Figure 10.1. Visitor to Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2019, Photograph by Jeffrey K. Smith.
Figure 10.2. The Shoe Shop, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, 1911. The Art Institute of Chicago. Permission for use granted by the Elizabeth Sparhawk Jones estate.
Conclusion
In the early 1900s, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones was a phenomenon in the world of American art, and justifiably so. Figure 10.2, The Shoe Shop, exemplifies the vibrant brushwork, engaging composition, and sense of openness and lightness that led her to winning awards and rave reviews in major newspapers and art journals. Her work was a chronicle and commentary on the lives of women, particularly young women, at the turn of the century in America. She was a rising star, her work reminiscent of Manet, Cassatt, Degas, and Tissot.
Figure 10.3. The Dreamer, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, c. 1942. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.
Watercolor on linen attached to board, 24½ × 28½ in. (62.2 × 72.4 cm). Bequest of John L. Sexton, 1955 © Elizabeth Sparhawk Jones Estate
And then it all turned to custard. Her emotional stability faltered, and in 1913, she had herself committed to a mental institution where she would spend three years, and then an additional twelve years in recovery, abandoning her painting. But she made a comeback, returning to work as a remarkably reinvented artist. Her work was still striking, but it is clear from figure 10.3, that it had changed dramatically.
What happened to this artist? What demons were there in her life? I happened upon the painting in figure 10.2 while visiting the Art Institute of Chicago. I had never seen the work before nor heard of the artist, but the bright and airy shoe shop, with saleswomen in crisp shirtwaists and Gibson-girl hairdos, and shoppers with elaborate hats getting new shoes was captivating. The painting is rapidly and confidently done, filled with lace, frills, and sunshine. I needed to know more. And in exploring her life, I came across The Dreamer, equally confident in execution, but filled with evil spirits, flying monsters, and skeletons. Could this really be the same artist? Is she the woman on the rock in The Dreamer? Are these her demons? As mentioned, she was once a prodigy, and then a tragedy, and finally she reincarnated into a new and distinctive artist. Her life and work have been, just within the past decade or so, discovered again, and happily so.1
Discovering Art and Artists: Nurturing an Open and Receptive Mind
This is the magic of art. Around any corner of an art museum might lie a work of art that is breathtaking. It might be the colors, the composition, the personal or political statement underlying the work, or an enigmatic smile on the face of a woman from five centuries ago. Art allows us to stand directly in the presence of genius, in the same relation to a work of art as the artist who made it. In figure 10.1 at the opening of the chapter, we see a visitor to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City who is captivated enough by a Max Ernst painting to capture it on her cell phone. Ernst would have contemplated whether the work was completed from roughly the same perspective.
The personal discovery of an artist might be someone whose work is well-known and universally revered, or someone obscure and unknown, and that artist’s life might be scandalous, immoral, or outrageous, or it might be one of modesty, kindness, and generosity. Viewing art is a process of exploration: of museums, of websites with art reproductions, or of galleries and exhibitions with works of art for sale, but it is also a personal exploration. When you explore art, you also explore yourself. What is it that you react to? What holds your attention, causes you to want to look longer and learn about the art you are viewing, and the artist who made it? How does the work make you feel and what does it make you think?
In over thirty years of museum researching, my wife and I have come to some general recommendations about viewing art. The first is to have a healthy level of trust in people who put together exhibitions for a living. Even when an initial trip through an exhibition is less than enthralling, it can be useful to give the works a second chance. Try to be open to what is new and different to you. The second recommendation concerns learning about art and appreciating it at the same time. Making sense of art is a highly cognitive endeavor, and it can get in the way of letting yourself go and appreciating what you are encountering. But both sense-making and appreciating are worthwhile. One does not take precedence over the other, but they are hard to do simultaneously, and it is important not to get frustrated when trying to do so. The third recommendation is to take your time. Our research shows that even masterpieces get less than a thirty second look from a typical visitor, and rarely does anyone in a museum spend as much as five minutes looking at a work. But there are things to see in that third or fourth, or tenth minute that aren’t apparent to the eye on a thirty-second viewing. So for at least a couple of works in a museum visit, spend some extra time. The fourth recommendation is that your appreciation will grow with your knowledge about a work and the artist who made it, but you can thoroughly enjoy a work of art the first time you see it. In fact, there is something special about first-time viewing.
Creativity and Art Viewing
Viewing art is essentially a creative process.2 What you see depends not only on what appears before you, but also on what you choose to see and how you choose to see it. At first, you can simply take a work in. Let it wash over you and see how you are reacting to it. If you think it has something to offer, something that has captured your attention, you can go into a second sense of viewing. This is where you become a more active viewer, spending more time on the work. In doing so, you invent a meaning that is yours alone, that you can savor, or share if you are viewing with someone else. And a great work of art will invite you back time and again, allowing you to discover something new about the work, or about yourself, each time you visit.
Figure 10.4, Paris Street; Rainy Day, is a stunning painting by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. It is a very large work, seven feet high and nine feet wide. When first seen, it is truly impressive and attractive. It puts you into a cold, wet Parisian day of the nineteenth century. But then where do you go from there? Does this work strike a chord for you? Are you scanning it to see what all Caillebotte has included? For me, I am intrigued by the idea that the travelers on this street seem to be almost “dotted in” in various places. They don’t seem “in” the scene as much as “on” it. And they all seem to have purchased their umbrellas from the same store. As many times as I look at this work, I am always drawn to the water on the paving stones. I love looking at the reflection of water in streets, and in my estimation, Caillebotte has captured that brilliantly. I want to see that place on a rainy day. I want to visit the shops, have a coffee to warm up, and maybe splash in a puddle.
And Caillebotte? Fascinating gentleman. This isn’t his only brilliant work. Independently wealthy, he didn’t have to sell his works, and in his thirties, he began to focus more on gardening and building racing yachts. He also supported other Impressionists by buying their works and organizing exhibitions for them. He was very much interested in photography, and I wonder if he painted this in part, from a photo. Note that there are two people in the distance behind the main gentleman’s umbrella stem. That looks to me like a result of a happenstance from a photo. Dying of a heart condition at forty-five, Caillebotte was only twenty-nine when he painted Paris Street; Rainy Day.
Figure 10.4. Paris Street; Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago.
Scoundrels, Cads, and the Art That They Create
The lives of nine artists are presented in this book (counting Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner separately), and for all but Artemisia Gentileschi, it is reasonable to describe them as scoundrels and cads. So, at the end of the day and at the end of the book, what are we to make of these people? How should we consider their art? Do we enjoy it, find deep personal meaning in it, or reject it because of the nature of the lives of the people who made it? This is currently a very hot topic in the popular press, but it is not a simple one upon which to make a judgment.
To start, there is no excusing bad behavior. To be sure, most of our scoundrels lived in unsettled, turbulent times, and most of them lost their fathers (or their fathers left their lives) when they were young. But that doesn’t justify philandering, brawling, bigotry, or murder. Nor can we excuse their behavior by saying, “Well, they are artists, so we have to treat them differently.”
Where does that leave us? Because I am a psychologist and not a philosopher, I tend to focus on questions of what people actually do as opposed to what they ought to do. So let me address the “actually” question first. I think for the most part, that people looking at art do not know what offenses the artist made in his life, or if they have a general sense of them, they do not enter into their viewing. This seems to be true with regard to famous people in all walks of life. We don’t think of Henry Ford’s political views when we turn on the ignition of our cars or Thomas Edison’s business practices when we turn on a lightbulb. Charles Lindbergh, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Wagner, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway—all had dark sides. I think that when we consider their contributions to society, we do so independently of personal failings. We can truly enjoy light in the darkness and still think Edison the man was not so great. Dickens inspires us today to fight for social justice even if he was a terrible husband. We separate the good from the bad.
So that is what I think we actually do, but should we? The ought question is much tougher. To begin, I would separate living artists (and scientists, politicians, etc.) from those of the past. Living artists are profiting from their popularity, and if their behavior offends you, by all means, reject them. But here is what I think about artists from earlier times. Simply put, “Take the good. There is nothing to be done about the bad.” The key here is that these people are dead. They wouldn’t have cared about your censure when they were alive, and they certainly don’t now. This work of art is no longer theirs; they are gone. It is now ours. If you wish to focus on the bad deeds of people, their objectionable opinions and attitudes, and blend that into your viewing mix, it is your choice. If you believe that their lives disqualify them from your viewing, by all means, go on to the next artist.
I always take what I know into account when viewing. For example, when I look at Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (figure 2.2), I always put it in context. I know that what Caravaggio has done here is to put his murder in our face, in the guise of a religious scene. I know that this painting is an altarpiece in a religious chapel today. I know that he did more than half a dozen other paintings of John the Baptist, some of them erotic in nature. That is the context for viewing for me, and there is no escaping it. But, and this is my point, there is no need to escape it. This is a murderer depicting a murder, symbolically, the one he committed. The mix of his personal malevolence with his artistic magnificence sets my head spinning.
A Final Artist
There are so many great artists to discover; here is one more with a fascinating life story. Rosa Bonheur was a nineteenth- century French painter and sculptor of animals. Her father was a painter, and her three siblings all became painters or sculptors of animals. Since she had done poorly in school and failed at an initial attempt to become a seam-stress, her father decided to try to train her to become an artist. I can imagine her father thinking, “She can’t sew; maybe she can paint.” And she could. At age twenty- seven, she painted the dazzling Ploughing in the Nivernais (figure 10.5); such a bright and airy day, such massive oxen! In her personal life, Bonheur was as open a lesbian as one could safely be in the France of her time. Her fierce independence and uncompromising nature broke ground for female artists who followed her. She had great success as a painter during her lifetime, but recent scholarship has been less kind to her, arguing that her work did not develop, becoming repetitive and mundane.3 But that does not mean that we cannot revel in Ploughing in the Nivernais. Note that there are men in this painting, but they are trivial. Bonheur had little use for men in general. “The fact is, in the way of males, I like only the bulls I paint.”4 (I’ll bet it sounds even more derogatory in French.)
Figure 10.5. Ploughing in the Nivernais, Rosa Bonheur, 1849. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
The Coda
Part of what I wanted to accomplish with this book was to introduce readers to a rogues’ gallery of artists past. I hope that you have been inspired to look more deeply into the lives of these fascinating people, to see what else they have painted, and to seek out their work in museums. But even more than that, I hope that you will search for your own set of artful dodgers (and nondodgers), whose work is moving, beautiful, spectacular, thought- provoking, startling, or endearing. We can each take a lifetime to discover the art that illuminates and enlightens our lives.