History

February 9, 1955. "PS 122 playground, Kingsbridge Road and Bailey Avenue, the Bronx, New York. Brown & Blauwelt, engineers." Subcontractors: Cheerless & Grimm. Large-format negative by Samuel H. Gottscho. View full size.

When my parents moved into a care-home earlier this year, they asked me to: take the art work from their walls, take the music and books from their bookshelves and sell everything else. I recognised all their paintings and drawings, except for their beloved Noel Coun­ih­ans.Noel Counihan (1913–86) was born in this city, Melbourne. He event­ually studied part-time under Charles Wheeler at Melbourne’s famous National Gallery of Victoria Art School in the early 1930s, where he met social realist artists for the first time. In the middle of the world’s worst depression, what a joy that must have been. Social realism, the belief that art should reflect the realities of society under capitalism, could not have suited young Counihan better.While still in his teens, Counihan joined the Communist Party, helped found the Workers Art Guild, created artistic banners and began printmaking, producing linocuts and lithographs for the party’s magazines and pamphlets.He wanted to be known as a pencil portrait­ist and press cartoonist. I presume it was because these were the very media that enabled him to create art that had a social purpose and could be used to expose social inequalities. Pastels, water colours and even oils might have been too soft and not gritty enough to depict people living in the slums.During the Great Depression Counihan participated in the Free Speech fights in Brunswick, organised by the Communist Party in response to a Victorian state government law banning subversive gatherings. Doz­ens of members of the Unemployed Workers Movement were arrested, and unemployed meetings in Sydney Road Brunswick were broken up by the police. Counihan, artist and brawler on behalf of the starving unemployed, became the stuff of legends.In the 1930s Counihan worked as a cartoonist for famous and not so famous pub­lic­ations, including The Bulletin and the Communist Party's paper, the Guardian.Here peace begins. 1950linocut with ink, 21 x 30 cmNational Gallery of Australia Even during the terrible war years, it was another social realist artist, Yosl Bergner, who encouraged and cajoled Counihan to continue. And to paint, rather than draw! A founder and member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, Coun­ih­an initiated its very successful anti-Fascist exhibition that was held in Melbourne right in the middle of the war, 1942. His work The New Order, one of the few paintings that he preserved from the show, was influenced by one of the American social realist artist William Gropper. And also influenced by the drab colours, sagging figures and ill fitted clothing as painted by Yosl Bergner. The Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition had works from artists who all saw their work as having an important social and political role in documenting the suffering of the oppressed. Some young artists participated in the exhibition after they became friends with Noel Counihan and other social realist painters and writers. They clearly shared Bergner’s social conscience.In The New Order 1942, Counihan wanted to be as direct as he could be with his anti-fascist politics. Both The New Order and Miners working in Wet Conditions (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) were shown in the Australia at War show, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1945. Miners won first prize in this major exhibition.Canberra's National Gallery described the New Order thus: He believed that art should have a social mission and that it could be used as a tool to expose political corruption, the hypocrisy of the church and the inequal­ities in society. The faceless Nazi soldiers are shown from behind, as anonymous symbols of oppression. They are symbols for all military oppressors. The victims, an elderly bearded peasant who has been shot and a decapitated woman, are symbolic of the civilian human sacrifice throughout the ages. Counihan’s comment has a timeless and universal significanceLater Counihan helped organise an Artists' Unity Congress, receiving awards for his painting

1960. "Airline hostesses Sue Pharris, Sharon Moore and two other women watching the Jack LaLanne physical fitness show and exercising." From photos taken to illustrate the Look magazine article "TV's Nature Boy." Among this picture's mid-century markers: Polka-dots, a pole lamp, rabbit ears, flip-flops, sliding glass doors. View full size.

November 1936. "Depression refugee family from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Arrived in California June 1936. Mother and three half-grown children; no father." Photo by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.

The Past is Present posting for April 8th about timing told of a volume of a periodical that got away from AAS despite the urging of Marcus McCorison.  This was the National Magazine published in Richmond, Virginia and Washington D.C. in 1799-1800 by James Lyon.  He was a Vermont printer who fled the state.  Mr. [...]

Title: Royal Mistress Author: Anne Easter Smith Publisher: Touchstone Publication Date: May 7, 2013 How Acquired: Through Net Galley What it’s About: Jane Lambert, the quick-witted and alluring daughter of a silk merchant, is twenty-two and still unmarried. When Jane’s father finally finds her a match, she’s married off to the dull, older silk merchant William Shore. Marriage doesn’t stop Jane from flirtation, however, and when the king’s chamberlain, Will Hastings, comes to her husband’s shop, Will knows King Edward will find her irresistible. Edward IV has everything: power, majestic bearing, superior military leadership, a sensual nature, and charisma. And with Jane as his mistress, he also finds true happiness. But when his hedonistic tendencies get in the way of being the strong leader England needs, his life, as well as those of Jane and Will Hastings, hangs in the balance. Jane must rely on her talents to survive as the new monarch, Richard III, bent on reforming his brother’s licentious court, ascends the throne. My thoughts: I’ve had a lovely couple of days spending time with my favorite Plantagenets thanks to Anne Easter Smith. I read and reviewed Anne’s last book QUEEN BY RIGHT about Cecily Neville, the Duchess of York, which I enjoyed, so I was eager to dive back into this world that I have loved ever since I saw THE LION IN WINTER in high school. Jane Shore, Edward IV’s last mistress, was someone that I had heard of, but knew very little. At first when I started reading the novel, I thought that it was just going to be another harlot with a heart of gold story. You know, “she sleeps with the King, but she’s a really good person who helps the poor,” type of thing but Jane’s story is much deeper than that. When the book opens, Jane Lambert is on the verge of spinsterhood. She’s twenty-two and still unmarried which was highly unusual at that time. Her father is bit of an asshole; he adores her younger sister Isabel but treats Jane like she’s a nuisance. He expects absolute obedience, and prefers women to be seen and not heard. Jane however is quick-witted, intelligent and not afraid to speak her mind. There’s a telling scene with her mother Amy who shares her story with Jane, that once she too was outspoken and feisty, until basically Jane’s father beat it out of her. She tells Jane that one day she too will learn to keep silent. How awful but also probably how common was that in the 15th century when educating a woman was seen as a waste of time. The fact that Jane can actually read makes her something of an anomaly. She’s also gorgeous, petite with an hour-glass figure, and wavy blonde hair. She’s the type of woman who men gape at on the street, while their women glare. It’s not Jane’s fault that she’s a pocket Venus but most men don’t see much past her pretty face. Jane is also a bit of a romantic, she wants true love which she thinks she’s found with Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset until she discovers that he’s not only married, but that he’s lied about who he is. Since she can’t marry the man that she loves, Jane settles for marriage to William Shore, a much older silk merchant who is eager to get in good with her father. She’s determined to make her marriage work but William won’t cooperate, or more to the point, a certain part of Will’s anatomy won’t cooperate. As I read further into the book, I experienced a range of emotions towards Jane. I liked her enormously for her sense of fun, her optimism, independent, and most of all her loyalty to her friends, her King, and Will Hastings. When she has the opportunity to help her friend Sophie as well as others in her community, she does. On the other hand, Jane was also naïve, stubborn, and headstrong. The novel details the last few years of Edward IV’s reign as well as the first two years of Richard III’s reign. Although the book is

Installation view of Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (April 14–August 5, 2013). Photo by Jason Mandella. © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art There are people sighing in the Mouse Museum. They are moaning, clucking, and cooing, too.(1) There’s no telling which objects elicit which murmured reaction, since part of Mouse Museum’s potency derives from affinities between things, and the repetition and variation among them. For those who haven’t seen it, Claes Oldenburg’s “Museum” is as it sounds: an exhibition space shaped in Mickey Mouse’s image (well, a geometric distillation of his iconic head, to be precise). Inside, an illuminated vitrine—filled with souvenirs, gadgets, and studies for sculptures—encircles the space. Heavy with faux food (pizza, hot dogs, ice cream sundaes), this display gives the impression of an aquarium made for a spoiled animal, a back-alley palace for a hungry mouse. But to scurry through the Museum would be to miss out on many of the subtleties within its densely ganged configurations. Indeed, the insights and pleasures on offer are different, and more gritty, than those of street food, nostalgia, or finger-pointing cultural critique. For me, it initially offered up a sensation similar to what I feel when I pack a lunch for my young cousins—a Tetris board of sandwich, granola bar, string cheese, goldfish crackers. Maybe even pudding. Placed just so, these industrially processed foods align in florid combinations of signification and absurdity. So too in the Mouse Museum: one gets the sense of a deliberate human—one exercising a brilliant eye for color and for the particularities of form—creating a civilization of things. Certain tableaux amount to practical jokes and visual puns: plastic bananas next to dildos, two ruddy pig masks ogling a half-eaten plastic Oreo keychain, a stack of bread made of sponge. Other combinations encourage more nuanced readings. Take the two porcelain stamp-moisteners glistening behind a wax hamburger. These moisteners were made to replace tongues as the workplace means for wetting the glue on the back of a postage stamp. In this case, they seem to be salivating at the greasy provocation of the burger/candle. They thus accentuate the very qualities of a tongue (bodily, carnal, erotic) that they were presumably manufactured to avoid. In the same square foot of space sits a pair of pears, a pack of cigarettes, and strange little booties. In the foreground rests a hunk of something rose-colored and meaty. Juxtaposed with this lump, the burger becomes baroque. It suddenly seems just as likely that the stamp-moisteners are licking their lips at the fleshier object. Here and throughout the Mouse Museum, what’s so challenging to summarize, and what’s responsible for so much pleasure, is this torqued and sustained cleavage between function and form. The objects seem willfully tangled between categories. In this way, the installation stays connected—in an intensified form—to certain familiar delights: figurative candy (Coke bottles, Swedish Fish); wearing a stem of cherries as a dangly earring; honey bears. Over time, these things have a tendency to get neutralized, their forms so taken for granted that they slip back into the realm of function. In contrast, the Mouse Museum’s objects do not settle down. This is Oldenburg’s currency: where expert play with form, scale, color, culture, incongruity, and category mistake makes room for new visibilities—for an expanded and fluctuating syntax. (1) By and large, these utterances are whispered, audible only if you stand quite close (which, mind you, isn’t too difficult to pull off given the popularity of the compact display). The looped soundtrack of the artist washing rubber toys seems to play in harmony.

February 1937. "Southern Illinois character. McLeansboro, Illinois." Photo by Russell Lee for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.

Brian Sewell laments the state of art history teaching today, including the neglect of Byzantine studies; though he ends on a hopeful note-  on THES site. Yes, an art history education should open up great cultural possibilities whatever your station in life. “If, on graduating, the student of art history has grasped enough of the discipline to form a chronological frame for further observation and experience, then he can add to it. No matter whether he becomes a monied banker or digs tunnels for the new fast train to Birmingham, his appreciation of paintings in the Louvre and the Prado (or even Birmingham), the architecture of Amsterdam and Angkor Wat, and the sculpture of Michelangelo and pre-Columbian Mexico, will be enriched by what he sees and reads and hears. No other compulsory subject (and certainly not mathematics) pursued in our adolescent years could so swiftly, broadly and ubiquitously elevate our cultural lives.” Am I glad that I recently taught some Byzantine art, at least its influence on the early renaissance, like the painter Berlinghieri shown here . I can’t run to Pre-Columbian, but I will be doing some Egyptian and Etruscan art on my Vatican blog. Watch this space.  

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