The Open Road (continued)

Landscape with a Carriage and a Train, Vincent van Gogh, 1890

Yesterday, I wrote about contemporary paintings of the open road. These would be impossible without photography or the automobile, so they are very much of our time.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people moved around on foot, by horse, or by ship. While there were genre painters dealing with those subjects, the mechanics of life did not particularly interest artists or their patrons. The social realism (or naturalism) movement of the 19^thcentury changed that. Its concern with the lives of the working class included the ways in which people travelled.

Vincent van Gogh painted Landscape with a Carriage and a Train shortly before his death, after he had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy. “Lately I’ve been working a lot and quickly; by doing so I’m trying to express the desperately swift passage of things in modern life,” he wrote.

The Third-Class Carriage, Honoré Daumier, 1864

The Third-Class Carriage by Honoré Daumier is the most well-known, and perhaps the earliest, depiction of mass transit, which has become such a fact of life in our modern existence.

Third-class railway carriages were dirty, crowded, and uncomfortable. They were filled with the lower orders. In short, they were the coach seats of their day. While the little family in the front row of Daumier's painting are fully delineated, the figures in the back rapidly dissolve into the anonymity of the endless human crowd.

Steaming Streets by George Bellows (1908) is a harshly honest look at urban transport. No Currier and Ives romanticism here.

In our nostalgic imaginings we like to believe we would have achieved a first-class railway ticket, but the vast majority of us would have been traveling coach then, just as we do now.

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Comparing yourself to others

Romance of Autumn, 1916, by George Bellows. I’m leading with a painting that makes me squirm every time I see it, to make a point: if you judged Bellows by this single painting, you’d think he didn’t know how to mix or apply paint. But he knew exactly what he was doing, as his catalogue attests.

The other day Brad Marshall jokingly asked us whether he or Anders Zorn was better looking. We of course immediately said that Brad was. “Oh, well, Zorn was the better painter,” he replied.

“Not better, just different,” I answered.

As mature artists, most painters have achieved mastery over their materials.  What we react to isn’t their technical skill, but how they speak to us. When we don’t like their work, it’s usually more a question of not responding to their worldview than that they are technically deficient.

Illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy, Hell, by William Blake. Blake was painting his edgy, uncomfortable, oddly-drafted work at a time when the highly-finished Grand Manner was in vogue. No wonder that his work was almost forgotten until he was rediscovered by Victorian England. Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest artists England ever produced.

It’s only in the learning phase that one painter is ‘better’ than the next, and even that is transitory. Some of us are faster learners than others, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be better painters in the end.

Last weekend, one of my beginning students got very frustrated. She was having trouble understanding why I asked her to lay down paint in a specific way. It didn’t help that her classmates were sailing through the exercise.

“I feel like everyone is doing a great job except me,” she said.

Childhood's Garden, 1917, by Charles Burchfield. His genius lies in his spirit and vision. He is often called the dark Edward Hopper, but many of his paintings radiate happiness.

Like most artists—experienced or not—she really has no idea where her strengths lie. She is emotionally transparent, so what she feels vibrates through her drawing. When she’s happy, her trees dance, the pavements sing. When she’s not happy, her canvas glowers.

That is a kind of talent that can’t be taught or bought, but can only be nurtured like a seedling set out in a garden bed. And it’s so easy to knock such a talent apart, because it comes from one’s inner vision, and that’s a fragile thing.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Does art reflect society or society reflect art?

McSorley's Bar, 1912, by John Sloan. McSorley's is the oldest Irish tavern in New York City. It only admitted women after being forced to do so in 1970. I got into my last-ever bar fight there, with an undergrad from NYU who imagined I’d slighted his girlfriend. “I can take him,” I insisted to my husband. “Who expects a roundhouse from a blue-haired church lady?”

Yesterday a reader asked, “Does art reflect society or society reflect art?” It seems to me that art is primarily a reflection of the aspirations and values of the society that created it. That is not to downplay the importance of social justice in art, and it doesn’t mean that artists can’t change people’s minds. Think of the tremendous courage it took for Émile Zola to publish J'accuse, and the influence it has down to this day. But even that was responsive to a reality: the injustice of institutional anti-Semitism.

By the turn of the 19^th century, America had recovered a bit from its earlier unbridled optimism. This could be seen in its literature, with writers like Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and Frank Norris describing the dark side of the American experience. The painterly equivalent was called the Ashcan School.

Steaming Streets, 1908, by George Bellows. The Ashcan painters did not gloss over the filth and danger of our cities.

The Ashcan painters opposed both American Impressionism and the highly polished work of painters like John Singer Sargent. They were darker, rougher, and harsher. They were not just interested in light and air; they also wanted to paint the grime, the frozen manure and the poverty that were also part of our urban reality.

From the standpoint of trendiness, their moment was short-lived. The Cubists, Fauvists and Expressionists took over the avant garde high ground with the Armory Show of 1913, and suddenly the Ashcan painters were lumped in with all those boring old realists from the 19^th century.

Eviction (Lower East Side), 1904, by Everett Shinn (gouache). Shinn had watched the eviction of an old musician from his apartment, which inspired this picture of misery and despair.    

That should not minimize their artistic and social importance. Painters like Robert Henri, George Bellows, George Luks, John Sloan, and William Glackens cast a long shadow. They were the first painters to admit that America was not Elysium, and the flaws they painted have only gotten more noticeable with time. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!