really wish she could see me in these. She wouldn't believe it. Nor would she believe that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is my haberdasher.

MOZART: Don't let it go to your head. I just thought.
. .maybe we should change back.

ME: I see a mood-swing coming on.

MOZART: A mood-swing? I don't like the sound of that.

ME: A mood-swing is a rapid and mercurial shift in overall affect.

MOZART: Say that again, please. Slowly.

ME: It's when you suddenly feel grumpy after a bout of hilarity, say. It's when you find yourself laughing at nothing at all, or crying for no good reason.

MOZART: Oh. What did you call it?

ME: A mood-swing.

MOZART: A mood-swing. (A song is born.) "I'm on a mood-swing and I'm out on a limb with a mood that is dim. . ."

ME: You're out Sondheiming-Sondheim.

MOZART: Who's that, pray tell?

ME: A lesser composer.

MOZART: If he writes like that, I should say so.
Hmmm.

ME: What?

MOZART: I feel better now.

ME: Another mood-swing.

MOZART: So mood-swings guide us from state to state.

ME: Yes. Unless you're on Prozac or something.

MOZART: Prozac?

ME: Just something we take for the blues. And the jollies.

MOZART: You know, there is too much of a cultural abyss between us. I'm afraid I don't understand you.

ME: You don't have to. In fact, all I wanted to know is how you got along in Vienna, and I think I got that.

MOZART: You know, I never really noticed the place. I was so damned busy composing, courting, or traveling, I hardly looked up. I'll bet you I couldn't even find the street I lived on today. It was just a place like so many others.

ME: You didn't notice. . .the architecture.

MOZART: Most architecture is mere window-dressing, a projection of the power and influence of the person who builds - or renovates - it. I got sick of architecture playing all those palaces. Give me a bare room with a piano and I'm on a heaven-kissing hill irradiated with sunlight.

ME: It's not where you are, but who you are.

MOZART: How pithy.

ME: Didn't say I was Shakespeare.

MOZART: I'm sorry. I can be a bit of a snob.

ME: We forgive the great their weaknesses and make up for it by oppressing the meek.

MOZART: Who said that?

ME: Got lucky.

MOZART: You know, I'm suddenly tired? I don't really get out much. People play my music, but they seldom want to talk to me. How do you say it? I don't get all that many hits.

ME: That's surprising.

MOZART: Just as well. If I had to choose between me and my music, it'd most definitely be the music.

ME: We are seldom as great as creations. If they're any good, that is.

MOZART: That does get you off the hook, doesn't it?
If I'd've known how much future generations would revere me, I would have misbehaved a lot more. I'm not even sure if I would have married Cosima. It just happened, you know? Not a bad girl, but she really didn't get the music. Good in bed, though. I'd say passing excellent, if you know what I mean. I'd even say the girl had a sort of genius in that way.

ME: That's nice.

MOZART: You are both more open and more hypocritical than we were. We didn't flaunt ourselves the way you do, but I'll bet you we did just as much. I'd even propose that the less flaunting there is, the more exciting the exchange. I mean, I didn't know what she looked like out of those clothes until I had the time to get her out of them. A woman in my day not only had to be conquered, she had to be uncorseted and unwrapped. With clothes like these, seduction is a sorry affair, isn't it? A aria sung at the top of the voice in quick time. A sort of on-the-spot, ready-to-go, easy-to-make-do activity. In my day, there was planning. (An inspiration.) You know, THAT was something Vienna was good for: seduction. Plenty of well-appointed rooms for that - if you could get into them. Casanova would have loved it here. So many little, out-of-the-way places when one could rendez-vous and savor the slow and complicated reality of courtship. Courtship, my friend, is everything.
Once the chase is over, the conquest is slight, and leads to melancholia. The desire to posses is overpowering, but the possession itself. . .that's why I loved music so much. You were always possessing it and throwing it off and possessing it again. Much more satisfying than any human relationship. More much satisfying than just about anything. Oh, my. I think time's up. I can only do about an half an hour, then I get scatter-brained. I hope I've helped.

ME: Thank you. You have. I'll go to Vienna with a greater appreciation of its nooks and crannies, as it were.

MOZART: Nooks and crannies. Very good. Nooks and crannies. I like it. I like it!

(Mozart leaves. I realize some moments afterwards that I am standing in his clothes. Wonder how I'm going to get out of them. But he was right: they're a lot more comfortable than you think and I think they look pretty good on me. Yep. They look pretty good
indeed.)

It is a fine thing to have a painter in our midst.
The run-of-the-mill Washington exhibit is more about conceptual muscle - the right to hack away at boundaries others have successfully breached (and carted off joyously to other places.) Look at any exhibition calendar; DC is fairly lousy with the stuff.

David FeBland started out not as a painter, but as an illustrator. His technique is gorgeously developed, but, as all technique should be, in perfect tandem with the content it most agreeably serves. Even so, FeBland is a direct descendant of the Boldiniesque tradition which seeks to wow the spectator with painterly moves. Yet FeBland's capacity to impress with bravura alone is held in check by his ability to hang out on a limb and strike at the heart of who we are and how we manage in urban environments that are out of step with human needs, yet irreducibly private.
He has taken a brutally pre-emptive world and populated it, not with grinning lunatics, but people
with urgent needs and obsessive yearnings.

In his earlier paintings, human connection appeared somewhat implausible, as pools of bright tarmac and smouldering red brick sloshed together. The FeBland of this recent show has found, if not love, then a certain amiable lubricity. His women are fully in possession of an earthy, albeit cosmetically enhanced, sexuality - reminiscent of the Venusian babes Reginald Marsh could do without trying. (FeBlands Redhead could be "High Yaller" in a better neighborhood.) His people are often elongated, exuding a wild energy that seems to be slightly ahead of them. Caught in the snags of our alienating infrastructures, they make ecstatic bids for affirmation even as they burrow into their private worlds. The quintessential FeBland figure is on a skateboard - fitting for a guy who'd been a bicycle messenger. But FeBland isn't always running around; he has lately discovered a strain of simple humanity that has been largely absent from his work in the past. His picture vendor (Laws of
Physics) has given up, but is willing to go through the motions. In Path of Escape two Hasidic Jews stand before a high fence puzzling over a post-9/11 scenario. An enraptured luddite has taken "his last cassette" to an open field to admire its wind-borne destruction . FeBland's unflappable technique, however, goes a little haywire at times. In artists with smaller repertoires, it's easy to stick to tried-and-true formulas and keep on doing them at least indifferently. FeBland has to contend with such a well-tempered instrument that he sometimes has trouble reining it in. Subterranean, for all of its superficial graces, is eye-candy. Kaaba is a kind of girly picture surrounded with wink/wink quotation marks. We understand that we might be in somewhere in the Middle East. On its sandy bosom a man prostrates himself as some possible Americans observe or try not to observe him. But the babes the focus of the thing and we have to decide whether we can live with her callous narcissism, which may be a stand-in for All of Us. FeBlands larger narrative paintings lack, as a whole, the intriguing ambiguity that sets his work apart from the illustrative chatter he has, for the most part, eschewed. The exception is Keystone, which shows a robbery in progress, with the thief only a few paces ahead of his well-heeled pursuers: the lady incredulous; her boyfriend hopping mad; the long-coated felon trying his damndest to get away.
You look at it and think somebody has taken that soft-focus picture of a sophisticated couple, fast-forwarded it a frame or two and - voila! - we have a situation! FeBland's claim to our minds and senses consists in his persistent willingness to take the old picture and run with it - run well past our conventional expectations toward a place where the rulebook is held up to ridicule after it has been consulted on a fine point of construction.

collideAscope runs through November 4th at the Fraser Gallery, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Ste. E,
Bethesda, MD, (301) 718-9651.

Artist's lives tend to follow a rather even tenor - in spite of the mythic magnificence cooked up by Hollywood and, before that, chroniclers of the bohemian lifestyle. Henri Rousseau is a case in point. In fact, he didn't live the artist's life - a la La Boheme - at all. When he moved to Paris from a country village at the age of twenty-eight, he got himself, through timely connections, a job as a customs agent, where he remained until his retirement at forty-nine. At that moment in his life, he'd been painting on his own for some years and was fully ready to join the ranks of the full-time, well-remunerated, and absurdly decorated artists whose coyly pornographic and extravagantly triumphalist concoctions were the toast of the official art world at the time. Problem was, Henri really didn't know what he was doing in this regard and was quickly dismissed from these ranks. This must've hurt, but the plodding Henri bounced back - as he always did - and found another outlet for himself. He was, in fact, welcomed into the independent fold and exhibited at its own salon for years. Here he began to garner a reputation as a man who could take a bit of foliage from the Jardin des Plantes, dress it up with a monkey, a lion, or some other recognizably fiercesome thing, and create a world of strange and peculiar harmony; a world in which it was possible to be an animal, but have the manners of the petit bourgeosie;
a world that was wild - but welcoming.
I imagine Henri, known to all of his friends as "Le Douanier", or "The Customs Agent", walking as a young man in the Bois de Boulogne dreaming of his civilized jungle running riot with wild beasts who are unaccountably fond of each other and eat just now and then. (The pictures he actually did, however, often had that element of cruelty, without which wild Nature could not survive.) He hallucinates a palm-fronded place where gentle creatures congregate and, incidentally, pose for him. He's just been to the great World's Fair and he can't get enough of the exotic people - tamed for a strictly Parisian audience; the bloodthirsty animals - lunging at one another as taxidermy specimens; the astounding natural marvels - permitted to flourish in gigantic fin de siecle greenhouses. His solitary ruminations would, however, become the basis of his most memorable work.
And it was this work that would garner him the fame and recognition this man of the people most sincerely craved.
Rousseau's odds-beating career is sort of a marvel.
Yet like another outsider artist, Maurice Utrillo, he did get just about everything he cared to have during his own lifetime, which spanned a couple of minor European wars, but stopped short of the first really big one. I would even hazard to say that some of his paintings, The Dream in particular, are among the most recognizable images in the Western World. Even the Simpsons poked fun of another landmark painting, in which a lion nudges a different dreamer, who sleeps on a coat of many colors, and does not - being dedicated to his inner vision - awaken. Not bad for an indifferently educated fellow with no ostensible training and a complete blank in that part of his brain where artistic theorizing generally occurs.
Which, in my opinion, ain't a bad thing in the least.
After Rousseau left his job, he did little paintings of the Parisian suburbs - paintings that lacked the spatial integrity of the impressionists while also losing out a bit to the academics in the way of form.
Yet today they charm us; they are a lonely man's loving portrait of a real place he knew extremely well. And they were purchased, for modest prices, by people who knew, and loved, these scenes in pretty much the same way old Henri did. In these paintings, Henri explored the "real" world - whatever that is.
He would return to it, over the years, as a sports enthusiast, a super-patriot (no intentional maverick, he), and as a collector of postcards and other ephemera that would occasionally find their way into his quirky masterpieces.
But for the most part Henri stayed in his private world. And it is with this aspect of his work that scholars and even dopeheads have been enthusiastic from the git-go.
In 1907, Pablo Picasso threw a big party - which he called a "banquet" - for Henri at his Montparnasse studio, Le Bateau Lavoir. The place was thronged by the Parisian avant-garde, which by that time had embraced the naive, but captivating inner life of the former customs agent. Picasso even owned some of Rousseau's work. Two little portraits of Rousseau's mother and father were among the emerging modernist's prized possessions. Three years later, Henri would paint The Dreamer and then pass out of this earthly existence.
And so a modern fable has been told. You start out with nothing but the dreams in your head and by dint of hard work and solid connections AND persistent dreaming, you rise to the very top of your profession, get in the textbooks, and have irony-drenched, but eminently respectful, cartoons made from your work.
"Jungles in Paris", which runs at the East Wing of the National Gallery through October 16th, shows the evolution of a humble, but recognition-craving bourgeois gentleman, who was both untutored and intelligent; lockstep conformist and supreme individual; little man and larger-than-life visionary.
If anybody painted from his heart, it was Henri Rousseau and we need such people now and then. We need them to remind us of our own lost innocence as well as our unassigned and uncontrollable. .
.possibility.

Some years ago, I tried to interest the National Portrait Gallery, which has re-opened here in the nation's capital, in a painting I'd bought at an antique store in Lower Manhattan. I thought The Gallery might perk up at the thought of owning a portrait of a distinguished American author and critic whose stock had fallen over the years, but was not yet
- thanks to his influence in the theatre - the dicey thing critical stock can often be. His name was George Jean Nathan and, if his star has dimmed, that's only the fault of people who fail to identify him with quotes (or near-quotes because I'm guessing) like: "I drink so that other people will be interesting." He and H. L. Mencken founded The Smart Set, which every serious writer wanted to get into - the way everybody of that ilk wants to get into the New Yorker today.
He, Nathan, wrote a little drunk scene for The Glass Menagerie for his girlfriend who'd originated the role of Laura. That scene has been excised from published versions of the play, but ran on Broadway for a goodly while.

The portrait was done by a popular illustrator of the Teens and Twenties and shows Nathan as dapper and handsome. (Nothing I have heard about him would contradict this image.) Aside from the money, one of the reasons I wanted the Portrait Gallery to take an interest was, to my lights, a nearly noble one: I wanted the picture safe from me, an inveterate traveler, from whom nothing precious or permanent would ever get a decent rap. It's not that I wasn't careful about such things. It's the nature of being on the move. You don't keep pictures on the wall if you know you've got, as it were, term limits on the space you're living in. Such was my situation at the time - and, if I knew me, such would be my situation for some time to come. I felt as if I were just "keeping it alive" until more nurturing hands could take the painting and cuddle it up a bit.

In those days, you made calls and wrote letters. I did both, and was invited to send a slide of the picture. I was surprised to learn from the National Portrait Gallery, my best possible quarry, that it already had a picture of Nathan. I even said that to the guy I reached on the phone after learning this.
He mentioned the name of the artist, of whom I had never heard, and thanked me for my trouble.

This National Portrait Gallery must be bigger than I thought, to already have such a portrait! So I looked back over our correspondence and found a reproduction of the portrait the gallery said it had. It showed a hypertense gentleman in a periwig. Hmmm, thought I:
something about this picture doesn't wash. Of course, the George Jean Nathan of the early Twentieth Century could've had an illustrious ancestor who'd dodged real, instead of paper, bullets; made a better mill-wheel; or laid the foundation for later successes with steam and sail. He could've been a pamphleteer - the first writer in the family. At any rate, he was apparently the famous one - or else somebody'd screwed up. In which case I wanted to know because it's just not good to give up on something like this until you get a definitive answer. Or until somebody sticks his foot in his mouth - which is a lot more satisfying, of course, but not always productive.

I got back with the guy at the portrait gallery and told him that the periwigged fellow was, I'm sure, a very worthy personage, but he was not the George Jean Nathan I was talking about. I was talking about somebody who'd left a paper trail more recently; among aging actors and playwrights, he might be cordially disliked today. (This was the early 1990's.)

I should point out that I left all of this information in a message. I will admit having a little fun with it.

Well, nobody ever got back with me. That would suggest a couple of things: that the man knew he'd made a boo-boo about the earlier Nathan, who possibly wasn't Nathan at all but some other guy in a periwig he'd gotten mixed up with Nathan. The other thing it would suggest is an appalling ignorance of 20th-century cultural history. I'm inclined not to know, partly because I've got the picture and still need to get rid of it; and mostly because I hate to think that a great cultural institution like the National Portrait Gallery is run by historical illiterates - which would make it a sort of Daily Double in our nation's life.

If anybody's interested in this portrait, he or she can contact me. I'm surprised I've still got it - for
all sorts of reasons.

I am fifty-one years old. If I were Shakespeare, I'd have only one summer left - though Shakespeare did not have as much to do to prepare for the unwinding of his mortal coil as I would. He lacked drive-in movies - which I would try to see once more before I went off.
He was not overtaxed with longish trips: I'd want to go to the near-ends of the earth and gaze upon marvels. Sweet Will was a homebody. If I had only this year, I wouldn't come home - second-best bed be damned!

As is likely, however, I will make it another year or two and won't have to worry about cancelling a cellphone plan that isn't scheduled to run out until after my fifty-second birthday. If not, I'm sorry, my dear, to be so thoughtless.

Another very palpable legacy - perhaps the only one - is my artwork, rolling stock that's reasonably well sorted into racks and boxes at my Richmond "studio" - a highfalutin' way to describe a storage closet that had been, on a wing and a prayer, aesthetically upgraded, gussied up, and walled in nicely in order to be pressed into public service as a gallery. The public, however, managed to stay off bad East Grace Street and stuck to the great broad way larger, more elegantly euphonious places have cognated. Broad Street (two words that stand happily alone in
Richmond) has a decent ring, but it ain't Broadway.

I decided to become a full-time painter after having tried it out for a year in Brooklyn, where I was better off outside (I always work on-site) anyway.
This was 1994. My father chose, very fortuitously, to die that summer, and bequeathed me a kind of "initial"
inheritance. His amiable third wife, and my favorite stepmother, was very much alive and would live off the principal of the estate - if I understand the arrangement correctly. With what I considered to be a fairly substantial sum of money, I moved from Brooklyn to Syracuse, New York, where I had a few friends, and began painting soon after I was able to schlepp all of my unstored possessions up three narrow flights of stairs into a wonderful eyrie from which vistas of another broad street were available from both sides of the house. The high ridges of Schiller Park could seen from the balcony. Ah, wilderness!

I "decided" to become a full-time painter because I could - and because I'd given up writing. I couldn't get much of anything published. Double jeapordy: I was unable to finish bigger projects I'd begin, with a wildly inspirational hundred and fifty page kick, over a manic period that rarely exceeded five days. My short stories were, moreover, too long; my essays too meandering; my satire too "broad" - or so said The New Yorker, which seemed to me its most ideal repository.
My several plays continued to get sifted down into the final heat of play competitions and were then tossed aside.

I was not new to painting. I had tried to keep both - painting and writing - on an even keel, and managed a kind of painful lopsidedness, which did not permit any kind of coordinated effort. I'd drop one and do the other. In this way, neither really got done.

So I tossed a coin - or, rather, heaved a typewriter - and came up with the idea of painting instead of writing.

Syracuse was the ideal place for that. I was completely snowed in after the first month I was there. This permitted the sort of full-time schedule flat-footed Brooklyn would not allow, and I must admit I thrived. I shopped with the lonely man's appetite for disposable things, and fed depressive genes with starches. For the most part, I was so enraptured with my new-found freedom that the habitual circuitry did not fire. My god was ecstatic and had no ear for Irish notions of despairing loneliness. My loneliness
- if it be that - was dedicated to an old work ethic my Germanic forefathers had bequeathed to its dour progency and passed onto my own father, who mistrusted joy - unless it could be had with some sort of male
bonding ritual.

My Syracuse routine was as simple as it was rigid. I got up early in the morning and started painting.
When it got to be dark, I ate a little something and painted until it occurred to me that I should slog off to bed. The old man who owned the building liked to have fun with me, a "downstater" who couldn't possibly know what ten inches of snow was like, and wove a few tall ones about impassable streets and men not finding their way home on their own block and freezing to a lamppost. Having seen the snowplows and the salt-houses and all the other winter paraphenalia most other cities manage to do without, I was confident that even lost old men could grope their way to a doorbell and lean against it if they had to. In fact, Syracuse's snow management skills are second to none.
I never heard of anyone ever getting stranded there - or getting cold, for that matter. Syracusans were (and remain) sensible people who knew how to make themselves comfortable. And did.

By degrees, as it were, I became the isolate most Syracusans, with their arcane social networks and neighborhood taverns, hardly ever become. The old man was frequently the only person I would talk with for days at a time. His youngish wife gave me a tour of their second-floor apartment once because she thought she had a knack for painting and wanted me to appraise her work - which is to say, she wanted me to come around and pronounce her a genuius. When I failed to become delirious in the face of her night-school attempts at idealized landscape and petunia-in-a-bottle still life, I was dropped from the social register. "What does he know?" I'm sure she'd asked the husband, who had, wisely, kept his counsel about those lousy paintings.

I had a sort of blowout after a trip to Memphis and broke with my old routines. I wasn't interested in working for the long, leaden months of December and January, but began to bounce back in February, and was all right again by March. At that time, I met a woman at a bookstore. Being neither young nor reckless, but merely tied somewhat daffily to the present, we lost no time moving in together. By that summer, we were commmuting out to her hardscrabble little property in the Alleghenies where I would look out at the low mountain ranges in wild surmise and wonder how it was possible to have ever been in Brooklyn. I painted there too. From her mid-Nineteenth-century farmhouse, I turned to field and wood, but came back to the man-made subjects that most interested me: a tub-shaped Ford truck, ramshackle outbuildings, the wasp-overtaken attic I reached by a flight of stairs so narrow I instinctively bottled my shoulders walking up them. Andrew Wyeth knew such stairs intimately. I almost felt an intruder into territory already claimed
by a more forceful talent.

I resumed my old routines from her smallish house, even after I ran out of money. She was overcommitted to my artistic development and did not pressure me to get any sort of job - though I would go off on a money tangent from time to time with a recovering alcoholic who'd - against form - become a housepainter after he'd taken AA vows and gone on the wagon. He became an on-again, off-again houseguest in an attempt to flee a girlfriend who might bean him one day and steal all of his money the next. If he liked you, he'd call
you "Rabbinowitz".

After another winter, she and I decided we should move and set out to see the Eastern Shore, where the yearly snowfall did not make headlines; if necessary, we might be able to put up a tent somewhere as we trolled about for a place to live. But no such luck. A storm came up and drove us landward - toward Richmond, Virginia, as it turned out. I decided to have a "eureka" experience as we exited 64 and found a funky little enclave full of drowsy people and houseplants that had somehow proliferated into monstrous, fruit-heavy, mythic-sized trees, shrubs, and vines. I breathed it all in and, well, it was "eureka" all over again.

We found a realtor and gave him instructions to find us something cheap and ugly, preferably in a place called The Fan, named for its sudden taper as peripheral areas pressed in on it. The realtor sent us a video of a place that had somehow escaped the house police and was still on the market at around fifty thousand - outlandishly cheap even in that pre-gentrified era. We took it and moved in. And, once, again, I went back to my old routines.

We broke up some years later because of a romantic contretemps that shouldn't have really driven us apart, since our relationship had become essentially platonic. But I was for some reason skittish about it and talked gorgeously around the whole thing. I ended up with the house for some months myself - a dust-moted place largely airless, and hot as a stove-lid during the final months of its vacancy.

By that time, I'd had a great many exhibits, both of my own and others' devising, and seemed to be on my way to a solid career - or at least as solid as a career in painting could be. We'd blown into town as free-booting outsiders and remained fully on the periphery of Richmond society. She scared people with her notions of progress and equality. She embraced everyone equally - a no-no in such a stratified world as Richmond can be. The well-heeled folk didn't like to see her giving homeless people soft drinks. The people she worked with found her daft sense of inclusiveness infuriating. I think even some of the homeless people didn't like her making up to certain other homeless people. For my part, I made people nervous with my darting movements; my intense, if misguided, dedication to the notion of a professional life; and lack of interest in the local brahmins - except as interesting intellectual properties. I made fun of people mercilessly, but democratically. People in the South can be touchy and don't like you laughing either at, or with, them - unless they make the joke first and laugh for a long time before you do.

Since that time, I've been in my "old" studio, a fine old building the tenants neither markedly improve nor significantly worsen. I opened it up as a gallery, which, as I've said, was not well-attended. All that time, however, I had been fitfully productive and now have an estate it would be very hard to disperse quickly - even if everybody I knew were to come in SUV's and haul the stuff away armfuls at a time.

And, now, over ten years after having left Brooklyn and left my longish stories, three-character plays, and eccentric humor in file drawers, I'm ready to go back to writing. It is hardly unusual to have forty or fifty-years - Gulley Jimson's while-away time - to fool around with doing one thing, but I seem to be cyclical sort who needs to abjure and embrace; whose creative juices are stirred now and then by breaking off, or away, from something. And so it appears to be time to give up painting - which has given me a decent, if worrisome, sort of living for a number of years - and go back to the thing I'd dropped, somewhat ignominiously, both because I'd had it - and, again, because I could.

It is both exciting and melancholy to make big changes. You weigh what you're losing against what you fervently hope to gain. You reflect on missed opportunities and miscalculated adventures. You develop "ifitis": if I'd been in another place; if I were another sort of person; if I'd been able not to burn bridges at this moment and maybe waited a while.
I would pronounce my post-midlife switch-over as a melancholy one. At this point I will not paint a new picture lest it get embroiled in yet another misadventure with a dealer, curator, buyer, or any other person who might express a half-hearted that will die; a momentary enthusiasm something else will divert; a genuine, if fleeting, interest that vanishes the next day. And this is not even to address the politics of the matter, which are most wearisome when you're the sort of outsider I am. The definition of the outsider is, for me, someone whose connections have a negative charge.

I received the cue I needed the other day when I ran into a young lady who was painting out on the Mall here in Washington. Her picture was conventional, but arresting, and I could see, in her, myself those ten years ago, when I was full of fire and enthusiasm, couldn't wait to get "out there" again, and wanted, genuinely, to share what I did with people who were willing to give it a good, honest look. She'll go on to paint for years and years. I can only hope my writing will catch fire the way my painting did those
ten years ago. And I do. I really do hope now.

Ever searching for persiflage and tomfoolery in the way of artspeak and imagery, I comb the shelves now and then (they're too-reliably stocked with the same tired stuff) and occasionally find a gem-in-the-rough that needs our fullest attention. I have found one in American Art Collector (#8). It features such imperishable interpreters of the American scene as Bruce Handford, watercolorist; Glenna Goodacre, living successor to the collectivist sculptors of old Rogers'
Groups; Christel Minotti, heiress apparent to Matisse (and quite a money-maker to judge from her very own "Price Range Indicator", which is posted with every artistic profile.) There is somebody called David Knowlton, whose large works now fetch $3,100 (down from $3,000 in 2000. This is apparently leap enough to warrant recognition.) Kent Wallis does assembly-line paintings that belong in the finest cheap hotels, though the magazine singles such work out as epitomizing "truth (and) beauty." It also has a "spiritual quality." Michael Flohr is an artist that has to be seen with sunglasses lest the potential art-lover suffer from an acute strobe effect. He is, however, showing in a San Diego Gallery, which is possibly well aware of this problem and may have a whole box of Ray-Bans available. It doesn't say this outright. What the gallery does say is this: "Michael Flohr's works capture the nostalgia of American life.
Collectors from all walks and all ages can relate to the humanity that Flohr captures on the canvas. The urban street scenes and lively bar scenes could be from any time period in history. Michael Flohr is our top artist in the gallery. He is a talented artist and a wonderful person."

A man named James Thorne, of "Exclusive Collections Gallery", wrote this; he obviously suffers from the strobe effect himself. He also writes as if he's just learning the language. I won't even go into how unfamiliar history must be to this man. If Flohr's tacky restaurants and obviously Second Millenium nightlife seem timeless to him, he's really got to start cracking the books again. This kind of perspective just will not wash.

I must admit to being somewhat gleeful. I think I have found the Worst Art Magazine. There are, however, some moderating influences. A man named Stephen Magsic does occasionally excellent paintings of the kinds of subjects Robert Cottingham and Richard Estes made acceptable back in The Day. But he does them with greater feeling; I would even say panache - though the word denigrates him somewhat. The Bernaducci.Meisel Gallery has mounted what appears to be an excellent group exhibit - though I can't believe a word the reviewer has said about it. Why is it that so many of the writers sound as if they're more comfortable in another tongue? (Few of these writers are credited, showing that the magazine at least has some sense of this defect.) Listen to this anonymous scribe as he or she rhapsodizes about a painting called "Sole Morning" which "demonstrates a more subdued feeling of summer, with a serene seascape that exemplifies his (artist David Dewey's) superb treatment of tonality and color." This is a thesarus speaking and not a real person with some rudimentary grasp of what one's native tongue can and cannot do.
The eponymous Frank Bernaducci, however, has the best quote. When speaking of his brainchild, he says it "presents not only a seasonal review but attempts to explore a wide range of visceral emotions. . ." I should say emotions are visceral. I'd hate to have any other kind myself.

Another excellent artist, in the mold of Huey Lee-Smith, also comes to light in the magazine; it was worth the price just to know of this man. His name is Aron Wiesenfeld and he has a handle on what it means to be alone and perhaps afraid in a land not of one's own making. There is also a bit of Tooker in his sallow-faced isolates, his dour perspectives, his uncompromising honesty. How he got in a place like this baffles me, but I'm used to seeing this sort of dichotomy in the art world, where the bad and the ugly occasionally cross swords with the conscientiously well-made and authentically heartfelt.

I just expressed wonderment at Wiesenfield's presence:
his gallery has taken out a full-page ad. Gotta get a little something for that!

I must, however, pause to explore one man's gaudy, but apparently impregnable, self-regard. He is John O'Hern and is Curator of the Arnot Art Museum. In his article, Secret Visions, he brings to light a few good artists who are characteristically out of place in American Art Collector. First he tells us about George Inness. Seems to me that any serious art collector ought to know about old George. But I'm just quibbling here. Let's let him tell us that Inness painted in the style of the "French Barbizon School" which was "noted for. . .painting in a darker palette with lose brushstrokes." I think he meant "loose brushstrokes", but he's a museum director and I'm just a high school graduate, so what do I know?
He also points out that Inness' paintings "suggest a spiritual basis to Nature." I love it when people capitalize words like Nature and Prosperity and such.
It just makes me all tingly inside.

The painters O'Hern chose are all pretty interesting:
Daniel Morper, Ann Lofquist, Alan Bray and Ben Aronson. Skipping around, here's what he says of Daniel Morper's interest in something Hopper and Burchfield introduced almost a century ago and doesn't really need exculpating. "Rail yards and rail cars (that foreign English again!) are seldom seen as objects of beauty. Even when they occur in the majestic beauty (there is it again!) of the high desert of the Southwest, they are overlooked or regarded as eyesores." I don't think people working in the yards overlook them. And a lot of train buffs in that locality no doubt find them quite fetching.
Who the hell, then, is he talking about? Us? All sorts of man-made things have appeared in paintings for a long time. Railroad stuff is old hat. Mr.
O'Hern doesn't need to draw attention to a lack of suitability that isn't really applicable. He goes on to say that Morper's skies "rival the real thing."
Well, whoop-de-doo! Morper's a realist painter; that's his job. Do all the rest of the artists in the article - or in art generally - fail with their skies?
He goes on to say that Morper "chooses times of day and conditions the layman would most likely just pass through." This phrase evokes the hobo. I think he means "pass over." That foreign influence again.
Perhaps Mr. O'Hern grew up speaking Gaelic?

This is really too rich. I've spent the last half hour scouring the magazine for other tid-bits of the sort I've already supplied, but let them suffice. I think Joseph Jefferson said you shouldn't enjoy yourself too much, and I must admit that I got somewhat carried away, so I'll let whatever I've already said stand. But, oh, there's so much more! I just can't wait to dive in for another peek. I really think I've found the very worst art magazine in
creation.

After I entered the marketplace - albeit in sideways fashion - I began to observe its mechanics - a cautionary tale for anybody who doesn't do his research. I think the classic ironic character is somebody who doesn't grasp the disconnect between practice and principle; one's ideals and the means by which he, the lapsed idealist, operates in the world. In this regard, I could have been Candide himself:  open, trusting - and therefore delusional.

I have concluded that art politics play a much greater role than the naif can possibly understand. That purchases - as well as the vetting - or art and artists take place in that region of the unconcious that also wants to drive the most expensive car, pose with the president, and drop the unwieldy names of the rich and famous. There is a paradox here in that both the worthy and unworthy cluster together. That is to say, just because a man happens to be educated in the right place and performs according to expectations doesn't mean he has nothing to say. Conversely, a woman who toils away in obscurity does not necessarily deserve attention because of it - whether she gets it or not. But some do just that and are overlooked. However, those who live by the rules are passed over rarely.

This is to say, that fortune is a thing most easily grasped by the fortunate. We love come-from-beyond stories because they're precisely that. They need to be told because they rarely happen in "real life." I must admit that I was personally sustained, for many years, by the selfsame myth: of some wise old person who, in scorning the usual niceties, shoulders conventional wisdom aside and elevates me to the eminence I deserve. A kindly old fellow with impeccable manners, but a stern and watchful rectitude: a man onto the flaws of the system and the hero-worship that attends success. A man swinging a lantern in search for another man like himself: an honest fellow doing his work as best he can, no matter what the price to himself or his loved ones.

I cringe to admit to such personal grandiosity, but it is true. I had to believe in this miraculous happenstance in the same way that cancer victims have to believe in the scientific researcher who will ultimately save them.

Needless to say, no such person has appeared. I have also, alas, ceased to believe in him (or her.) Though I still watch old Hollywood movies and think it would be a damned nice thing if such a person could exist outside of set or studio.

I began by thinking that the marketplace - for art, in my case - was based upon finding the best possible item and putting it up for sale. A very naive supposition. When a student is given a text, the student takes it all in, without wondering what was left out. I took in art history under the assumption that what was written was all there was. An artist learns his trade, he takes it to the marketplace, where the moneyed and discriminating congregate, and the artist finds an audience that will grow and grow. This happens, of course, but therein lies the fallacy of all convention-bound histories: they deal only with the successes - or very spectacular failures. In art history, the gods are on the side of the strivers who make it. There are no others. The myth of the underappreciated artist is, of course, a stock-in-trade of our cultural mythos, but, in order to qualify, he or she must eventually become known and appreciated. It is a story with a beginning, a long middle, and a Hollywood ending. It doesn't address what actually happens, and is happening, in our culture on a daily basis. And will go on and on until basic truths about how taste and reputations are made begin to enter through the front door.

I've been ranting about the hegemony of certain art-forms over others in my blog lately, but I can hardly claim to be onto something new. How this happens goes to the heart of what happens both in, and outside, of our museums and galleries. How this happens underlines our present star-struck and fame-obsessed culture and offers, in my opinion, another cautionary tale.

I suppose it is impossible to eliminate prejudice - which can be defined, in this context, as an assumption about a person's status or character based upon trifling externals. These trifling externals are magnified into a rigid belief system and are perpetuated in the usual way: by constant exposure and easy ratification. "That so-and-so. He's flatfooted, isn't it?" "Oh, yes. You can see it in everything he does." "Well, I'm not going to have anyone of his type in my house." "Oh, no. You can't have anyone like that. We're godfearing, arch-supporting people!"

"Amen to that!"

And so it goes. I've found that art and artists are dealt with in a similar way. If an artist is accepted, he is acceptable. If you find him in the best homes and choicest collections, you will most likely find him in an ever-increasing spiral of such places. Again, hardly a revolutionary notion.

Success breeds success and that's all there is to that. What is pernicious about it, however, is the assumption that if a certain thing is in a certain place, it's worthwhile. It is a kind of smoke-and-mirrors system applied to high culture. If you actually frequent such places, you can hear all sorts of ridiculous conversations about who has what and how much x paid for y and, by the way, did you get down to the shore this summer? (A stupid question: of course he did!) If there is any talk about the meaning of such an object, I rarely hear it. Nor do I hear much about how it might stack up to other objects in other homes. (Homeless objects rarely come up.
What in hell are they anyway?) I have tried to strike up conversations about the nature of seeing; good art as opposed to bad; art that's available, but underappreciated in such places and have gotten the look I always get. It says: "You're an interesting fellow, but why on earth should we care about that?"

Point well taken. Such people have their quarry already. And if it is good quarry and approved of by everybody else in the circle, why on earth do we need to talk about anything else?

Again, point well taken. But there is a real problem here. Those who are privileged enough to choose their reality don't have to think about anything that might otherwise trouble them. But my mind seems to be nothing but trouble. It breeds questions about class; intrinsic value; good character and bad - and all sorts of other stuff the people who seem to be in control rarely wish to address.

Over the years, I've made inroads into this culture myself. I've had to. Poor people don't buy paintings. But I've made it only so far. The big collectors go after the Big Quarry and I'm not that.
I've had to move within the bottom tier of the big money, where I manage to scratch out a living among people who can gaze upon fifty of my choicest paintings and choose a small one - or, as things generally turn out, nothing at all. It is possible that the small one strikes this person's fancy. I tend to think that I'm not considered important enough for someone so much more important than I am to spring for something substantial. I could be wrong, but I know something about the other stuff my economy-minded collector already has. If she wanted to, she could buy all fifty of the paintings I've chosen to wave at her (and her husband) in good temper - but almost always in vain.

It is good mental conditioning to realize that the world operates in this way, but accepting it should not be an option. Subversions should be attempted at all times. When I have a show, I consider it not only an opportunity for banter, but as a platform for my ideas. Because I'm temporarily elevated to a somewhat higher status, I can use my transient powers to educate. I try to do this in an unobtrusive way, provided I drink sparingly, but what I most wish to do is shake these people and tell them, oh, what I could do with your money. The collection I could assemble with my knowledge, experience, and disregard for its social significance. There was a gambler, I'd say, named Canfield who got rich off of his Manhattan casinos. He started collecting art and, while he had to do business with the swells, his friends were the artists. Now that's real subversion. Care to try it?


Another paradox has always struck me: how timid the rich are! They have what Bogart called "fuck-you money" out the wazoo and yet they march in lock-step socially and intellecutally (f that's not an
oxymoron.) If you look at the world's major collections, they're pretty much in the copycat mold. If there is any independent thought, it's been rigorously edited and roundly discouraged. These collections are, however, about money as well. There is a gambling element to them. Bet on this horse and he'll take you to the finish line and beyond - I promise! Hearing this sort of talk, the rich collector goes to Sotheby's and gets his Picassos or his Impressionists and ignores the rest.

Is greed an exponential thing? Can it be nurtured like any other delicate organism? Or is this kind of speculation just another aspect of social cowardice?

Are these collectors already thinking - after the first flush of acquisitive pleasure - of the Big Donation, which will perpetuate their name?

I can't know. All I can do is speculate - and perhaps dream of a time when art will become a communally significant exercise and not objectified by the wealthy and opportunisitic. Now art simply provides an perfect shell-game for the socially conscious speculator - and there will always be such people as long as there are other people he or she can exploit.

But: with my last shred of idealism clutched in my hand, I wish for a time when people who want something can at least be honest about why they want it. That would represent, for me, a real stride - a milestone in human honesty, a tremendous breakthrough for all of us. For now, however, I have to content myself with the occasional sale and, of course, whatever species of ire, indignation, wonderment and hope compels me to sit around and write when I should perhaps be out promoting myself. After all, a living isn't made by itself, my friend.

Profound Gaps and Valuable Spaces (in one beloved
institution)

As I was browsing through the Barbizon and Impressionist "rooms" at the National Gallery, a number of predictably unpleasant thoughts regarding the collecting mentality began to take shape in my mind. Those who are familiar with my "take" on collectors and collecting will probabably be able to guess them accurately enough. (I must inject a qualification here and say categorically that I don't necessarily expect ANYBODY to be familiar with my thought process. I am just assumming that the curious handful may have scanned my blog and it is of this possible population that I speak.)

At any rate, as I was browsing a very persistent thought began to assert itself. "Why this?" might be an accurate expression of that thought. (Or, rather:
Why JUST this?") Any lower-case national gallery should bring together, from the various significant movements of art history, a sort of compendium of the best of these movements and trot them out for the public. What it chooses should be carefully considered. I suppose gaps are to be expected, but in our National Gallery's emphasis on the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, it misses the boat significantly. Art history has, for some time now, cast so-called academic painters in the role of villains and villainnesses. They were the ones who fought so hard to keep the radicals out. And indeed many did. But in the Eighteen Seventies, Monet seemed to be working in daubs and swatches. Later on, Cezanne also seemed to be brewing up a sort of lunatic potion of broad directional strokes and eye-searing, board-flat colorations. Van Gogh might be seen as a real lunatic, with his borrowings from Japan - which were far more oddball than Whistler's - and his expressionistic (as opposed to illusion-centered) handling of form, color, and spatial relationships.
These people were very, very odd - though a casual study situates them all just to the left of the academic painters with whom they studied for a while, but whose more conventional techniques and (to use that scrumptious word) methodologies they ultimately spurned.

However, as I browsed, I remembered that there were a few academic paintings among the great roomfuls of now-acceptable daubs and I went to see them. Before making my pilgrimage, however, I studied Manet for a while. And Bazille. Manet was essentially a studio painter incurably smitten with Velasquez and Murillo.
He did not really understand natural light and is therefore an impressionist-by-default. Degas understood it much better and was by far the more complex talent. The National has done well by him and collected figures studies, portraits, and interiors by him. Manet shows very poorly alongside of him.

Bazille's work looks hopefully wooden and incoherent.
He simply doesn't belong in a great national collection. The wallspace is just too dear.

The academic paintings are, by and large, not much better. If there is a duller classicist than Puvis de Chavannes, I'd like to know what he or she might be.
There are way too many of his paintings - which is to say, one is almost too much. He belongs in the basement. But the Benjamin Constant and Arnold Bocklin - two very different people - are a credit to the collection. Constant does what Manet attempted to do - academic set-pieces - but beats him all to hell in capturing natural light, and is easily his superior in terms of what Manet is famous for: paint application and/or painterly texture. His offering is no less (or more) absurd than Manet's stagey painting of studio models together in a non-setting - and is called something on the lines of "The Emir's Favorite." It shows two lovely ladies posing langorously in a shadowy courtyard with the cool Mediterranean in the distance. A casual study is rewarding. You notice that the handling, while solid, is reliant on suggestion. The golden lights of veils are dragged with the brush over previous layers.
Shadows are mysteriously transparent, faces are not overdeveloped. It is a pretty damned good painting, all in all, and makes you wonder whether the academic painters, for all their infamous conservatism, weren't justifiably exercised when they first set eyes on the Impressionists and their dissentious colleagues. They actually knew how to do what they Impressionists were trying to do, but were, alas, chained to a system in which success was determined by rigid rules and intractible aesthetics. Delacroix gave you exotic paintings of a similar type, but he too diverged from the classical presentation of them and thereby won himself a place in the pre-Impressionist pantheon.

The Bocklin is a marvel, in places, of palpable representation. I forget the title of the painting, but no matter. It's really about his fantastically luminous marble wall against a brooding, storm-laden sky. I wondered, while looking at this wall, why everybody was stuck with the Van Goghs. But, of course, that's me and while I "get" Van Gogh in my own way, the nuances of perception were not his strong suit. Van Gogh was among the first painters to offer up his inner life as something to be gazed upon and valued for itself. A hard thing to do at the time, and I admire him for it. But I must admit that I often prefer the text of his paintings - the great letters to his brother and patron, Theo - to the paintings themselves. They just don't have much to offer visually, which is not a good thing in a painting. And in this regard I'm sure almost any cross section of sophisticated museum-goers will disagree with me.

At any rate, yes, I'd rather look at these particular academic paintings than most of the impressionist paintings in the place. There are some good Monets, of course, a few decent Cezannes, and an early Renoir
- a Diana done when the artist was twenty-six (at the Gleyre Atelier, if I'm not mistaken) - that could almost be a Courbet.

However, why not have a mixture rather than have the Impressionists predominate? It does the public a great disservice by subtracting from art history significant movers and shakers who have merely fallen, through some sort of coattail consensus among art collectors and historians, out of our consciousness.
We, the public, should not only know who the Impressionists were opposing - but what. It is possible that, upon seeing the opposition, we, the public, might like it better - or, at any rate, just as well. Many excellent painters, now relegated to basements or provincial museums, could easily hang in the rooms the Impressionists have taken over. And they could be purchased with just a few astute and cash-conscious de-accessionings.

This is our National Gallery and I think it should be as good as it can be. It's pretty damned good as it is, but it is lacking both in great European art of the 19th-century (where are the Danes, Poles, Russians, among others?), but also in American art, which seems to stop cold in about 1910. Where is the contract that severs a national institution from living painters and refuses to include anybody other than the Pop, Absract Expressionist and Minimalist Crowd? If Rothko can have an entire gallery in the East Wing, why shouldn't equal space be given over to John Koch, Raphael Soyer, Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus - to name a few of his realist contemporaries. Our National Gallery does not tell OUR story and it ought
to. Moreoever, we ought to insist that it does.

The great Barnes Collection is about to move from Merion, PA, where it's been since its founder, Albert Barners, inventor of something called "argyrol", built it. Mr. Barnes didn't really like people to visit him
- except certain artists - so he fashioned a wall of byzantine procedure and limited opportunity around his collection. Once it was "finished", he mandated that no more paintings could be purchased. And, of course, all his odd hours and arbitrary schedules had to be observed as well. He was rich enough to be able to have his rather capricious rulings enforced. It's always been hard to get into the Barnes Collection.
And when it moves to Philadelphia, it won't be much easier.

His choice in art was formed partly by his old high school chum, William Glackens, whom Barnes dispatched to Europe for some high-toned looking-around.
Glackens returned with the nucleus of Barnes'
collection - with its essential design and direction, in fact. A frustrated impressionist, Glackens leaned toward Renoir and bought Barnes' first little ladies.
(Taking the reins himself, Barnes ended up purchasing a hundred and seventeen others.)

What's wrong with this picture? Nothing and everything. First of all, Barnes was an American citizen and, as such, was more or less obliged to love French modernist painting first while ignoring the art of his countrymen. Glackens, as his advisor, did him a great disservice in steering him toward France. He could have easily introduced him to a cadre of artists who were far more revolutionary than Renoir and lived right in New York City; they were, in fact, Glackens'
own friends and colleagues. I always wonder why in hell Glackens did that, when he was already privy to the revolutionary cell that might have drawn an eccentric millionaire like Albert Barnes. But, no, not only did Barnes relinquish that opportunity, he jumped over the pond as a sort of critical occupation and kept purchasing Van Goghs (no Frenchmen, he, but close enough), Gaugins, Soutines (not a garden-variety Parisian either), and other modernists - most notably, Henri Matisse, who would eventually do a mural for the big house and install it there.

It is sobering to realize that Barnes had a hand in changing history. If he and other similarly motivated collectors had lost their money somehow, the face of American museums would be at least somehwat different.
Instead of intoning the names of Monet, Manet, and Gauguin, you'd likely be talking about John Sloan, Robert Henri, and perhaps even Glackens, (William) himself. Big blockbuster exhibits might well feature the shenanigans of Sloans' alcoholic wife, Dolly, of whom he made an "honest woman" (at least most of the time); Robert Henri's passionate parochialism, by which every moment and every thing could be transformed into art; Ernest Lawson's famously bejewelled coloration (and not Pissarro's, say.) We'd have different artist stereotypes: the artist uberman or artist worker; the artist/ballplayer, artist/politician. Artists would be celebrated for confronting modern realities and not going off into the country - or dodging out on a major war - and tracking the nuances of light on the facades of country cathedrals or popular trees. It would be honorable to talk politics - perhaps even to vote in minor elections. It would be a good thing to acknowledge poverty and not merely glorify the pleasant and predictable. And while some of Barnes'
major purhases are not necessarily soft-core, they are generally focused on either the gestural or decorative. By the early Nineteen hundreds, the best American art had begun to eschew that and had finally come into its own. Yet after having made a decent beginning, its potential champions and collectors abandoned it and turned to the more rarefied regions of pure design, pure tonality - pure formalism.

It's interesting to note that this turnabout was not necessarily foreordained. The artists who had been Glackens' illustrator colleagues and students were the enfants terribles of the early Twentieth Century and were in an excellent position to steal the thunder of their more genteel betters at our nation's bastions of polite culture. But the Armory Show changed all that and essentially made a purely American statement irrelevant - even embarrassing - to the sophisticated collector. Rather than haunt the dankish studios of George Luks - or find themselves holding a filthy glass full of lousy red wine at an Independents'
exhibit Downtown - the new collector went to Alfred Steiglitz and let him talk on and on about the hot properties of Paris, like Picasso and Matisse and their American counterparts, particularly John Marin.
Steiglitz passionately believed that representational art (except anything the camera could produce) was passe and he promoted artists who had found their own personal and artistic salvation at the Armory Show, with its startling European innovators. Collectors like John Quinn walked away from the Ashcan School and into Steiglitz' gallery - and they stayed. Barnes was rich enough to leave the country early and often. As he scoured Paris, New York City and other American places were ignored, setting the stage for the backlash of the Nineteen Thirties, when regionalism had its brief, but triumphant, reign in the art world of the Depression. Of course, few people collected it. That's not necessarily what it was for.

I suppose what riles me about Barnes and his ilk is their tremendous influence. On a recent NPR program, for which the presenter, Susan Stamberg, had travelled to Merion, Pennsylvania to pay homage to The Collection, she, Ms. Stamberg, could hardly contain her astonishment at seeing so much great work in one setting. It is arguable whether Barnes collection is a great one, but it certainly is big. I'm wondering what she would think if she had an opportunity to study the basements of American museums and see what a wealth of early and mid-Twentieth century painting that was stuck there. A lot of it isn't that good either, but because of the disproportionate influence of Barnes and his ilk, that's the stuff that gets buried. Even a lousy Renoir is seen more often than Sloan or Henri. Mediocre Matisses and Vuillards get more exposure than the best artists America has to offer. Even Andrew Wyeth, our only living Superstar, doesn't have quite the clout as the above-average French modernist. (Close, though.) Few other American painters, however, have quite the gravitas of dozens of European artists. Nor is the average American citizen even aware that they exist at all.

We now live in a time of almost supernatural productivity in the arts. Painting - a sort of esoteric pastime - is being produced at a rate that would astonish atelier artists of the late Nineteenth-century. However, the best representational painting in this country is still a well-kept secret. It is collected avidly by the very few who seem to lack the egotism of most collectors and therefore keep a low profile. The "name"
collectors outnumber these souls almost exponentially.
Take a gander at any Top One Hundred collections and they are copycats for the most part. And the names you often hear are the same ones that had once charmed the ears of Albert Barnes - who did not start the virus, but was eager to spread it.

My point is not that one's own country should necessarily be first in our minds as we think about which art, or artists, should matter. No art collection is good because it's "patriotic." (The opposite is more likely.) However, it would seem to make relatively good sense for anybody who's been bit with the collecting bug to try to look around a little before succumbing to the exotic-itis Barnes and his colleagues did. They essentially searched for expensive novelties - and got them! So you could call them successful according to their lights. But not to mine. A collector has a public responsibility, in my view, and should be held to a higher standard than that of some others. His or her collections - if they're expensive enough - will be bequeathed to institutions or become institutions themselves. They will be regarded as the gold standard. They will set the pace for other collections, the ever-increasing bouts of acquisitiveness-to-come. Their legacy very much outlives them - and I'm sure they'd all be very happy to know it.

In Barnes' case, I'm not happy in the least. His search was essentially for the novel and eccentric. A minor passion, but not worthy of being on the world's
stage.

Charleston In My Time: The Paintings of West Fraser University of South Carolina Press, 2001

Because I prefer to have lived with an artist's work for a while and not be pressured to "sound off" about something I haven't at least tried to assimilate, I have reviewed this book from memory. I have not provided facts unless I was certain of them; the rest I have let alone. This review is not about a particular painting anyhow; it is about an artist's development; his strengths and flaws; his prospects and possibilities. I apologize for any factual errors
- or oversights.

Charleston in My Time is the sort of volume artist/producers dream about: it provides the artist an almost unlimited opportunity to strut his stuff; sets the stage for his development; and respectfully reproduces work from the most significant phases of his career. Very few living artists are favored with such a volume and I think West Fraser, the recipient of this honor, is duly sensible.

The book's "scholarly" approach, however, falls flat.
It may well be addressed to a provinicial audience keenly curious about the art and artists of the lowcountry, as I think rural South Carolina is known to its own people, but there isn't much to recommend it to a general audience. The art of South Carolina's past is - as everywhere - uneven in quality, but is perceived in this volume with an almost outlandish adoration. This sort of uncritical reverence might be seen as indigenous to Southern people - as it is. But it also speaks of a narcissism that might be pardonable in the collector, but has no place in the critical analysis of one's predecessors.

I would have preferred to hear more about the artist himself, perhaps in diary form or interview format.
He is allowed to provide some biographical information, but it is scant. The book is his; Fraser's artistic forebears are merely footnotes and should be treated as such. People are, in the main, curious not only about an artist's life, but his struggles and triumphs. Of these, the book gives us
dribs and drabs, but is mostly silent.

Just for the record: Fraser outdoes all the dead people, with the possible exception of Alice Ravenel-Smith, whose watercolors are drenched in a personal lyricism that transcends regional affiliation. She should be better known, and perhaps will be. Over the past ten years, there's been a great deal of grabbing going on. Dealers and curators from elsewhere might want to start grabbing up forgotten Southerners and start re-introducing them to their conceputally fogged audiences on either coast.

At its finest, Mr. Fraser's work is impressionist in color and realist in feeling. Even failed paintings have the attributes of impressionism: deep space, optical color, "picturesque" design. (The realist's self-critical detachment is, however, missing.) Mr.
Fraser started out in watercolor and worked largely from photographs. In these early watercolors he is for the most part literal, though he is occasionally redeemed by his genuine feeling for place as well as his spirited drawing and design. However, they are fatally flawed in their reliance on a photographic source and do not begin to approach his more mature integration of subject and seeing. However, there are some brilliant foreshadowings. I think he made an excellent decision (if it was that) not to turn to oil until he "got his chops" on paper. Everything he would do later on canvas, he more or less anticipates in his watercolors. Yet the watercolors for the most part lack the masterful spontaneity and suggested form of his best oils.

When he begins with oil, he lacks substance. He seems to be somewhat color-mad, unable to find his way into the form of his subjects. But as he begins to hit his stride, we begin to observe a shift from mere experimentation to a dawning sense of purpose. His very worst faults are mostly ironed out. When he hits his stride, he is able to create completely convincing, not to say breathtaking, illusions of a cityscape known largely for its old world charm; palm-fronded landscapes in which the air is felt; spectacularly vivid sunsets in which land and sky are fused both spatially and conceptually. There is no "girly girly romance", to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, about these paintings - even if they are, at bottom, "romantic." Fraser obviously loves his Low-country subjects as well as his adopted city - sanitized somewhat after Hurricane Camille swept through it. The book leaves off some years ago, but there's a suggestion of tremendous potential in his panoramic cityscapes, painted from a sweeping vantage point, like some of his early watercolors. His greatest cityscape is here, a magnificently constructed panorama of an old, but vital place we've come to know pretty well in earlier, more selective views. There is an astonishing unity here: of roof and steeple; apartment and townhouse; of color, light, and form. This creative fusion of visible phenomena is what landscape painting, from Constable to Wyeth, is all about and Fraser understands it very well.

Embarrassing, however, are titles that suggest bad Nineteenth-century poetry or overblown religious sentiments, as in "God's Golden Light" - otherwise an excellent painting. His figures are lopped-off humanoids whose blocky movements seldom lead anywhere.
There is a painting of a bunch of good ole boys, complete with Confederate flags, out on the bay in their motorboats. You might as well just wrap them all in white sheets and call it "Singin' Dixie."
There are slews of paintings of the merely picturesque that may hardly surpass the local talent. The worst of these paintings seem to shill the charm of the old city for tourists and other gullible outsiders. Some are downright bad and shouldn't have been reproduced.
I'm thinking of particular images here: of a pyramidal form in a graveyard; another of uncertain palm-like foliage done in feathery greens and puky lavenders.

To his credit, Fraser is rarely as bad as this and should not be judged by a few anomalous missteps.

He sometimes commits himself to series' that really don't require quite so much repitition. I'm sure he's aware of Monet's preoccupation with the fleeting effects of light on a particular subject and has wished to duplicate that experiment. In some cases, he pulls it off; in others, well, he doesn't. In this particular circumstance, the work should be selected carefully. Here very little care seems to be present.

When compared to a truly great artist, like Edward Hopper, who might also be identified with a particular place, Fraser falls short. One might liken his best efforts to Hopper's watercolors, also on-site explorations of a specific subject and impeccable in this regard. Fraser is a master of the sort of reflected light and color-drenched palette necessary to plein air painting. Fraser is fundamentally an eye-painter and not an artist in the sense that Hopper, or even Burchfield, was. He is a sort of masterful technician whose incredible bravura can often hinder an inner vision. He does not invent, he merely records. He has no vaulting imagination; his talent resides mostly in his eye and hand. He doesn't have the sense of the tragic any of number of his literary counterparts have had and can't, it would seem, endure scenes of poverty and human distress without sweetening them up and making them picturesque.

However, what Fraser can do well is considerable.
Witness the plethora of bad impressionist paintings that overflow Red State galleries. He is an excellent designer and an interpreter of light with few equals.
His forms look real; that is to say, they are rooted in something - are made of something. Painting tactile surfaces is also a considerable accomplishment. He can show you hard noon light on a plaster wall and make it stick in your imagination as the definitive interpretation. He is able show us what a deserted street in a good-time old town feels like, with its few electric lights and irrelevant church steeple. He'll guide you down a footpath toward a shack along some sandy road and you feel you're there, walking barefoot.

I would prefer a greater sense of the monumental, less emphasis on the picturesque, more empathy - for want of a better word. But within his limitations, Fraser is a very good painter indeed. And that is more than good enough. I'll take it over just about everything else there is in representational painting today.

Remember, however: I said almost.

Printmakers are a funny lot. I've always marvelled at their sub-specialty status in an art world that might wish to embrace them, not only for aesthetic reasons, but economic ones as well. That is to say, the work of very few living printmakers is out of the range of any art collector - and might easily be acquired by non-art collectors who are drawn to artist of subject for their own reasons. In a word, printmakers deserve better. It's as easy to collect prints as Star Wars memorabilia - and almost as cheap. Prints are fairly plentiful and only the most fastidious collector insists on an early "number." Most printmakers don't really give a damn about whether a collector owns 6/150 or the very last of the run. They are working artists for whom a check represents an opportunity to run out and make other images. Most have other jobs, work obsessively at their plates and drawing boards, and exhibit, mostly, with other printmakers. These unusually gallant people work in the shadow of the painters, sculptors, and video artists and don't seem to mind it.

Their sangfroid is commendable and might be emulated in other quarters.

Many of the best New York-area printmakers are represented in "Tides Lines: Prints of the Staten Island Waterfront" at the Noble Maritime Museum. I would like to take the opportunity to re-introduce
readers of this blog to one them.

My choice is entirely prejudicial and I would apologize for it if I thought it would do any good.
However, Bill Murphy is an artist whose steady, if fulsome, growth I have watched over the past fifteen years and I'm proud to have been able to look over his shoulder.

I met him at a gallery neither of us frequented - a co-op gallery in one of those fine old industrial buildings people were so crazy to live in twenty years ago. It had a roster of forgettable artists - a measure of honorable intentions: neither of us wanted to leave the area without seeing something, however mediocre.

The gallery was reached by a tortuous flight of stairs and had obviously been without visitors for a while.
If there had been a gallery sitter, he or she had absconded; we had the place entirely to ourselves. I don't remember the exhibit at all. Some co-op artists, then as now, deserve better too. It is a pity that the best of these are more or less blackballed (mostly by default) from commercial galleries that often promote lesser, but more saleable, talents. I think that's another reason why both of us hung in there. We identified with the people who were exhibiting in this gallery and other places like it - even if we were working feverishly to avoid their fate.

After taking a respectfully solitary tour of the exhibit, we retired to a coffee-shop where we started to compare thoughts. I was delighted (and relieved) to find another artist who didn't necessarily swoon at the mention of the smallish talents who were enjoying largish reputations at the time; intrigued by his independent-mindedness; cheerfully provoked by his resistance to some of my own half-baked notions about the world around whose peripheries both of us had little choice but to move.

I learned that Bill was from Staten Island - a place I identified with firemen and sanitation workers (a thing sadly borne out by the spate of funerals after
9/11.) He talked like a guy who might've strayed into business or real estate: a down-to-earth sort of guy whose more rarefied interests were tempered by a love of baseball that surpasses my own. To this day, he never fails to mention, in our emails, how the Mets are doing. (I boycott my home-team, the Nationals, because I would prefer to have fewer potholes on Capitol Hill than RKF Stadium spectator-crammed.) I told him that I'd seen some excellent drawings by him in a frame-shop on Lexington Avenue and wondered how he'd done with them there. (Hadn't done much, he
confessed.)

I would take him up on his invitation to visit his studio shortly afterwards. A word to the wise: it is best to go to Staten Island when you have an entire day at your disposal because it is an irresistible place to go for a five-hour walk. Even if you don't generally take walks like this, you will there.
Bill's mentor, John Noble, *walked around the place like mad and knew it better than anybody. His lithographs of the old waterfront life, with its moody infrastructure and proudly decaying tankers are among the most underrated bodies of work in the Twentieth Century. I would urge anyone for whom the genuinely romantic is not a despicable notion to look for the work of John Noble. His elegies to the world of "steam and sail" are poetic documents of a time that has - even on the Island itself - vanished completely.
Nor are they particularly expensive.

Like Noble, Bill has never seen any reason to leave Staten Island. He recently sold his citadel of a house in a marginal neighborhood and moved to another one - on the Island, of course! People know him there and are glad he's around - though he is not the art world celebrity it might be possible for him to be elsewhere. He teaches at Wagner College and is, I think, an esteemed and respected member of his profession. He's done a slew of portraits of college presidents, and will, no doubt, have done a complete set before too long. He's is as much part of his community as his Rutherford, New Jersey forebear, Dr.
William Carlos Williams.

I consider his artwork somewhat more subversive. His best prints are almost strident essays on our common mortality - he'll make a pile of old bricks in front of a big amusement park ride stand, in a symbolic sense, for all of us. He's accomplished, in a series of panoramic etchings, the nearly impossible: a sort of Staten Island timeline stretching back before human occupation to a our present era, in which man's imprint ranges everywhere - yet whether imprint exerts a benign, or malignant, effect is entirely up to the viewer. Bill records the notion of man as dangerous, however, in an intuitive way. His approach to a murky waterfront is marked not only by painstaking observation, but a lyrical steadfastness before which the less committed among us might stand aghast. His prints and watercolors of this once-teeming place accomplish the impossible in their capacity to illuminate the unseen while also - as Hopper said - sticking "to the fact." This dichotomy is also present in the work of Charles Meryon, the great French printmaker whose untimely death made a legend of his legend first, and his work second. This is unfortunate in that the work, in this case, was much greater than the man.

We rarely know our great artists when they're among us. They seem too ordinary; too approachable; "just folk," as it where. Do you think anybody ever gave a second thought to the round-shouldered man who spent so much time looking after The Globe Theatre? William Shakespeare was just a little guy who might've become an aldermen if he'd stayed in Stratford! Great. .
.but unremarkable? Inspired. . .but inconspicuous?
In Bill's case, these contradictions are mostly true.
He wouldn't give up his life as father and homeowner easily and, at present, nobody's asking him to. He hasn't finished with Staten Island as a place to watch
- though he's ventured into New Jersey lately - the scene of one of his best recent prints. Also into Coney Island, which is somehow as connected to Staten Island as it is to Brooklyn - where he sets up his easel often. Yet Staten Island is the staging-area for most everything Bill does and, like Constable's
soggy Deptford, is more than place enough for him.



* Bill remembers Noble differently. I will quote him.
"Sorta doubtful. he knew the old industrial area (Richmond Terrace) and how to gget to the Paramount Bar and Grill to Demyan's Hofbrau to Bayonne and his studio."

(The following is a partial, and certainly idiosyncratic, impression of the event. I did not take it all in because my cloudy vision isn't up to taking in a lot; tiny blood vessels start to throb and distend and, well, it isn't pretty. So I have cut the thing in half, ommitted a slew of excellent paintings, and have left out some people, like Charles Conder and William Stott of Oldham, who ought to be in here. I hope this maddens everyone with curiosity.)

In the midst of old friends, I feel a sense of comfort the new, and perhaps more dynamic, people in my life cannot supply. I study these old friends for cracks in the old facade, significant hair loss, hearing anomalies, and I still find them very acceptable.
Kurt Vonnegut suggested that we shouldn't entirely forsake those who knew us when we were young - and it's not a bad idea, in spite of what they may remember.

Well, I have always regarded Degas as an old friend of
mine: a cranky one, to be sure. A man never at a loss for the stinging sarcasm and the irreverant jibe, generally at my - or the world's - expense. A small price to pay for having such a fellow in one's embrace, as it were. Degas was certainly the most accomplished draftsman among his Impressionist colleagues. No: he was the only draftsman among them.
One looks in vain for preparatory sketches or schemata in the Impressionist oeurvre. Monet had a brief flirtation with caricature, this is true. And he wasn't bad at it. Had he been more interested in human character and not the play of light on a river-bend or field of poppies, he might have become one of those second-tier artists stuck in the long, annihilating shadow of Daumier - who was a pretty good painter in his own right.

Yet seeing Degas in any context is a cause for jubilation. The Phillips Collection has been wisely restrained in its use of him. He appears sparsely in an exhibit that is, in part, dedicated to his work.
The exhibit has a larger context: to connect Degas - and, to a lesser extent, Toulouse-Lautrec - with colleagues across the English Channel: colleagues who have been under-recorded in Impressionist literature, but were lively, even indispensible, cohorts and contributors.

Whistler too is short-shrifted in the exhibit, but his influence is all over, particularly in the work of Sidney Starr, who weighs in with a space-filled, but defiantly tonalist, canvas (Paddington Station, 1886)that shows the great London railroad station at twilight. Have we heard of Sidney Starr here across The Pond? A few of us have, but he's largely a footnote in an era that is largely a clean slate in our conventional art histories - a largely clean slate scrawled with the names of Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Caillebotte, Bazille, and a few others I'm sure art history students are made to learn by heart.

Then there's Sickert - a man who has gained some notoriety lately for being Patricia Cornwell's Jack the Ripper, the original body-scatcher/hit man archetype who preyed, infamously, on Unfortunates who plied their trade in London's East End - a place with much worse things than mush-mouthed taxi-drivers.
Whether this is true or not, Sickert - who had a knack for compartmentalizing himself, to be sure - became a Master of the Underworld in his own way, using as his social lense both the performers and spectators in the music hall of the 1880's and 90's. At this time, public spectacles were seen to by the likes of William Powell Frith, about whose convention-sized painting of Victoria Station Whistler admitted that it had been finished, but never started. Ford Madox Brown was also a popular sermonizer, who depicted England's working-class in an acceptably didactic - yet dazzlingly Three-D - sort of way that still retains its essential documentary function.

Sickert chose the more frighteningly intimate way of showing society both coming apart, and mending itself, at the seams. His spectators are a not-so-gentile mob; his performers are often isolated by a spotlight
- or by the lascivious gazes of a male audience with things other than sweet Irish ditties on its mind.
Sickert did not care for storytelling per se, and yet there's a world of the unspoken - a narrative trail complex and inviting yet as maddeningly elusive as the man himself. Sickert would disappear for a time in rented rooms where he obviously painted - though we can't really know what else went on in them. With or without the possible opprobrium of a crazed double life, Sickert's paintings provide - as well as close off - a proscenium view of a society with secrets and obsessions.

Sickert didn't like naturalism and was not very nice to Stanhope-Forbes, who was dedicated to a narrative style he, Sickert, found impossibly literal-minded.
The word "jejune" comes to mind; perhaps Sickert himself used it. All I would say is that he should have lived to see photo-realism. (I personally disagree with his anti-naturalism bias.)

Sickert's later work lost some of its immediacy and settled for formalist sophistication. The Phillips has hung this phase of his work - which it owns - in two side rooms. Here an aging Sickert is set off with a few good paintings by Edouard Vuillard - a man whose sensibility can be said to chime in very nicely with Sickert's own.

The naturalist school is represented by George Clausen, in a street-scene (A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, 1881) that appears saccharine at first, but upon a second look, yields a multi-layered formal dimension for which such work is rarely credited. Clausen wasn't as interested in his pretty girl - who comes toward us and is in the sharpest focus - as he was in his street-crew or his plaster-sided buildings - all made with his famous square-brush technique. Clausen may still get a bad rap from the anti-narrationists. Too literal! I don't find it so myself, but I tend to prefer the interpreter to the aesthete: the honest storyteller to the social and formalist butterfly Whistler ultimately became.

There isn't much in the way of quantity in the exhibit, so those of us who don't need a whole catalogue of an particular artist's work will be relieved. The vastly overrated James Tissot's insipid and overdressed young idlers do show up, but the greater vitality of his colleagues shouts him down.
Phillip Wilson Steer is represented by a few paintings, the most fluid of which shows a model in a chair (A Girl at Her Toilet, 1892-93). It could have been painted by John Sloan. Sidney Starr's excellent pastel of a carriage-eye view of a city boulevard is a striking example of the sort of cropping for which Degas is justly famous. There are, in fact, just a handful of Degas paintings - mostly interiors of his beloved dancing studios. Another painting (The Ballet for 'Robert de Diable", 1871) shows the affinity he had with Sickert for live performance. He was able to capture set, peformers, and orchestra with a sublime economy loaded with tantalizing half-lights and painterly smudges.

As this is a sort of informal review, I have no intention of including everyone. (I refer the reader to my "disclaimer" at the beginning of this article.) Most of the artists in this show developed deeply personal ways of reacting to their environment; their work is therefore "of a piece." I am writing here about old friends whom I know well enough to forget in some ways. I don't remember what date we met, or with whom. I don't care what any of us was wearing. But I still find I enjoy listening to what they have to say.
Over time, their message has lost is purity perhaps - even some degree of that urgent context out of which a whole body of action may eventually spring - but the old charm remains and I'm glad to have seen so many of them together again. Given the current disrepute of any sort of realism that is not either in sharp focus, or deals with obsolescent classical notions of reality, it is also a rare privilege to have so many tonalists and naturalists together in one space. Both Tate Britain and the Phillips Collection can be credited with this somewhat minor, but significant, change of venue. Before too long, there will be another spate of Impressionist exhibits that'll make lots of money and keep this particular artistic ghetto in the limelight.

For my money, I prefer to see Clausen's navvies,
Starr's twilight, and Sickert's boorish spectators.


- The exhibit runs through May 14th at the Phillips
Collection: 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009, (202) 387-215.

I've often pondered the strange disconnect between art collectors and producers. Having had the collector mentality first, I think I understand it. Having acquired the producer's mindset, however, I'm not as sympathetic to the collector anymore and would like to spend a little time analyzing it both for my own benefit and, I hope, for yours.

When I was a kid, I collected everything. The mania began with a postshard I'd picked up on my way to school. Because it was just a piece of something and embossed with a fancy-looking design, it had to be old - and valuable perhaps. Unfortunately, my mother encouraged this delusion and set me off on a many-year's adventure. (I persisted in thinking that the potshard was ages old and made by Chickasaw Indians when, in fact, it was just a piece of something that had been in someone's yard and been
broken.) I still have that postshard somewhere. No collector ever gives anything away and grieves for each and every loss, no matter how trivial.

Then came fossils and arrowheads; other rocks and minerals; bird's eggs; stamps; coins; baseball cards.
My room was an orderly riot of collectibles, circa 1965. In that day and time, you didn't have access to the sort of stuff a child does, with the click of a mouse, today. I had to wait, every summer, to go to the Evansville Museum for my mineral fix. I had to save my money and send off for little bitty rock-samples that were glued to a postit thingy and identified at the bottom. The legend there said what the rock was and where it came from. I lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where there were no interesting rocks and minerals except in buildings, which you had to leave alone. The vast majority of the most stunning rocks and minerals in the whole US of A seemed to be in Arizona. I would complain bitterly about the horrid privation of being a Memphis, and not a Phoenix, boy. I had to make do, and that was a valuable, if deeply unsatisfactory, lesson to learn.

I hit the "Tilt" button with baseball cards. By that time, I had the accumulator's mad-skills: I could identify, label, box, and categorize. I could put my collectibles in a safe place, but get at them quickly. I could also whisk them away in record time if I perceived a threat at the door, or heard an insistent parental voice bidding me to do something that would bore me to tears and thereby build character. As I got new baseball cards, I'd fold them gently into the older ones - or just contemplate them in magnificent isolation. I once came into some old, old cards from the previous decade and pored over them separately, not needing the rest at all. I'd not heard of some of the players and absorbed their stats with an acolyte's patient curiosity. Having put this new information in perspective, I'd introduce the old cards - the old players - to the newer, active ones and sit around admiring them all together. I'd organize the cards by teams, positions, leagues. I'd create hierarchical designations and essentially make up my own Hall of Fame. I could busy myself with baseball cards for a whole summer and keep the antic flame by inventing new and exciting combinations that were even more complicated than the ones before, through the winter months. Then it would be spring again and all the new ones would be out!

Believe me: I know what the collecting mentality is like.

When I discovered literature - which is, to a certain extent, the art of collecting stories - I realized that you didn't need anyTHING to participate. All you had to do was to read other writers and pay attention. You'd eventually imbibe enough material of your own to start writing, if you cared to do that. The stuff you HAD was immaterial. Books you could get and then give away. Writing supplies: well, you could find them almost anywhere. So I jumped from being a collecting junkie to a sort of spiritual plateau that didn't need anything but constant enrichment from sources that were largely unseen.

With painting, you need stuff, but you're traveling on the same road writers do. It isn't really the painting (or whatever it is you make) that's important. It's what feeds it. If you've got that, you can make more paintings than you'll ever know what to do with, let alone sell.

Collectors come from the place I used to be in and I find the infantile acquisitiveness of many of them very tiresome. The most annoying is the type that must have one of everything. (I know what that's like. I had to have the whole team or I'd have fits!
Believe me, it's the same damned thing.) You'll go through a typical collection of this sort and remember nothing - unless the collector acquired something good by accident. This is a very common sort of art collection and gets unduly recognized because there's a lot of stuff in it. Yet it is mostly worthless and bears no personal imprint at all.

The second worst type of collection has merely bad work. The collector is like the untalented musician who can play the notes, but is not musical. He or she will have bland, uninspiring pictures and sculpture that's been recommended by various dealers and there will be a lot of it and none of it will be much good.  This sort of person also gets undeserved recognition because he or she also has a lot of stuff and we like a lot of stuff in this country.

I think the worst affliction of the undistinguished collector is name-itis. He or she will collect the name of the artist, in which case the picture is a sort of by-product, not of the man (or woman), but of this completely arbitary, though symbolically charged, attribute by which we instantly know a Picasso or a Dali (even if we don't know diddly about his work.) Some of these names may well produce excellent work, so these annoying ACCUMULATORS will get something good fortuitously. But they don't mean to and they really don't deserve to have it. I fully realize it's absurd not to recognize that purchasing power is power indeed and gives anybody who has it access to almost anything whether it's "deserved" or not. Yet being a sort of justice-seeker in my spare time, I am personally engaged by the notion of deserving. And I will say it again: these people don't deserve the good stuff they happen, by accident, to possess. These people could buy something worthwhile, but unfortunately, they buy signatures.


A good collector operates not only from a personal aesthetic, but from a sense of discovery. He or she will see something and it will begin to exert an irresistible fascination. The collector will often not know the name of the artist because, at this level of intellectual independence, it won't matter who the hell the artist is. He or she will go see the painting (or whatever) over and over again, and then, with a forced sense of calm, slap down the money. Or:  he or she will see the thing and know that's it, that's what I want, let's get it! In French, this is called a "coup de foudre" and it's more than just love at first sight. It's a heart-tremor and a soul-dusting. It gets inside of you and it won't go away.

After a while, this thing becomes just a piece of artwork that's hanging somewhere, but at the time of its discovery the world is fresh and new, the sensibilities are at least temporarily heightened, and everybody advances to the next square on the board.
Collecting is good for you if you don't take the object itself so seriously.

On the other hand, some objects should be taken more seriously than others - and they're not necessarily the ones a lot of the "experts" dub irreplaceable.  These "experts" are often as deluded as any short-sighted person, tied as some are to a personal/political agenda. Best to prevail - or screw up - independently. In collecting, as in everything else, tomorrow is another day.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to have stuff that meets one's personal standards of excellence. Such standards also change. I didn't know anything when I started out. I just got whatever pleased me. Over time, I began to scope out certain nuances, establish preferences; I got to know both "the field" and myself. I developed a certain open feeling, with elements of: "Okay, show me!" and "No, I don't think so" as well as: "I'll do anything to get this."

I also went through both the "name-itis" and the "one-of-everything" stages. Everybody who isn't spectacularly endowed with talent and judgment absolutely must.

Any sort of growth requires that skins are sloughed off so that other, more durable stuff may grow on top of them. In collecting, the process of sloughing-off is continuous. No REAL collector ever thinks he or she is "done." If collecting is to be a real adventure, it must be pursued with this take-virtually-no-prisoners attitude. I think the urge to collect should also be sprinkled with scholarship, embellished with idiosyncrasy, and redeemed by a sense of responsibility to the community within which a given collection is seen and appreciated. If the collector is interested in self-aggrandisement, there is no community feeling.
It is egotistical and is dedicated to achieving recognition at the expense of everything else. This type of collector will build a wing at the museum and desposit "important" holdings inside of it. Some of these holdings may be worthwhile, but in most cases they were acquired in a competitive spirit which, in my view, is anathema to the spirit of collecting. If you collect to trump another collector, you are, in my opinion, lost. Collecting in this context is just ostentatious movement, another social grace to trot out, a negative raison d'etre. It is trophy-hunting of the most obnoxious sort.

The genuine collector is a serious human being who knows that creating art is a process that interests other serious human beings and is not merely the pursuit of valuable "properties." There is always real estate for that. Or just gambling, which is frankly about winning (you lose in gambling only because you're trying to win) and nothing else.

A lot of collectors plunge into the business head-first and are either totally satisfied (and therefore impervious to critical thought) or they find, as they go along, that they were perhaps a bit too impulsive at the outset and might want to get rid of some of the dreck they purchased when they were green and, well, green.

Why not start modestly, people? There are all sorts of ways, both inexpensive and not, to do that. The most obvious is with student work. In some cases, it's as good, or better, than what is available in galleries. In others, it isn't, but it's cheap and will afford the untutored collector an opportunity to live with artwork that isn't necessarily "commercial."
I would, in fact, advise anybody who is seriously interested in starting a collection informed by an evolving personal aesthetic to avoid purchasing artwork in commercial galleries. Put a year's moratorium on it, then come back.
The honest collector will find he's already outgrown a lot of it, and will save his or her money.

A more honorable and legitimate way to acquire artwork in one's aesthetic infancy is to go to the print market. And by print, or prints, I don't mean the bastard stuff that's available at "print galleries" in the mall. You'll have to swing a pretty big cat to find an etching or lithograph in these places. And, if you do, it'll be drenched patriotism and/or family values. Or it'll show a cute little place off in a glitzy little corner thronged by pretty people who don't ever have to brush their teeth. If that's what you want, you should probably stop reading now.

There aren't many print galleries in our nation, so the beginning collector must seek them out. They are among us, however, and even a casual search will locate a few. The most famous is, of course, the Old Print Shop in New York City. It's an old, old family business that represents artists both living and dead.
Most the beginning collector won't have heard of - but that's nothing. Most serious printmakers don't make it into the big-box style art history manuals that are force-fed college students. Oh, you'll see a Hopper etching or a Grant Wood print, but, by and large, printmakers aren't even the "artist's" second cousins; they're more like the jailbirds nobody ever talks about. Those dark, dark people who do something bad and get put away. When they do their time, or escape, they lay low for the most part and are rarely seen by civilized persons again.

This black-sheep situation is as disturbing as it is grimly humorous. Many great artists were printmakers.
Rembrandt's etchings are among his greatest accomplishments. I'd rate Whistler on his etchings first and his paintings second. Hopper was known exclusively as a printmaker until his breakthrough watercolor exhibit in the 1920's. By that time, he was a middle-aged man.

But back to the Old Print Shop for a moment.

The Old Print Shop is a model of what print shops were, and still ought to be. You can go in there without an appointment and look around for a while.
Its wallspace is crammed with the work of mostly dead artists who had acheived some prominence in their lifetime, but have since slipped off the art historical radar. Martin Lewis is among its most famous alumnus. The Old Print Shop represents his entire estate. It was here that I also first saw Lewis' paintings, sparkling realist/impressionist sketches of American industrial sites and precipitous Japanese landscapes. All you have to do is ask and a salesmen will pull open a drawer and show you original Martin Lewis'. I think Lewis was one of the great interpreters of city life - New York City in particular. His fabulous noctures (though he didn't call them that) teem with exciting mysteries and almost-surreal dangers. No one could re-awaken an already-legendary place as Lewis could. He tapped into the great mood-swings of day and night; ecstasy and despair; longing and frustration; a sense of belonging cross-bred with the certainty of being entirely on one's own. His worried crowds bustle along stately boulevards or ratty old buildings the next generation will claim for its own tawdry designs.
His workmen are sweaty people who have to get the job done - even if it's 3 a.m. and nobody's eaten anything since eleven. His people are not lonely, as Hopper's are, but the place they must negotiate is often oppressively present. Lewis' New York City is both exhausted and majestic; great and piddling; world-class both in its pretensions and excellences and pathetically homely among its wayward and forgotten. I breathe Lewis' air when I see his prints and I value them as I value Thomas Wolfe and Arthur Miller; John Cheever and Dorothy Parker; Charles
Addams and E. B. White.

Lewis was Hopper's teacher - which is to say he showed Hopper the rudiments of the craft. Hopper ran with it in his own way, of course. Of the two, however, I prefer Lewis. Hopper would make his greatest mark, I think, as a painter.

In order to best appreciate a place like the Old Print Shop, it would be a good idea to go to the library and check out as many books on printmaking as you can possibly stomach. While I have no particular volume in mind, excellent anthologies of American printmaking have been available since the 30's. Thomas Craven edited a pretty good one back then. Joseph Pennell, a Whistler acolyte, and an excellent printmaker in his own way, put together the very best anthology I know - though it's hard to find. In it, he presented the best of both American and European printmakers up to First World War. It'll probably come up from time to time on amazon.com.

The greatest virtue of prints, aside from their artistic merit, is their price. Many of my friend Bill Murphy's prints can be had for less than $500.00.
This is one of the great deals of the century. Here you can own an original work by a master printer for what a lot of gullible folk pay for a totally worthless, elaborately framed faux-print at a strip mall and think they're getting a good deal. I cannot emphasize the value. . .of this value enough. The work of Bill's Staten Island and New York City colleagues is similarly affordable. A rich collector could sneak into the exhibit a number of these artists are having right now at the Noble Maritime Museum and scoop up the lot without blinking. And he or she would have the germ of a wonderful print collection.

Privacy issues forbid me to tell you a great deal about a prominent print collector/art dealer who lives in Central Virginia, yet she an independent-minded person "of parts," as they used to say; she loves great prints and printmakers as much as I do and does the best she can to promote them. Her efforts have fallen largely on deaf ears, except in two cases. She is able to market the lively and irreverant imagery of a young man who is still very much rooted in working-class values, but can step back from them and take a hard look at their absurdities and contradictions. His satirical gifts are widely appreciated and he is at least moderately popular.
The more profound artist of the two is also insanely prolific - and indisputably master of the more finicky techniques required of an etcher as well the spontaneous, even gestural, drawing that's needed in drypoint. I wish I could tell you more about these people, but I must respect this collector and dealer's
request that I not mention names.

What's behind this apparent indifference to, and lack of feeling for, this kind of work? I can't address all the causes here, but the most obvious, for me, is their rigor. Prints are essentially drawings and drawings are about structure and volume. It's much easier on the eye to appreciate these things in a painting, when they're "clothed" in color. The color makes 'em go down easy, as it were, and keeps them at bay. A print has nowhere to hide - but, then, nor do you, the viewer. To appreciate an excellent print, you must know something about drawing. You must also appreciate how drawing applies to the special process of creating a print on either a plate or stone and pulling it out, by hand, of the press yourself, or in the company of a master printer. It's not easy to learn these things. Nor is it easy to slough off the viewing habits of a lifetime - whereby "easy" color holds the ticket - and become addicted to "first processes" like drawing.

Yet why not? Collecting should not only cater to one's acquisitive instincts, but to one's curiosity, not only about art, but about the issues art must deal
with: sin and redemption; the love of place and/or self; the denial (and necessary embrace) of mortality; joy and abundance; the infinite promise of being young and the crabbed compromises of getting older. Prints have always been, for the artist, the most personal of media. A great artist only needs a very small space in which to express a world of regret or triumph.
Rembrandt conjures up a mighty cathedral in the space of a foot; he gives you a resurrection, not in a wall-sized canvas, but in something you can put in your pocket if you must. In prints, it is you, the collector, who are on view as well as the printmaker him (or her)self. Prints are not forgiving, but they will bring infinite joy and satisfaction to anybody who takes the time and trouble to wrestle with them a bit. Nothing is worth owning that's gotten with a checkbook only. And with most any print, your checkbook will stay loaded.

In my next installment, I'll talk a bit more about specific printmakers, particularly Americans, and
where they might be presently available.

I bitch a lot in emails and letters about the stuff I routinely see hanging in lobbies and boardrooms. Much of it is there because somebody ran into somebody else at a party or ball-game and the deal was closed before a moderately educated person could get in on it.

Everybody has seen this kind of thing. Duck prints are popular in Richmond, which is the city I most identify with unfortunate and summary decisions regarding interior decoration. (Not that it's alone in this. Some of the worst stuff I've ever seen was in New York City, cosmopolitan capitol of the known world. It should be remembered, however, that New York contains seven boroughs and what you often see in places is strictly out of Astoria, if you know what I
mean.)

At any rate, why is it that you can't walk into a corporate headquarters, say, and not see paintings, etchings, drawings, and sculpture that resonate with powerful feeling, super-accomplished draftsmanship, and aesthetic sophistication? Well, sometimes they get it right. A well-known financial conglomerate in Richmond has a pretty good art collection that is, however, controlled largely by two people with overlapping prejudices that should be tempered with overlapping prejudices from the outside. However, they get it right half of the time, with the result that the corporate campus is fairly enriched with examples of the best art Virginia has to offer. Not all the best art, but some of it. And in a culture that dismisses art except as a means to project its image to the world, that ain't too bad. I'd rather it be mostly good, but nodoby there listens to me and I can't tell the chain of command anything except "Okay, I'm going!"

Generally, however, the work you find in such places is wretched and should not have ever gotten in the door, let alone into the boardroom.

Why does this happen? Well, it comes out of a fairly complex dynamic, but, from my vast and dismal experience in the art world, I'd posit this reason:

one group (the producers, or "artists") relinquishes control while another group(the curators, dealers, and other "cool" sorts who can't make an honest living) takes control. It's prettyy darn simple, really.

Parallel situtations exist in almost any government.

When a dictator or demagogue rises to power, he or she does so through a complicated series of small victories and compromises in which other people willingly participate. No monopoly (or dictator) gets to be a one overnight; he (or it) gets there partly because we let it and partly because anybody who wants something that badly is willing to work twice as hard getting it as you work to oppose it.

In the past, it was fairly difficult, as an artist, to be independent. The culture of the marketplace was too entrenched and largely immovable. Now, however, things are more fluid and an artist doesn't necessarily have to depend on a dealer or curator to do his or her business. A website can lead a potential client to artwork that had never been available before. Printed matter is cheap now, so an artist can easily send the mailer that was once the responsibility of the dealer exclusively. An artist may just up and call a business him(or her)self and make an appointment. This is not often possible because curators and dealers often have interested businesspeople staked out already and don't like it when an artist attempts to encroach on territory they consider their own. But this is a belief, not a reality in most cases, and if a dealer connives to exclude an artist not only from a collection, but from the corporate ear, as it were, the artist should have every legal right to prosecute that dealer. Nobody owns anyone else the last time I looked and this sort of profiling should not be tolerated - particularly if the dealer has shown no interest in the artist's work to begin with. It's not unlike killing an ex-lover because you don't want anybody else to have her - even if you're not necessarily interested yourself!

I realize I haven't connected this ugly boardroom thing to the political culture of the art world. Yet.

Let me first say that dealers and curators could be quite useful if they wanted to be. Most, however, search for the main chance and stick with it. I rarely see a great deal of passion or curiosity on the part of most arts professionals; they have their little roster of people who are in - as well as their aesthetic do's and dont's - and pretty much stick with them. There is a certain social and academic pressure to do so and they mostly cave into it. If the world were swarming with dealers and curators of provocatively independent mind, the situation would be much different. But I only know of one art dealer who doesn't give a damn about credentials (Did said artist graduate from Yale? Know anybody from there perhaps?) or pedigree (So you haven't shown in New York? And the Pollock-Krasner turned you down how many times?.) What would an artistic Shakespeare - who only made it through middle school - do today?

Probably get on the phone and stay on it till something happened.

As I maybe didn't say, however, dealers and curators are in a certain way necessary. They don't make bad judgments all the time. In fact, whenever I'm looking for interesting artwork, where do I go? I check out the ads in ArtNews and American Art Review - even Southwest Art. I don't necessarily believe I'm getting everything from these sources, but I don't omit them because you always find something worthwhile, even if it does have to come from an art gallery.

Am I down on art dealers and curators? Yes. I think the vast majority do their jobs only by half.

Knowing this, however, the talented, but unpopular, artist who has not found favor with them must go his or her own way and make the existing system work - or create a new one.

Now: let's go back to the lousy art you mostly see in boardrooms and lobbies and pizza parlors and other public places that might just as well have good art.

How do you change that? For one, you should contact these places and tell whoever is in charge that they could possibly do better - in a nice way, of course.
Generally, you will end up talking to a dealer or curator, which is often a dead end. Best to speak to someone for whom the corporate (or pizza parlor) image is paramount. Preferably, you should meet this person, or a friend of this person, socially. In other words, you should try to do what the in-folk have already done. And be twice as gracious as you ever were with your grandmother. If you're selling a new concept, you are the embodiment of that concept.
It does no good to rough it up from the git-go.
There'll be plenty of time for you to put your personal stamp on things.

Ultimately, it is the artist who is the trailblazer in this regard. And while the search for the boardroom is hardly tantamount to the dignity of man, it has some redeemming social significance. Most civil rights pioneers were also its victims, alas. Luckily, an artist/entrepreneur is not necessarily trying to crack police department and other govermmental infrastructures. He or she is just trying to get the message out: I'M HERE is the content of that message and it's - compared to the strident rhetoric of the civil rights movement - fairly innocuous. But it is a necessary, and often painful, step to make that annoncement and to experience its repercussions. When I was in Richmond, I couldn't get a reviewer to come and see any exhibit at my gallery for love or money.
So rather than flog that dead horse, I contacted other writers, some of whom responded, some of whom did not.

But by the time I left, I was not unknown - and, in many cases, unliked. I've made a living at painting and selling pictures for many years now and I attribute that to getting my message out in a small way to the sort of people who would welcome it. I'd also attribute it, in equal measure, to the luck of the draw. It is fallacious and even arrogant to believe you are the sole agent of your life's accomplishments. Being the master of your own fate disappeared with hunting and gathering societies which compelled a gritty self-reliance past anything we socially dependent organisms can understand. In our life, salvation depends on knowing other people, not being able to go out and clobber a mastodon and drag it back to your cave - although the solitary nature of an artist's life is sometimes reminiscent of that dankish place.

There will always always be ugly pictures in boardrooms, but we who don't care to see them must do something about it except bitch to our friends, lovers, and bartenders about it. And we have to start by believing we can do something ourselves rather than allow this precious opportunity to be frittered away by others who can't possibly care about it as much as
we should.