Bassquiat and Purvis Young at Tampa Museum of Art: Ordinary/Extraordinary Assemblage in Three Acts

Contrary to the museum's protestations to the contrary, the juxtaposition between the lives and art of the black American artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Purvis Young is thrown into sharp relief in exhibits of their work at Tampa Museum of Art. The two discrete shows (Jean Michel Masquiat: One Master Artist/Two Masterpieces and Purvis Young: 91) are part of an exhibition series titled Ordinary/Extraordinary Assemblage in Three Acts; the third show in the series is titled Sacred Diagrams: Haitian Vodou Flags from the Gessen Collection.

Each of the foregoing can be viewed as a separate show but, according to the museum, are linked by

... the use of found objects, such as discarded wood and repurposed textiles ... More importantly, historical and socio-economic narratives informed by the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora, the black experience in America, as well as European artistic influences unite the artists featured in the series.

I will focus on the Basquiat and Young shows in this post.

This is the second exhibition of both artists works that I have attended this year -- Basquiat at the Brant and Young at the Deland Museum of Art -- and I am struck by more of the contrasts than the commonalities between the two artists. The chart below is illustrative.

The way that the individual shows are exhibited also provides a juxtaposition, with two Basquiat originals emplaced on a wall, with significant white space around each piece, and, in the next room, separated by a perpendicular wall, the cacaphony of the Young exhibition.

The first of the two Basquiat paintings (Untitled (Word on Wood)) is one of 17 Basquiat paintings that incorporates wood fence slats. The slats are painted black and divided into two unequal hemispheres. The upper hemisphere is dominated by a blue square with a gold border which serves as a frame for an African-mask-like structure with mismatched oval eyes and bared teeth. A line runs from a distinctly negroid nose through a unibrow to the top of the forehead, dividing the forehead into two unequally adorned hemispheres. The top of the head is festooned with light-brown, cornrow-type structures.

The lower hemisphere is populated by some of the markings for which Basquiat is known. The left, chair-like structure is brown in color and associated with a white comb marking while the right leg is entwined by a green vine and is adjacent to an upturned comb.

Untitled (Word on Wood), 1985
Jean-Michel Basquiat

The second painting is a collage of different textured items emplaced on a bright-yellow, two-hemisphere, wooden door. The Spanish word for miracle is repeated a number of times on the structure's upper hemisphere.

Yellow Door (1960), 1985
Jean-Michel Basquiat

As you walk around the dividing wall, you are suddenly confronted with the cacaphony of the Young series. The 91 paintings, the totality of the museum's Purvis Young collection, are hung shoulder-to-shoulder from floor to ceiling in honor of the author's "magnum opus:"

For a short period of time in the 1970s, Young installed his paintings from the ground to the rooftops of abandoned storefronts in his neighborhood. The Wall of Respect in Chicago, a mural that featured heroic black men and women painted at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, influenced Young. He aimed to replicate the Wall of Respect in Overtown with his powerful, provocative paintings and often overlapped the paintings in an extreme salon-style hang. Titled Goodbread Alley Mural, the project was on view from approximately 1971-74 until the City of Miami started to dismantle the artwork. The installation on view in this gallery takes inspiration from the Goodbread Alley Mural ...

I found this layout jarring: I was not sure whether I should evaluate it as a mural or evaluate each piece on its own. In general I find Young's work slightly claustrophobic -- due to the object density on his pieces -- and that feeling was on steroids with so many of his pieces stacked together. Museums are requesting that patrons spend more time evaluating paintings on view: I do not believe that this layout advanced that objective.

It is not obvious how the Vodou Flags exhibit fits in with the works of these two well-known artists.

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The immediacy of the Phillips Collection exhibition The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement

In an opinion piece in the New York Times (Blessed are the Refugees, 9/13/19), Brett Stephens identified Harry Truman's signing of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act as the first time that US immigration policy "became actively sympathetic to the utterly dispossessed." As a result of this law, and subsequent legislative activity, the US accepted (Stephens):

• 40,000 Hungarians who fled the Soviet tanks after 1956 (including the young Andy Grove who became the CEO of Intel Corporation
• Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing Castro's repression after 1959 (including a young Gloria Estefan)
• 750,000 Soviet Jews fleeing persecution by Soviet despots (including a young Sergei Brin)
• Over 1 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians after the fall of Saigon
• Hundreds of thousands of Iranians after the Khomeini revolution
• In excess of 100,000 Iraquis since the fall of Saddam Hussein
• Over 100,000 Burmese.

According to Stephens, a total of 3 million refugees have been accepted into the US since the Refugee Act of 1980 and "by almost any metric, America's refugees tend to succeed, or at least their children do. Whatever they do to enrich themselves, they enrich the country a great deal more."

In light of the foregoing, and the "ennoblement" that accrues to the US as a result of opening its doors to the displaced, the actions of the current administration renders this a "moment of unique shame for the United States" according to Stephens. The number of refugees has plunged from 97,000 in 2016 to 23,000 in 2018 with plans to potentially bring the number down to zero.

But the US is not the only major country to be moving in this direction. According to an article in today's New York Times (Patrick Kingsley, Is Trump's America Tougher on Asylum Than Other Western Countries?), "Mr. Trump's plan is also in keeping with a wider international trend  of curtailing the right to asylum, as western nations try to curb migration from the global south, where the overwhelming majority of displaced people live." Mr. Kingsley then goes on to detail actions that have been taken by the EU, Australia, and Israel to limit refugee flows.

It is within this context that The Phillips Collection has organized an exhibition titled The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement. This exhibition, spread over three floors of the Goh Annex and Sant Building of the Phillips Collection premises at 1600 21st Street NW, Washington, DC.,

... brings together works of art from five continents to consider the current mass movement of people globally alongside historical migrations to and within the United States. Through sculpture, video, painting, photographs, and more, the exhibition poses urgent questions about representation and experience of migration and dislocation. The artists bear witness to both personal and historical events, many also questioning the capacity of images to portray reality and truth.

Material on the first floor of the exhibition focused primarily on providing context for the exhibition  plus two pieces focused o North America and the Mediterranean Sea.

There are two striking exhibits on platforms located alongside the stairway leading between the first and second floors. The items, which, at first sight, appear to be a jumble of blown glass and disparate ephemera, are representations of typical street hawkers of African cities. "These 'rescuers' are known for recycling salvaged goods to sell and are thought to 'save' their customers with their resale services. This particular savior is a passport seller, a welcomed figure of luck for desperate migrants."

Sauveteur (Passport Vendor 1), 2011
Pascale Marthine Tayou

The multimedia installations on the second floor focus on migrations and displaced persons in countries outside the US ranging from a group of Syrian refugees in the port of Lesbos, to a map of a refugee camp in Lebanon, to a Chinese artist's plaintive cry for his mother who had remained behind in China.

Queen Mary II, La mère (The Mother), 2007
Adel Abdessemed

Refugees 4, 2015
Liu Xiaodong

Mémorial aux Réfugiés Noyés (Memorial for
Drowned Refugees), 2016
Meschac Gaba

Ville de Calais, 2015 - 16
Henk Wildschut

Shabriha 1, 2001
Marwan Rechmaoui

Where is my Mother, 1926
Yun Gee

Maine Family, c. 1922 - 23
Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Liberty, N.Y., 2001
Zoe Leonard

The pieces on the third floor switch to a focus on migration in North America: from the wall on the Southern border and how it has split families apart; to the Trail of Tears, the forcible displacement of Native Americans from their southeastern homelands in the 1830s; to the migration of blacks from the South to the North beginning at the turn of the 20th century. The latter movement is captured in Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series (1940 - 41), a 60-panel set, 30 of which are owned by The Phillips Collection and are displayed in this exhibition.

MOIA's NYC Women's Cabinet, 2016
Aliza Nisenbaum

The Wall (Component), 2015 - 2016
Griselda San Martin

Miguel & Christian, 2017
John Sonsini

Untitled, 1941
Diego Rivera

Traveling (Lead Kindly Light), 1918
William Edouard Scott

The Migration Series, 1940 - 41
Jacob Lawrence

Trail of Tears, 2005
Benny Andrews

This exhibition is thought-provoking and causes self-reflection on the part of the viewer. In today's environment, when being born in the Southern Hemisphere increases the likelihood of one being a refugee, thoughts run to what actions are available to us, the more fortunate. It caused me to look, contemplatively, at the potential for this situation to become even more dire in the future given the potential for climate-driven refugee flows.

This exhibition does not dwell on the whys of migration or offer any solutions going forward; but that is not its stated intent. Rather it seeks to inform and place the viewer within the minds and experiences of the refugee/displaced person. And it causes us to think about our shared humanity,

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Franz Boas and his early battles against the "establishment" societal model -- after Charles King

In Chapter 3 of his book Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King provides the backstory of the evolution of the establishment position on societal organization and how Franz Boas came to oppose that position. I summarize the high points in this post.

A version of the word anthropology has been around since Aristotle but its impact and meaning has shifted over time. The first academic to have the name Anthropologist in his title -- Edgar Burnett Tyler of Oxford University -- defined the field as the "study of man" while early institutional use -- Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute and France's Musée d'histoire Naturelle -- placed the field as a branch of anatomy or natural history.

For early Anthropologists (a la Frazer), the secrets of human societies lay primarily in the texts that they produced. Beginning in the 1840s, a new word -- Ethnology -- made its way onto the scene, with the premise of extending the study of humans into their "ethnos." The US Government funded the Bureau of Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institute, to go beyond what was ancient and written, to collect observable data about remote groups.

John Wesley Powell was appointed to head up the Bureau of Ethnology and he organized it -- and charged his staffers --after principles espoused by Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan had studied the Iroquois Federation and had written a definitive tome on the history, language, and culture of this alliance. In a follow-up book -- Ancient Society -- he combined his Iroquois learnings with texts from ancient Greek and Roman sources in order to formulate a global model of how societies organize themselves. According to Morgan, all societies run through the same stages in their evolution, beginning with a simple form which becomes more complex over time.

Powell bought into this concept fully, making the book required reading for all staffers and then formalizing his construct in a March 1886 presentation to the Anthropological Society of Washington. The evolution of this thought process is shown in the chart directly below while the characteristics of each societal component are shown in the table immediately following.

Table 1. Identifying characteristics of the three societal components

Characteristic	Savages	Barbarians	Civilized
Societal Organization	Primary kinship group	Tribe	Nation-State
Language	Individual words and simple concepts	Complex phrases	Languages capable of handling complicated abstract ideas
Music	Beat out a rhythm on a log or a stone	Sing a melodic line	Added counterpoint and harmony
Religion	Many gods, often represented as a beast or fowl	Forces of nature as gods	Single god

The role of the Ethnologist, according to the Bureau of Ethnology, was to study (King):

• The frontiers between the stages of human progress and to describe how different peoples have travelled from one end of human culture to the other
• The development of languages and other specific characteristics that defined each of them
• The various institutions --- from tribes to states -- that allowed them to remain coherent units
• Their changing opinions on life and the universe.

In this model, Ethnology was "simply the act of a civilized man conversing with those who had yet to travel the same pathway he had once trod."

After his initial work on Baffin Island, Boas had returned to Germany where he finally fulfilled the requirements for his Ph.D. Based on contacts he had made while in Germany, he returned to North America and traveled to British Columbia to collect cultural data on myths and folktales from North Coast inhabitants.

Upon the completion of that work, he returned to New York where he got a position as an Editorial Assistant at the young and struggling Science magazine. Shortly after beginning work, he traveled to Washington, DC to visit the Smithsonian's collection on the peoples of the Northern Coast. He was questioning of what he saw.

Boas felt that the museum's collection was mis-organized and would continue to be so because the data collection premise and framework were flawed. The solution, he felt, would emerge after comprehensive study of collected data rather than by going in with a template and trying to fit data into boxes. Boas used his platform at Science to argue his position but he was going up against much more powerful people and his contract at Science was not renewed upon its expiration.

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Summary of Cultural Relativism drivers -- after Charles King

I have just begun reading Charles King's Gods of the Upper Air, the story of how Franz Boas, the German-born "father of American anthropology," and a small group of like-minded disciples, took on, and debunked, the commonly held beliefs on societal construct, race, sex, and gender.

In the first chapter, King does a masterful job of summarizing the views on society and individuals that held sway at the time and the "animating theory" that drove the "little group" to their competing views on race, sex, and gender. I illustrate the key aspects of the chapter in the charts following.

Compiled from Gods of the Upper Air

Compiled from Gods of the Upper Air

Pictures from wikipedia.com; illustration compiled from
Gods of the Upper Air

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Summary of the major Low-Countries Northern Renaissance art movements

I recently embarked on multi-post effort to provide an overview of Dutch and Flemish art in the periods covered in a number of major current, and recently concluded, international art exhibitions. To date I have covered all of the major strains associated with the Northern Renaissance period and I summarize those in the chart shown below.

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Book Review: Tony Horwitz's Spying on the South

I heard Tony Horwitz interviewed by Mary Corrigan on NPRs Fresh Air earlier this year regarding his book Spying on the South. I was intrigued by the author and the story behind the book so I purchased a copy. You can imagine my shock when driving home about a week later I heard it announced on the radio that Horwitz had collapsed and died of a heart attack while in Washington DC on a book-promotion tour.

Horwitz was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning "... journalist, historian and author whose books have graced best-seller lists and college syllabuses." His books included One for the Road, A Voyage Long and Strange, and the acclaimed travelogue Confederates in the Attic.

In this, his final book, Horwitz describes retracing a portion of Fredrick Law Olmstead's journeys through the South between the years 1852 and 1854. Olmstead is best known as the landscape architect of Central Park, the US Capitol Grounds, Biltmore Estate, and many college campuses and residential neighborhoods across the country. Prior to his trips across the south, Olmstead's distant past included stints as a merchant seaman, an experimental farmer, and a European traveler.

Frederick Law Olmstead

Over the course of his travel through the South, Olmstead served as an undercover correspondent known as Yeoman, "a Connecticut Yankee exploring the Cotton Kingdom on the eve of secession and the Civil war." Olmstead was 30 years old when he undertook this assignment, --"restless on his farm" and "romantically adrift" -- and he hoped that a short sojourn in the South would both renew him and provide an avenue for success as a writer. Instead he made two major journeys to the area, resulting in numerous newspaper dispatches and three books about the South.

Prior to embarking on his journeys, Olmstead had held the belief that the residents of the South would be susceptible to reasoned discourse; by the end of his travels, he had been disabused of that notion. He found the South's leading men to be:

• Implacable
• Convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound society
• Intent on expanding it
• Utterly contemptuous of the North.

Writing about these leading men seven years before the Civil War, Olmstead described them as "a mischievous class."

In 1953 Olmstead's three books were abridged into a single volume called The Cotton Kingdom, a volume which Horwitz had used in a 1980s college class. Horwitz came into contact with his college copy a few years ago and, after reading a few passages, was hooked. After researching the original dispatches, he made the decision to follow Olmstead's path. As he described it, no bookings, no itinerary, "just a ramble across America with long-dead Fred as my guide."

Horowitz followed Olmstead's off-the-beaten-path journey "through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican badlands." In many cases he used similar modes of transportation as did Olmstead.

At this point the book settles into a somewhat regular rhythm of describing Olmstead's journey from point A to point B and his sojourn at point B followed by a description of Horowitz re-tracing the original steps. The description of Olmstead's journey would include the mode of transportation, the duration of the trip, the scenery, and when they (his brother accompanied him for a portion of the trip) ate and slept along the way. A significant portion of the trip was via horseback so many a night was spent camped out in the wilderness. Horowitz would then describe Olmstead's impression of the people, food, and conditions at point B.

Horowitz replication of the trip was rather challenging because of the changes that had occurred over the intervening years: some of the modes of transportation were no longer available between points; some of the towns no longer existed, or existed in a different frame; or there had been significant population change.

Horwitz had the option of using the Olmstead story as a frame and then making the book all about his travel but instead he chose to weave the two stories one into the other. This makes for a very long book and places some patience-demands upon the reader. As a mater of fact, the Olmstead story, as told herein, begins before the trip and ends well after its conclusion; he continues with Olmstead's transition to a landscape architect and his work on Central Park and the difficulties he had with work colleagues and his wife. This additional work appears to be beyond the stated scope of the book but the author would probably say that Olmstead's landscaping "chops" were gained and honed by his observations during his travels in the South and by his conviction that open spaces could bring Northerners together in a way that would be the antithesis of the South.

In a manner similar to Olmstead seeking to understand the perspective of the South in the years prior to the civil war, Horwitz explores political perceptions in the South in the runup to the 2016 election. He found extreme conservatism in East Texas. For example, folks in Houston County saw a 1992 UN Resolution promoting public health, environment, conservation and poverty reduction as being a move to create a Soviet-style uber government. A geologist in Kentucky spoke about his fellow-county-residents thusly: "The know-nothings in this county just seem to be getting stronger. People are proud of their ignorance, and when you challenge it, they fall back on conspiracy theories and fake facts."

At the end of his journeys, Olmstead came away with a new mission: "To fortify the nation against the South's slaveholding elite and feudal ideology, the North must uplift its own citizens to demonstrate the true promise of a free and democratic society." Central Park was his first stab at creating an environment which would advance that mission. Horwitz has no such aspirational experience at the end of his.


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The Haarlem Mannerists: Mannerism above the dividing line

I have previously covered the benefits that accrued to the city of Harlem as a result of the migration of businessmen and artists out of Antwerp in the years prior, and subsequent, to the surrender of Antwerp to the Duke of Parma. This inflow of human capital transformed Haarlem into one of the leading artistic centers of the young Netherlands. Haarlem Mannerism, unique to the city, was a key element of the Haarlem artistic scene; I trace its origins and development in this post.

Hans Speckaert
Mannerism's journey into Haarlem is somewhat convoluted, with its origins rooted in the works of Hans Speckaert (1540 - 1577). Speckaert was a Flemish Renaissance painter who had travelled to Rome sometime after 1566 and was prominent among the small group of Flemish artists working therein. He had closely studied the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and other Renaissance artists, as well as the Mannerist painters Parmigianino and Jacopo Bertoja, resulting in a style "characterized by tall, elongated figures in highly expressive poses" as seen in his The Assumption of the Virgin and The Crucifixion of Christ.

The Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1570
Hans Speckaert

The Crucifixion of Christ, c. 1577
Hans Speckaert

Speckaert died in Rome in 1577 and management of his estate passed to his friend Anthonie van Santvort. Van Santfort came into possession of Speckaert's drawings shortly after upon the death of Cornelis Cort, Speckaert's former print publisher, and opened his house such that artists visiting Rome could study them. As a result of van Santfort's generosity, Speckaert's "fluid and elegant" drawing style was exposed to, and exerted significant influence on, Northern contemporaries such as Bartholemus Spranger, Hans von Aachen, and Karl van Mander.

Bartholemus Spranger
Bartholemus Spranger (1546 - 1611) was a Flemish painter and etcher who, upon completion of his landscaping apprenticeship in Antwerp, taught himself the formal idiom of Mannersim by copying engravings after Frans Floris and Parmigianino. He traveled to Paris in 1565 then onto Rome via Milan and Parma. He gained Cardinal Alessandro Farnese as a patron in 1567 and was later appointed painter at the Vatican by Pope Pius V.

Following the death of Pope Pius, Spranger was summoned to the court of Emperor Maximillin II in Vienna in 1575 and, six years later, to the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague where he gained the Emperor's favor and attained great fame and fortune.

Spranger's body of work is comprised of "mythological and allegorical pictures as well as erotically tinged scenes in the Mannerist style." His nudes were built around mannered poses, slender, elongated bodies..." and inviting smiles. Two of his works -- Venus in Vulcan's Forge and Venus and Adonis -- are shown below. Note the monumentality and expressive poses a la Speckaert.

Venus in Vulcan's Forge
Bartholemus Spranger

Venus and Adonis
Bartholemus Spranger

Spranger exerted significant influence on the younger generation of painters at the court as well as on German, Flemish, Dutch, and French art. From the early 1580s, Hendrik Goltzius, whom I will discuss later, made engravings of Spranger's paintings, further spreading his fame around Europe.

The Haarlem Mannerists
Karel van Mander (1548 - 1606), better known for his history of the Northern European painters of the 1400s and 1500s than for his own works, resided in Italy from 1573 to 1577 and, while there, met Giorgio Vasari, who by that time had completed his work on the Lives of the Italian Artists. Giorgio also operated a large art school at that time. Van Mander was impressed by the school, Vasari's book, and his Mannerist paintings.

When van Mander returned to Holland, he brought along some Spranger's drawings and they had a significant impact on Dutch art. Spranger moved to Haarlem in 1583 and founded an academy with Hendrick Goeltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

Hendrick Goeltzius (1558 - 1616), a German-born copper-engraver and publisher, learned his trade under the Dutch master Dirck Volckertszoon Coomhert and moved with him to Haarlem in 1577. At the age of 21, Goeltzius married an older widow and was able to establish an independent and successful business.

The academy founded by the three men was responsible for development of the Haarlem Mannerist style, a style characterized by "complex compositions and figures with exaggerated physiques and comparatively small heads." Another source describes the works as depicting "exaggeratedly brawny musclemen, violent drama, with fantasy and a rare richness of detail." Works from each of the founding members are shown below.

Icarus
Hendrick Goltzius

Before the Flood
Karel van Mander

The Fall of the Titans, 1588 - 90
Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem

In 1585 Goltzius had gotten in touch with Spranger and developed a copper plate method suited to translating his "elegant, affected, and figure-oriented mannerism." Distribution of these works aided in the popularization of Spranger and established Haarlem as the center of Mannerism in the Dutch Republic. Goltzius' workshop and publishing house were focal points of activity for Haarlem Mannerists and his students included Jan Saenredam, Jan Muller, Jacob Matham.

Goltzius eventually traveled to Rome in 1590 and, upon his return, deserted the Spranger Mannerism for a "calmer, clearer language of forms informed by antiquity and the Italian Renaissance." The contradt can be seen in the two Hercules works below, The Great Hercules done prior to his trip to Rome and the other done on his return.

The Great Hercules, 1589
Hendrick Goltzius

Farnese Hercules, 1592
Hendrick Goltzius

Even though Goltzius had moved on, his student Jan Muller continued with the Mannerist tradition well into the following century.

Cain violently kills Abel
Engraving by Jan Muller after Cor

Cleopatra, c. 1598
Engraving by Jan Muller, after Adriaen de Vries

Unconstrained by the religious considerations bounding Flemish Mannerists, Haarlem Mannerism was free to develop along the lines pursued by the artists and demanded by the patrons. First, there were multiple sources of influence, to include the court at Prague, artists returning from trips to Italy, and communications with artist communities active in Rome. Second, the Haarlem Mannerist figures seem to evolve from elegant to more "brutish" over the course of the movement's life.

In any case, the end of the Flemish and Haarlem Mannerist strains at the end of the century signals the end of the Northern Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque period.

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