President Elect by James Rosenquist

Standing on a narrow scaffold high above Times Square, James Rosenquist had a unique perspective on popular culture. He’d recently left his little home on the prairie to study at the prestigious Art Students League in New York City. Working as a billboard painter to earn money, he learned from a less illustrious group. New York sign artists taught him how to paint large murals from small photographs. They taught him about color, perspective, and how to paint perfect bottles of Schenley Whiskey over and over again. Odd training for a fine artist, but perfect for one fascinated by popular culture. After a fellow sign painter fell to his death, Rosenquist quit his job and started creating fine art on billboard-sized canvases.

When Rosenquist first arrived in New York he was ill equipped for the consumerism of the city. He was a poor kid whose parents wandered from North Dakota to Minnesota looking for work fixing airplanes. While in college he painted signs to earn money for tuition and food. Now, he was painting billboards promoting products and places he couldn’t afford. Being penniless in a rich land gave him a different perspective on consumer-driven popular culture. He was part of it and outside it at the same time.

Most of the leading Pop artists shared his perspective. Warhol was from working class Pittsburgh and first prospered as an advertising illustrator. Jasper Johns became an artist because “I thought it would mean I’d be in a different situation than the one I was in.”

This ragtag collection of starving artists looked at America through wry eyes, as much fans of celebrity and suburbia as social commentators. To them popular culture was art. You just had to change your perspective to see it.

Read more about Pop Art, HERE

“President Elect” was painted in 1960-61 and finished in 1964 by James Rosenquist. It is currently owned and displayed by Centre Georges Pompidou, Musee National d’Art Modern/Centre de Creation Industrielle in Paris.

(Top) Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp

(Bottom) Salome Dancer by Robert Henri

On the evening of February 14, 1913 America tried on something new and liked the way it looked. The 69th Regiment Armory stood on Lexington Ave. between East 25th and 26th Streets in New York. Here an odd collection of 24 artists turned the armory’s military arena into the world’s largest art gallery and filled it with the best modern art from America and Europe. They called it The International Exhibition of Modern Art. Its effect on American culture was so big that, in true Madonna fashion, it became known simply as “The Armory Show.” Its true nature was captured in the show’s pinecone logo copied from an American revolutionary flag.

On that night, 4,000 invited opening night guests saw the chasm between modern art in America and Europe. American modernist, Robert Henri painted an exotically clad woman as an exotically clad woman. Europe’s avant-garde master, Marcel Duchamp painted a nude walking down a staircase as motion.

And so two worlds collided.

Critics called Nude Descending a Staircase “an explosion in a shingle factory” and “Rude Descending a Staircase.” But, crowds in New York, Boston and Chicago, made it the breakout hit of the traveling exhibition. Modern artists in America took up the European’s challenge to capture a world beyond appearances.

Francis Picabia said it best: “Painting nature as she is is not art. It is mechanical genius.” ¹

As Walt Kuhn, one of the Armory Show organizers, wrote his wife, Vera, “Our list of European stuff stupefies everybody.”² 110 years later, it still does.

What is Modern Art? Find the answer HERE

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 was painted by Marcel Duchamp in 1912 and was thought to be inspired by the recent invention of stop-frame photography. It is in the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Salome Dancer was painted in 1909 by Robert Henri and is in the Permanent Collection of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

¹ ARTnews, artnews.com Nov. 18, 2016, “Francis Picabia, Art-World Jailer: Philip Pearlstein on ‘One of the Prime Movers of Modern Art,’ in 1970”

² Walt Kuhn letter to Vera Kuhn, Dec. 14, 1912 from the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art

Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight by Claude Monet, 1892

The Impressionists lived during a significant era of innovation. Telegraphs. Anesthesia. Morse Code. Sewing Machines. And more. All were discovered while the Impressionists innovative paintings were becoming more popular.

But one of the most interesting pieces of technology was the Beauvais Astr…

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Three Young Girls Sitting in the Grass by Jean-Auguste Renoir, c.1896-97

Can you imagine a date night with your spouse or significant other, where you got all dressed up for a festive trip to the city Morgue? What would you wear.

During the heyday of the Impressionists, morgue visits were all the rage. The Paris Morgue, itself, was designed with large gla…

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At the dusty intersection of traditional and modern art sat a Frenchman with daddy issues. One road led to his hidebound banker father, a wealthy man who tormented his son with expectations he become a banker or lawyer.

The other road led to Hortense Fiquet his lover, model, muse, mother of his only child, eventual wife and best kept secret. For 17 years Cézanne kept Hortense and son, Paul Jr., in a separate household, hidden from his family because his father didn’t think her a good match for his son. She was too high-maintenance. Too untraditional. Too common. Too modern art.

By the time Cézanne and Hortense did marry in 1886, his father was well into his 88th year with only four months left to live. By then the bloom had faded from their secret romance. They married to ensure their teenage son a share of his grandfather’s estate and, eventually, Cézanne’s own. Cézanne’s romantic murmurings were reduced to “all she cares about is Switzerland and lemonade.”

When he died in 1905 Cézanne left everything to his son and nothing to Hortense who ended up gambling away the settlement Paul Jr. gave her. In the end, the only thing remaining of their secret love was 29 portraits of her. Every one a bold step forward in the evolution of modern art.

Read more about Neo-Impressionism HERE

The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Evenement” (l) was painted by Cézanne in 1866 and is generally recognized as a statement of his new-found independence from his father due to a number of technique and compositional clues. Also, the father is reading a journal in which Cézanne’s dear friend Emile Zola, had a regular column. Zola championed Cézanne’s artistic ambitions and the journal is not one Cezanne’s father ever read. This painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (r) was painted between 1888 and 1890. It is the only one of the 29 portraits he painted of her to place her in an elaborately furnished interior. This painting is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

LET YOUR CURIOSITY TAKE YOU FURTHER:

I don’t intend to “solve painting.” Instead, I’ll leave the search for meaning and artistic excellence to others far more qualified than I am. Instead, my curiosity leads me to explore the world in which artists from different eras in art history resided. How did they dress? What was the excitement in the air? How did artists mirror the world around them? My hope is that understanding their world will help you understand them. But, a funny thing happened along the way. I found that history really does repeat. In searching for links between history and art history we learn more about art … and ourselves.

Following are a short video and slide show exploring one thread in the tapestry of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. One historical occurrence that helps us understand what spurred these first Modern Art movements. Enjoy!

NOTE: The following video uses AI generated voices that built a 2-person podcast based on a single source of information: a script I wrote. It was either that or make you listen to my Canadian goose-like voice.

For those of you who want to see more Impressionistic and Neo-Impressionist art, here is a slide show with 18 more masterpieces of the era. This was built from my original script for the video

To view this slide show, click on the Title Image below. It is a Dropbox link to the PowerPoint presentation:

Haussmann Makes An Impression Slide Show

28.7MB ∙ PDF file

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Monday Morning ARTe will soon change its name to: Live Curious. Love Art. But, this is more than a name change. It is a comprehensive new content package designed to show how Art and History are intertwined to create beautiful tapestries …

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Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing by William Blake

In the darkness of a night in 1787, Blake sat by candlelight watching his favorite brother, Robert, gasp for air as if drowning in his bed. At last gasp Blake saw his brother’s spirit rise through the ceiling in joyous celebration. A year later Robert returned to Blake’s visions introducing h…

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Aegeus Consults the Oracle of Delphi a red figure kylix found in the Etruscan city of Vulci

Perhaps Liberty is always depicted as a woman because democracy owes its birth to a woman on the take.

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Venus de Milo by Alexandros of Antioch

What better way to start a fight than to choose the most beautiful from among three vain goddesses. In Greek mythology a young Trojan soldier named Paris was asked by Eris, goddess of discord, to select the fairest of three other goddesses. The prize was a solid gold apple. All three tried to bribe Paris. Heras offe…

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The Grove, Lynn by Maurice Prendergast

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Portrait of William Duguid by Prince Demah

As the famous portrait artist, Robert Edge Pine, gazed at the mud-splattered door of his London studio, he saw a black man standing quietly behind a rotund and bearded white man. The black man’s eyes looked down at his worn boots while his master rapped on the door with his pearl-handled cane. The Massachusetts …

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February 20, 1909: An overwrought poet hijacked the leading newspaper in Europe and started a revolution. The Manifesto of Futurism printed on the front page of Le Figaro in Paris was Filippo Marinetti’s shriek from atop the coal furnaces of the Industrial Revolution. A call to create art dedicated to youth, speed, violence and other symptoms of the mod…

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Raindrops by Margaret Yuko Kimura

Yuko Kimura stands on the shoulders of two women. Her grandmother, Tei, gave her a family history and a pile of her old sewing patterns. Her mother, Tomoko, gave her Cleveland.

Tei’s life was different …

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Oasis in the Badlands (Red Hawk, Oglala Sioux) by Edward Sheriff Curtis

The Sun Dance of the Plains Indians was so powerful, it ended up costing Edward Curtis his business, fortune, family and mental health. When he agreed to accompany George Bird Grinnell, editor of Field and Stream Magazine, Curtis thought he was going on the kind of outdoor adventure…

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Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi

In biblical times, an Assyrian bully was dispatched by his king to take vengeance on Israel for refusing to help him in a recent war. Holofernes, the bully, laid siege to the city of Bethulia cutting off their water supply. Things looked desperate for the Jews of Bethulia.

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On a chilly evening in 1922, Josef Albers met a girl in the hallway of his school, although he didn’t know it. Both were dressed in party costumes that hid whether they were man, woman, or even human. Things were about to get interesting.

What happens when you tell 75 modern artists to come to a party dressed as something original? It happened often at t…

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Two Milliners, Rue du Caire by Paul Signac

Paul Signac believed in mixing opposites in both art and life. How else to explain a man whose art was built on side-by-side dots of contrasting colors and whose daughter had two mothers? One old, one young. One formidable, one beautiful. One his wife, one his mistress.

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Runner #1: As Persians invaded ancient Greece, a runner was sent from Athens to Sparta to ask for help. Pheidippides, a professional “day-runner,” covered the 150 miles in two days under a blazing August sun. The Spartans agreed to help, but wouldn’t march during Karneia, a religious celebration due to end on the full moon, still days away.

So, Pheidippi…

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The Pilgrimage to Cythera by Jean-Antoine Watteau

Forget your cares and woes for just a few minutes. Close your eyes and imagine you’ve been transported to Paris in 1717. Not yet the cosmopolitan Haussmannian Paris of Impressionist times but already a magnetic city pulling French culture and art from the Sun King’s Palace of Versailles.

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Marrakech by Frank Stella

On a late summer night in the early 1960s Barbara Rose sat in the Cedar Bar on the very eastern edge of Greenwich Village. Little-known artist Frank Stella walked in and her date asked him to return a raincoat he’d left in Stella’s apartment. “I’ll trade you the raincoat for Barbara” replied Stella. He then retrieved the coat, c…

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