Fine Arts News

This famous 1948 photo by Cecil Beaton shows a group of young models in Charles James gowns.



Cecil Beaton/Metropolitan Museum of Art



James said he named 1932's knit wool Taxi dress because he wanted a woman to be able to get into or out of it in the back of a taxi.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art



James pins a suit on a model, possibly Ricki Van Dusen, in 1948.


Cecil Beaton/Metropolitan Museum of Art



The Butterfly gown from 1954.

Cecil Beaton/Metropolitan Museum of Art



James' wife, Nancy, photographed in the Swan Gown in 1955.


Cecil Beaton/Metropolitan Museum of Art



Austine Hearst, wife of William Randolph Hearst Jr., wears the Clover Leaf gown she commissioned for President Eisenhower's inauguration in 1953. Hearst had to wear something else to the ceremony when James couldn't finish the gown on time.[/LIST]
Thursday in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art officially reopens its fashion galleries after a $10 million, two-year renovation.
Named for Vogue magazine's editor, the Anna Wintour Costume Center features an inaugural exhibit of the work of Charles James, a flamboyant designer considered America's first couturier. This caps days of glamorous events at the Met, including the Costume Institute's benefit gala, presided over by Wintour — with Hollywood stars.

Hundreds of gala gawkers lined up behind the velvet rope on Monday to see stars like Bradley Cooper — in white tie — and Sarah Jessica Parker — in an elaborate ballgown — sweep up the Metropolitan Museum stairs; at the Costume Institute benefit gala, Hollywood dominates.

Earlier that day, in the Egyptian wing, with the soaring walls of the Temple of Dendur as a backdrop, it was string music and air kisses, as designer after designer turned up to honor Anna Wintour and her contribution — $125 million raised for the Institute as a Met trustee. Oscar de la Renta, Alexander Wang, Marc Jacobs and Donatella Versace all paid tribute — with a special guest appearance by Michelle Obama, who told the crowd that "the Met will be opening up the world of fashion like never before. To show that fashion isn't an exclusive club for the few that can attend a runway show or shop at certain stores."
Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann models a copy of the famous Clover Leaf gown.

The newly reconfigured center, Obama said, is for anyone who is curious about the impact of fashion on our culture and history; and she specifically addressed the fashion students present, telling them to be inspired by Charles James and his innovative career. "It's a career that involves, science, engineering, accounting, marketing and so much more. Maybe they'll learn about the math behind Charles James's designs. And they'll think to themselves, maybe I should pay closer attention in geometry," she said.

Harold Koda, the chief curator at the Costume Institute, says it wasn't a question of if, but when the Met would do a serious Charles James retrospective. James was born in 1906 to a British officer and an American heiress; his life went from the end of the Edwardian era to the punk era, from Downton Abbey to the Chelsea Hotel. Christian Dior said James inspired his post-World War II New Look. And Balenciaga said James was not just the most important American couturier, but the best in the world.

"He wasn't a conventional fashion designer," Koda says. "He was an artist. And he approached his metier as an art, and that's not consistent with being a fashion designer."

James was a mercurial genius, best known for elaborately constructed magical ballgowns. He dressed elegant Park Avenue heiresses, and glamor queens like Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Arden and Gypsy Rose Lee. After his wealthy British father cut him off, James absorbed everything from engineering to 15th-century armor — he became a meticulous sculptor of cloth, such a perfectionist, he once spent $20,000 refining a sleeve.

Great Fashion Exhibitions

Chicago History Museum
Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity
Bard Graduate Center, New York City
An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile & Fashion Design, 1915-1928
The Museum at FIT, New York City
A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk
RISD Museum, Providence, RI
Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion

If James had a masterwork, it is the Clover Leaf dress from 1953, designed for Austine Hearst, wife of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst Jr. "The Clover Leaf ball gown is something that he meant to be danced in," says Koda. "It weighs 10 pounds! But the physics of it is so carefully disposed over the body that you could literally dance in this huge dress."

Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann — daughter of actor Isabella — has modeled a copy of the dress. "You feel like a paradise bird," she says of the experience. "You kind of always have to have your arms up in a very elegant way. So you feel like a ballerina. So it certainly makes you feel very regal and beautiful — it's actually fantastic because the front part of the clover that comes in is the perfect place for a man to come in a take you and dance with you but anything else is totally impractical. Sitting, kind of hanging out, none of that is possible!"

Fashion-centered exhibitions like the Charles James retrospective have been hugely lucrative for museums: The Met's 2011 blockbuster Alexander McQueen show, "Savage Beauty," was one of the most popular exhibitions in the Met's history — and museums all over the world are discovering the value of a fashion show.

Charles James, interviewed at the end of his life — the video quality is poor but the audio is intact.

Valerie Steele is not surprised. She's the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Attendance at their exhibitions has doubled in the last decade, she says — but that doesn't mean all designers favor museums. "For a number of fashion designers, they don't want to be shown in museums because they feel that's a cemetery for dead clothes," she says. "They believe that clothing is not art, but it's a part of life. And it should be seen in movement, on the street on pretty girls wearing it."
Charles James did not feel that way — he urged his clients to donate their gowns to a museum, in his case, the Brooklyn Museum. That preserved some of his work, says Steele, but not his reputation. "Unless a designer is still producing perfume, once they are dead they are forgotten amazingly fast. Part of our mission is to try and remind people that there were great figures in the past whose heritage and influence lives on."

Artists were James' last clients, when he was living in three rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, months behind on the rent, making dresses into the night on a board positioned over a bed. He was visited by the likes of Elsa Peretti, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, and many fashion students sought him out. Just months before his death in 1978, James' friend, R. Couri Hay and filmmaker Anton Perich conducted an epic 20-hour interview at the Chelsea in which James assessed his legacy.

"I've remained a myth because people don't see evidence of my work enough," he told them. "And what would you set out to create?" the interviewer asks. "Would you be just creating dresses for museums? Would you want to be creating dresses for people? For the masses?" No, James responds, "Dresses going to museums once they've been created for people. Once it's taken up by the market, it's destroyed by the market."

But James seemed to know he'd have his moment again. And now, he has. The show, "Charles James: Beyond Fashion," is up through August 10 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Anna Wintour Costume Center in New York City.

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Edward Hopper's 1950 Cape Cod Morning is one 70 works on display at the American Art Museum as part of the exhibit "Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection."

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Plenty of collectors want to donate artworks to museums, but the museums don't always welcome them with open arms. "We say 'no thanks' 19 times out of 20," says Betsy Broun, director at the American Art Museum. Sometimes the works aren't museum-quality, other times they don't fit with the museums' philosophy.

But in 1986, representatives from the Sara Roby Foundation called the Smithsonian with an offer it couldn't refuse: paintings by Edward Hopper, Raphael Soyer, Reginald Marsh and many more. They were all collected by Roby, who, in the early 1950s, who took on a mission: to save Realistic art from the maws of Abstract Expressionism. The results of her dedication are on display at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum.

Cape Cod Morning is a classic Hopper from 1950. A woman peers out the window, bathed in sunlight, but framed in darkness. Black shutters frame the window and a black-green forest sits behind the house.

"She's hemmed in — this woman is hemmed in by these sentinel-like dark shutters. Almost as if she's a target," Broun says. There's no way out of this Hopper house. "No steps, no door. ... Hopper is famous for putting fences and barricades up in front of his homes and these are basically homes with no entrance, no exit."

Roby, an amateur painter herself, collected works of all kinds from known and unknown mid-century American painters — Ben Shahn, Saul Steinberg, Mark Tobey, Louise Nevelson.

Roby was very generous, says American Art Museum chief curator Virginia Mecklenburg. Her father made a lot of money in cement in the 1920s and '30s — when all those skyscrapers were going up in Manhattan. In the early '50s, with that money, and guidance from her art teacher Reginald Marsh — an Ashcan School follower who painted seedy New York scenes in the '20s and '30s — plus other advisors, Roby created a foundation to help American art and artists of her day.


Ashcan School painter Reginald Marsh taught Sara Roby, who was an amateur artist. Above, Marsh's 1951 work, Coney Island Beach.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

"She wanted to do something that counted," Mecklenburg says.

Marsh gave a dinner party for her in New York, and invited art scene movers and shakers — painters, dealers, museum officials. He seated Roby next to art historian Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum. Roby asked his advice — how could her foundation best serve artists and the public.


Two pensive women share a mysterious, intense moment in Raphael Soyer's 1980 Annunciation.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Legend has it he said: "Well, hell, Sara. If you want to help artists, buy their paintings."

And so she did: almost 200 artworks, by more than 100 artists — a major collection, plus a traveling program to take contemporary American art around the country.

Trained in traditional, realist art, Roby, who died in 1986, wanted to preserve that tradition against the encroachment of Abstract Expressionism. The drips and dribbles of Jackson Pollock, the revolutionary slashes of Willem de Kooning were wow-ing the art world in the '50s, and elbowing Realism out of galleries and museums. So she and her advisors cruised artists' studios, and bought pieces hot off their easels.

In Raphael Soyer's 1980 oil painting Annunciation, a young woman leans against the wall near a bathroom sink. She is shoeless, one bare foot on top of the other. Another stands nearby, wearing a turquoise slip and holding towels.

Both women are pretty — with dark hair, pointed chins — they could be sisters. And they're pensive. The moment is intense. What's going on? "Annunciation." Has one told the other she's pregnant? Had an abortion? Made a mistake? The painting is realistic and mysterious — a puzzle to ponder.


In Philip Evergood's 1952 Dowager in a Wheelchair, there are visual parallels between the old woman being wheeled in the foreground and the child being wheeled in the background.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Many different stages in a woman's life are painted in Philip Evergood's bright yellow 1952 canvas Dowager in a Wheel Chair. Hemmed in by a yellow New York Checker cab on one side, and a brick building on the other, the aged lady, in elegant long black gloves and good jewelry, peers out at life from under her veiled hat. A pretty young thing rolls her wheelchair down the street. But for Smithsonian director Betsy Broun, the poignant part of the painting is in the distance — a nursemaid pushing a child in a baby carriage.

"So we start being pushed around and we end being pushed around. There's a cycle of life story going on here," she says.
Poignant, funny, the pulse of the city is in this painting. A slice of mid-century existence, as are so many in this show, whether by Hopper, Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield or Jacob Lawrence.

The donation of this collection to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in 1986 was like manna from heaven. It gave the museum works their own budget could not afford. And put them on the map, as a venue for important American artists. All because, as Broun says, an art-loving donor had money and a mission.

"I love donors for their personal vision and passion," Broun says. "They set out to do something with a burning intensity and in fact it's different from the way a regular museum would collect. It's not that we lack passion, but we are not quite as free to pursue some highly idiosyncratic or quirky or personal take on art."

Sara Roby was free and the evidence is on view at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art through mid-August.

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Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's 1851 painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Saturday at about 10:30 in the morning, as New York took a turn for the muggy in what turned out to be anticipation of rain, I climbed the steps to the Metropolitan Museum Of Art and rented one of the audio guide units that hang around your neck on an orange strap. I stayed about five hours, wearing out the battery on the audio unit and turning it in for another, wandering from the Egyptian art into the Temple of Dendur, through European sculptures to Arms and Armor and the American Wing, through Oceania, Africa and the Americas. Then upstairs, through the European paintings and the Modern and Contemporary Art; through some of the Asian Art, some of the Near Eastern Art and the Greek and Roman statues.

Somewhere around Athens, it became clear that the curiosity was willing, but the feet were weak.

Saturday night at 8:00, I saw a live performance of The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Ben Acker and Ben Blacker's "staged production in the style of old-time radio." It was packed with comedy podcast royalty and guests, including Paul F. Tompkins, Scott Aukerman, Scott Adsit, Paget Brewster, Wyatt Cenac, Busy Phillips, Zachary Levi, Jonathan Coulton, Paul and Storm, John Hodgman, Marc Evan Jackson, too many funny people to list if we're being perfectly serious as you can now see, and Dick "Yes, That Dick Cavett" Cavett. They performed radio plays about vampires, Martians, time travel, glamorous married people drinking to excess, robot hands, a succubus, and roving bands of invisible stupid wise men. The audience at Town Hall whooped and roared so unreservedly that a lady sitting near me kept sticking her fingers in her ears, overwhelmed.

In between, and all weekend, I read The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy Of A Hollywood Fiasco, Julie Salamon's 464-page, more than 20-year-old book – dishy, sad, and fascinating – about the making and flopping of Brian De Palma's film The Bonfire Of The Vanities. In the book, a project that begins with the conviction that adapting Tom Wolfe's novel can only result in the rare film both admirable and popular suffers wound upon wound: an unrealistic schedule, unrelenting industry gossip, a cynical casting change, location debacles (one involving a scene that couldn't be shot as planned in the Temple of Dendur), resistance in the Bronx to stereotypical depictions thereof, enormous egos coexisting about as successfully as a family of elephants in a college dorm room, and the fact that from the beginning, Wolfe's acidic outlook seems utterly incompatible with the desire – and, given the money being spent, the imperative – to make a hit.

At the museum, there is an ivory comb from the Egyptian Predynastic Period. Roughly 3200 B.C., they say. They suggest it might have been part of the accoutrements of someone's funeral more than 5000 years ago; more than 20 times the entire history of the country the museum is housed in. More than 115 times as long as I've been alive. The teeth of the comb are broken off; what remains is a little more than two inches tall and a little less than two inches wide, and those four square inches hold more than 20 individual renderings of animals. The carvings have symbolic significance, but they're also carefully and elegantly done, particularly on a piece so small. The comb played a role, perhaps, in an important ritual, but it's also a beautiful object, like many of the drums and bowls and pieces of blown glass.

The piece was, then, meant to be an offering of the artist's skills, to convey a meaning, to evoke an emotion, and to bring pleasure. So was The Bonfire Of The Vanities. So was The Thrilling Adventure Hour.

Those aren't the only purposes to which these other works are being put: the film was also engineered to make money, of course, perhaps cripplingly so. The live show, while far less damned by its relationship to commerce, is part of the performers' livelihoods particularly in the broad sense, since many of them remain people whose projects might well be described using, at some point, the word "cult." It supports you, the cult, but only sometimes does it keep you in food and shelter. And it demands to be fed in return, of course.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities didn't just aspire to keep people in food and shelter; it aspired to keep people in mansions and private planes. What it doesn't have that The Thrilling Adventure Hour has is an animating love of the material. Everyone involved seemed to have assumed Wolfe's book was capital-G Great, whether or not they had read it, but they began excising its controversial elements – which in this case meant its essential elements – almost immediately. There was so much money, there were so many trailers, there was so much fake rain, there were so many gowns and extras ... but the way Salamon tells the tale, few of them were – maybe nobody was – there for love.

At The Thrilling Adventure Hour, everybody is there for love. They sweat it into the air and the audience inhales it, then directs it back as enthusiasm, and the cycle repeats.




The Bonfire Of The Vanities, on the other hand, spent tens of millions of dollars, and while the internet will teach you that everything has its adherents, it's not inaccurate to say that nobody cared, particularly if we're rounding to the nearest Hollywood definition of "nobody." It wasn't for lack of attached talent that could deliver with audiences: De Palma had just made The Untouchables, Bruce Willis had just made Die Hard, and Tom Hanks was well on the way to becoming Tom Hanks. It wasn't enough. For all the cynical Hollywood efforts to reduce it to science, audience reaction remains a complex, mystifying dance, and the more it defies all efforts to predict it, the more it underscores that people do respond to artfulness – or at least to something more complex than calculation and deliberate provocation.

There's a painting at the Met called "Madame X," which the artist, John Singer Sargent, sold to the museum after hanging onto it for decades after painting it around 1883. It shows Madame Pierre Gautreau standing in a simple black gown with beaded straps, one of which Sargent originally showed slipping off her shoulder. The painting created, as the audio guide explained it, a scandal. So much so that her name isn't in the title, even though it's known. So much so that he eventually repainted the strap to show it back in place. The suggestion of her slipping strap, together with the expanse of her unadorned pale skin, was an embarrassment.

The actress Beth Broderick has a scene in The Bonfire Of The Vanities in which she pulls off her underwear and hops up onto the glass of a copy machine. It wasn't in the book; it was added for the movie, and at the time, Broderick was dating Brian De Palma. Salamon quotes her explaining that she didn't love playing scenes like this, but for pretty actresses, options were limited. "What you hope and bank on," she said, "is that with your training and your other qualities you'll get a chance to exercise them, if you do this first." As Salamon tells the story, Broderick filmed the sequence for nine hours and wound up "with bruised buttocks and thighs and feelings of humiliation quite unlike anything she'd experienced before in her professional life."

There was a great deal of painting done – for centuries – for wealthy people and for the church. There are works at the Met of pure playfulness and delicacy, but also of compromise and patronage. Even the ancient art reminds you that those who had beautiful things were often those with wealth – wealth with which they were not uncommonly buried, wealth they hoped would help smooth their way to the afterlife.

Even the museum itself is a constant reminder of the relationship between art and business, as walking from gallery to gallery becomes a dizzying sequence of tasteful but conspicuous reminders that you are enjoying this art courtesy of, let's say, Margaret (or John or Peter or William) P. (or S. or D. or L.) Stone (or Anderson or Franklin or Hughes). It's stunning to think just how much money and effort is devoted to making these beautiful things available: there are people whose entire jobs seem to center around making sure no one leans where they shouldn't. I sat and pondered the value of something like Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. It's not for sale. It's 12 feet tall and more than 20 feet wide — what are you going to do with it? Steal it? Fence it? Put it in your basement? What does it mean to assign a value to it at all?

The Thrilling Adventure Hour is part of a growing DIY cultural movement that capitalizes on the cheap distribution capabilities of the internet to make art with fewer resources, and thus fewer compromises. There are sponsors on the podcast, and there is certainly an exchange of money any time you're showing anything in a place like Town Hall. But much of the show's juice comes from social media, from the enthusiasts who are its evangelists. It's often said that live performances are a dialogue between performers and an audience, but that rarely feels more true than it does with a shaggy, funny, made-to-look-easy comedy showcase that will always give more to that live audience than it ever can to anyone else, simply because they're seeing it, and everyone else will only hear it. The mischievous recoveries from small flubs that enrapture the live audience will be snipped out; what remains will be 10 percent more perfect and 10 percent less wonderful. We are the only ones who will ever see it; it will be shared, but it won't be shared, not beyond this room, not exactly.

When you make Bonfire Of The Vanities within the Hollywood system – even within the Hollywood system of 1990, which was before the full effects of Batman could be felt but after it first rattled the earth the year before – you intend to share it with everyone. You intend to make as many people as possible eager to see it and as few people as possible reluctant to see it. De Palma is an artist who came from independent filmmaking and was tasked with making an end-of-year tentpole intended to be an Oscar contender.

The Met has a collection of 19^th century miniature portraits, mostly watercolor on ivory, about the size of snapshots you might frame on your desk at work. They're meticulously done and staggeringly detailed for their size. A few are curiously composed to show just part of a person – one eye, in one case. They were mementos, perhaps something to wear or pull from your pocket to look at someone you loved. They fell out of favor when photography came around. That they contained the touch of an artist, and that they represented the exercise of great skill, didn't keep them from being replaced by what was easier, more real, and eventually much, much cheaper. Not only are we not living in the first era to see improvements in technology create lost arts, but we are nowhere near it.

The Devil's Candy spends a good amount of time with second unit director Eric Schwab, who conceived and executed Bonfire's opening shot – singled out in some reviews as one of the film's few strengths – of New York from the vantage point of a gargoyle, as well as a much fussed-over shot of the Concorde landing against a view of the setting sun and the New York City skyline. The Concorde shot takes about eight seconds on screen; Schwab worked on it for months. It affected his career. A skeptic might tell you they'd probably do it all with computers now. You'd make the sky the way you wanted it, put the plane where you wanted it, and tinker with it the same way you would with a spreadsheet. Like the slicing and splicing of physical film that consumes the editors, exhausting yourself and blowing your budget to arrange real shots using real things the way Schwab was doing – getting the Concorde pilots to land in exactly the right spot at exactly the right instant – may eventually be a lost art just as much as the miniature portraits.

Part of what protects The Thrilling Adventure Hour is its very raggedness; its reliance on simple elements that have been part of art and amusement for thousands of years. Jokes, characters, scenes, music. It's like a folded sheet of very thin paper where you can see through it to the layers underneath — not just to old-time radio, but to Westerns, cartoons, vaudeville, the Globe Theater. It feels hearty because it's so simple. Things like this don't remain the way physical objects do, of course. We can look at a drum that accompanied dance in an ancient civilization, but we don't see the dance. Objects have a certain permanence that makes them beautiful; performance has a certain impermanence that makes it precious.

I stopped for a while in front of a 16^th century boxwood rosary bead from the Netherlands that's two inches across and is carved with elements so tiny they have to have been done with a magnifying glass, as the guide points out. Inside, the figures hold spears the breadth of a hair. While the bead is certainly beautiful, what resonates is the humanity that was poured into it. There is a profound sense of a person or people, precisely because it's such an impractical object, made for the purposes of devotion, but carrying the carver with it. It's impossible not to wonder about the hands that made it and the eyes that peered at it until it was done, and to wonder what that person would make of where the bead is now and of my eyes looking in.


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Andrew Burton/Getty ImagesKara Walker was barely out of art school when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, in 1997. Back then, her early work shocked audiences in part because her murals looked so charming from a distance. Black paper shadow portraits of colonial figures seemed to dance on white gallery walls; but lean in and you'd find your nose pressed up against images of slavery's horrors — mammies, masters, lynchings and sexual violence.


Visitors wait in line for the Kara Walker exhibit on May 10, opening day. The show was housed in a former Domino Sugar refinery. Inside, visitors described the building as "cathedral-like" and "creepy" and said it smelled like a bakery.

In other words, Walker is used to filling a room. But this spring she was asked to fill a warehouse — the abandoned Domino Sugar factory in New York. It's about to be leveled to make way for condos and offices, but before it goes, Walker was asked to use this cavernous, urban ruin for something special.
Walker took me on a tour of the show a day before it opened. The factory is covered in sugar — it almost looks like insulation or burned cotton candy.

"It's a little bit sticky in some areas ..." she said. "There's sugar caked up in the rafters."
I was so busy trying not to get molasses on my shoes that when I turned the corner, I was stunned. There in the middle of this dark hall was a bright, white sphinx. The effect is the opposite of those white-walled galleries; a dark space and a towering white sculpture made of — what else? — sugar.

"What we're seeing, for lack of a better term, is the head of a woman who has very African, black features," Walker explained. "She sits somewhere in between the kind of mammy figure of old and something a little bit more recognizable — recognizably human. ... [She has] very full lips; high cheekbones; eyes that have no eyes, [that] seem to be either looking out or closed; and a kerchief on her head. She's positioned with her arms flat out across the ground and large breasts that are staring at you."

Walker has dreamed up a "subtlety" — that's what sugar sculptures were called in medieval times. They were a luxury confectioners created for special occasions.


Kara Walker's A Subtlety stretches 75.5 feet long, 35.5 feet tall and 26 feet wide.

To understand where all this is going, you need look no further than Walker's teasingly long title for the show: "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant."

I know, it's a mouthful. But Walker has this wide smile and as she sweeps her hands around in broad gestures, white tides of sugar dust ripple at the edge of her feet — and she sells it.
"It was very fun and childlike to, you know, have your hands in a bucket full of sugar, or a 50-pound bag of sugar, throwing it out onto the floor," she says.


Walker's candy boy sculptures started melting fast in the non-climate-controlled factory, and the result looks a lot like blood.

She's doing what she does best: drawing you in with something sweet, something almost charming, before you realize you've admired something disturbing. In this case, that's the horror-riddled Caribbean slave trade that helped fuel the industrial gains of the 18th and 19th centuries; a slave trade built to profit from an insatiable Western market for refined sugar treats and rum.

"Basically, it was blood sugar," Walker says. "Like we talk about blood diamonds today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands."

She explains that to make the sugar, the cane had to be fed into large mills by hand. It was a dangerous process: Slaves lost hands, arms, limbs and lives.

"I've been kind of back and forth with my reverence for sugar," Walker says. "Like, how we're all kind of invested in its production without really realizing just what goes into it; how much chemistry goes into extracting whiteness from the sugar cane."

Walker went down a rabbit hole of sugar history, at one point stumbling on some black figurines online — the type of racial tchotchkes that turn up in a sea of mammy cookie jars. They were ceramic, brown-skinned boys carrying baskets. Those were the size of dolls, but Walker's are 5 feet high, some made entirely of molasses-colored candy. Fifteen of them are posed throughout the factory floor, leading the way to her sugar sphinx.
The boys are cute and apple-cheeked, but they're also kind of scary — some of the melted candy looks a lot like blood.



The candy sculptures have been disintegrating so fast that Walker began throwing pieces of the broken boys into the baskets of the ones that are still standing.

"I knew that the candy ones wouldn't last," Walker says. "That was part of the point was that they were going to be in this non-climate-controlled space, slowly melting away and disintegrating. But what's happened is we lost two of these guys in the last two days or so."

Losing those figures in service of the sugar is the slave trade in a nutshell.

"Also in a nutshell," Walker says, "and maybe a little bit hammer-over-the-head, is that some of the pieces of the broken boys I threw into the baskets of the unbroken boys."

OK, that's not so subtle, but it's also not unusual for Kara Walker. She's dressed in a shiny, oversize baseball jacket emblazoned with the gold face of King Tut on it. I ask her if at a certain point she worries about doing work that is seen as being just about race.

"I don't really see it as just about race," she says. "I mean, I think that my work is about trying to get a grasp on history. I mean, I guess it's just kind of a trap, in a way, that I decided to set my foot into early on, which is the trap of race — to say that it's about race when it's kind of about this larger concern about being."
I tell her it's almost impossible to talk about our history without talking about race. She replies: "There [are] scholarly conversations about race and then there's the kind of meaty, unresolved, mucky blood lust of talking about race where I always feel like the conversation is inconclusive."

Inconclusive, but for artist Kara Walker, ongoing.


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Rufus Reid has played with just about everybody in the mainstream jazz world. His latest project, Quiet Pride, is based on works by the late sculptor and civil rights activist Elizabeth Catlett.

Jimmy Katz/Courtesy of the artist
Bassist and composer Rufus Reid has been playing jazz for half a century. He's worked with just about everyone, from saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Stan Getz to singer Nancy Wilson and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. He's written a book on bass method and a three-movement work for symphony orchestra.

His latest project takes him in yet another direction. It's called Quiet Pride, and in it, Reid tries to convey in sound the sculptures of the late African-American artist and civil rights activist Elizabeth Catlett.

Reid says he chose five of Catlett's sculptures from a book of her work because they jumped out at him. Though he did not keep pictures of them on the piano for inspiration while he was composing, he remembers each one vividly. Take Catlett's 1981 work "Glory," a bronze bust of a woman's head, for example.

"There's angst in the face, there's power in the face, there's maybe some anger in the face — and yet composure in the face," Reid says.



Elizabeth Calett's Glory (1981).

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So: How do you capture that in music?
"You would take maybe something that was fast, something that was angular harmonically, skips in intervals that make you feel uneasy hearing them," he says. "It's not tangible, but I think there's a feeling."

To get his vision across, Reid showed his musicians pictures of Catlett's work. Tanya Darby plays lead trumpet in the ensemble; she says that as a black woman, it was important to be involved in a project honoring another woman of color, whose work radiates passion.

"It was special to me," Darby says, "because, seeing the artwork, you can kind of follow the lineage of African-American history."
Darby says the musicians played differently after they saw Catlett's work.
"All the black-and-white notes that you see on the page, all of a sudden that starts to turn into a lyric, as opposed to just playing notes," she says. "It turns into wanting to tell a story with what's on the page."
Percussionist Francisco Mora Catlett is one of the sculptor's three sons; he says his mother's work speaks to him.

"The expression of her work, especially women, is the beauty of black women — not the stereotype beauty of black women from the cover of a magazine or something like that, but the inherent beauty and the strength and the power of black women," he says. "That's what she found, also, in the Mexican woman — and on a broader scale, the universal aspect, the power of ordinary people."

Elizabeth Catlett spent most of her adult life in Mexico after moving there in 1946 for a fellowship. The US government denied her a travel visa for nine years, declaring her an undesirable alien because she was a suspected communist. Though her work was shown in exhibitions around the world, it was another story in the country of her birth: "I, as an artist, a black woman artist, have been invisible in the art world for years," she told NPR in 2003.

Rufus Reid intends to change that: He has organized several programs at universities, including Louisiana State, that blend his music with her sculpture.

"We had two days of performance with the LSU Jazz Ensemble in the four- or five-hundred-seat hall, and upstairs on the fifth floor they had 17 pieces of Catlett's art on exhibit. It was incredible," he says.
Elizabeth Catlett had a chance to hear an early version of Reid's musical tribute before her death in 2012.
"What I was concerned about was just to get this music up to the level where I where I put her art," Reid says. With Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project, he thinks he's come close.

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In a letter, Mary Cassatt describes working on Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) with Edward Degas. An X-ray of the painting reveals brush strokes unlike Cassatt's regular strokes.

National Gallery of Art

In her novel I Always Loved You, author Robin Oliveira imagines a passionate scene between Edgar Degas — a French artist known for his paintings of dancers — and Mary Cassatt — an American painter known for her scenes of family life. The kiss in the novel is pure fiction, but then again, "nobody knows what goes on in their neighbor's house, let alone what happened between two artists 130 years ago," Oliveira says.



It's possible that Cassatt's use of unconventional materials inspired Degas' textured surface on Portrait after a Costume Ball (1879).

The Art Institute of Chicago
A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., explores the tumultuous, passionate, artistic relationship between the two artists.

"In many ways, [it] is a romance of two like minds who admired one another greatly, and who I believe completely relied on one another for artistic and emotional help," Oliveira says. "Their relationship is a sort of an elevated, intellectual love affair that tied them to one another for the rest of their lives after they met."
They left behind no diaries, no letters. National Gallery curator Kimberly A. Jones says it was a passionate but platonic aesthetic attraction. "There's no indication that there was anything romantic between the two of them," Jones says.

So what was the relationship between this American in Paris, and a Frenchman, 10 years her senior, who was known and respected in artistic circles?

"It was all about the art, and that kind of laser focus and 100 percent dedication to the art that they really shared," Jones says.

They met in 1877. At 33, Cassatt was studying painting in Paris. At 43, Degas' work was on view around town. "Even before she actually met him she recounts how she had seen one of his pastels in a storefront window and she pressed her nose up against it and was just dazzled by what he was able to do," Jones says. "She knew his art and was thinking this is the direction I should be going in. So he really did change her path."
Oliveira — who did a tremendous amount of research for her novel — says before the Degas dazzle, Cassatt had been trying to master a more traditional approach.



In At the Theater, Cassatt incorporates metallic paint with gouache and pastel.

Collection of Ann and Gordon Getty

"He helped her switch from the academic style of painting that she had been trying to learn — which was sort of the standard across Paris — and encouraged her along into the impressionist style, the impressionist brush stroke, the use of color and light. The subject matter changed."
Neither Degas nor Cassatt liked the term "impressionism"; to them it implied carelessness, haste. They called themselves "independents" and labored over their work. A year after meeting Degas, Cassatt made a painting that was a real break in her style.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair is full of Degas' influence. First of all, he brought the girl to Cassatt — she was the child of his friends. In a pretty dress, she sits slumped in a chair, hand behind her head and legs spread apart. She looks bored, exhausted and not at all dainty or proper. Other big blue chairs and a sofa are in the room — "like bumper cars," Jones says. A window in the corner may show Degas' direct influence.

In a letter written long after she made the work, Cassatt told her dealer that Degas came into her studio and worked on the painting with her. Looking for evidence, National Gallery conservator Ann Hoenigswald used X-rays, infrared imaging and magnification to study a diagonal — unusual in a Cassatt background — that builds across the canvas from that rear corner window.

"We looked at it, and indeed the strokes were a little bit different. They were these sharp, small, quick strokes that we weren't seeing anywhere else," Hoenigswald says.


Degas frequently painted and sketched Cassatt. Above, he captures her at the Louvre, in 1879-1880.

The Art Institute of Chicago

The brushwork of Degas, perhaps. Cassatt's influence on Degas can be seen in a painting with an unusual mixture of media — pastels, oils and metallic paint. Cassatt was the first to use metallic paint on canvas; ordinarily it was for decorating crafts. Jones believes Degas saw Cassatt's metallics and decided to try it himself.

They worked side by side at times, went to exhibitions together, and Degas often drew and painted Cassatt. A frequent image: Cassatt at the Louvre, painted from the rear — big hat, smart jacket, long skirt, tiny waist, her right hand and arm leaning on an umbrella as if it were a walking stick.

"You have this wonderful juxtaposition of the female curves of her body," Jones says. "The way he has her leaning plays off the swell of her hips and her waist. But you have that powerful arm — and it's this perfect balance of elegance and strength."

Confident and in control, Cassatt owns the space. Degas captured that image of Cassatt in pencil, pastel, prints and paint. Jones says Degas also captured Cassatt in the art he bought.

"He owned more works by Cassatt than [by] any other contemporary artist," she says. "More than Pissarro, Manet, Gauguin."

They remained friends all their lives, although they went their separate artistic ways in later years. Their interests and styles changed. Degas' eyesight failed, as did Cassatt's. But the intensity of their relationship — the early obsessions — shaped each of them, early on.

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Yellowstone serigraphs, circa 1939.

Courtesy of Doug Leen and the Interior Museum
If you've ever been to a national park and stopped off in the gift shop, you may have seen drawings of iconic park sights for sale as posters or post cards. The brightly colored print reproductions showcase the parks' impressive vistas, such as Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser and the Grand Canyon's overlooks.



Original Grand Teton serigraph, 1938.

Courtesy of Doug Leen and the Interior Museum
The originals of some of those prints are currently on display in an exhibit called "Posterity" at the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. Curator Tracy Baetz explains that the silk screen printed posters — known as serigraph — were done by Works Progress Administration artists for the National Park Service from 1938 to 1941.

"There were 14 original designs; we have six of those originals here," Baetz says. There may have been 1,400 or so originals, but only about 40 are known to survive.

"The first one that they produced was this sort of experimental one in 1938 for the Grand Teton National Park," she says. The poster reads: "Meet the Ranger Naturalist at Jenny Lake Museum" and shows a steep alpine landscape, clear waters and blue skies.

Not much is known about the original artists except that they worked at a Park Service office in Berkeley, Calif. The project ended with the onset of World War II and the posters were all but forgotten until the day a seasonal park ranger named Doug Leen came across one at the Grand Teton National Park.

"We were cleaning out an old shed just nearby and I stumbled on this poster hanging up in this barn literally covered with dust," Leen says. "And we were going to take everything up to the dump, and I looked at this poster that I'd found and realized it was a screen print, so there must be others. And certainly it was a beautiful design and well done and I thought, 'Well perhaps [it's] something I shouldn't put in the burn pile,' so I took it home and thumb-tacked it up on to the wall."



Grand Canyon serigraph reproduction.

Courtesy of Doug Leen and the Interior Museum

Leen later became a dentist and hung the poster in his Seattle office, all the while wondering whether there were others like it out there. With a little research, he discovered the Park Service archives had black and white photos of posters for other parks. He hired an artist, Brian Maebius, to replicate them, guessing at the original colors, and the reproductions were a hit. Soon, other parks approached him to design retro-styled posters. Eventually, Leen says, the company he started, Ranger Doug's Enterprises, became bigger than his dental practice:

"I've kind of tried to put myself back and, you know, set my watch back to 1938 and try to get inside the heads of these artists," Leen says. "Actually, my biggest compliment is when an art historian calls me up and says, 'Were these printed in the '30s or is this something you've made up? Which is it?' And I've had that happen several times and it's kind of flattering, in a way, because we've hit the mark by going back in time."

At the Interior Museum, curator Tracy Baetz says it's fun to watch visitors admire the old and new posters. "People bring so much of their own personal history with the parks to it and it's not uncommon to hear people come in and point to one and say, 'Oh, that's where we got engaged,' or, 'That's where we had that great family vacation.' "
The exhibit will be on view until spring 2015.



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Joan Brown's 1970 Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat is the first image you see at the National Portrait Gallery's "Face Value" exhibit.

Estate of Joan Brown/Courtesy of George Adams Gallery/National Portrait Gallery
"Walk softly and carry a big fish" was one curator's take on a humorous self-portrait of a tall woman, holding an enormous yellow fish and a paintbrush, with a black cat lurking below.

Bay area artist Joan Brown's image is the first thing you see at a new National Portrait Gallery exhibition called "Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction." Brown's painting, like so many in this Smithsonian show, is powerful and funny.

In a nearby sculpture, Hugh Hefner — the Playboy poo-bah — holds a painted pipe in one hand, and has another pipe — a real one — poking out of his painted mouth. (You can see this 1966 work by Marisol Escobar here.)

Escobar is "always using humor and wit to unsettle us, to take all of our expectations of what a sculptor should be and what a portrait should be and messing with them," says curator Wendy Wick Reaves. "So when she's asked why there are two pipes, she says, 'Well Hugh Hefner has too much of everything.'"

Hefner claimed his life's work was to overthrow American prudery and puritanism with his bosomy bunnies and skimpily clad centerfold cuties. Escobar sculpts him in a comfy red cardigan — a kind of Mr. Rogers sweater. The homey outfit upends our expectations of what a sex merchant would sport.
The flip-side of Hefner is Sylvia Sleigh's 1973 painting The Turkish Bath. Six men sit together — naked, exposed, and looking a bit stoned.

"She is turning the idea of the male artist and the male gaze — which was often trained on women in an objectified way in the past — on its ear," says Brandon Fortune, Chief Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. "She's flipping everything around in a feminist way. ... This is one of the strongest feminist paintings I've ever seen."

Think of all the female nudes you've seen on museum walls. Sleigh's Turkish Bath puts men in similar poses — not worshipping them, the way male artists adore the women they paint, but poking fun at the males.


In her 1973 work, The Turkish Bath, Sylvia Sleigh challenged the way male artists painted female nudes.

Courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Sleigh was a rebel, as are many of the artists in this show. Curator Wendy Wick Reaves says there was an art revolution underway in the 1950s and '60s. Abstract was the word de jour, but that didn't faze these painters.

"Critics like Clement Greenberg basically said that you can't be a progressive artist and paint the figure," Reaves explains. "And so they decided that was exactly what they were going to do, but they're doing it in a completely different way. And I think the fact that it was so unfashionable at the time really pushed them to reinvent, to reinvigorate the whole concept of how you portray the individual."

The results are on display at this Face Value show — these knock-out portraits make you smile, make you look and make you puzzle. Take, for example, Philip Pearlstein's 1968 portrait of two artists — painter Al Held and sculptor Sylvia Stone, who were husband and wife. Curator Brandon Fortune says they were friends of Pearlstein's.


Philip Pearlstein "poses his people like objects," says curator Brandon Fortune. In 1968 he painted a portrait of two friends — married artist couple Al Held and Sylvia Stone.

Photograph courtesy of the artist and Betty Cuningham Gallery/Philip Pearlstein


Andy Warhol was generous when he painted this glamorous portrait of artist Jamie Wyeth in 1976.

Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art

A man walks past Emile Nolde's "Das Leben Christi" (1911/12, Life of Christ) at the Städel Museum.

Arne Dedert/AFP/Getty Images

I visited the Emil Nolde (1867-1956) exhibition now up at Frankfurt's Städel Museum this past week. Nolde's paintings are small, sketch-like, personal, and serious. They are authentic: one person doing what he obviously needs to do and making no bones about the fact.

I was moved by his religious paintings — almost comic-book like depictions of events in the life of Christ. So direct and explicit in their illustrative power that I found found myself excited by the religious feeling they expressed.

I had never seen most of this work before. I took delight in seascapes painted early on in his career. They were reduced, in the way of Turner, or Rothko, to a fog-like non-structure, a kind of blankness, a blankness that still did the work of picturing.

And so they invite us to ask: what is a picture, anyway? And how do we behold the beach and the sea and the sky when we behold them, as we do, in a picture? These paintings don't just show the sea; they put that showing on display, right next to the evident signs of the artist's brushwork, his choices, the manifest fact that what we see, really, is the product not so much of human labor, as it is of something more like result of a kind of compulsion.

I had that sense at the Städel looking at Nolde's work.

I had a similar feeling at the David Hockney show that was recently up at the de Young museum in San Francisco. The painter as a doodler, the one who just can't stop the pencil, or pen, or brush, or, in the case of Hockney, the thumbs and fingers on his iPad or iPhone.

Not that Nolde's pictures are not composed.

One striking painting depicts a woman performing on a stage. It is an erotic act and she is exposing herself sexually before an audience of staring men. We see the captivated faces of the men; but we don't see what they see. And neither does Nolde. He's on the sidelines, watching people watching her. This picture, which is downright enthralling, directs our attention to watching itself, to wanting to watch, and to the detachment, or even isolation, that sometimes accompanies not only watching, but making paintings, too.

Nolde's work was banned during the Nazi period. In the eyes of fascist authorities, his work was was deemed inferior. His paintings were removed from museums and many of his paintings were included in the notorious "Degenerate Art" exhibiton of 1937. He was prohibited from painting, even in private.

It is painful to stand before some of the very paintings on display at the Städel that Joseph Goebbels and his cohort put on display as examples of degenerate art. Because of the personal nature of this work, the
establishment rejection of the work feels particularly cruel.

But I am glad I didn't know Nolde had been a rather enthusiastic member of the National Socialists himself when I visited the Städel. It might have distracted me from the pictures.

He seems to have been a person of dark, racialist ideas. Of German and Danish extraction, he adopted the name Nolde. It was the name of the town near where he grew up. The exhibition puts this rather vulnerable, objectionable and even pathetic side of the artist very much on view.


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American Art. Above, Eleanor Dickinson sketches model Cory Weldon.

Eleanor Dickinson papers/Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
An artist friend, Virginia Isbell once asked me to pose for a quick pastel sketch in her Paris studio. I was flattered. And amazed to be on that side of a work of art. Never have I been looked at so intently, except by a parent or a lover. I was being fixed, examined, absorbed. And, for all the intensity, there was absolutely nothing personal about it.


Students participate in a figure drawing class at the Stone City Colony and Art School in 1933.

Edward Beatty Rowan papers/Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
I was an object to be replicated. Her eyes went from my face to her sketchpad, my nose, my eyes, mouth, chin — sketched in pastel in 20 minutes. It was fun. But it felt as if something had been taken from me.

I thought of Matisse and his lifetime of models. In her novel The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead, Alison Leslie Gold portrays the painter reminiscing about his models: Lisette Lowengard, Helene Galitzine, Greta Prozor. Gold says to do their jobs, those women must master the rigors of a pose. They must hold stock still "for hours and hours and hours," she says. "Often in a cold studio. This is a testament to the models who stood there and didn't shiver and try to control their goosebumps."

You can't see the goosebumps, but there are several photographs of Matisse and his models in an exhibit at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, which explores the relationship between artists and their models. The show is culled from artists' papers and records. The women are stark naked. Matisse — ever the gentleman — sits inches away, in a suit, vest and hat. He looks warm.

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