GLENN LONEY'S MUSEUM NOTES

At the Brooklyn Museum: The Eyes Have It!

Kerry James Marshall's unusual visions of Black Lady Angels—with shrines in their living-rooms to the Martyrs Martin Luther King and the Brothers Kennedy—are now on view at San Francisco MoMA.

The only banner on this great Beaux Arts facade that's still current is the Museum of Arts' Free for All on the first Saturday of every month.

This is the first of an on-going series of photos of New York Museums, large and small, known and unknown, overfunded and underfunded.

Duane Hanson's Body Builder—created from auto-body filler, fiberglass, and mixed media, with accessories.

Already known in Europe, where he had made some formative experiments, Hanson delighted many with his almost lifelike and certainly life-sized sculptures of Americans from many walks—or slouches—of life.

Doing a feature on Hanson for After Dark, I was permitted to photograph various seated and standing figures. Just as I snapped an immobile statue of a guard, he moved!

Observing an overweight and overdressed couple staring at a similar Duane Hanson pair, I wasn't sure which was which. Until the Hanson couple moved on.

But is it Art?

That was a question often asked then and now, especially by critics. And more especially by those who despise figurative art of any kind.

Had the late Duane Hanson reduced his people to Abstract Amorphous Blobs, he might have become the darling of these taste-makers.

It is instructive that the current show—some twenty years after Hanson's first at the Whitney—has only four venues. Aside from New York, none of them are major museums.

It originated in Fort Lauderdale, appropriately enough, for Hanson spent most of his later career in sunny Florida.

Despite the apparent lack of interest in this Hanson Retrospective in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in other important cities, Hanson in his lifetime had numerous solo shows. And his works are in most major museums.

There are those who think Hanson merely made casts of real people's bodies and then glued the parts together, inserted body-hairs, glass-eyes, and teeth, to make human copies.

Hanson's figures are composites of castings from various people. They are New People. Even if they do come perilously close to stereotypes and generics.

While it is true that the attention to physical detail which Hanson used in creating his people indicates fantastic craftsmanship, he was no latter-day Madame Tussaud.

Although some of the figures' skins do look waxy, this is no waxworks show.

In fact, Hanson's people look much more real than those to be found in any branch of Tussaud's.

Had Hanson been as infatuated with his creations as was the legendary sculptor Pygmalion, he might have prayed for the gods to breathe life into them. But what kind of Galateas would that have produced?

Hanson's people are not beautiful, per se. Certainly some have the dignity of their humanity, like Seated Artist. Or their labor, as in Lunch Break (Three Workers with Scaffold) .

But Hanson's Humans are often overweight, garishly dressed, and overtaken by lassitude. Some seem merely tired out. Others suggest people who are even tired of living.

Ugly Americans on the Grand Tour—Duane Hanson's visual satire, Tourists II, from the Saatchi Collection, London.

Those Hanson fatties armed with cameras and shopping-bags look very much like the Ugly American Tourists so derided abroad.

Because the figures' eyes cannot move or focus, there is something strange about their almost vacant expressions.

Are they in despair? Lost in thought? Or merely lost in life?

The initial one-on-one encounter with a Hanson human sculpture can encourage the viewer to marvel at his technique.

But, on stepping back a bit, it becomes apparent that the bodies Hanson has chosen, how he has posed them, how he has dressed them, and what environments he has placed them in do constitute an artist's comment on the individual human condition. At least in America.

So there is more than at first meets the eye. Hanson is not Pygmalion. He is a social commentator. He can be considered a satirist, but his people are not really caricatures.

Skin/Deep by Alison Saar—devised from nails, copper, & ceiling-tin—now in the Whitney Museum's permanent collection.

There are too many Lives Ones in the Whitney galleries who resemble Hanson's people.

The exhibition catalogue contains much interesting information about Hanson, his career, and his working methods. It also has a number of excellent color photos of memorable figures in this show. Titled Duane Hanson: A Survey of His Work from the '30s to the '90s, it is available in the Whitney shop.

Also at the Whitney is Hindsight, an absorbing overview of more than fifty artworks acquired since 1993. To be exact, there are 56 works by 44 artists.

Of special interest is the new Louise Bourgeois Whitney commission: Topiary. The Art of Improving Nature.

Alison Saar's arresting novelty, Skin/Deep, has been created from nails, copper, & ceiling-tin.

Other artists on display include Glenn Ligon, Sue Williams, and Matthew Ritchie.

Dosso Dossi's powerful Renaissance painting of St. Michael defeating Satan, now at the Metropolitan Museum.

But this handsome bearded man, his head crowned with vine-leaves, is nothing like Swift's gullible Gulliver. With a classical landscape, complete with palaces, in the background, the reclining figure is, in fact, Hercules.

And the baffled army of midgets aren't Lilliputians, but Pygmies.

This suggests that Dosso Dossi, official painter to the Estense Court of Ferrara, was mining the Legendary Labors of Hercules for subject-matter long before Dean Swift borrowed the same idea for his famous allegorical literary satire.

Religious themes, as well as the myths of classical antiquity, provided Dossi with provocative topics for his often satiric brush and brilliant sense of color.

Dossi was a favorite of two successive Dukes of Este, the rulers of Ferrara, Alfonso I and Ercole II. He was favored not only as court painter, but also as a cultivated friend with whom a powerful but sensitive nobleman might pass an instructive hour to two in conversation.

While Dossi was marvelous in rendering faces—some seem almost ready to speak to you—he was also a master of detail in painting nature. The image of Jupiter concentrating at an easel, busily painting delicate butterflies, is especially amusing in the picture's context.

A wronged Virtue has come to protest to the Father of the Gods an Olympian Moral Outrage. But she has not the presence or the power of Henry Hyde and Trent Lott.

So her intermediary, Mercury, is telling her to Get Lost.

Dossi also had a sense of humor in concealing messages in his canvases. One of the masterworks currently on display at the Met has a large letter D with a bone stuck through it at the lower right corner. In Italian, a bone is Osso. D + osso = Dosso!

Most of the Ferrara collections were dispersed when the Estense Dukedom came to an end at the close of the 16th century. So the current exhibition has drawn on Dosso Dossi canvases in a number of major museums, notably the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Fortunately, some of the finest works are still usually on view in Ferrara—where this show opened in 1998. For the moment, however, they can be seen at the Met. Then it will be seen at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, from April 27 through July 11.

The handsome catalogue, Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, is $65 in hardcover. With 328 pages, it includes 103 color plates among its over 200 illustrations. It's available at the Met and is distributed elsewhere by Harry N. Abrams.

Golden heads of wheat remind Anselm Kiefer of a quote from Goethe's Faust: "Your golden hair, Margarete." (Glenn Loney photo)

These are all in the Met's permanent collections and range from 1969 to 1993. They represent works of special personal interest to Kiefer.

Who is nothing if not impacted by the weight of the German Cultural Heritage and the more recent Germanic Barbarisms of the 1930s and 1940s.

It's not too much to suggest that Kiefer, among all Germans painting today, is the heir of Caspar David Friedrich.

Even though Kiefer's brush or knife-work is much more slapdash, abstracted, than the carefully detailed canvases of Friedrich, there is about them a similar air of mystery, darkly veiled allusion, and foreboding.

When Kiefer makes visual—and even textual—references to Germanic legends, to Schiller & Goethe, to monumental Nazi architecture, there is about his canvases a sense of doom and despair.

They are haunting, often unforgettable. Especially when they are created on an epic scale.

Even in small watercolor works, unsettling symbols emerge. One Kiefer used and reused is a tiny man, his right arm extended in the Nazi salute.

This image was created originally when Kiefer photographed himself in that pose. Photographs, as well as cultural artifacts, are artfully collaged in this show.

The German obsession with Siegfried and Brünnhilde—Wotan's children, with great works of Nature such as the Rhine and the Alps, with the music-dramas of Wagner, with the Romanticism of Goethe: all these are variously reflected and refracted in Kiefer's works.

Hitler's [unbuilt] Nazi Hall of Heroes is symbolically sited on the River Rhine and boxed in with boards—an allegorical Germanic satire by Anselm Kiefer. (Glenn Loney photo)

A very small work, Predigstuhl, is translated on the wall-text as Pulpit. That is of course the general usage.

But Kiefer is here referring instead to the great mountain of that name, which looks rather like an immense pulpit looming over the landscape. Actually, the daubs on the paper don't remotely suggest the natural wonder.

The exhibition catalogue, Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a valuable reference resource. Anyone interested in Modern Germany and its culture can learn much from the extended discussion of the artist, his influences, his passions, and his working methods.

Curator Nan Rosenthal's text is in fact a good read. And she has provided some ancillary materials and artworks in the exhibition to further illuminate Kiefer and the culture that spawned him.

The richly illustrated catalogue costs $45 in hardcover and $30 in softcover. You save $15 with the paperbacks, true, but if these get any real reading and reference-use, pages may begin to work free from the binding.

Cubist influences in Thayat's 1922 design for a Madeleine Vionnet gown

Or with still eminently wearable modern confections of Dior and Chanel, given by the Leading Ladies of New York Society.

These are all wonderful to see, especially when they are not in motion on an owner or a fashion-model. Close up, you can examine in detail how they were designed, cut, stitched, and, when required, sequined and trimmed.

You can also study the weaves of various fabrics, even the stuffs from which they were made.

But that's not enough to lure the general public down those monumental backstairs below the Egyptian Tombs.

Met Costume Shows have got to have a theme, a subject around which to organize.

The current theme, however, does seem a stretch of the imagination.

Only at a madcap costume ball in the Flaming Twenties would an elegant woman have wanted to appear dressed like a Braque Cubist Canvas.

Dressing like a Picasso exercise in skewed geometry would have been even more difficult to accomplish. Especially with eye-makeup to match the gown!

Both eyes on one side of the head?

Even though Richard Martin—curator of both the Costume Institute and this show—insists that fashion quite naturally engaged with "the planes, cylinders, mutable optics, and dynamic motion of Cubist art," the evidence on display is not all that convincing.

True, the breastless, contourless silk, satin, and jersey tubes of 1920s Flappers were basically cylinders. But they don't suggest the Cubism of Picasso, Léger, or Braque—unless they have woven or printed Cubist designs on them.

Fortunately, there are in fact a number of those on view. Of special interest are costumes created by Madelein Vionnet, Paul Poiret, and, of course, Chanel. What could be more boxy or Cubist than the famous Chanel Suit?

The Dahesh Museum's current cramped second-floor space on Fifth Avenue in midtown is not the right place to show large 19th century salon paintings. But, as few major museums, such as the Met or the Brooklyn Museum of Art, frequently focus on French or English Academic Painting, the Dahesh has become the venue of choice, by default.

And also thanks to the passion of Dr. Dahesh—a Middle-Eastern collector—and his friends who have made this intimate showcase possible.

But, when a furious Landmark Preservationist outcry arose over Donald Trump's announced plan to take over the Hartford Gallery site and create a luxurious apartment-complex, the bid of the Dahesh Museum for the site and for Edward Durrell Stone's Modernist Venetian Palazzo seemed a godsend.

The Dahesh proposal was welcomed, not only to avert more Trump-Your-Ace architectural vulgarities on Columbus Circle. But it was also logical to provide a proper space for exhibition and study of the genre, subject-matter, and artists of Academic Painting, long out of favor.

Recently the bidding for the building has been complicated by the desire of the Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation to acquire it as a permanent repository of its horde of Sandy Calder sketches, stabiles, and mobiles.

Of course, it's not quite fair to say that when you have seen one Calder Mobile, you've seen them all. But you can certainly get their message after only a few viewings.

Not to overlook the fact that there are myriad Calders in major museum collections. Not to mention the immense and boldly colored steel Stabiles which dominate many a public plaza across America.

There's one before the IBM Building at Madison and 57th. And one by the Met at Lincoln Center.

Once again, it's possible that the now despised art of yesteryear will lose out to the simplistic abstractions of Modernism. For people in a hurry, without much on their minds, visually digesting a Calder requires less effort than eating a Mars Bar.

Milady takes her rest, fanned by attendant maidens, in Albert Moore's Midsummer, on load to the Dahesh Museum from the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth, GB.

In the summer heat, she is being fanned by two young maidens in similar attire, the three explosions of orange immediately riveting the viewer's attention.

As real ladies do not slump or slouch, she appears to have slid down in the chair, the better to find repose. The technical detail is fascinating, including the intricate designs of mother-of-pearl inlaid on a cabinet at one side.

The Modernist riposte to such lavish Romantic Realism—clearly inspired by Pre-Raphaelite predecessors—has customarily been: A photographer could do it better!

Possibly, but only if he had the good fortune to find such models, such props, and such moods.

Moore's is only one of the impressive paintings on loan from the Russell-Cotes Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth.

The wall facing the Dahesh entrance is now blazing with color and gold-leafed frames. Fortunately, unlike the original collectors of these paintings, the curators have not filled every square inch of wall-space with pictures.

And, as the framed canvases are not small, they make quite a stunning show, carefully spaced along the wall.

Vintage photos of the Russell-Cotes Collection, in the balconied atrium of East Cliff Hall, show paintings hung from wainscot to ceiling, with not an inch of wallpaper to be seen.

Statues, ornate furniture, tapestries, and other objects-d'art are also crammed artfully into this space. It is a Rich Victorian's Dream and a Modern Artist's Nightmare.

Profiting from the new prosperity of the Victorian Era, the Russell-Cotes had money to spend, if not to burn. Their mansion, the core of the present-day gallery, looks like a Victorian Wedding-Cake. It's all turrets, towers, balconies, porches, and glass-conservatories.

As with many English collectors of their day, they preferred to buy salon pictures by approved English academic painters. Rather than acquire Old Masters on the Continent.

That doesn't mean they were anti-European stay-at-homes. They traveled widely and they collected art-objects—if not paintings—eclectically. The result, in their own time, was an eye-catching jumble of periods, styles, nations, colors, and patterns.

In the current show, there's even an oil-painting of the fiery volcanic crater of Kilauea in Hawaii. This was painted for them by Jules Taverniers, shortly after they had visited the scene.

Instead of bringing along a camera in 1885, they brought a painter!

One seductive canvas on view shows an auburn-haired beauty with an arrow pointed at her naked breast. This is the Venus Verticordia of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Considering the acknowledged academic mastery of classical scenes by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, it's interesting to find his place taken by small canvases painted by his wife and his daughter.

There's no Stag at Bay, but Sir Edward Landseer is represented by a horrific natural disaster north of the Tweed: A Flood in the Highlands.

Biblical subjects—very popular with Proper Victorians—are intricately illustrated with Thomas Matthews Rooke's series of painted panels detailing the downfall of King Ahab and Jezebel.

Rooke's fanatic attention to the most complicated details in the various patterns on the robes of the infamous pair is amazing. It almost steals attention from the main composition.

But it is very Moral, as well as suggestive, for it illustrates the Sin of Covetousness. It also avoids presentation of Scenes of Violence, following the dictates of Neo-classical Decorum.

Thus the viewer sees Jezebel being thrown from a balcony, but only from the back before she's over the parapet. You do not get to see her torn to pieces by dogs.

Byam Shaw is also represented with a Jezebel. Cleopatra and the Asp shows Sir Edward John Poynter's taste and technique in action.

Lucy Elizabeth Kemp-Welch is no Rosa Bonheur, but her lusty visions of Gypsy Horse Drovers does seem to take some inspiration from The Horse Fair.

Because these carefully selected canvases are so technically assured—and historically interesting, at least in terms of the History of Taste—this show suggests that a visit to the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth should be on the agenda of any trip to England in the near future.

The soaring tower of Henry Chapman Mercer's castle, Fonthill, in Doylestown, PA. (Glenn Loney photo)

All of these treasures are in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a short drive from the tourist haven of New Hope.

Most imposing is Fonthill, Mercer's "castle," though the larger Mercer Museum certainly does command respect as a do-it-yourself architectural project.

The third of Mercer's unusual constructions is the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, just over the hill from Fonthill.

What is special about all three buildings is that they were made of poured concrete, laid layer on layer. So all three are solid cement structures.

Even window-panes are set in concrete, becoming part of the fabric of the buildings. In Fonthill, Mercer even made bedroom cabinets and other furniture part of the walls and floors. The drawers were built to fit.

The impressive tower of Fonthill is six stories high. That all the wet concrete to be dumped into the forms was hoisted up by a single horse, Mercer's Lucy, makes this feat all the more impressive.

Working with a pulley-system of his design, Mercer got a lot of horsepower out of Lucy—who is memorialized on a Fonthill weathervane.

A skilled archaeologist and historian, Mercer traveled and explored widely. But one of his most important discoveries was made in villages around Bucks County.

In old barns, attics, and junk-shops, he found the hand-made tools of craftsmen made obsolete by the Industrial Revolution. No one needed them—or wanted them—anymore.

With astounding foresight, Mercer began to collect entire shops of tools and fittings. These he installed in the Mercer Museum, also constructed with the help of Lucy and some day-laborers.

Mercer's Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, with more than a little Spanish influence in its design. (Glenn Loney photo)

He called his collections "The Tools of the Nation Maker," and wrote definitive texts about them. He rightly believed these tools "would be worth their weight in gold in a hundred years hence."

In his travels, Mercer had become fascinated with the varieties of decorative ceramic tiles which had been created over the centuries and in many cultures. This formed another collection, much of which is on display at Fonthill.

But he also applied his knowledge and enthusiasm to the creation of his own tile designs. In addition to single design tiles, he devised a system of ceramic tile elements which could be combined in various ways to create different visual narratives or patterns.

One could call this system Mercer's Movable Mosaics. One source of visual inspiration were cast-iron panels of Pennsylvania Dutch stoves and fireplace backs.

These—which he also collected—were covered with veritable folk-art figures, trees, flowers, and letters and numbers to depict Bible lore.

Chapman Mercer's Bible in tile (Glenn Loney photo)

With his own versions of such images, he provided a beautiful chancel for Doylestown's Salem Moravian Church. The pastor wanted a cash donation, but Mercer gave him something far more valuable—The Bible in Tile.

At the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, volunteers from the Bucks County Historical Society are still turning out Mercer Tiles from the original molds. And painted and glazed in the original colors.

A Mercer tile design composed of many elements, featuring a tree at its center. (Glenn Loney photo)

Not only are these for sale, but interested collectors and interior designers can also special-order copies of some major Mercer tile mosaics.

[Disclosure: I discovered the Mercer heritage in the 1960s, when my cousin, Theron Zimmerman, was Associate Pastor of Salem Church. At that time, the Tile Factory was a neglected semi-ruin, with only a few scraps of original Mercer Tiles on hand.

[Fonthill was the domain of Laura Swain, Mercer's housekeeper, who had the use of the castle for life. She conducted her own eccentric tours.

[And, if she took a fancy to you, she'd dig out a special piece of Mercer tile from a stock she had hidden away. At the very least, she'd give you a dried locust-pod from the tree outside.

[She also let me take pictures of the myriad Mercer tile mosaics installed on every surface of Fonthill, including ceilings and floors. You cannot do that now.]

The remarkable Boston African-American poet, Phyllis Wheatley, is one of these. She was present—by proxy—in mid-January when the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History sponsored a symposium on "Slavery in the Era of George Washington."

Wheatley sent General Washington a flowery poetic tribute which he greatly appreciated. It also helped convince him that some slaves, with educational opportunities, might prove very capable citizens.

Father of His Country on Horseback—with Slaves: George Washington is attended by two young African-American grooms in liveries. Martha and the family look on, in this 1858 engraving.

It is of special interest that it was first published—not in Boston, where Abolitionist sentiments were already forming—but in the Virginia Gazette in 1776. This was surely the doing of George Washington, at a crucial time in the beginning struggle for Independence.

At the symposium, held at the Historical Society, several hundred New York history teachers heard Steven Mintz, David Brion Davis, Christopher Brown, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Dorothy Twohig analyze American attitudes about slavery before, during, and after the Revolution.

Washington himself was—as were his fellow Virginia plantation-owners—a slave-holder. Considering the immense visual and verbal hagiography which surrounded him in his own lifetime, it is all the more important today to understand how he really felt about the institution of slavery.

Not to mention others among the Southern Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson.

Among the autograph documents on display from the Gilder-Lehrman Collection—usually on deposit at the Morgan Library—is a very revealing letter from Washington. It shows a gradual change in his attitudes.

Writing to John Francis Mercer, Washington asserted: "…I never mean…to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the Legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees."

In his will, Washington freed his own slaves. But those Martha inherited from the estate of her deceased first husband were "dower slaves." As such, they were entailed, and, on her death, had to be passed on to the Custis heirs.

On February 4, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute is sponsoring "George Washington, the Unifier," at the Historical Society. This is a lecture by Don Higginbotham, Dowd Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and visiting at West Point this term.

For those who are still wondering what makes 1999 such an important 200th anniversary, it is the year that the Father of His Country died. Universally mourned—or almost so.

<3>Coming Up Next Installment: The Morgan Library's show of masterworks from the Wormsley Library. These have been specially selected to honor the Morgan's 75th Anniversary by the distinguished British collector, Sir Paul Getty, K.B.E. This priceless array of rare manuscripts and printed books will be on view until May 2.

Described by the Met Museum's publicists as "Iconic Portraits of Femininity," a special exhibition of Julia Margaret Cameron's Women will be on display until May 4. [Loney]