About : standard furniture sonoma
Title : standard furniture sonoma
standard furniture sonoma
good evening everyone. my name is nona martin and i am the manager of public programs here at the smithsonian american art museum. on behalf of the museum, and staff, and many volunteers i'd like to welcome you to this evenings program, director's choice. a few housekeeping notes. we ask that you please turn off your cellphones, any kind of electronic equipment. you may want to think about if you have one of those samsung phones just bring it back
to the lobby, we will take care of it for you. also, this program is a live webcast. if you want to look at it again you can do that on your computer at home. we are asking you to go to the microphones to present your questions during the question and answer period that will follow dr. broun's presentation. but i wanted to say a special hello to many of our friends and friends of betsy's over the years who have come to the program this evening to share and to listen to her talk.
i have been trying to organize this program, this talk with betsy for quite some time now. i think after badgering her so many times that she finally decided to give in. elizabeth broun is the margaret and terry stent director of the smithsonian american art museum. most of you know that during betsy's tenure, she has successfully completed campaigns to renovate and enhance the museum's two historic buildings. the main museum, formally the patent office building
and the renwick gallery. those renovations provided new public spaces a conservation center, an art storage and study center, an enclosed wonderful and beautiful courtyard, and this auditorium. also the macmillan education center that recently opened. betsy came to washington in 1983 as chief curator and assistant director of the museum. she has served as the museum director since august of 1989.
she earned a doctorate degree in 1976 in art history from the university of kansas for her work on american art exhibited in the 1893 chicago worlds fair. her 1989 exhibition catalog on albert pinkham ryder won the prestigious alfred h. barr award for distinguished scholarship. please join in welcoming betsy broun to the podium.
- applause - thank you very much nona. can everybody hear me? i'm talking a little quieter to not stress my voice too much. yes, nona can be very persuasive. but also she lied. she told me that this would be a handful of friends in the macmillion center sitting around a table talking about my favorites informally. only after it was announced she moved it to the auditorium and now i'm embarrassed.
nonetheless, i thank her for all the work she did putting this together and all the other good work she does organizing fabulous public programs for the museum. i also want to thank laura griffin who was indispensable in helping me with my always needy technology concerns and with a lot of the research as well. she is in our education office so she is also very helpful. when i came in '83 as chief curator, i was an art historian and i thought i was here to do art history. i wasn't real sure how i would have define that, but i think it meant organizing exhibitions to sort of chink in the knowledge about various artists' work.
you know, the early period of an artists we have never heard of before, sort of making all those style influences sort out. after i had been here a few years i figured out art history is not what we do here. that is a tool we use in order to do the bigger more ambitious task of telling the story of the american experience. through the years here i've had a chance to work with so many fabulous artworks and curators who understand and develop the ideas around them, that i feel extremely fortunate to have this window onto the country that we are today. it makes me sort of a contentious guest at a debate party,
because i constantly want to tell people the backstory of whatever issue that is being debated on the stage. all the issues we debate today were issues 150 years ago as well. you see it in the artwork. i decided i would just pull out my top 10 favorites and group them in two or three groups and talk about them from that perspective. on my top 10 list there are actually 18 artworks, but that's down from a much bigger number. if i had a to do it over i would have said since we made everyone register i wish i had asked each of you to tell me your favorite artwork. then we could have tried to string it together. maybe we will do that next, right?
let's get started. lets see i think i have to click that way. surprise! could we get the lights down in the house so the pictures look better please? i don't guess anyone will be too shocked that i open with an albert pinkham ryder. i've only written one book and this was it. he is the artists that i know the best. also an artist who is extremely identified with this museum. we have the largest collection of his work
as well as many of his masterpieces. it is because the collector, jen galatle thought albert pinkham ryder was the finest artists in the world since botticelli. i like to cite that because one of the reasons i want to keep talking about ryder and starting with him and making him my flagship painter is because i worry that he is in danger of being forgotten. there are very few pictures on the market, and it is often contested market pieces that
keep the excitement around an artist. a lot of the paintings, his best paintings, are in collections in museums where they have been allowed to deteriorate. fortunately ours were taken in hand by some very aggressive conservators called the kecks, caroline keck. they went right in there and restored them and they have survived beautifully. but the ones that were left to their own organic disintegration almost don't function as paintings anymore. there are a variety of reasons. did i mention that he is probably the most forged american painter? the market is scared of him. when something comes on view there is
often a flurry of emails whether this is authentic or not. i regret to say that of all the pictures that have been shown to me with that question posed, i've only found one that i thought was authentic and previously unknown. this artist who was at one point celebrated by all the great artists. hartly wrote about him in visionary language that was so inspiring. jackson pollock considered him the greatest artist of his generation. he was thought to be both the last great romantic artist,
working with biblical and historical themes and narrative traditions, but also the first great modern artist. the artist who understood that the meaning of a picture often is conveyed in abstract terms through composition, or actually, through the actual qualities of the paint. the thickness of the paint itself. he intuitively understood that. he wouldn't let go of his pictures, he kept working on them again and again, sometimes over years. he also was a clinical hoarder.
how those two things relate is a subject of some interest to me. he went over his pictures again and again until they become somewhat over determined. this is of course his masterwork. this is jonah and the wale. it's one of the only pictures of this scale, for him a very large picture. he labored over it for a long time. in some ways it's also his testimonial. ryder began as a very optimistic and inspiring artist who fell in with a group of really hot ticket artists in the 1880's in new york.
people like julian alden weir and childe hassam and many of the people who were taken up as the new men in paint. he had a great dealer who promoted his work. he attracted quite a number of patrons. because his works were so few in number and hard to get, they were much prized and big prices were paid. the idea that he was a starving artist living in a garret with no help is just wrong. he was a huge success and much lionized.
but one by one all of his youthful friends went off and got married and had families of their own and moved away, and ryder became quite lonely. he suffered, as many people do in middle ages, the afflictions of bad fortune. the dealer who had made him such a prize died prematurely. the person who took his place wasn't all that good and didn't move the paintings very much. in short, i don't have time for the whole story here, but he became depressed, i think he had adult onset diabetes. he was in ill health a lot of the time and he was lonely.
he did try to fix that. one time he heard a woman in his apartment building singing and he always loved the sound of a woman singing, so he knocked on her door and proposed marriage. his colleagues were very disturbed at that and took him away to europe just to get him out of the temptation. another time he found a girl on the streets, one of these girls coming to the city from the country looking for work he felt sorry for her and he took her home and kept her for a couple of weeks. the friends came in and said, "no, no, you can't do that either."
long story short, he reached a point where he felt he had more or less lost control of his life. you could almost not walk through his apartment because of the years of hoarding. he had fewer and fewer friends. he was making fewer and fewer sales, he felt less and less up to the ambition of creating the major picture. but he had a kind of tenacious belief in art. what i love most about jonah is that in the frame of one canvas just roughly three foot square you have a man in total desperation at the bottom of the canvas
alienated and tossed overboard by his friends on the boat who are themselves in fear and terror and a giant beast is descending on them all to swallow him up and kill him, and yet overall, overall this turning sea you have god the father spreading his wings, his hope, and the sort of light of the world. ryder always did have a kind of belief if not a strict religious belief a kind of spiritual tenaciousness that there was a higher power guiding us. a lot of his
moonlit boats under the under the, the boats drifting in the moonlight are about the same thing. about an unseen hand guiding us in our way. this is also just one of the most dynamic compositions of the 19th century. you see this combustible energy zigzagging up through the middle of the composition and it wants to explode at the top. he actually did another picture where that happened, where it's like rocks leaping out of the water. here you've got these enormous wings spread out over the horizon.
sort of crowding out any sense of the beyond. it creates an immensely compacted and condensed and compressed energy within the artwork. i think it's actually unmatched. for all of the sad stories of ryder's biography, he remained an incredible masterful artist pioneering the kind of modernist vocabulary of expression. it's not too hard to see why pollock loved this.
there is a kind of a turn and a surge in the work that is definitely something pollock learned. i could go on forever about that, but let's move on to another personal favorite. get this one out of the way too. i'm from kansas city and you get injected with the benton juice in the hospital when you are born in kansas city. benton can be his own worst enemy. late in life he became so contrarian, and contentious and angry that the impression many have in the art world of him is as a kind of angry, cranky old man out in the midwest. but, in fact, he was in the beginning of his career a liberal modernists who
had grown up partly in the midwest, but partly in washington d.c. his great uncle, of course, was his name sake. thomas hart benton who was a five term senator and the architect of manifest destiny. his father was a congressman for a period of time, so benton when he was in high school was living over on a street on capital hill. it was about the time the library of congress was being built. the sort of guided age extraordinary masterpiece of literary and narrative illusions
in mosaics and murals. a kind of vocabulary that was new to america. benton studied up, he read mythology. when his fathers constituents from missouri would arrive thomas hart benton would trap them over to the library of congress and show them the mosaics and tell all the stories. he was not untrained. he was a musician. he actually was the first person to develop a notation for harmonica music. but he was a sophisticate, and he was well read, and he knew his music, and his art, and his history, and his background.
the 30's were pretty good to benton. he had grown tired of some of the liberals in new york decided he would move back to the midwest and it came right at a time when americans were heralding this, sort of, what we now call fly over country. he was on the cover of time magazine in 1934. the year before he had done murals for the century of progress show in new york. he was doing murals even then for the missouri state capital. he was getting along great and he wrote a wonderful book, which i
recommend to you, in 1937 called, an artist in america. you have to get that right, because many years later he wrote a second autobiography called, an american and art, a very different book. but artists in america is a kind of pee-on to the natural beauty of america. it's organized by the parts of the country, the south, the west, the north. it is his statement about how he came to love america. in part by seeing it through the eyes of the washington experience and the political experience.
sometimes he could get a little harsh with that. one of my favorite lithographs is when he was trying to get back at some of the marxists he had been associating with in new york who were all about how the marxist struggle was coming to america. he thought that was probably never going to happen. so he did a lithograph show of an elderly farmer kind of an old hay seeds sitting on the hood of his old jaded pickup. they are out in the middle of this corn field. with stubble all around and it's under a moonlit sky
and the title of it is called, waiting for the revolution. years later, when he is in his mid seventies and by now he is really a cranky old man and he has written his second book which is really a harsh book. it's a jingoistic book, it's a judgmental book. he sounds like a bitter man, which he was. but he had a near fatal heart attack. the illness brought about a great depression. he said he wouldn't go back into the studio and he wasn't going to paint anymore.
one of his friends in kansas city, and old-time drinking buddy decided to commission a small painting from him, just really as a way of getting him to go back in the studio. so, he did and this is the painting that he made. it's not very big, a few inches square and it's just stocks of wheat, but when i think about it, i'm pretty sure this is his artistic testament. he was such a profoundly patriotic guy he deeply loved walt whitman
and indeed i think this is his midwestern translation of whitman's leaves of grass. what you see are rows and rows, like armies of wheat marching all the way back up. no horizon again. a very compressed image, just like the writer. in the front you see a couple of the rows have been mowed down and harvested. already green shoots are coming up to replace the ones that have been harvested and right behind
is the stock, which is broken, but not harvested yet. that of course is benton. that sort of drooping branch. again if you use your art history background, it is the permeated arm of christ coming off the cross. it is the gesture of the arm of the dying christ.
this is his way of saying, "i am broken and soon to be harvested, but not yet." it is his testament to america. this one is in here really because i want all of your help. this too is a late in life testament by yasou kuniyoshi. we did a big show of his a couple of years ago. it gave me an occasion to study an artist i had long been curious about. i'm fascinated by immigration. why do people come to this country and what makes them
either pushing them out of where they are or attracting them into america? kuniyoshi came from japan in 1906, he was a teenager, he had no money. he didn't come with parents or relatives and i feel pretty certain he was coming to avoid the draft in japan he was well aware that japan was hugely militaristic at the time. they had fought a big war with china, they had fought a big war with russia. he did not want to be part of that. he arrived on the west coast, found his way to new york, fell in with some really wonderful artists and by 1920 he was married to a german american woman
and had become a pretty well known artist in the art circles of new york city. but, i think, he spent his entire life hoping to avoid militarism and fearing what it could bring to the world and to him personally. of course, by 1920 when he was in new york being a successful artist america was in the grip of an enormous vitriolic hate campaign against asians. who were referred to as mongrels. there was an enormous wave of hostility to immigration which led up to the passage of an enormously restrictive immigration act of 1924.
one thing it did was to say we are not even going to put a cap on the number of immigrants but we are going to cap the percentage that can come from any given country so we don't change the balance of power in america. if before 3% of the immigrants came from china, then only 3% can come now even though the number is much smaller. the goal was to keep the power structure among ethnicities unchanged in this country. asians lost out, they couldn't enter into contracts, they couldn't own property.
when he married his german american wife, she lost her citizenship. also her parents didn't speak to her for 6 years. they had no children. i'm curious about that because he did a series of paintings in the early 20's about children. they all looked like little neocolonial sort of lunder folk art kids with the big heads and tiny bodies. i would like to know more about whether it was a choice not to have children or whether they simply didn't feel that a child of theirs
would get fair treatment in a country that would have regarded them as mongrels. anyway, fast forward i'm not going to go through the whole career, but he was, as you can imagine, devastated when his native country of japan did a sneak attack at pearl harbor in his adopted country. he immediately volunteered to help and volunteered for service. he painted propaganda posters and did everything he could to advance the american cause. but then, he felt enormously violated when his adopted country who he had liked the isolationism in world war i,
but we turned around then and dropped atomic bombs on his home country. the bitterness that crept into his art is palpable. you can find it in the way his art changed from sort of dreamlike and almost childlike to kind of hostile acid colors and really angry looking pieces. but we don't always know what they mean. this one, which is called fakirs, f-a-k-i-r-s is such a late testament. he did it in 1951.he died in 1953. we still don't really understand this picture.
i show it to you partly because i know there is a story for this picture, but i haven't found it yet. i guess, i think that, all of us should be looking to understand the context, to understand why the artist would do such a gorgeous picture, but with those shrill colors. the ugly clowns, you notice the ones, lets see. whoops, now i'm getting my clickers confused. this one is hanging off the arm of the big one, and there is another little guy right down here
who is holding the standard. it's sort of evil clowns hanging off of bigger evil clowns. i don't know. what is it about? i keep playing with things. it was 1951 when we had the korean war. it was when japan signed a treaty with 48 nations. the first peace treaty they had after wwii. joe mccarthy was in the throws of his anti-communist witch hunts, having just declared the state department was just riddled with communists.
senator pat mccarran passed the internal security act of 1950 which dramatically scaled back civil liberties and it was a real crack down. i think this man who had spent his life just trying to find a safe place to live and work without being tossed on the wheels of the war machine was shocked. i'm still working on this one. ok, new topic. i said i'm interested in immigration, so the next
three are by three of my favorite immigrants. they, i think, were not so much pushed out, well maybe in one case, but they were attracted to america, because of something special here. the first is christo. i will just never quite get over the way that christo and jeanne-claude arrived in 1964 in new york determined to make a new life here. christo was officially state-less. he had no country, he had no passport for 17 years. he was not coined by any country.
jeanne-claude spoke a little english, christo spoke almost none, but they decided to do a hugely ambitious outdoor piece on the far left coast on a country they had only just moved to. that is, of course, the running fence. they finally got it up and running in 1976. it was viewed as a bicentennial project. it went 24 and a half miles across marin and sonoma counties. somehow the attraction artists feel to marin county is overwhelming. it comes up again later in this talk. it was like a magnet, it was like a paradise, it was like a dream pulling them across the country.
here, too, i think there are deep meanings for america and for christo. he had, or course, fled bulgaria. he hated communism, his mother had been teaching in an art school. so he took some names of friend's of hers who were in paris and other european countries. he got out of a railroad car, landed in paris with no money not speaking french found friends of his mother. anyway, long story short, he saved himself from that, married jeanne-claude came to america in 1964
and always conceived of the idea that true freedom was art. that the ability to execute an artwork on your own idea, your own instinct a free and clear idea that you yourself thought of beholden to no one was his idea of freedom. he didn't want to deal with museums, because they have their own agendas.
you could never sponsor a christo, you couldn't commission a christo, you can't call up christo and say, "would you come wrap my house? i'll pay you money for that." you can't be a corporation sponsoring a christo, he accepts no gifts and donations. if you want to support his work, you buy the drawings he makes. he sponsors all of his own works by selling art. he pays every person who works on all of his projects a going rate, not just a meanial rate. if you are an engineer you get paid at an engineers rate. he has a concept of labor and of worth
and of fair exchange that is so beyond just ethical. it's kind of a world view that he has about what is the right way to make your own work freely. i think it's not for nothing that he wanted to make this piece on the far west coast of the western hemisphere, always associated with greater freedom. just to give you an idea of how big 24.5 miles is if you started here in this museum you could go almost to annapolis. or if you started here in this museum and went north you could go all the way to bwi. that's how big the running fence was.
not coincidentally 24.5 miles is exactly the length of the berlin wall that divided berlin in the 1960's. i believe he is the great artist of the cold war. every one of this projects is somehow related to an incident having something to do with the standoff between east and west. the umbrellas project, the gates in new york, certainly the running fence, the wrapped reichstag, all of these are related to cold war incidents. i once said that to him. i said, "i feel like i found the key."
he said, "please do not make me into a political artist. i left politics in order to become a free man in art." it's all mixed up in his mind what it means to live a free life. i find it endlessly inspiring and i'm very proud that he chose to come and do it in america. here is another artist who also came in 1964 but for a different reason. david hockney had been born and raised in northern england, went to the royal academy. i said ryder was the last romantic, well david hockney is sort of the last traditionally trained studio artist. he paints in the established categories of the royal academy. he does portraits,
he does still lives, he does landscapes, he does interiors. he paints as if he is a great trained master of the 18th or 19th centuries. he is highly acutely attuned to what's going on in the day. often there is a rye undercurrent, but he came to america for a different kind of freedom. he felt very constrained in england. he was a gay guy and he just didn't feel he could acknowledge that and live his life the way he wanted to there. but boy in california it wasn't such a problem. he loved 24 hour t.v. he loved being able to freely associate with his gay friends, he loved
the swimming pool culture, he loved more open and accepting atmosphere of the collectors. this is a piece he did early on in 1967. he moved to california in 1964. savings and loan building, and, of course, it's his commentary on minimalism which was then the leading raining style in the art world where everything had to be flat and on a grid. so here is his picture, flat on a grid
except, of course, it has it's own little coded explosive touch of the palm trees down on the lower right. which if you want to read as a symbol of a lifestyle you may do so. then the third immigrant. this, too, will not surprise anyone - nam june paik. who also came in 1964, but for yet a third reason. he came in order to be on the forefront of technology. he was interested in engineering. he was the first artist to have the inspired idea that you can make art from television. he is called the father of video art. he was just experimental in every way. in fact,
he had set out to become an avant garde composer. he was training as a classical musician. then switched to avant garde music when he was in germany. it was there that he met people like john cage and merce cunningham and other americans who persuaded him to come to the united states in '64. his background was a little shocking. he came from quite a wealthy industrial family in seoul, south korea. when the north invaded during the korean war, they appropriated all of his families holdings and they
took his father as a hostage. he and his mother escaped and went to japan. he spent a couple of years there in high school before leaving to go to germany. to study avant garde music. when he came to america it was really for the opportunities to be on the forefront of the new emerging technologies. of course, i love this piece. i'm quite fond of things that get labeled as eye candy, but to me this is brain candy, too.
it is a tribute he did to his adopted country 30 years after he arrived. he did this in 1995. it's, i think, the best portrait i've ever seen of the sheer chaotic crazy regionalism of this country. we talk about being one nation, but we are so broadly diverse in geography, in people, in economics and cultural traditions that the idea that we are one nation is sort of hard to believe.
here he records just what he knows about each state. he doesn't obviously know anything much at all about the midwest, i doubt he ever went there. kansas has the wizard of oz, oklahoma has the movie oklahoma, missouri has meet me in st. louis, so it tells me that he knew nothing about those states except what he had seen on american movie classics. he had only one thing about idaho, which was potatoes.
he had only one thing about washington state, which was that his friend merce cunningham was from that state. but state by state you can go through and see what had penetrated over 30 years, what had he payed attention to? to me, it's kind of an inspiring vision of an artist who was so open to everything this country had to offer. who was so receptive, he was like wired for america. again, i'm proud that he came to do his art in this country. christo, hockney, nam june paik all came in 1964.
i think that's more than coincidence. i think it's kind of an afterglow of the kennedy affect. we had gone through war years, and then we had a retired general as president. the country felt like it had slogged through a long time, but by the 60's we were enjoying an enormous prosperity, great economic recovery, and then we got jack and jackie kennedy in the white house and suddenly we had youthful optimism and they were bringing artists to the white house,
celebrating our culture, and building the kennedy center. all of that. i think for these artists it was as if america had hung out the sign saying open for business. it was a place where you could come and self create. you could be the artists or the person you wanted to be. it was less judgmental, less restrictive, fewer people telling you what to do a little more open and inventive. i think, it was a golden moment for america. anything was possible. we are about to show gene davis paintings from the 60's
i look at those two and someone said the color filled painters are like court painters to the kennedy administration, a kind of brash optimism and openness and excitement and it's as if we've let go of all the sociological weight of wwii and abstract expressionism and angst and sort of have a fresh start. which is interesting. we do that every now and then. we did that after the civil war, we needed a fresh start. in the 60's, through the civil rights movement,
through many other things we sort of had that feeling of a fresh start. okay, going on. i have three works here by three of my favorite african american artists and the first is william h. johnson. born in florence, south carolina. boy, it was poor back country. he was born in 1901. jim crow was alive and well in south carolina in 1901. he moved to new york by the time he was 17 and he was always given opportunities. he trained at the national academy of design. he raised money and went to europe, he
knew soutine and studied with some of the great avant garde artists in europe. but he came back here, he actually came back a couple of times, but he came back definitively in 1938 - late '38 as storm clouds were beginning to gather over europe. he decided he would change his style completely. instead of being a slashing modernist, he simplified. he went to these flat colored shapes. and adopted this sort of deliberately pho-naive or sort of false folk art style. he painted a number of different subjects but some of my favorites are these recollections he had of life in rural south carolina.
this is called, early morning work. for all that he had gone through, there was plenty of oppression, i'm not going to tell you the many sad things that happened to him, but there is a kind of wit in these pictures. i'm charmed by the fact that you can find, if you trace this pictures, everything means something. you've got the father, whoops wrong clicker, sorry. you've got the horse and the plow, and the father getting ready to go out in the field.
it takes you just a minute to realize that the father has his back to you. he is getting ready to exit out stage left. we've got the mother and the son, here in the front with these pails that they are holding. i love this, you know the clasp holding the same pail. you've got the chickens over here. two chickens looking a whole lot like two eggs. you've got these crazy things like the tree, see the tree?
it starts way back behind the house but then it kind of comes forward and leans on the roof in front of the house. you've already got the laundry on the line. even though this is early morning work, the laundry is already out. they've been hauling water, they've been chopping wood. you have a real sense of a community of expression and this is just one of many that he did that i find so immensely powerful with such simple means. these works are all the more valuable because they were almost destroyed. he was not able to care for them. they were in a warehouse in new york city.
people tried to get them adopted by various museums, no one wanted several hundred works that were in terrible condition. some of them had been chewed by rats. the surrogate court of new york ordered the collection destroyed. it was then that the smithsonian stepped in and many of you who have been here a while will remember adelyn breeskin who was a curator here for many years and she said, "you know this guy isn't too bad, i think we will take those paintings." instead of destroying them all, they came to our museum.
we have pretty much his entire life work. when i think about how ryder may not survive another generation, he may be forgotten and i think about how close this artist came to having his life work destroyed. it makes me realize the sort of heavy weight of responsibility that we have here. to make sure important artists find a friend in us and someone willing to take a stand. he was unknown, he had no reputation. he had for years been hospitalized, he had no advocates.
long story short, he reminds me, it's like a call to conscience for our museum and many others. then, that was 1940 fast forward to the 60's. actually starting as early as 1950 the great james hampton throne. have all of you seen it in the new folk art galleries? it's bigger now. we renovated the folk art galleries and in doing so, we created a new home for the throne and it's now more complete than it had been before, with more elements. it looks better.
we still don't understand this work all together either. why was he doing this? was he going to open a store front church? was it simply a private devotional, enterprise, something he was doing just to glorify god? we do not understand. he, too, came from south carolina. he was born there in 1909 and this piece is, robert hughes said it was the most important piece of visionary art ever made in this country. it is a spectacular achievement.
made of the most humble materials. one of the things i like knowing is that he was making this out of found cardboard and cast off furniture and tinfoil at the same time that louise nevelson was making her big collages. she was also using found material and wood. painting them, and giving them names like "sky altar" always with some sort of religious symbolic title.
in a way they are doing the same thing but one was in the celebrated fine art world with dealers and museums at her fingertips and the other was working in a rented garage on 7th street in d.c. with nobody knowing what he was doing. this, too, was destined for the dustbin until a handful of people in washington including our own deputy director harry lowe said, "no this could be important, we are going to save this." saving a piece of self-taught art seems
clear today, but back then in the 60's no one knew what it was about. we are lucky to have this one too. then fast forward again. the past two, the william h. johnson and the james hampton were both in some ways sort of struggling on their own without much help or recognition, but now we have moved into another era. i like this because it makes me feel like progress is being made. even if it's two steps forward one step back sometimes. this is by mickalene thomas, it's from 2010.
it is dramatic, it is sensual, it is huge - it's 8x10 feet. it's covered in sequence and rhinestones. it's kind of flashy. all of these are things that for so long were denied to women or denied to black people. here she is a proud african american woman doing this dazzling image of empowerment, which this woman with her high heels and her confident gaze
and she is reclining as if she is some sort of monet nude or something. she is a very self-confident self-assured person saying, "i'm here." i look at this and i go, "yes, and it's about time." this is in some ways one of my favorites because it feels so affirmative. it feels so powerful and so different from all the artworks where you have to tell a sad story to go with it. not with this one, mickalene is on top of the world. but, if we segway now from african americans to women
we could go back 50 years and look at a woman with a little different take on things. there she is. she is 1950, this edward hopper. it's a gift of the sara roby foundation, sara roby was herself a trained artist and a patron. she was aided in her choices by lloyd goodrich. he was one of the smartest people in the field, he was director of the whitney museum. he always thought the sara roby collection would go to the whitney museum instead it came to us.
i don't know if he would have picked this, or if she picked it, but in many ways, it is the picture that describes the domestic sphere of a woman's role as of 1950. here is the woman sort of trapped between these two shutters. that are poised like sentinels and sort of reinforced over here by one more. it's like there are three sort of guardians there.
keeping her locked in. all of the boards of the framed house are sort of pointing in perspective to her. it's like incoming jet-streams or something. she is clearly locked in and imprisoned in this bay window. the colors are red, white, and blue. i don't know, is that meaningful? i don't know, but she is leaning forward with this look. she is yearning, looking out the window yearning. we can't tell. is there something out in the yard she sees? we don't know, but what we do see is that outside that window
everything is horizontal and softly focused and billowing and it's in complimentary colors of green and orange, and a beautiful blue sky, and she is never going to get there. so there is some kind of an awareness. it was after the war, the women had come back to home, the men had come back and taken the jobs again. it was a time when women had very few outlets. not for nothing did people like simone de beauvoir and others start writing books about this. to me this is a powerful statement. anytime you see a hopper, his houses are invariable anthropomorphic in some way.
sometimes they are guarded by three or four layers of fence, as if to say do not approach. other times these houses are sort of perched on extremely unstable foundations with boulders that look like the whole house could topple at any minute. sometimes they are perched right on the edge of the ocean and they look like they are going to fall off the cliff. they rarely are the stable open welcome inviting home that we tend to imagine. they mostly have some kind of a don't approach, or somewhat closed doors and windows. there is a lot of fencing.
this one, i think, is extremely evocative. this is hopper. it may or may not pertain to his own marriage. his wife jo was his only model, and that's how she looked, but we don't know if it's a statement about jo. it is true he got married in 1923 so 25 years later when they celebrated their 25th anniversary in the late 40's jo said, "maybe we should award ourselves the quad-ger." sort of recognizing the cross of military combat. they had a very tumultuous wedding. who knows? who knows what's going on? we are never going to know the inner life of
edward hopper. he was the notoriously silent one. but this picture seems clear to me about the frustrations of a woman in 1950. well of course we know what happened. it kind of bubbled over. let's see, is this? i'm now totally confused on my clickers. yeah, this is martha rosler in 1974 or '75. my favorite title: semiotics of the kitchen.
what had happened in 1971? anybody? it was when ms. magazine was started by gloria steinem. it was sort of the what's called the second wave of feminism. after the suffragettes in the teens and 20's then you have this second wave of feminism in america. everybody was questioning the paternalistic structures of society and why women were confined to the domestic sphere. i just have to play a minute. this is a video and
let's see if i can play you just a minute of this. opps, wait a minute, how do i play this? i thought i just clicked on it. do we know nona? otherwise i get to describe it. i can act it out. do you know how to make it play? oh, right there. you are so smart. fork. grader.
hamburger press. ice pick. i was just the right age for this in 1974. i got married in '68 and i got married to a very traditional man, and i had very traditional expectations. my mother had been a stay at home mother, she cooked dinner every night. but somehow i wanted to work and the tension was enormous. when ms. magazine happened and the second wave came out i still remember my husband saying to me
"if you don't stop sounding so shrill when we go to parties we don't have any friends left." i just so loved this work. i can't tell you the minute i saw it i said, "i know this woman!" she goes through the entire alphabet, a-z where she does all of the kitchen implements with this sort of hostile attitude. i cannot tell you how much i loved this work. mike mansfield introduced me to it and i thought where has martha rosler been all my life? i needed her many times.
these artists capture things. i can't believe she was smart enough to do that in 1974. it's so witty, but it's also angry, but it's also evocative. it just speaks to my inner soul. ten years later, we got viola frey. to me martha rosler is like a commentary on viola frey. i mean, this woman is like 9 feet tall. when you see her she is in ceramic. when you walk up to her, she towers over you. you feel like a little kid, because it's like mom is so tall
and kind of terrifying. viola frey captured that. i think in her own way she also was doing the changing role of women and what it felt like. she supported herself. she wanted to be a ceramicist and an artist, but she needed to make ends meet so she did office work at the museum of modern art and at macy's. i can scarcely imagine the woman who knew how to create this sort of towering looming, sort of overwhelming woman doing
office work at macy's. she was in the same generation of arnason and voulkos, these sort of vastly masculine ceramicists. who were setting the tone then for what was ok to do. she went her own way and then just one more on this theme. these are recent acquisitions by margarita cabrera. they are from 2011. of course, being latina she has a sort of different angle on the whole story. these are the soft toaster and the soft blender.
they are made out of polyurethane and leather. it's a commentary about how most of our household appliances, many of them are manufactured in mexico by women who are paid next to nothing. she has left all the wires and the threads and the strings there just to remind you that somebody made all that stuff. a lot of the manufacturing after nafta has gone to mexico and here are women making all these toasters and blenders and the whole domestic sphere, idea, has a different meaning for her.
moving on, changing chapters now. i had to show catlin, didn't i? i put this one in and i thought, "what do i say? why does this have personal meaning for me?" i can't tell you how much i admire catlin. he seemed to somehow have missed that self-protective thing where we all kind of are scared to venture out. he went willingly and knowingly into the planes area, met with indians, to paint their pictures. no one had dreamed of doing anything like that.
all of his portraits are more or less life sized and they are mostly confronting you full face. it's as if you are meeting someone for the first time. they are all portrayed as actual living individuals, they are not stereotyped, they don't have a family look where they all sort of look alike, they each come to us with an indian name, a transliterated name, a tribal affiliation, and a few words about who they were and how the functioned within their tribe. these are people. we are meeting these as people
not as some estranged alien other people out there, but as people we might want to get to know. even today i think one of the proudest moments i have is when sometimes native people will come and they say, i want to see that portrait, because that's my ancestor, that's my sister's great aunt, whatever. it's also just a masterful picture. the big pinwheel on his chest, and the face and the hair anyway, i won't analyze it for you.
i brought up catlin in order to show you this one. this is a tiny little thing, it's just a few inches in each direction. the boat was going up the missouri river towards canada. he went up in the spring when the flood waters were high and then he would float down over the course of the summer as the river was going down. and get off from time to time and paint tribal groups on either side on the banks. to me this picture is like those little landscapes you see in a lot of northern renaissance pieces that might be the
virgin and child and there will be these amazing distant landscape with these little castles and rivers and so forth. they look like this, they have this kind of minute sense of distance. he puts a little person there. let's see, is this my clicker? see that little guy? to me he is like the little figures you get in a caspar david friedrich sort of standing and starring out into the vast ocean. he is sort of contemplating the scene, he is representing us in contemplating the scene. but mostly i love the way it just goes back, and back, and back, and back, and back,
and back, all in a picture this big. the recession in this open and inviting landscape with this verdant green the sense of promise, the sense of always another horizon or another bend in the river to go around. it's like an invitation. it's like an invitation to go to explore this territory. it's such a kind of a open positive embracing of it. it reminds me, of course, of huckleberry finn was about going down a river.
how many times have people used this idea of a river journey to kind of be the metaphor for the journey of life or greeting the world? it's an invitation and i think no one did it better than catlin. interesting, 30 years after catlin went, we get emanuel leutze, and of course he is doing this big machine picture. i mean, it's clunky. it's a study for the mural in the capital building. it's got all kind of illusions and metaphors and fancy things it really needs a four page description just to tease out everything that's there, but what i'm especially interested in is this part.
if this were an altar piece, that would be the predella, down at the bottom. of course, it's this beautiful golden gate view. the goal of this journey, is to arrive at this beautiful golden gate. that's marin county over there, it wasn't yet marin county, but in the 60's it was already that view that was drawing people to the west. the number of times artists are drawn to this coastal subject is breathtaking. christo went out there to do the running fence, catlin was showing the same kind of endless river recession.
i just find it evocative and i guess i would say specific to american. that kind of a open enticement, a kind of confident willingness to march forward in the future, a kind of willingness to take what the country presents. i think i've got another one. ah, yes. i love this. this is 1934. it's by ray strong. president roosevelt put this in the white house in the 1930's. it, of course, shows that same golden gate area.
now we are constructing a bridge. talk about an infrastructure project, wow! it was an engineering marvel. it called out the very best ideas. you can see these itsy bitsy little people up there. there are little engineers standing around here. i know you can't really see them, it's too small. there are little people running around here and there, they are like ants. this is a gigantic project. how can it look so positive and so hopeful when we are in the bottom of the depression
one of the very worst years, and just months before this was painted, on halloween 1933 an enormous storm came and actually tore out one of these trellises. it set them back by months, they had to rebuild a lot of it. it was so daunting as an engineering project. many people lost their lives. it was heroic, it was like building the pyramids and no one was shrinking from it in 1934. at the same time they were building the hudson tunnel in new york. these were massive big ambitious projects and in a way
they were completing a journey that had been anticipated by catlin and by leutze and by many others to drive this country through. it, of course, hugely benefited developers. it opened up marin country to development. there a historic contest there about how much development versus how much rural. ray strong, he was painting like this in 1934. he never really got beyond being a regionalist. i don't understand that. he lived until uh, i'm forgetting the date - 2006.
he was 101 and yet, somehow the artistic power structure in this country keeps some artists in their place. you want to be a great national painter? you must go to new york. i hate that. i've never understood why if you paint the hudson river you are a great american artist, but if you paint the missouri river you are a regionalist. i don't get that.
this is an artists who deserves a lot better than he got and he is in here sort of standing for literally thousands of artists who just sort of got bypassed by the art world. they were not in the right place at the right time. then my last picture, number 18 of my top 10 is a wayne thiebaud. isn't it really the same vision?
now it's the sacramento river valley. he starts with this vantage point. first of all, he has got the magisterial view looking down from a great height. you see the flow of the river and you see the fertile farms on either side. he was a cartoonists, he used to draw a cartoon every day. there is just a little diagrammatic cartooning going on in the way he shows you these fields, shows you the cattle, shows you the river, but at the top it just opens out in this great estuary, this sort of open end of the river
to fill up the entire horizon again. it's like ryder with god the father up there. all these people who want to throw everything up to the horizon. it's because they have so much they want to put in. to me, he too, like so many others, is giving you the positive view of the future that is in someways uniquely american. i'm going to close by reading to you from a vovo ad. i hear this come on my television and i'm always riveted. i stop and i wait until i hear the entire ad.
i'm actually giving you a little more than what's in the ad. it's from walt whitman's song of the open road. afoot and light-hearted i take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever i choose. henceforth i ask not good-fortune, i myself am good-fortune, henceforth i whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, strong and content i travel the open road. you road i enter upon and look around, i believe you are not all that is here,
i believe that much unseen is also here. from this hour i ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, going where i list, my own master total and absolute, listening to others, considering well what they say, pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. i inhale great draughts of space, the east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. i am larger, better than i thought, i did not know i held so much goodness. all seems beautiful to me.
i see that in those artworks. thank you. so it's more than an hour and everyone is excused until anybody wants to ask a question and i'll stay for a little while. maybe we need lights up. ok, i answered all the questions. yeah? i don't have a question, but if i could just say your daughter and my daughter went to walt whitman, and i'm going to share, this is available online and i'm going to share it with dr. goodwin who is the current principle varied in the liberal arts -good-
and loves literature and art and i just think this has been wonderful and i just think young people would love seeing this. you touch on a sensitive issues because my daughter was there for 4 years at walt whitman. at one point i went out and said, "i'm available to talk to any classes if you'd like me." no one took me up on that. but i don't hold that grudge so much as the grudge that says my daughter went through 4 years of english at walt whitman high school and they never read a line of walt whitman. not one. he is a little too raw for high school teachers. he has got a little too much juice, and
maybe he has the wrong object of his affections. this same principal, at my request, accepted his selected poems for dover for ever child to have. good! well you are making great progress i knew it. well, i don't know how much they get read, but you know, it never hurts. well whitman is inexhaustible. if you ever are depressed or lacking inspiration for anything you can just open a book of whitman to any page. it's there. he'll wear you out, i mean, 10 pages later he is still going on, but it is always inspiring. when i heard that
volvo ad on t.v. i went, "oh my god, who wrote that copy?" and then i went, "i know who wrote that copy." i have a question. yeah? have you, betsy yourself, ever created works of art, or are you tempted to and if so in what medium? i used to in high school - draw and paint. but i came to find out that you know you actually can train people to draw and paint reasonably well. i was a good student, but i was not an inspired person. i don't have an urgent,
i went to art camp in the summer for three summers in high school. i was around people who are just born artists, they just want to make things. they have ideas, they are constantly just going, "oh i know what i can do with that." i didn't have that. i'm more academic. i'm not so right brained i'm more left brained. my second grandson is just a born artist. if you give him a water bottle and a cough drop, he will go make you an artwork. he's just got the gift. yep, joe? betsy not so much a question, but more of a statement.
i want to thank you for all the years - well, i owe everything to this museum for letting me have this opportunity. you know, i never dreamed when i came here that it would be such an amazing stage with so many wonderful friends and people which it's going to be very hard to leave. y'all can't go anywhere. i need to find you exactly here again. okay. yeah, question? you can shout it out, i can hear you.
do you plan to write a book on any of these works? i don't know. i'm taking 90 days to think about what i want to do. i don't know how much structure i want in my life. i don't know if i, i mean, am i in bed going why should i get up i don't have anywhere to go? that's a possibility. or if i am i going to go, "oh good i'm going to take the open road, the long path before me. i'm going to walk where i will." i don't really know how i will react when i don't have job demands. writing a book seems like a very solitary thing and i worry it's too much
solitary right away. maybe i need a little more people in my life. but i do, yes, not being shy there are easily 10 artists who i'm pretty sure i'm the only person who understands their work. so i owe it to them to do a book, right? yeah? betsy, thank you so much. you mentioned gene davis, but you excluded any abstract art. is there any reason for that?
i love a lot of abstract art, but i love figurative art better. i like the richness. i like it when you get great visuals going, and a great narrative, and fabulous subject and a great back story and a wonderful cause. abstract art - i'm a fairly concrete person, i will confess that i went over to see the new national gallery, which is stunning gorgeous, and i loved so many things there. the calder room blew me away.
i was just going to snip some of those wires and bring some of them over here. but i went up into the tower with the barnet women and the rothko's and i realized i'm not very spiritual. i don't react much to those. so i guess i'm missing some special gene that allows you to really plum the depths of those. i seem to need the prodding of a story or a subject. yeah, anybody? okay.
thank you all for coming.