Musicians

Scott Ross (1951-1989): The Modern Ancient

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Written by Kenn Sava (Photographs from Discogs.com)

Today, as NYC Pride Parade goes on outside, the late Scott Ross has been on my mind. For those who may not know him, Mr. Ross was a harpsichordist who was one of the great interpreters of Baroque Music of our, or any, time. He almost single-handedly, using two hands, brought the harpsichord back into the conversation from decades of neglect in Classical Music.

Scott Ross died of HIV/AIDS-related causes in June, 1989, but it never defeated him.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1951, he moved to France with his mother after the death of his father in 1964, Living in France the rest of his life, he never became a citizen, and had stopped making U.S. Social Security payments, a combination that conspired to leave him not eligible for medical care. He was forced to look to his circle for support and to care for him at home until he died.

Scott Ross appeared on the Music scene at a perfect moment. Beginning in the 1960s, a group of dedicated Baroque Musicians and scholars had been making waves in the world of recording by performing the Music of the Baroque masters on instruments that existed at the time they wrote their Music. This upset the apple cart of tradition where the world had gotten used to hearing this Music played on modern instruments, including the piano (and the modern orchestra for that matter), which didn’t exist at the time of the earlier composers. They had written their Music for the “Klavier,” usually a harpsichord. As the piano was perfected over hundreds of years it assumed the central place in Music-making, leaving the harpsichord to museums, until the synthesizer came along to make the piano take a back seat. So, Scott Ross, at once, continued this “original instrument” movement in Baroque Music, and was, again, something entirely new. Most modern listeners had little, if any, experience with hearing the harpsichord. The surprise was furthered by his “natural” appearance at his concerts. He showed up dressed as he was, as you can see on his album covers shown in this piece.

Beyond all of this, however, Scott Ross always put the Music first. He was a brilliant interpreter of every composer he turned his talent to, whose recordings stand up against anyone else’s- before, during, or after his lifetime. Even those of Glenn Gould, who I love, and Mr. Ross had problems with.

“When all you do is play music from morning till night you end up unable to hear it properly. It is extremely important to think about other things, to have other interests, in order to bring a new vision to your work. Discovering new things gives meaning to my life and when I become interested in something there are no half-measures. For example, the interest I had as a child in pebbles goes back as far as my interest in music, and it has never left me,” Scott Ross quoted in the liner notes to The Art of Scott Ross, CBC Records.

In addition to his Musical gifts, Mr. Ross was a passionate grower of orchids who was fascinated with “strange ones,” not the type you’d see in a flower store. He created an early computerized database of those he cross-bred. He was also a Photographer with his own dark room, an authority on edible mushrooms; volcanoes and minerals, cooking and home renovation and carpentry, were among his many other interests as something of a true “renaissance man.” 

Today, and for much of his life, he was and is, perhaps, best known for his first-ever recording of the complete Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. After first showing symptoms of HIV in 1983 (just two years after the identification of the virus and in the infancy of treatment), he realized that he had a fatal illness. Yet, he kept working and producing remarkable results. Somehow he found the strength & fortitude to enable him to achieve something never before done. He undertook ninety-eight recording sessions, producing 8,000 takes, between June, 1984 and September, 1985 in Paris, Avignon and Château d’Assas recording the first-ever collection of Scarlatti’s compete keyboard sonatas which were released on THIRTY-FOUR CDs.

“An heroic achievement,” BBC Music Magazine. Seen here is the cover of the 2014 Erato reissue.

That’s just staggering to consider- for someone in perfect health. We’re talking about FIVE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE sonatas! Today, almost 40 years later, they are still widely considered “definitive” recordings. In the time since Mr. Ross recorded his cycle only one other complete cycle by one Musician is known to me. (One other cycle features different pianists on each disc.) Even more remarkably, he revealed in an interview- “When I suggested this marathon undertaking to Erato and Radio France, I simply did not know most of the 555 sonatas. I had to work like a madman. I was anxious to make the recordings quickly, not only because of the three-hundredth anniversary (of Scarlatti’s birth in 1685) and the broadcasting requirements of Radio France, but also in order to stay in the spirit of Scarlatti. It is very likely that al the sonatas were written quickly1.”

Mr. Ross was notorious for breaking boundaries and doing things his own way. His “natural appearance” at concerts was something never before seen in an austere classical concert hall: be it in a leather biker jacket, or wearing flannel, looking  a bit like John Lennon, or in a knit cap, as he is below in his final concert, the Soundtrack for this piece, performing Rameau’s “La Livri” in Rome on April 6, 1989, just 8 weeks before he died.

It’s absolutely amazing to me that his skill remained undiminished right to the end in spite of all he was going through, as you can see and hear below in one of his few video performances, which is also evidenced on every one of the recordings he made. A true testament to his strength and perseverance. Even AIDS couldn’t overcome his brilliance.

 

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  1. Interview in the booklet in the Scarlatti CD set ↩

Edward Hopper: The Last Traditionalist Faces Change

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava (*-unless otherwise credited)

Show seen: Edward Hopper’s New York @ The Whitney Museum, Part 2. (Part 1 is here.)

Edward Hopper in his New York. With his wife, Jo, strolling the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden in 1964. In this Photo, by Eve Arnold, Edward is glimpsed unawares like a good number of his subjects were. *-Photo by Eve Arnold, Magnum Photos. Thanks to Lana for finding it. Click any picture for full size.

Change is the only constant in the universe. For those, like me, for who New York City IS the universe, every day brings change. During Edward Hopper’s time here (1900-67), the City of continual change metamorphosized more than it ever had.

Screencap from the short Film, A Ride on the 6th Ave El, 1916. Edward Hopper frequently rode NYC’s elevated trains, and he was located closest to the 6th Avenue el, which he no doubt rode before, during and after 1916. He glimpsed more than one scene he turned into a Painting while riding one. *-Ford Motor Company video.

The advent of the tall building & skyscrapers (facilitated by the development of elevators with safety brakes), first in Chicago and then here, along with the ongoing spate of bridge building (Brooklyn Bridge, then Manhattan Bridge and others), the advent of the elevated train, the subway, electric lights, movies, and the rest, ushered in with them what we know as modern urban life. All of these inventions & developments brought side effects. Edward Hopper’s New York reveals that the Artist may not have been a fan of some of these changes.

Edward Hopper’s Art: What I See

As I said in Part 1, having the chance to see 58 Hopper Paintings from early through late in his career 14 times, Edward Hopper’s New York completely changed how I see his work. This is shocking to me because I’ve been looking at his work almost as long as I have anyone else’s- well over 40 years. To this point, I saw his work as one of the ultimate (and perhaps unsurpassed) expressions of modern loneliness and isolation in the Art of the 20thy century. But, this is a theme that requires human subjects (like the vast majority of his NYC work has, though he Painted these scenes with people elsewhere as well). What about the rest of his oeuvre; all the other scenes he Painted that don’t include people? These include landscapes he Painted in Maine, Cape Cod, and elsewhere in the U.S., and Paintings he made on, or inspired by, trips to Europe and Mexico. Some of the non-peopled landscapes include houses, buildings, bridges or other man-made structures. Some of them are pure landscapes. (An overview of the range of his work can be seen in any comprehensive book on Hopper. I particularly recommend seeking out Edward Hopper: The Art & The Artist, by Gail Levin, the catalog of the last U.S. Hopper Retrospective, at the Whitney in 1981.)

As a result of considering the whole, I’ve come to believe there are two primary threads, intentional, or not. that run through almost all of Edward Hopper’s work.

First, the “man-altered landscape,” i.e. what man has done with and to nature.

The man-altered landscape. Apartment Houses, East River, 1930. It seems fairly obvious what Edward Hopper thought of this waterfront development. All works are Oil on canvas, unless specified.

In Photography circles, this is what is called “New Topographics” in honor of the legendary Photo show of the same name at the Eastman House, Rochester, in 1975-6, eight years after Edward Hopper’s passing. The subtitle of the show was “Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” What man has done to and with nature, as in Apartment Houses, East River, is a theme I now see in more of Edward Hopper’s work than I see any other theme.

Room in Brooklyn, 1932

Yes, I even see the “what man has done with and to nature” theme in works like the sedately charming Room in Brooklyn, where “nature” is reduced to flowers in a vase. It’s interesting that Hopper’s flowers are higher than the background buildings.

Automat, 1927. Edward Hopper spent a lot of time in Horn & Hardart’s extremely popular Automat Restaurants in the 1920’s, so much that Jo worried he was drinking too much 5-cent coffee. It was worth it because he produced this, another of his show stoppers. Jo chided him for not being able to Paint beautiful women, but Automat certainly puts the lie to that. Its stripped-down composition is a masterpiece of including only the essential. I still wonder about that fruit bowl in the back, though. Is this an instance of “what man has done with nature,” along the lines of Room in Brooklyn?  The reflected receding lights are a master stroke.

A byproduct of what man has done with nature in cities, in Hopper’s time and everywhere since, which some call “progress,” is the effect of what man has built on those who live and work in these places. So, I now include all of Edward Hopper’s work that includes human subjects under this man-altered landscape theme, including his New York work (though not all of them include people- like Apartment Houses, East River, shown earlier).

Office in a Small City, 1953. Life in the cube. An example of what I call the “Hopper fish bowl.”

Many may see Edward Hopper as the “king” of depicting the isolation and loneliness that was endemic in 20th century modern life, and feels increasingly so in the 21st century, but after seeing it as his primary theme for so long, myself, I now believe he is depicting side-effects of this new modern urban life in the man-altered landscape to “turn up the volume” on his feelings about these changes. Therefore, when he depicts it, in my view, he’s also “commenting” on what man has wrought on his fellow man through altering the world so. All of this also makes me wonder about the melancholy that permeates his Art. Is it indicative of “the inner state of the Artist” (as I quoted Hopper saying in Part 1), or is it solely being used to depict the state of his subjects in the man-altered environment? Gail Levin’s Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography certainly provides fodder for the former-

“Raphael Soyer, for whom Hopper posed for a portrait…observed: ‘There is a loneliness about him, a habitual moroseness, a sadness to the point of anger1.'”

That makes me wonder if the effects of this new, modern world ON HIM is a good deal of what we’re seeing in his work/or, that he’s recognizing in people he sees.

Intermission, 1963. Edward & Jo Hopper were avid movie & theater goers, and Edward Hopper’s New York dedicated a gallery to his movie/theater work making interesting observations of how some theater sets and Films may have influenced the settings of some of his Paintings. Others, like this, are set in these venues. Intermission presents a “basic” idea in a theater environment, yet it makes me wonder- People have been going to concerts and theaters for many hundreds of years. Why haven’t I seen it done like this before?

The man-altered world’s effects on the population, then and now, run deep. So deeply, in fact, I’d been living with these symptoms for 40 years myself before I realized that they are what I was seeing them in Hopper’s work! ”

Was mankind meant to live this way?” may be another question his Art asks.

Nature. In all its natural glory. Blackhead, Monhegan, 1916–19. Edward Hopper in Maine. *-Whitney Museum Photo. Not in the show.

The second theme that I see in his Art is the unaltered natural landscape. These exclusively depict locations outside of NYC.

  “If you look at landscape painting from that time in America, there isn’t anyone close to him (Edward Hopper) in technique.” Alex Katz, Artist, and designer of the installation of Edward Hopper’s Maine at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2011 on Hopper’s landscapes.

I’ve come to believe his unaltered natural landscapes, like Blackhead, Monhegan, remain very under-appreciated. Though they are beyond the scope of this piece, I will say that it’s fascinating to me to consider that this one was done after Cézanne & Monet’s innovations; two of the “earlier French Artists” I referenced in Part 1. I don’t see their direct influence, though indirectly, his unaltered natural landscapes, like this, also strike me as “impressions,” as I called his New York Paintings there.

“There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of the house. You know, there are many thoughts, many impulses, that go into a picture … I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than in any symbolism.” Edward Hopper2.

Landscape with Building, c.1900, Watercolor and graphite pencil on paper. *-Whitney Museum Photo. Not in the show.

As I mentioned in Part 1,  Edward Hopper’s New York sent me back to the beginning of his Art looking to see how his themes began and evolved. This non-NYC work from the year he started Art school strikes me as an early example of the man-altered landscape theme. At various points in his life, Hopper professed an interest in rendering “sunlight on buildings,” and he had a love of Architecture. You can say he’s expressing both here. But the building, rendered in a predominance of grey, certainly doesn’t look to be basking in the sunlight. It’s almost like he’s using the grey wash  (instead of simply leaving the paper a bare white) to downplay the effects of the sunlight. What strikes me is how forlorn and seemingly out of place the building looks in the peaceful landscape. 30 years later, Hopper Painted East River Apartments, shown earlier, again rendering the buildings in grey. The only sunlight in that Painting is playing on the buildings in the back. If he is not showing his love of “sunlight on the buildings,” in these, what is he showing us? Is he being Edward Hopper: Architectural critic? The encroachment of man into nature seems plausible to me. The unspoken question he may be asking is “What do you think of this?” A question I feel being asked in any number of his man-altered landscapes. Given what he said about no “symbolism,” is what I see a coincidence? A coincidence that runs through most of his work is most likely not a coincidence.

Remember how this looked on opening day in Part 1? Here’s the opening section on closing day, March 5, 2023.

What we call modern city life now only existed in Chicago, the birthplace of the tall building, and New York when Edward Hopper began to Paint here in the first third of the 20th century. Since, of course, it has spread everywhere, all around the world. There are countless millions more people living in these environments now than when he began rendering these places. In some ways, Edward Hopper was reporting from the front lines on the change that was happening around him in NYC. Change that was soon to happen in those countless other places around the world.

Early Sunday Morning, 1930. Edward Hopper is not going to hit you over the head with it. Instead, his subtlety is front and center here, in my view. The Whitney paid $3,000. for it in 1931, then featured it when the Whitney Museum opened to the public for the first time in November, 1931. 91 years later, it’s featured again.

For a long time I looked at Hopper’s famous Early Sunday Morning, 1930 as a charming Manhattan street view, one that depicts a block in my neighborhood 93 years ago. Now, I see it as something more ominous. I can attest that as 7th Avenue, shown here, runs North/South, the Sun, which rises directly behind the viewer, has never shone as Mr. H. has depicted it here- see the Photo of the site now in Part 1. Why did he do so? For me, the long shadows mimic the subtle dark rectangle extending off the canvas to the upper right. That’s part of the newer, tall building you can see in my recent Photo of this scene in Part 1, which was just going up when he Painted it. It’s the only building in this Painting that is still standing. The charm of the old human-scale neighborhood is evidenced by the barber pole, shown in full sunshine just to the right of the center of the composition, which emphasizes the human scale of the buildings. This is about to be lost as it is already being ominously encroached upon (if not engulfed) by “progress” (i.e. new tall buildings) while the City sleeps, i.e. while the public was helpless to stop it. This scene is about to be lost, which it was, as I showed. This idyllic, peace hides the loss of a world the Artist knew and loved, and the helplessness to do anything about it.

For me,  Early Sunday Morning is a work that encapsulates Edward Hopper’s melancholy as he was about to lose the City he loved, and a  “wake-up call” to those “sleeping” through what was happening around them. Now, it’s a reminder that there are always things happening most people aren’t all that aware of that will change their lives. Is he saying here, “Wake up, before it’s too late”?

The City, 1927. Change comes to Edward Hopper’s front door.

In The City, Hopper’s home, 3 Washington Square (see my picture of it from November, 2022 in Part 1), is seen in the row of buildings in the mid-distance. For me, everything about this screams distaste. This is Edward Hopper’s neighborhood; the block he lived on, on Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. From the vantage point of a new taller building to the east, the people now look like ants. Two, new, taller buildings are unceremoniously chopped off. Edward Hopper Painted, virtually exclusively, in the landscape format. I take this as another instance of holding on to his values and refusing to compromise by Painting tall buildings in the portrait format. Eventually, change would come up and knock right on his apartment door. In 1946, NYU, which was in the act of swallowing up much of the area, bought 3 Washington Square and proceeded to try to evict its residents. The Hoppers publicly fought NYU for a few years before winning permission to stay. They would both live out their lives here.

The show made me think about the locations he Painted, and those he didn’t Paint. The latter is easier- it’s interesting that in spite of living and working here for so long, he never Painted NYC’s most iconic landmarks- Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, The Metropolitan Museum (or ANY New York museum), and on and on. Instead, he found his meat in “second-tier landmarks” and everyday locations. Still, in each work, it seems to me that the notoriety of the building or bridge included isn’t his point. He down plays it or presents it as an element in a man-altered landscape composition, again asking, I believe, “What do you think of what man has done here?” Again and again, the takeaway for me was it was all about change: rapid change, or change over time.

Queensborough Bridge, 1913. All of Hopper’s bridge Paintings (including Macomb’s Dam Bridge, 1935, which has much in common with Queensborough Bridge) strike me as man-altered landscape works.

Bridges were a favorite subject for Edward Hopper going back to his time in Paris (I showed Le Pont des Arts, which he Painted there in 1907, in Part 1). Back in NYC, he Painted Queensborough Bridge in 1913, just 4 years after it opened in 1909! It has a few things in common with most of his other bridge Paintings. Most of them show the bridge from underneath, reminding us of human scale, and giving the viewer the sense he must have felt at the time of suddenly being VERY small. In this one, the first tower is chopped off by the top of the canvas- like he does with the new tall buildings. A sign of distaste? Also typical, the structure is cropped oddly and ends suddenly just past the right of center. This gives me the feeling that it’s not the sole focus of the composition. We also see East River and what is now Roosevelt Island with a colonial style (i.e. older) house. The house is in a bit shaper focus and is just to the right of center. The bridge draws the eye along until it suddenly trails off right over the house. Human scaled, it looks puny next to the huge bridge. The juxtaposition of size between these two man-made objects is jarring. Given the water in the foreground, which with the strip of land, represent nature, I see this as both an example of the man-altered landscape and how man changed it, first with the colonial style house, and again later with the bridge. The island looks fairly deserted, but it wouldn’t be for much longer as “progress” marched on inexorably.

Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928. The lone figure, dwarfed by a wall in the Loop part of the Bridge, who adds so much, might have been a late addition to the composition. He does not appear in the Drawn Study on view in another gallery. Perhaps my favorite Painting in the show.

In the wonderful Manhattan Bridge Loop we aren’t seeing the bridge from underneath as he usually shows. We’re on a little known and now lost part of the Manhattan Bridge that was called the “Loop.” Built in 1906, Manhattan Bridge, which connects Lower Manhattan at Chinatown with Brooklyn across the East River, was another bringer of change to the City. It’s hard for us to imagine this now, but for several years after it opened in 1883, Brooklyn Bridge at 272 feet tall, remained the tallest structure in the Western hemisphere for a few years3! Walking across it, when you reach the middle of the Bridge, you suddenly find yourself out in the open, its structure having magically disappeared due to the genius of its design. Every time I stand there I try and imagine what it must have felt like to those who stood here in 1883 when, as far as the eye could see, nothing was higher than you were. What a feeling that must have been! It still is. At 336 feet in height, Manhattan Bridge was even taller. These tall bridges presaged the era of tall buildings, and the effect of these immense structures that dwarfed human scale must have had a profound effect on the populace. I get that feeling looking at Queensborough Bridge, in particular, the newness of suddenly feeling so very small in the presence of the new bridge. Perhaps this is also Edward Hopper’s motif for Manhattan Bridge Loop- with a twist.  Behind the wall the man walks in front of, which dwarfs him, and under the gantry, which mimics a bridge tower, is a trolley that ran on a loop from one side of the bridge to the other giving the work its title. In  Manhattan Bridge Loop, Edward Hopper finds a new way to express the size of the bridge versus the human scale world he knew. And guess what would happen to those buildings along the back.

Change continued after Hopper. The approach to the Manhattan Bridge (seen in the far distance under the arch) on May 18, 2023. That’s the Confucius Plaza complex on the right. The Loop Hopper Painted was located to the right behind the arch. The only way to access it now is to walk around the center arch on the Bridge roadway(!) and hope it happens to be as deserted as it is here, which it almost never is. No, thank you.

Not willing to risk life and limb as I did further below, I shot this from in front of the arch (part of which is seen at the upper right across the busy two-way roadway on May 18, 2023. This is approximately the scene of Manhattan Bridge Loop . Human scale was lost in a big way. Unlike Hopper, I’m using the portrait format to show just how tall the Confucius Plaza complex, which is where the buildings in the Hopper stood, is.

As in Early Sunday Morning, as time progressed, the beginnings of the loss of human scale in Manhattan Bridge Loop would only dramatically increase as time went on.

Approaching a City, 1946. Perhaps not one of NYC’s more scenic locations. The Artist visited the site, at Park Avenue at East 97th Street, the point where above ground trains become underground trains (and vice versa) going to and from Grand Central Terminal 55 blocks south, multiple times in 1945 to Draw it. Interestingly, the first work in Edward Hopper’s New York, my research reveals it was the last work shown in the Whitney’s 1950 Edward Hopper Retrospective catalog. I’ve been unable to find out if that means it closed the show. 

After the introductory wall of early works I showed in Part 1, Approaching a City, 1946, showing another bridge, is the first work in Edward Hopper’s New York, proper after the introductory wall. I was surprised by this choice, but the more I studied it, I’ve come to see it as a commentary on change in the City over time. First, I was interested that Hopper chose this site, given how far it is from his apartment (and mine). As a result, it’s a bit of an outlier among all the subjects of his NYC Paintings. That made me wonder if this, too, was another scene he initially glimpsed while a passenger on a train, particularly given its low vantage point, and then decided to go back and Draw it. I was so puzzled by the Painting and why he chose this location that I visited the site to see what the real thing would reveal.

Park Avenue & East 97th Street, February 15, 2023 with the area shown in the Painting centered. What strikes me is that factory Hopper shows in the center & left of the Painting. Was it really there in 1946, right across East 97th Street from an apartment building? I didn’t crop this picture to the area showing in the Painting to show that the entire surrounding neighborhood is residential, and these building look to me to be 100 years old, if not older.

Today, it’s not possible to get down low enough to recreate the angle he shows- unless you’re on a train coming or going from Grand Central Terminal, 55 blocks to the south. Standing above, I took considerable risk taking this photo, my back danger close to the traffic zipping by on Park Avenue behind me. Vintage Photos in the City’s archive from the early 1940s show there was no factory where Hopper Painted it. The neighborhood was, and is, residential, and I believe the buildings I saw there now were there then.

I spotted this fleeting scene in the Film, The Band Wagon, 1953, showing the scene Hopper Painted just 7 years after he did! It’s highly unlikely the buildings in the background had changed that much.

Instead, Hopper chose to show a range of Architectural styles from Colonial, far right, to brownstone, to its left, to the modern factory, center, which could be taken as a comment, or a lament, on change in the City over time (a bit like Queensborough Bridge, and Early Sunday Morning do for me). The evidence would seem to show that he modified the background buildings to suit his purposes. So, what does modifying an actual place in a Painting mean? It means the Artist is using “Artistic license,” and putting it at the service of his or her intentions. (So much for so-called “realism.”) He or she may also want to remove the distraction of the place from the “point” they are trying to make. In the case of Approaching A City, Edward Hopper replaced a residential building with a factory and placed it among other residential buildings. He also changed the Architectural styles of the other buildings. It’s up to the viewer to read this as he or she will. For me, it shows that if he did so once, he would do so again. And he did.

Therefore, when I look at the places he shows, whether or not they are actual places is now a secondary consideration, said the guy who spent decades looking for the “actual site” of Nighthawks. I was driven by the fact that Hopper had Painted actual sites. But, as time went on, he moved away from doing so because it no longer served his purposes, or he modified them as he did here. (For those interested in knowing more about the actual sites Hopper did Paint, and comparing them with his Paintings, Hopper authority, Gail Levin, the Whitney’s first Hopper curator, and author of both the Hopper Catalogue Raisonne and the definitive biography, has published a book of Photographs she took traveling in NYC, the rest of the U.S. and Europe of places Hopper Painted appropriately titled, Hopper’s Places.) Finally, the darkness inside the tunnel I find interesting. Is it a comment on where things are heading? Into the unknown4?

The Hopper Fish Bowl

A frame from the 1916 short Film, A Ride on the Sixth Avenue Elevated shows the train approaching a row of windows, which might have provided Edward Hopper, a regular rider, with ample opportunity for fleeting inspiration…

Life in NYC offers little privacy. New Yorkers are forced to adapt, but somewhere in the back of their mind lives the thought that “someone’s always watching.” That was born in the days long before video cameras, helicopter & drone surveillance! That Edward Hopper had his eyes open is seen by the number of his Paintings that look into a window. These strike me as new in Art. Some of these may have been inspired by fleeting, passing moments witnessed while a passenger on a train, others while on one of his walks around town. In any number of his Paintings we see one or more people behind glass. As I said in the caption for Office in a Small City, earlier, I call this the “Hopper fish bowl.” These include the “looking into a window” works, like Night Windows, 1928, which I showed in Part 1, and Nighthawks, which includes 4 figures behind glass.

Office at Night, 1940. A work that has haunted me for over 40 years. I saw it here for only the second time in person.

Office at Night, 1940, is another scene apparently glimpsed through a window. Or is it? In The Art & The Artist, P.60, Gail Levin quotes Hopper saying there are three sources of light for this picture- the overhead light, the desk light and the window. If it was a scene glimpsed while on a passing train there would need to be 4- with another window in the front. I think people who have seen many Hoppers will immediately assume this is another “glimpsed in passing” scene, as I have until I read that. Who else Painted something like this before 1940? I grew up being forced to work in an old office that looked a bit like this one as a child, so it always gives me the chills to see it. The quiet drama at work here speaks volumes, and says everything about what has become “life in the cube.” It seems to me that Edward Hopper owns the genre of Painting office interiors (including Office in a Small City, shown earlier), and the next one, all showing the effects of the man-altered landscape on those who live in these places.

 Edward Hopper’s New York, Now

New York Office, 1962. With a change in telecommunication equipment, this could be now in Downtown, NYC. In 500 years, if people make it that far, it’s hard for me to imagine this won’t still be speaking to them. Hopefully, it will have a better frame by then.

Beyond changing my thinking about his work, Edward Hopper’s New York made me realize that sooner or later, everyone who lives in NYC (and perhaps most other cities) for a period of time winds up lamenting the loss of what it “used to be.” Early Sunday Morning is, perhaps, the epitome of this, but I think it’s there in many of his works. I miss the NYC of the 1970s and the 1990s. The pandemic has changed the City dramatically, too. It’s still hard for me to believe that 45, 215 irreplaceable people have died in NYC from covid as of June 1, 20235. Building and renovation (i.e. “progress”) continues as robustly as ever- for better or for worse. Rarely has there been an Artist who documented change in the City as Edward Hopper did. In spite of all these changes, he never changed. He kept working in the landscape format until the end. There were only a handful portrait formatted Paintings in Edward Hopper’s New York, notably his Self-Portraits and his Portrait of Jo, and a few in the square format, like Office at Night. It’s easy for me to relate to his angst at losing part of what he loved. It’s obvious how much he cared. As we venture into this new time of change, Edward Hopper’s New York can also be seen as lessons to us now- before, during and after change.

What I’m saying here is what Edward Hopper’s Art says to me. As with all Art, it’s up to each of his viewers to take from it what they will.

Edward Hopper’s final Painting, Two Comedians, 1965. He and Jo taking a bow in front of a dark blue sky(?) background with a landscape prop to the right. At first glance, it seems a straight-ahead Painting. I now also see it as showing a man-made setting (the backdrop and prop) depicting the “natural world,” thus “flipping the narrative” from what man has done with and to nature in his final work. Or, is it a reminder that everything he’s shown us was created by by him, assisted by Jo, in paint?

Back at home, Edward Hopper always struck me as being somewhat out of place in Greenwich Village. It became the home of the beatniks and then the hippies as his life came to a close. He died on May 15, 1967- right at the dawn of the “Summer of Love.” Throughout his 84 years, Edward Hopper held on to his traditional values and way, as I discussed in Part 1. He never went with fads, changing styles, or trends. At times this made him seem “old-fashioned,” particularly in the face of Abstract Expressionism and then Pop, but he’s having the last laugh now. The crowds that flock to see his work wherever it’s displayed around the world are proof positive that his Art is speaking to more people right now than it ever has before. People everywhere have seen the modern, man-altered world that was new in his time in New York up close and personal where they live and have been effected by it- for better, for worse, or some of both.

 

Last look at Automat. Closing day, March 5,2023.

Another big take away from Edward Hopper’s New York came from observing my fellow show-goers. It struck me that that for many others, as it does for me, it serves as a confirmation of what they’re feeling wherever they’re living. That makes me wonder- was Edward Hopper a visionary, too? Did he foresee that what was going on around him in NYC between 1910 and 1950 would become a world-wide phenomenon? I tend to think he was NYC-centric, like I am. He was worried about what he saw going on around him in a place he loved and loved living in. He noticed the effects these changes had on his friends and neighbors and on total strangers he happened to glimpse for a fleeting moment as he moved around town. He froze those moments in oil paint where they have become frozen in many of our minds. That front line moved further and further until it covered much of the world in the following 100 years since he started.

Ending this series with the same piece I began Part 1 with: Edward Hopper’s Self-Portrait, 1925-30, begun 98 years ago. Seen on March 1, 2023. In 2022, I also featured it here, where you can see it close up.

“I saw the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney Museum in the fall of 1995 and I was amazed at the number of people there and how they reacted to the paintings….Hopper seems to reach more people than any other American artist.” Alex Katz, Looking at Art with Alex Katz, P.88-9.

Since that show Alex Katz refers to in 1995, Edward Hopper’s star has continued to rise- both here and especially around the world, If Edward Hopper isn’t THE most popular American Painter world-wide right now (and he may be), the inexorable rise in popularity his work has seen these past 100 years tells me he will be just that one day soon.

Closing Day, March 5, 2023

For me, in the end, the very good thing about that would be that his popularity is not due to a fad, sex appeal, a glamorous lifestyle, or the trappings of celebrity. It’s solely due to his Art speaking to people! In this modern day & age, with all the trappings of 21st century life that Edward Hopper couldn’t begin to dream of…imagine that.

A Postscript that looks at some serious issues involving & surrounding the Art of Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum is here. 

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin, who returns from Part 1. Feeling “blue” may be a symptom of the man-altered environment. Gershwin was the ultimate interpreter of his own Music, of course. After his early death, the charge of performing Gershwin authentically fell on his friend, the extraordinary Oscar Levant. Best known as a somewhat sarcastic actor in An American in Paris, and other Films, lesser known is as one of the great pianists of the 20th century he was the highest paid concert artist for quite a while. (If you want to be blown away, check out this segment from the Film, which may be the first Music video.) Here, he powerfully performs “Rhapsody in Blue” with Eugene Ormandy conducting. It is posterity’s eternal loss that the record companies never sat Mr. Levant down in front of state-of-the-art studio recording equipment and had him record every note George Gershwin wrote that included a piano part. I cherish what we have.

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You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

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  1. Gail Levin’s Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, Expanded Edition, P. 722. ↩
  2. Quoted in Sheena Wagstaff, “The Elation of Sunlight,” in Edward Hopper, Tate Exhibition Catalog, 2004, P.12 ↩
  3. https://www.history.com/topics/landmarks/brooklyn-bridge ↩
  4. Compare it with this from 1906. ↩
  5. Source and updated total, here. ↩

Edward Hopper’s Impressions of New York

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava (*-unless otherwise credited)

Show Seen: Edward Hopper’s New York @ The Whitney Museum
Part 1 of 3 Parts.

Introduction

Smack dab in the heart of Edward Hopper’s New York, the Artist stares out at us in one of hs few Self-Portraits, one he began 98 years ago (1925-30). What would Edward Hopper make of his New York now? Click any picture for full size.

Edward Hopper. What more can I say about his Art? In 2015, I named this site after his masterpiece, Nighthawks, because of that figure with his back to us that no one ever talks about. I relate to him more than I do any other figure I’ve ever seen in a Painting because I’ve been that guy, alone in a bar, cafe or restaurant in Edward Hopper’s New York too many times to count.

The first time I ever saw Edward Hopper’s work was in the late 1970s in a friend’s parent’s copy of this massive 10-pound, 16 by 13 1/2 inch, monograph by Lloyd Goodrich 1 published by Abrams in 1978, with 306 pages and 246 illustrations, but only 88 in color, unfortunately. One or other of his Paintings has been lingering somewhere on my mind since. My banner has been a continual homage to Nighthawks for the past 7+ years2.

Mister Hopper’s Neighborhood

The heart of Edward Hopper’s New York for over 50 years: 3 Washington Square (center). Between them, he &  his wife Jo, lived on the top floor from 1913 to 19683. Beginning in 1947, they had to fight NYU, who took over the building in 1946, to stay. Today, the Hopper Studio has been preserved though the rest of the building is in active use by NYU, as it was when I shot this, November 16, 2022. Nighthawks, among countless other Hoppers, was Painted here4.

At this point, I have lived in what was his extended neighborhood for over 3 decades. I have sat in the Park right in front of his long-time home and wondered if he sat on this very spot. I’ve walked by numerous actual sites he Painted, and I spent a night in the Provincetown, Massachusetts  rooming house he Painted in Rooms for Tourists, 1945, while I was in Cape Cod fruitlessly trying to find his Truro summer house and drinking in the atmosphere of another area he Painted. Today, any number of times I’m reminded I’m literally walking in his footsteps on streets he is known to have walked. Living in his footsteps is probably more accurate.

Early Sunday Afternoon, March 26, 2023. Does this scream “Edward Hopper Painting?” 93 years later, it’s hard to see Early Sunday Morning, 1930 (which I discuss in Part 2), in this scene in my neighborhood, but this is where it was on 7th Avenue between West 16 & 17th Streets. Only the building partly shown on the right is in the Painting. I had to wait for the sun to go behind the center building (to the west) to take this shot, its glare still bleaches out the wall of the building on the right, proving the direction the Sun shines in the Painting was “Artistic license.”

A bit of my passion for his Art comes from this “shared experience” of this part of Manhattan at different times, but most of it lies in the endless mystery at the heart of his Art. Mystery that no amount of looking seems to solve. Until I saw Edward Hopper’s New York, that is. 300 pieces in here on NighthawkNYC.com since July, 2015, except for a bit at tail end of “My Search for Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks Diner,” this is the first time I’ve written about his Art.

Setting the Stage

Before the crush. Edward Hopper’s New York Member’s Preview Opening Day, October 13, 2022. A wall of early work, including Self-Portrait, Oil on canvas (as all works featured are, unless specified), right, introduces the show. For Hopper, 1906 marks the beginning of his life as an Artist, the year he graduated from Art school, then embarked on his first trip to Paris. He would return twice before 1910, then return to NYC to get his Art career started.

While not a career retrospective (there has not been an Edward Hopper Retrospective in the U.S. since Edward Hopper: The Art & the Artist in 1980-81 5), Edward Hopper’s New York is a career-long look at what is, perhaps, his most famous subject- New York City, where he lived & worked for almost 60 years. I took the chance to see its 58 Oil or Watercolor Paintings6 by Hopper, among the 200 works and items of ephemera on view, 14 times between its opening day, above, and its closing day, below.

Now. Or never. This is about as crowded as an NYC Art show gets. 5pm, March 5, 2023. One hour to go on its final day. The final weekend was sold out.

Edward Hopper’s New York was the very first time  I’ve seen so many Edward Hopper Paintings in one place. I went 14 times because who knows when I’ll get another chance.

There’s how Hopper Painted, then there’s what he Painted. I’m going to attempt to look at both. In this part, I take a look at how he Painted, i.e. his style, and how, and if, it evolved. In Part 2, I look at what he Painted in a piece that is a personal reaction to what I see when I look at Edward Hopper now. Having the chance to see and study this many Hopper Paintings from early through late in his career Edward Hopper’s New York completely changed how I see his work. This is shocking to me because I’ve been looking at his work almost as long as I have anyone else’s- well over 40 years. To this point, I saw his work as one of the ultimate (and perhaps unsurpassed) expressions of modern loneliness and isolation of the century. Now, I see that as ancillary to other themes, themes that occur even when there are no human subjects. Themes that occur in his work in and outside of NYC.

One great thing about Art is that it’s there for everyone to see and make up their own minds what it says to them. I’m sharing here what it says to me. I hope everyone will look at Edward Hopper, and all Art, for themselves. 

In a Restaurant, 1916-25, Charcoal on paper. For those who’ve criticized Hopper’s technique. He came by it honestly. 6 years in Art schools under esteemed Artist teachers. How they felt about his skill is evident in the fact that he was assigned to teach life Drawing, one of the hardest types of Drawing, before he graduated.

“In every artist’s development the germ of the later work is always found in the earlier. The nucleus around which the artist’s intellect builds his work is himself; the central ego, personality, or whatever it may be called. and this changes little from birth to death. What he was once, he always is, with slight modification. Changing fashions in methods or subject matter alter him little or not at all.” Edward Hopper7

Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882 in Nyack, NY, some 80 miles as the Owl majestically flies from the City. He visited the City as a child with his parents, then came here on a daily basis while attending Art school from 1899-19068. Towards the end of that time, he took up residence on West 14th Street, before taking three trips to Paris from 1906-10. After returning to the City, he lived at 53 East 59th Street9 before moving to 3 Washington Square in 191310.

Untitled (Study of Man Sketching in Front of a House), c. 1900, Opaque watercolor, fabricated chalk and graphite pencil on paper (recto); Graphite pencil, pen and ink and opaque watercolor (verso). *-Whitney Museum Photo. Not in the show.

Seeing that introductory wall, shown earlier, sent me delving deeper into Edward Hopper’s Artistic beginnings (1895, at about age 15, to 1913, when he moved into 3 Washington Square at about 31) for the first time, looking to see when his themes began, how his style and technique changed over that time, and what they could tell me about his familiar later work. Most of Hopper’s early work is in the Whitney’s Permanent Collection, thanks largely to the 1970 Jo Hopper Bequest. It is, unfortunately, too rarely seen, and in my view, under-considered.

From the beginning, one thing that stands out to me is that Edward Hopper was a “traditional” Painter. That is, he relied on his preliminary Drawings & Studies as the basis of his Paintings, as Painters had been doing for as long as there had been Painters. Though Photography was making steady inroads into all aspects of life, and being used by an ever-increasing number of Artists & Painters during his lifetime, Edward Hopper never used Photographs as the basis of his work11. Untitled (Study of Man Sketching in Front of a House), from the year his Art school studies began, may be of a fellow student or be a de-facto Self-Portrait. In either case, it shows something I imagine Edward Hopper did regularly for the rest of his career. In addition to relying on long-standing traditional methods, Edward Hopper steadfastly remained true to his vision. He not only resisted Abstraction, but he uncharacteristically fought against it in print, in a publication titled Reality, which he contributed to.

Le Pont des Arts, 1907. Edward Hopper Painted this outdoors near where he was staying on his first trip to Paris. So, it’s strange to see early on in a show devoted to his NYC work. Nonethelessless, it’s interesting for its style and for its content (see Part 2).

While in Paris, Edward Hopper saw shows of the work of the so-called “impressionists,” (a box I don’t subscribe to, so I will use “earlier French Painters” instead) but, apparently did not see the work of Picasso. It’s hard not to see their influence in this, but, at least for me, not that of any one Artist in particular stylistically. Under their spell, he seems to be doing his own take on it.

The question for me became- How far did this influence go, and how long did it last?

“It took me ten yers to get over Europe,” he said.12. Ten years after Europe would be 1920. Looking at the show, a case could be made it lasted much longer.

New York Corner (Corner Saloon), 1913 became a touchstone for me over my 14 visits. If it wasn’t for the familiar lamp post and the smoke stacks in the rear, you might think this is a corner in Paris. A charming and unique early New York work, it was in MoMA’s collection until at least 1981. At some point after, they sold it! A shortsighted mistake in my view.

After returning from Paris, the 28-year-old Artist set about surviving as one. To this end, his work as an Illustrator from 1917 to 1925 provided him with income until his work began to sell. His first show, at the Whitney Studio Club in 1920 (the predecessor to the Whitney Museum), with 16 Oils, produced no sales. In 1923, his Watercolors began to sell after they were shown at the Brooklyn Museum. Then, in 1925, The Met bought 15 Hopper Etchings. Later that year, he sold Apartment Houses to the Pennsylvania Academy, his first museum Painting sale. As his Paintings finally began to sell (mirroring the experience of Winslow Homer, to whom his Watercolors were compared, whose Watercolors also sold before his Oils began to13), in September, 1925, he was able to give up illustration14. Among his early Paintings, the wonderful New York Corner, 1913, caught my eye. It’s interesting to contrast it with this work by John Sloan, one of his teachers, Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, 1907.

John Sloan, Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, 1907. The Sixth Avenue elevated train, which Hopper frequented, runs to the left. The gold sign on the right reads “LION BEWERY,” which was the 6th largest brewery in the US in 189515. I believe this view may be looking downtown, if that’s the Jefferson Market Courthouse in the background. *-Photographer unknown.

New York Corner currently resides in the collection of the Canter Center, Stanford University. Upon acquiring it, their press release says, “New York Corner, created when the artist was 31 and considered the first work made in his representational style.” Wait. What?

“representational-noun 1. showing things as they are normally seen” Cambridge Dictionary

What’s “representational” about it?

In December, 1913, Edward Hopper moved into 3 Washington Square on the Park, where he would live for the rest of his life, so this may have been executed based on a scene near his East 59th Street home just before or just after his move (unless this is a scene on East 14th Street. There’s nothing like the background anywhere else in what would be his West Greenwich Village neighborhood.). When I look at New York Corner, I see an Artist who’s in transition. It seems to me Hopper is wrestling with the influence of his teachers Robert Henri & John Sloan, and what he’d seen in Paris. The top half (i.e. the building) is slightly more “representational,” slightly more resolved (especially in comparison to work he did in Pars, like River Boat or Le Pont Royal, both 1909, and American Village, 1912,), while the bottom half is entirely out of focus. The figures are more like shadows, the indistinct but distinctive gold signage is striking, and stands in stark contrast to the sign in the Sloan. It only adds more mystery to the feel of the whole piece. The upper two floors of the building feature windows that are not much different from those seen on the upper floor of Early Sunday Morning (which are more defined) or across the street from the diner in Nighthawks (ditto). He’s starting to get there.

New York Interior, 1921. Seen through a window, this wonderful piece is one of a number of Hoppers that reminds me of Degas. See Night Windows, below. Notice the clutter on the mantel. Then compare this with Room in New York, seen further below.

As I’ve said, I don’t subscribe to most of the “-isms” that proliferate in Art, and the world, and that applies to putting Edward Hopper in anything other than the “Edward Hopper box.” As time goes on, putting him in the “realism” box he’s usually stuck in seems increasingly problematic. To wit- In Gail Levin’s massive 780-page Expanded Edition of her Intimate Biography of the Hoppers I couldn’t find one instance of Edward Hopper referring to his Art as “realism.”

“realism-noun 1: corcern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary” Merriam-Webster

Richard Estes, Times Square, 2004, Paintings don’t come much more technically astounding than this. Unless, they’re by Jan van Eyck. Having stood on this spot before, during and after 2004, I can certainly verify the overwhelming visual noise that still is Times Square, something that has never been more faithfully realized than it is here.

I’m sorry, but when I look at his Art, it doesn’t fit that definition. For another thing, “realism” in Art is a term that began seeing heavy use in the 19th century, though I’ve seen the term applied to Artists like Caravaggio, 1571-1610. In all that time, things have changed. In 1966, the year before Edward Hopper died, Richard Estes began Painting New York in ways that redefined what had been called “realism,” making everything stuck in that box previously look, well, “different.” While Edward Hopper often Painted scenes looking through windows, Mr. Estes took the art of rendering their reflections to an entirely new level, while often Painting at the hyperfocal distance, which added new depth to his depictions of the world. Suddenly, the eye was free to go anywhere on the canvas and it was all rendered “democratically” (i.e. with apparent equal weight) and in focus. Others, including Rod Penner, followed, pushing the envelope of what had been done, all the while in the service of Art. There was suddenly more than one kind of “realism!” Since none of them have put their Art in a box in their interviews, I certainly don’t subscribe to the terms others ascribe to their Art. Therefore, Messers Hopper, Estes and Penner reside in only one “box” each: the one with their name on it. “Realism” has been used for over 125 years! it’s past time to retire it. It’s outlived its supposed meaning.

Night Windows, 1928. Among the earlier French Painters, Edgar Degas is someone I see in numerous Edward Hopper compositions. Perhaps more than I see any other Artist. Hopper seemed to share Degas’s voyeuristic streak. Many of both of their Paintings show women being observed apparently without their knowledge.

It’s pretty plain to see that these recent developments are at odds with Edward Hopper’s style. Then again, I don’t think he was ever out to win the realism race. Hopper authority Gail Levin said his work has “the suggestion of reality16.”

Finally, there’s this for all those who box Hopper as a “realist”-

“I think I’m still an impressionist…” Edward Hopper.

Edward Hopper didn’t say that in 1913 after Painting New York Corner. He said it in 1962, a mere five years before he died! He said it in an interview published in Katherine Kuh’s book The Artist’s Voice: Talks With Seventeen Artists, in 196217. That Edward Hopper, who never minced words, or used them without careful consideration (like the careful consideration he gave every detail of his compositions) especially in the very few interviews he did, would say this so late in his life and career HAS to be taken seriously. So far, it hasn’t been. The “realism” noise surrounding his work remains deafening. I came upon the “impressionist” quote after already being convinced by the visual evidence in Edward Hopper’s New York that he took what he learned from the earlier French Artists and used it in his own way. He was one of the Artists who forged what some call an “American style,” an important goal at the time. Yet, his influences remained in his work throughout his life to the extent he chose to use them, in varying degrees, to suit his purposes in each particular work.

GeorgiaO’Keefe quoted on the back cover of the catalog for her 2021 show at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Part of that influence, I believe, was that as time went on, Edward Hopper began removing unnecessary objects from his Paintings. It seems to me his work lives on its mystery. Isn’t too much information an enemy of mystery? He also stopped using “real” settings, creating his own, possibly based on actual places combined with his imagination. In spite of my decades of looking for the “real” Nighthawks diner, this may well be what he really did: he based it on a place he saw then modified it in his imagination to suit his purposes (and he said as much). And that is the key: everything superfluous went out of his Art. That’s one thing that makes Nighthawks such a brilliant, timeless, nebulous work.

The result? For me, many of Edward Hopper’s New York Paintings are “impressions.”

Room in New York, 1932.

I rest my case with Room in New York, from 1932. One of his masterpieces, in my view, it defies every single box Edward Hopper has been put in. It’s one of his many scenes looking into a window. Perhaps something he saw in a fleeting moment while riding the Sixth Avenue elevated train, or in passing as he walked, or maybe it’s a scene he imagined, possibly filtered through his own relationship experience. If, and it’s a huge “if,” this is (at least partially) filtered through his marriage, this may be as frankly as he ever depicted it. Look closer-

Edward Hopper’s “realism?” Bah humbug. A classic example of why I ignore boxes and just look at the work for myself!

Look! The faces have no details! This is by intent, of course. He obviously considered facial details to be unnecessary to what he was trying to express, or distracting from it. Is this what he meant when he said, “I think I’m still an impressionist…?” Isn’t this closer to the work of the earlier French Painters than anything else? No so-called “realist” Painted like this! Only George Seurat, among those earlier French Painters, Painted like this- on occasion (not all the time). In most Paintings that include humans, their faces and expressions carry the weight of the work. Not here in this scene that includes a woman and a man and not much else. How utterly daring! Without them, what’s a viewer to focus on? For me, all that’s left is the body language. And that red dress. “All dressed up with no where to go?” The woman in Nighthawks is also wearing a red dress. Could it be a pendant to Room in New York?

When people talk about the”genius” of Edward Hopper, for me, it’s on view in Room in New York, 1932. He had evolved through his education, his time overseas, his influences & experiences, and had arrived at the place of knowing, then executed it using his time-tested, traditional, methods. He knew what he wanted to say here, and had developed the confidence to leave out the non-essential (perhaps, inspired by seeing the earlier French Painters do it), including “minor details” like facial features! He created an impression of a scene, in my view, real or imagined, that mimics the fleeting moment that may have inspired it and somehow works perfectly, just as it is, without them.

Two on the Aisle, 1927.

In Two on the Aisle, from 1927, five years before Room in New York, the faces are “incomplete,” but more “defined” than the two in Room in New York. Perhaps he became emboldened to go further after works like this. 

The Sheridan Theater, 1937.

In Sheridan Theater, nothing is in sharp focus.

Then, in Morning Sun, 1952, the woman’s face (Jo was his model) is Painted so expertly (in my opinion) as to leave her expression ambiguous, making the work open to endless contemplation. These are just a few of the works that have “selective details,” i.e. details the Artist chose to include, or omit. In my view, this is always done to forward what he’s trying to express.

Boxes confine an Artist to one style. If the Artist says my work is in this box? So be it. It’s when other people put an Artist in a box that’s wrong in my view; for the Artist, and for not giving the viewer the chance to see the Art for themselves. Artists, being people, are free to change their minds, evolve, even move into other styles over time. Boxes don’t allow for this. Edward Hopper used his technique and the wide range of his skill as he saw fit in each work. A good number of them (i.e. many) strike me as “impressions,” and it’s their nebulosity that adds so much richness to considering them. There is enough detail in these to ring true with viewers, and enough vagueness to allow them to return to the work again and again. In other works, like Office at Night,1940, he chose to sharpen things up, but still managed to keep the mystery and the drama due to the brilliance of his composition and the realization it.

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world,” Edward Hopper18.

On the surface, these works may be “impressions” to my eyes. They are also transcriptions of the Artist’s “personal vision of the world.” Whatever you call them, they are as close as Edward Hopper got to making his inner world, “reality.”

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “An American in Paris” by George Gershwin, 1898-1937, a contemporary of Edward Hopper. Born 16 years after Hopper, he died, tragically of an undiagnosed brain tumor, 30 years before the Painter would. Hopper’s taste (if any) in Music is unknown to me, however as Edward Hopper’s New York points out in a room dedicated to it, he was an avid theater and movie-goer. As such, the name George Gershwin could not have been unknown to him. Gershwin, like Hopper, helped define what some call an “American style” of Music, as some say Hopper did for Art. Gershwin, who also Painted, was born in the City and spent most of his life here. Here “An American in Paris,” in homage to Hopper’s time there, is performed on a piano roll by George Gershwin, himself-

In Part 2, here, I take a look at what Edward Hopper’s Art says to me now, after immersing myself in Edward Hopper’s New York. Part 3 looks at some current issues surrounding Edward Hopper’s Art. 

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  1. The first Hopper authority, outside of his wife, the Artist Josephine Nivison Hopper aka Jo, and curator behind the 1950 Edward Hopper Retrospective and the 1964 Edward Hopper show. ↩
  2. In saying all of the above I am not saying that Edward Hopper is my favorite Artist, or I think he’s “the best.” I don’t believe in qualitatively comparing creative beings or works. ↩
  3. Edward passed in 1967. Jo, the Artist Josephine Nivison Hopper, continued to live there in failing health until she died in 1968. ↩
  4. Hopper worked on Nighthawks during the beginning of World War II for the U.S., having started it around the time of Pearl Harbor. In the Logbook of Hopper’s work, Jo recorded it being completed on January 21, 1942, as I show here. Jo worried German bombs would be falling through their skylight. Edward was too busy working to seem to care, or maybe he was escaping into work (Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography Expanded Edition, P.348.) ↩
  5. on 2 floors of the old Whitney, who have mounted smaller shows juxtaposing Hopper with other Artists, since, as well as the floor they gave him in their Full House show in 2005, and the Hopper Drawing show, which I saw in 2013, which had over 200 Drawings and some Paintings, including Nighthawks, on loan, as I partially showed in my very first piece in 2015. ↩
  6. which does not include about 30 Illustrations whose media were not listed but many appear to include watercolor. ↩
  7. from a letter from Hopper dated 1935 quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper As Illustrator, P.1. ↩
  8. Twice the length of time his teacher Robert Henri recommended. ↩
  9. Gail Levin, Intimate Biography, P.84 ↩
  10. While spending summers in Maine and then in Truro, MA. ↩
  11. The lone exceptions I’m aware of are his 2 Civil War-related Paintings which may have been based on Photographs he saw in a published collection of Civil War Photographs. ↩
  12. Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art & the Artist, P.126 ↩
  13. Gail Levin, Intimate Biography Expanded, P.171 ↩
  14. https://archive.artic.edu/hopper/chronology/ ↩
  15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Brewery,_Inc. ↩
  16. Gail Levin, Intimate Biography Expanded, P. 441. ↩
  17. P.135, as quoted in Sheena Wagstaff, “The Elation of Sunlight,” in Edward Hopper Tate Exhibition Catalog, 2005, P.25. ↩
  18. Statement in Reality #1 as seen in the show. ↩

Remember The Light- On The Passing of Wayne Shorter

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

I was very deeply saddened to learn of the passing of the incomparable Wayne Shorter at 89 on March 2nd. As a saxophonist, a composer, a band-leader…as a Musician, he was one of the supreme Musical talents in any kind of Music, ever. I am confident that is how posterity will come to think of him.

A classic Francis Wolf Photo from the 1960s of Wayne signed by him in London in 2008. From my collection.

I wrote about Wayne’s oeuvre and recommended a few of his albums in my 2018 piece celebrating his 85th Birthday, here. His body of work is so deep, so full of richness, surprise, endless innovation, exquisite taste, awareness and humanity, it defies categorization as “Jazz” or even Music. It’s aural Art. In thinking about Wayne, a word continually comes to my mind: teacher- one who shone his light on others. A very deep thinker, Wayne endlessly explored an extraordinarily wide realm of life: from physics & cosmology to literature, to science fiction, to Buddhism, and of course, Music of all kinds. He was a personal witness to much of Jazz history. His stories could make your jaw drop. He saw Charlie Parker and countless other earlier legends. He and his friend(!) John Coltrane spent hours practicing together. The night Bud Powell came to his hotel room very late when he was in Paris for a festival. And of course, the Miles Davis stories….

Wayne’s one-of-a-kind brain knew no boundaries or limits. Of course, this is demonstrated, for all time, on his records. It’s not a coincidence, or in passing, that one of his pieces was titled “On the Milky Way Express.” Concepts like space-time regularly appeared in his interviews.

When asked for his definition of “Jazz,” Wayne’s famous answer “Jazz means I dare you,” defines more than Jazz, in my opinion. It characterizes how he lived his life. Wayne dared continuously throughout his career. He dared to defy the expectations (earning the wrath of critics of his brilliant album High Life who wished he’d continued remaking his classics), broke boundaries by guesting on other Musician’s records in an extremely wide range of genres-  from Carlos Santana, Norah Jones and Steely Dan, to Don Henley and Joni Mitchell, one of the first Jazz Musicians to do so, and by writing and performing with so-called Classical ensembles, culminating with his opera, Iphigenia, which debuted in 2021. 

Wayne performs “In a Silent Way,” with its composer, Joe Zawinul, for the last time the two friends & legends would perform together before Joe’s passing in 2007. They cofounded the legendary band Weather Report. Joe wrote “In a Silent Way” for Miles Davis, who made it a classic on an album of the same name. I was lucky enough to meet Joe in the 1990s when my friend, the late Mark Ledford, was playing in his band. I can still feel his strong hand shake.

One never knew what to expect from a Wayne Shorter album or performance- except the unexpected. Without a Net is the apt title of one of his later albums, and that sums it up. In the spirit of the immortal Miles Davis Second Great Quintet, of which he was a key member, he and the Wayne Shorter Quartet always “went for it:” in the studio or live in concert. Along with the unexpected, one can trace on his recordings how he continually evolved over his long career.

Here is one example of his evolution over 40 years in 3 versions of his composition “Children of the Night,” of which I am certainly one, perhaps the Wayne composition I’ve played more than any other. The richness of its lines never ceases to amaze me, and different details emerge on each version. Originally written for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, it appeared on their 1962(!) album, Mosaic–

Note Wayne’s tenor sax playing. He would leave Blakey a few years later and join Miles Davis in Miles’ Second Great Quintet, one of the greatest groups in Music history. (My “shortlist” of recommended Miles Davis albums is here.) As a result of his time with Miles, the ultimate master of using space in his playing, Wayne’s own playing became sublimely tasteful. 33 years after Mosaic, Wayne reprised “Children of the Night” as the opening track on his 1995 classic High Life, which Marcus Miller brilliantly produced, completely remaking it!-

Then, in 2002, “Children of the Night” was heard in an arrangement for big band on this wonderful live performance with his now immortal Quartet (with pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, who Wayne performed with for about 15 years of this century), and the NDR Big Band, shown below, 40 years after the original version was released1. This version strips away the production to reveal the intricacies and gorgeous counterpoint of his composition. Note the difference in Wayne’s playing on this version compared to that in the 1962 original! That sublime economy gained through 45+ years of experience and performing live at that point; the knowing what NOT to play…a hallmark of a Master. He starts out playfully until things get serious at 1:45…I also love how, at a number of points, he can’t resist joining in and playing some of the section parts (parts he wrote for the ensemble). Something you never hear a soloist do, and something I can’t recall Wayne doing elsewhere. In fact, he does relatively little soloing on this version (mostly at the end), especially compared to the 1962 version. Throughout, Danilo, John and Brian follow him like the fingers of a glove…

After the Wayne Shorter Quartet stopped performing live around 2014-5, the other members, Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade continued touring, calling themselves “The Children of the Light.” I tip my hat to whoever came up with that name. There are countless other non-members of the group out there, like me, who now consider themselves members of that family.

Imagine the sound. Moments before I took this, as everyone around me was standing and applauding, the Wayne Shorter Quartet had just finished lifting the roof off of Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2012. John Patitucci’s Bass rests on the floor behind Wayne’s soprano & tenor sax.

Though in all of his Art there are riches to last lifetimes, these past few weeks since his passing, I’ve thought as much about the lessons of Wayne’s life and example…

“I dare you,” I can hear him say, “to break out of the expectations and boundaries in your life.”

*- The soundtrack for this piece is “Children of the Night” by Wayne Shorter.

For Benjamin J. Arrindell

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  1. My guess is that Wayne Shorter arranged what we hear in this concert, perhaps based on the charts for High Life, but no arranger is credited in the video. ↩

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Artist

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava (*- unless credited otherwise).

The next lines are- “But my drawing is certainly very much less charming than its model. That, however, is not my fault. The grown-ups discouraged me in my painter’s career when I was six years old, and I never learned to draw anything, except boas from the outside and boas from the inside1.”

On April 6, 1943, the story broke that an alien being had descended to Earth; not in Roswell, New Mexico, but on the other side of the world from it as the owl flies in the Sahara Desert. This small being appeared to the pilot of a crashed plane, who was suffering from severe dehydration, over what turned out to be the last week of the visitor’s one-year stay on the Earth; just one of the planets he visited on a desperate mission to secure the protection of his beloved rose on his home asteroid (a world so small he once watched 44 sunsets on a single day), and rid it of a baobab infestation.

After a week, he suddenly disappeared.

The pilot lying at the foot of a cliff with his plane in the distance, 1942, Watercolor and ink on tracing paper. Not published in the final book, in which he chose to leave out any representation of the pilot. It’s damaged condition ironically echoes that of the plane.

On or about July 31, 1944, that pilot, the only person to witness & record the event and what transpired during that week, also suddenly disappeared with nary a trace at just 44 years of age. He left behind the story and renderings of their encounter.

The world has never been the same since.

Publishing history. 1943 1st Edition, 1st Printing copies of Le Petit Prince, in the original French it was written in, right, and The Little Prince, in the original English translation by Katherine Woods, left, both published in the USA by Reynal & Hitchcock who had asked Saint-Exupéry for a children’s book. This marked the first time the author had created Art for his books and/or their covers. It wouldn’t be until after the war that the book would be published in France.

April 6, 2023 marks the 80th Anniversary of the publication of The Little Prince by the remarkable Author, aviator, and resolute French patriot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (aka Saint-Ex). Charged with writing a “children’s book” by his publishers, the result is a book that defies categorization that is now 80 years in on its way to timeless.

You’re looking at a remarkable and historic Photograph. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry after his crash in the Sahara desert, 1935. *-per Alexandre Tanase of the Succession Saint Exupéry-d’Agay, Paris; “Saint Exupéry next to his Caudron Simoun C630 F-ANRY. It was not taken right after the accident (and, consequently, not by Saint Exupéry himself or Prévot). This picture and others (there is a full series of them) were taken a few days after Saint Exupéry and Prévot were found, when they came back with others, especially Suzanne and Emile Raccaud, the couple that hosted Saint Exupéry after he was rescued. It is either Emile or Suzanne who took the picture.”

“For I do not want any one to read my book carelessly. I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend2“

The book is apparently set at the scene of Saint-Ex’s 1935 Sahara Desert plane crash which he survived only to almost perish of dehydration in the days after before he and his navigator/mechanic, André Prévot, were rescued by a passing Bedouin. The story was recounted in his memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, before he used it, again, as the setting of The Little Prince, the last book he would finish. Earlier this year, The Morgan Library presented The Little Prince: Taking Flight, which provided a fascinating look at Saint-Exupéry’s original Art for The Little Prince, as well as text and Art that he decided not to include in the final book. As a prior Morgan show, 2014’s The Little Prince: A New York Story, reminded us, he created the book in NYC while he was in exile after the fall of France in World War II.

1st edition/1st printing copy of Wartime Writings, 1982, with a foreword by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from my collection.

“He was… against the armistice and ‘stole’ a transport plane in Bordeaux to convey forty young pilots to North Africa in a vain attempt to continue the war there. When he discovered that the armistice extended to North Africa as well as France, he was at an impasse…. Without being consulted, Saint-Exupéry found himself nominated for a position on the Vichy National Council, an offer he immediately refused. He did not, however, feel he could join the ‘Free French’ group behind General de Gaulle. (‘I should have followed him with joy against the Germans, but could not follow him against Frenchmen.’) …With enormous difficulty he obtained a passport for the United States…In December, 1940 he sailed from Lisbon to America. Once established in New York, he was depressed by the isolationist reaction of American citizens to war and shocked by the conflicts between exiled French groups (some of who harassed Saint-Ex over the Vichy Council nomination).” Anne Morrow Lindbergh, author and wife of Charles Lindbergh3.

It was in these circumstances that he wrote, and created the Art for, The Little Prince. On April 2nd, 1943, a few days before its publication on April 6,, at the age of 42, he boarded a troop transport with 50,000 soldiers and returned to France to return to combat.

No one or nothing could stop him, though I can’t tell if the soldier on the right is trying to. A die-hard patriot, Saint-Ex is seen piloting a reconnaissance plane in 1944, shortly before his death, in a scene eerily similar to what his departure on his last flight may have looked like. He crashed for the 5th time on one such flight around the time of this Photo. Yet, he managed to get permission to go back up. *-Photo by John Philips, from The New York Times, April 11, 2008.

By July, 1944, at 44, he was overage for a flier (38 was the cutoff), overweight, and suffering from the aftereffects of FIVE crashes4. He was unable to put his flight suit on by himself, or to turn his head to the left to spot enemy planes. Still, due to his prestige, contacts, non-stop politicking (he volunteered for every mission), and indomitable desire to fight, nothing would stop him. “I have no taste for war, but I cannot remain behind the lines.” he said5. After training in a P-38 Lightning, he flew 8 reconnaissance missions, one ending in his fifth crash.

The Little Prince: Taking Flight, Installation view, February 4, 2023.

Still, the powers that be somehow let him back in the cockpit for his ninth and what was supposed to be his last flight. While flying from Borgo, Corsica, headed for the Grenoble region of southern France, he suddenly disappeared, eerily like his most famous creation. Some facts are known, but there’s still no real evidence as to what happened to him6. In 2004, Stacy Schiff, author of a biography of Saint-Ex, wrote in The New York Times, “His was a noble death, made in the name of the greater good to which all of his literature returns. As his widow noted, the exit was custom-made, a meteoric fall at the end of a star-chasing life7.”

To date, The Little Prince (or Le Petit Prince, as Saint-Ex wrote it in his native French), has sold TWO HUNDRED MILLION copies8 and has appeared in 536 languages & dialects9. It continues to sell 1.8 MILLION copies a year10. 

Already, within one month of its U.S. publication there was discussion about just who The Little Prince was for. John Chamberlain wrote a glowing New York Times review of it within days of its publication, calling it “A fascinating fable for grown-ups.” Ad from The New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1943.

200 million copies sold, and I missed it. HOW is that possible? (Not that I am generally a fan of the very popular.) It was never assigned to me as a kid in school, and never found its way to me outside of it in my Art book-obsessed life. It was only after I met my Muse, Lana, who has been under its spell as her favorite book since she was 11, that I read it. Of its effects on her, she told me, “I looked at the sky and imagined the planet where the prince lives…I had many dreams about the little prince.” Coming to it later in life, it seems to me to be a book that one can read at any age (I do wonder how it would have hit me as a child). Saint-Ex was asked to write a children’s book by his publisher, but what he handed in is something that’s not quite a children’s book, nor purely a book for grown-ups. Which ever end of that telescope you look at it through, there are things that feel out of place.

The Little Prince opens with this image, ostensibly a “copy of the drawing” the narrator says he saw in a book. No doubt by Saint-Ex. Seen in my copy.

To wit, the very first image on the very first page of the book does make me wonder about the book’s intended audience. It’s surely something never seen in a “children’s book” before, or probably since, let alone right in the beginning of one. We are shown a Drawing of a boa constrictor wrapped around its prey, baring its teeth with the helpless, captured animal, looking straight into the jaws of death. Terrifying, even for this adult! Saint-Ex doesn’t stop there: the first THREE images in the book are of boa constrictors! “Toto, we’re not in Roswell anymore.” Such is the charm of the book, that I have yet to see anyone talk about this.

Looks harmless enough. The manuscript of the first page of the book showing Saint-Ex’s Drawing Number One, upper center, and Number Two, lower center. The Manuscript is written with graphite on “cheap, dime store tracing paper,” one Morgan staff member told me. Notice how the first image in the book, shown before, is in a different style than his Drawing Numbers One and Two. As I stood looking at this page I was struck by this question- How many billions of pieces of paper contain words and Art work on them? How many of them turned out to be the first page of an immortal book?

Saint-Ex “softens” their impact in Page 1 of his text by discussing his early Artistic life, not snakes. We are shown his Drawing Number One (a boa) and his Drawing Number Two (also a boa) and then are told that the grown-ups he showed them to thought they were Drawings of a hat. Creatively frustrated, we are told that “That is why at the age of six I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter.” (The Little Prince, P.2) At that moment, I was stopped by one question-

Is this true? 

10th Avenue, Chelsea, NYC, October, 2018.

In biographies of the Artist I could find no detail about his Artistic beginnings. A wall card in the show says “From a young age, Saint-Ex had a passion for art and literature, composing verse as early as six years old and illustrating his adolescent writings with doodles and caricatures.” In her biography of Saint-Ex, Stacy Schiff says, “His mother vouched for the accuracy of his many reports…11.” Those indirect words are all I’ve found. The earliest Art of his I’ve found is in the terrific complete collection of Saint-Ex’s Art titled Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:Dessins: Aquarelles, plumes, pastels et crayons (English title: Drawings: Watercolors, feathers, pastels and pencils) published in France in 2008.

The Complete Artwork. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:Dessins: Aquarelles, plumes, pastels et crayons, published by Gallimard, France, 2008. Notice how Saint-Ex drew this figure’s head and face, and his unique way with hatching.

It begins with Drawings Saint-Ex did for “skits” accompanying his plots, which the wall card might be referring to, to be put on by he and his siblings for their mother at about 13. Nothing earlier is shown, so I was unable to verify his beginnings from age 6. From then on, he seemed to Draw incessantly evidenced by the fact the book totals 328 pages.

“It is for that purpose, again, that I have bought a box of paints and some pencils. It is hard to take up drawing again at my age, when I have never made any pictures except those of the boa constrictor from the outside and the boa constrictor from the inside, since I was six. I shall certainly try to make my portraits as true to life as possible. But I am not at all sure of success12“

Though he had never included his Art in his books before The Little Prince, Drawing was by no means a new endeavor for him. In fact, the Art of The Little Prince shows this. The Drawings are executed with skill, invention and imagination. They show a sublime economy. Not one line is superfluous, and the coloring is done with subtlety and terrific taste.

The little prince on the planet invaded by a baobab, 1942, Watercolor and ink. At the time he Drew this, France had fallen to the Nazis, who had taken over all of Europe except for Great Britain. It’s hard for me not to see the baobabs in The Little Prince, which were taking over the little prince’s entire planet, as symbolizing the Nazis. The little prince struggles daily to rid his planet of baobabs, eventually leaving his planet/asteroid in search of better ways to.

It’s up for discussion how much of The Little Prince is cloaked autobiography and how much is a fairy tale. Certainly the plane crash in the desert and the pilot as the narrator line up on the side of ringing truth. Did he hallucinate the little prince while suffering extreme dehydration in the days after the crash? Saint-Ex was far from home when he wrote The Little Prince, and in need of friends. His little prince is too. When asked by the fox if he is looking for chickens, he replies,”I am looking for friends13.” The baobabs standing in for the Nazis, then engulfing his homeland and most of Europe, would be a plausible metaphor.

As published. “Perhaps you will ask me, “Why are there no other drawing in this book as magnificent and impressive as this drawing of the baobabs? The reply is simple. I have tried. But with the others I have not been successful. When I made the drawing of the baobabs I was carried beyond myself by the inspiring force of urgent necessity14.” It’s easy to see everything that was at stake for him at that moment in those words, and in this Drawing of the baobabs devouring his planet. Things that would cost him his life.

So would the little prince’s beloved rose being a characterization of Saint-Ex’s wife, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, according to quite a few.

Unknown Photographer, Portrait of Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, ca. 1940-43. Consuelo was also an Artist & writer, who wrote a memoir of the couple’s relationship titled The Tale of the Rose.

The Morgan would seem to be one of them, and they included a beautiful portrait of her in the show next to a card reading “CONSUELO, THE ROSE.”

1st Edition/1st Printing copy of Night Flight, 1932, minus the dust jacket. From my collection.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is no one-hit wonder. The Little Prince was not his first rodeo. An early novel, Night Flight, was made into a 1933 Hollywood feature film of the same name starring Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy. His memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, won the prestigious (U.S.) National Book Award, and is still #3 on National Geographic’s list of 100 Greatest Adventure Books. Yet, I seriously doubt any of his many readers were prepared for what he gave them when The Little Prince was published here 80 years ago, and posthumously in France after the Liberation. For one thing, its prose is dramatically of a different style than that of Night Flight or Wind, Sand and Stars. It’s stripped down, almost zen-like, which enhances the open-ended nature of his words. This is immeasurably furthered by his Art, which often includes details not to be found in the text.

The entrance foyer for The Little Prince: A New York Story, at the Morgan Library, 2014. Photos were not permitted inside, so the photos of the Art shown here are from the Morgan’s The Little Prince: Taking Flight, 2023.

In 2014, Lana’s passion for the book convinced me to read it for the first time, just in time to see the landmark show, The Little Prince: A New York Story at the Morgan Library, an amazing, and fortuitous, coincidence. The Morgan relates the genesis of their involvement with The Little Prince thus-

“As he prepared to leave the city to rejoin the war effort as a reconnaissance pilot, Saint-Exupéry appeared at his friend Silvia Hamilton’s door wearing his military uniform. “I’d like to give you something splendid,” he said, “but this is all I have.” He tossed a rumpled paper bag onto her entryway table. Inside were the manuscript and drawings for The Little Prince, which the Morgan acquired from her in 196815.”

The entrance for the one-gallery The Little Prince: Taking Flight, Morgan Library, February 4, 2023.

I returned to The Morgan in January, 2023, to see the compact The Little Prince: Taking Flight16. Size didn’t matter; both shows were endlessly intriguing. A New York Story featured more of the manuscript, alongside a new translation of unpublished sections, than Taking Flight does. The latter is more focused on his Art- both published and unpublished. Of course, over both shows it was the Art that struck me, but I didn’t really appreciate it in my initial exposure to it in 2014 until later.

Over my three visits, The Little Prince: Taking Flight was never less crowded than this. January, 13, 2023, with another 3+ weeks left to run.

After seeing both shows, as I began looking into the long history of The Little Prince, I discovered that quite a few others have taken their shot at relating the story visually- in Art, Film, on the stage, in Opera, and you name it. I started exploring this realm, but was stopped almost immediately in each case. Why? For me, in each instance, whatever I looked at only served to send me running back to Saint-Ex’s version- i.e. his Art. 

Wait a minute. No one I’ve read has referred to Saint-Ex an “Artist.”

Installation view, The Little Prince: Taking Flight, January 23, 2023.

The “simple” Art he created for The Little Prince has held up against anyone else’s visual interpretation of it thus far. Here, for me, was the first, and the most important, “proof” that indeed he was an Artist, and an under-rated one at that. Then, the more I delved deeper into his Art, the more impressed by it I became. In The Little Prince, his work is beautifully subtle. In his Art (the original Drawings for which were rendered in the delicacy of pencil or ink and watercolor), we get the essence of his words, but often extra details that add even more layers to the text, and in a sense create a dialogue with it, while being essential and an irreplaceable part of the the whole experience that only the author, who was also the Artist, could create.

The little prince standing on the edge of a cliff, c.1942-3, Brown ink on paper. Everything about this is interesting: from the hatching on the lines, to the unique flowers (possibly roses), to the way Saint Ex carries the composition off without a single excess line.

Of course it is beloved by those who love the book, but why hasn’t his Art received more attention and acclaim as “Art?”

For one thing, I believe Saint-Ex purposely set a trap with the way he presents his Art. On the first page (showed earlier), he shows us his Drawings Number One and Two, which appear to be “simple” line drawings colored with watercolor (though he says he used colored pencil as a child). These are the traps. Having lowered our “Artistic expectations” about as low as possible right from the start (which also takes the pressure off of himself as the Illustrator of the book), he then proceeds to present much more finished Art as the book progresses.

Taking flight. The little prince flying over a planet with mountains and a river, 1942, Watercolor and ink.

Herein lies the second phenomenon: Only the Artist who happens to also be the author knows more than he or she’s said in the text. The little prince’s outfit, shown in the first image in this piece above, is a perfect example of what I mean. It is not described in anything near this detail we see in the Painting in the text! It seems to me that this is why the interpretations of others haven’t spoken to me. Saint-Ex has this unfair advantage over them that leaves them guessing.

“The flower that you love is not in danger. I will draw you a muzzle for your sheep. I will draw you a railing to put around your flower. I will–” (The Little Prince, P.28)

A major takeaway from The Little Prince for me, something I continue to think about, and one that I have not heard others address, is that over and over the narrator attempts to use Art to solve the little prince’s problems. First, by repeatedly Drawing him a sheep until he hits on one (that is quite abstract, zen-like, and reminds me of something the great Marcel Duchamp, a fellow French contemporary who was living in Greenwich Village in 1942, would come up with. As far as I know, they never met.) that satisfies him. Then, in the quote, above, and again, during his final encounter with the little prince the narrator feels Art is a key to solving a dilemma. Therein lies the sprit of a true Artist. In fact, more than one renowned Artist has told me they hoped their work “would change the world.”

The little prince looking at a mountain range, 1942, Watercolor and ink.

Over time, much of his Art (as seen in Dessins) shows a propensity for portraits and figures. Most of them are not “finished” to the degree we see in The Little Prince. I particularly find his faces to be unique. They’re drawn economically, with what appears to be quick lines, selectively minimalistic, and some daring details including a rakish lines forming a kind of “unibrow” in a number of them. It’s hard to tell the gender of a number of his Portrait and Figure Drawings, something that continues in some of The Little Prince Drawings. A number of his portraits are striking. Some appear to be quick sketches, others are more finished and more like “traditional” studies or portraits. But it is those that are “sketch-like” that stand out for me. Looking through the book, we see early echoes of what we would see in The Little Prince. Figures stand alone in fields, some sharing body or vague facial similarities to the little prince.

Unknown Photographer(s), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, (Per Alexandre Tanase of the Succession Saint Exupéry-d’Agay, Paris) “taken in 1937  or 1938, in the apartment he was renting at the time, 15 Place Vauban in Paris.”

There are some who feel his books have, largely, the same “message.” Perhaps, it’s not surprising, then, that, as Dessins shows, was, also, a continual evolution of figures leading up to what stands as his final & ultimate realization. But, he was only 44 when he died. As different as The Little Prince is from Wind, Sand and Stars, which preceded it, all bets were off for where he would have taken his work had he lived. He remains, tragically, another great Artist taken from us all too soon by the war, along with Anne Frank and Charlotte Salomon, among too many others.

Am I saying that no one else should try to visually interpret The Little Prince? That’s up to them. I’m sure there are many who enjoy what has been created based on The Little Prince, and probably will with future interpretations. 

For itself, under the scrutiny of 2 museum shows, Saint-Ex’s Art surprises- as the book has countless readers. His Art comes across as ephemeral as its subject. For one thing, he created much of the Art for his timeless book on cheap dime store tracing paper: much of it bearing the visible watermark of Fidelity Onion Skin, a paper that clocks in at all of a 10 pound weight17!. Some of his pencil lines are fading. There is a cigarette burn hole right in the middle of one Drawing. Another has been crumpled up as if it were thrown out, then rescued. Others show signs of coarse handling. Through it all, his art has held up for 80 years. 

I was staggered when I saw this. Saint-Ex’s identity bracelet that he wore on his final flight found in a fishing net in 1998. Seen at the entrance of The Little Prince: A New York Story  at the Morgan Library in 2014.

Among the countless other things it is, The Little Prince is a lesson in what really matters in the face of the temporality of all things, the overwhelming noise that surrounds them, and all the things that don’t really matter we waste our lives on. Of invisible connections, of love, loss and longing in the aftermath of the little prince’s sudden disappearance (uncannily mimicked by the sudden, mysterious disappearance of its creator, himself, a year after its publication). One of my reasons for writing this piece was because The Little Prince reminds me of what I learned in my journey through cancer in 2007. In my February, 2017 10th Anniversary of treatment piece, “Cancer Saved My Life,” I wrote that I learned love and being loved were all that mattered in life, echoing the Fox’s lesson in The Little Prince valuing invisible connections over all. This February, as I mark 16 years free of cancer, I would add something I believed at the time but did not say: Art also matters. Art is one way to live on after death.

“All I had was a common rose…,” the wall card for this Drawing was titled. The little prince lying on his stomach, 1942, Watercolor and ink.

Francis Bacon said it took 75 to 100 years for art to be considered Art. I’ve always felt it took longer. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has been living on for almost 80 years after his death through his work. With almost 2 million copies continuing to be sold each year, The Little Prince shows no sign of passing into obscurity. Will future generations of kids or adults be immune to its charms? It seems to me it will take something radical to happen to human beings to make them immune to it. My bet is by that point Saint-Ex will also have finally received due recognition as an Artist. 

…maybe they both did.

 

 

 

-For Lana, who sees with her heart, Happy Birthday!

 

 

 

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “It’s No Good” by Depeche Mode from their album Ultra, 1997.

“Don’t say you’re happy
Out there without me
I know you can’t be
‘Cause it’s no good…”

My sincere thanks to Alexandre Tanase of the Succession Saint Exupéry-d’Agay, Paris for his insights & expertise. 

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You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here. 

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  1. The Little Prince, P.10-11 ↩
  2. The Little Prince, P.18. ↩
  3. from her Introduction to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-44, P.xiv. ↩
  4. These include a 1923 crash outside of Paris that left him with a fractured skull. The infamous, near-fatal, December, 1935 Sahara desert crash recounted in Wind, Sand and Stars and The Little Prince. A 1938 crash in Guatemala which left him with injuries that never healed, and a crash on a reconaissance mission just prior to his disappearance. ↩
  5. Quoted by Anne Morrow Lindberg, ibid, P.xvi ↩
  6. Sources for this paragraph are here, here, and here. ↩
  7. Per. ↩
  8. Per ↩
  9. Per ↩
  10. Per ↩
  11. Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupéry, P.101 ↩
  12. The Little Prince, P.19. ↩
  13. The Little Prince, P.66 ↩
  14. The Little Prince, P.24. ↩
  15. https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/little-prince ↩
  16. From Alexandre Tanase of the Succession Saint Exupéry-d’Agay: “…this second Morgan exhibit was created following A la rencontre du petit prince (Meet the little prince), a unique retrospective presented in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, from February to June 2022, for which the Morgan framed and lent some sheets of the Little Prince manuscript, that was shown in France for the first time. This exhibit had more than 600 items, and was noteworthy especially for the artwork shown: many drawings presented for the first time (notably some Little Prince watercolors from the Consuelo Collection), and many that were discovered after the publication of the Album you mention in your article (which is from 2006, not 2008). For instance, the now famous Lettres à une inconnue. The links to this exhibition website: https://madparis.fr/A-la-rencontre-du-petit-prince-2120 and https://madparis.fr/A-la-rencontre-du-petit-prince). If I mention this, it is because you may then be interested in the catalog that was published for this event (by the same editor, Alban Cerisier, who worked on the 2006 book, Dessins). This second book is a reference concerning Saint Exupéry’s artwork.” ↩
  17. Fidelity Onion Skin is STILL in production! One vendor characterizes it as- “Our best option for onion skin paper is Fidelity Onion Skin. This thin yet surprisingly strong paper is constructed from a true 10 lb. 100 percent wood fiber, giving you all of the most desirable onion skin qualities. This specific line is beloved by crafters in need of paper that offers easy folding, great acceptance of inks and optimal strength. Fidelity’s version is chlorine-free and features a smooth, uncoated finish. Popular choices include 25 x 38 and 8.5 x 11 onion paper.” ↩

What’s Left Unsaid About Remixed Classic Albums

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It’s 2023. Do You Know What Your Remix Is?

One of the monuments of modern western culture. An early Parlophone CD release (1987) of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s. At the moment, there are 1,099 DIFFERENT versions of Sgt. Pepper’s listed on Discogs. This one sells for about $5. If I wanted a CD version, this might be one I’d recommend. Why? Read on. Lps, CDs & DVDs shown are from my collection.

In my prior life as a musician and Music producer, as now, I have always respected the wishes of the Artist across whatever medium he, she or they worked in in the visual or aural Arts. Yet Artists, being human, have finite lives. Art, doesn’t.  As time has gone on, a lot of Music has outlived its creators. But, new listeners, even new generations of them, are continually discovering Music of the recent or distant past. The record companies are then faced with a dilemma. Do they keep reissuing the exact recordings that were originally issued?  Or, do they “update” the original recordings using the latest technology?  This has turned out to be an age-old question over most of the past 100+ years of sound recordings. It’s big business for those who own the recordings and/or the rights to them. Imagine making a product once, then being able to re-sell it to people over, and over, and over, and over again. 

The immortal Duke Ellington began recording in the 1920s in mono, of course, stereo being invented in 1931, but adapted slowly after. RCA, Decca and Columbia recorded him early on. Here in the first 20 volumes of their The Complete Works of Duke Ellington Lps, RCA has reissued their recordings from 1927-1943 in mono pretty much untouched except for the covers and the Lp format. Leaving aside the dated cover art, I believe this is the right way to do it.

After the Artist hands in the master recording on whatever format (i.e. tape or audio file), the label then takes that, packages it and releases it. After an indefinite while, the label decides to repress or rerelease the record. Then, the questions begin. Represses of vinyl or compact disc albums usually involve minor changes- a different pressing plant, perhaps, etc. These changes that no one except the dedicated fan or collector would notice are usually only documented on Discogs.com and on fan and collector sites.

Up to 1948, all sound recordings were mono, meaning everything was recorded on one track. In 1949, guitarist Les Paul invented multi-track tape recording, “sound on sound,” he called it1. This opened up a gigantic world of possibilities that was brilliantly explored by The Beatles and their Producer, Sir George Martin, among others. The amount of tracks you had to record on grew from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16, and on and on, and so did the possibilities.

If you see this message in GarageBand, it’s time to mix down some tracks to make room for more!

Today, everyone with Apple’s GarageBand app can have a whopping 256 tracks right at home! 48 tracks was the most I ever recorded on in my studio days, and even back in the early-mid 1990s, very few NYC recording studios had equipment to handle that many. After recording all the parts on to however many tracks, the Musician/Artist and their producer and engineer would “mix” the tracks together, adding equalization and effects, and placing each instrument within the aural space, to create the final sound of the piece. They would do this for every piece of Music to be released on an album. They would then make a 2-track stereo master tape of the finished album from start to end and hand that in to the record company as the finished, final product, to be manufactured and released to the public.

My copy of Miles Davis, Round About Midnight, Columbia CKS 8649, originally released in 1957, in the 1977 “Re-channeled for Stereo” reissue. More recently, Sony has begun to remix his immortal 1960s, and 70s albums that were originally recorded in stereo and produced by the legendary Teo Macero. Buyer beware!

When a record company decided to reissue an album, the changes to it may be small, or extensive. Some companies opted to reissue the original recordings, more or less the same, though there were caveats to that. Were they using the original materials- i.e. the original master tapes (in the tape era)? Or, were they working with a second, third, or fourth generation copy of the original?

As you move further and further away from the date of the original recording, tape begins to disintegrate. Copies had to be made. Uh oh! You’re then relying on the expertise of those making the copies doing a good job2  Later on, as stereo became all the rage, many earlier mono recordings were “electronically rechannelled” to mimic stereo, with varying results.

Charles Ives in Quad??? Wow, I’ve got to hear this! it turns out there are two types of Quadrophonic sound- both using 4 speakers arranged around the listener- Discreet, which featured different instruments coming from each speaker, and SQ, which this is, which artificially mixed the sound to mimic Quad, and “better suited” to be played on regular stereo equipment.

Next, it was quadrophonic sound, and some older recordings were, once again, processed to imitate quad, though they were originally recorded in stereo. More recently, there has been no shortage of technical innovations for the enterprising record companies to use as a reason (or excuse) to reissue older recordings. It’s gotten to the point that, according to Discogs.com, to date there are 1,099 versions of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!

Roll over Beethoven. Tell Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky the news.

In my opinion, if you want to hear The Beatles records as THEY intended their Music to be heard go to the source. Get the original releases. Seen here on the verso of the Parlophone CD I showed up top the key information is lower center. Only Producer George Martin (who died in 2016) & Engineer Geoff Emerick (deceased in 2018) are listed in the technical credits. Meaning this CD was made from the master tape without someone else, who wasn’t involved in the original recording sessions, remixing them.

How many copies of it do you have? Why did you buy each of them? There are a heck of a lot of people out there who own more than one copy of Sgt. Pepper’s. And, probably, a heck of a lot of people who own more than one copy of other albums. Extra tracks, on many albums, and/or added documentation are a draw, in addition to so-called “technical improvements.”

What’s rarely mentioned in the rush to market the latest reissue is respecting the Artist’s wishes!

Recently, the record companies have started going back to the original multi-track master tapes and remixing them! Sometimes, reiusses are done under the direction, involvement, or at least the approval of the Artists. Other times, it’s hard to tell if that’s the case or not. As time goes on, fewer and fewer Artists or members of a group, may be living. Eventually, no one who was directly involved in the recording is left. Then what? There is big money at stake in the issuance of product by countless name Musicians or groups for the record companies. Of course, few bring in as much money as The Beatles, and given their enduring popularity, I used them as an example, but my thoughts apply to every recording Artist. Having been a musician, an independent record producer and a record aficionado for over a half century, a few things are clear to me- First, ONLY THE ARTIST knows what they want their Music to sound like. Everybody else who wasn’t involved in the original recording is guessing!

Rock and Jazz aren’t the only Music being rereleased of course. Here is a reissue one of the towering monuments of recorded Music- Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations. His very first album. The 1955 recording was in mono, so much less to mess up here. Ironically, his final album was also Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1981. The two performances are night and day different! If I could only have one album with me on a dessert island, it would be his 1981 recording. (Last year, Sony rereleased that album with all existing unreleased recordings in a box set to pair this with one, which I have not seen as yet.)

They may be making educated guesses, but they are guessing none the less. Artist’s ideas often evolve over time. Listen to both recordings of Glenn Gould performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for example, for proof. They are completely different. Who’s to say what Artist X would do in remixing an album he/she or they made 20 or more years ago? Basing a remix on what someone did before ignores this fact because NO ONE who is not the Artist knows for sure.

Second, when an Artist approves a Musicial “product,” that’s it. It’s finished. Done. The end of the story. It’s not subject to modification at some later date. How many Painters go back and alter a Painting years later? A few. maybe. Not most of them. But, someone else modifying a Painting greatly affects what it is, and opinions about it. It lessens that work in the eyes of Art historians! WHY isn’t that the case with Music remixed by others?

Glenn Gould was a perfectionist, in addition to being eccentric & unique. I’m left to wonder how he would have handled these reissues of his Goldberg Variations recordings, and IF he would have permitted the extra material, which was rejected in the first place, to be released at all! Surrounding his original masterpiece with 6 other CDs of rejected material may serve to diminish the effect and impression of the final album. The material should be preserved for historians, but releasing it to the public is highly questionable in my opinion.

Third, If someone who wasn’t part of the original recording remixes an album, it’s their vision of the Music, in my view. Their interpretation. If I want to hear The Beatles, I go to the original recordings they themselves made and were involved with producing and mixing (with Sir George Martin). Period.  

I bet no Musical Artist working in the 1960s, say, was ever approached with the following questions- “Is it ok with you if, at some later date, we remix your Music?” “Is it ok with you if, at some later date, we “electronically modify” your Music?”

What do you think the answers would have been?  “IF I’m involved in it, and personally approve the results,” might be the answer I would expect to hear most often. A LOT of time, work & care went onto getting things just right in making that original final mix and final master. To let someone else change it later? In my opinion, it’s outrageous. 

The reasons that these questions aren’t foremost on the minds of most Music listeners is, first, the Artist’s name is on it. It’s easy to assume the Artist approved anything with their name on it. That’s increasingly becoming up for debate! Then, in my view, some are too busy worrying about things that, frankly, are not as important! Be it CD vs Vinyl, or the new 40th anniversary edition with extra tracks and a 200 page book, with new mixes by the son of someone who was involved on the original record. Even how “good” something recorded in 2022 sounds compared to something recorded in 1999, 1969, 1959 or 1929. (Yes. I don’t think that’s as important.) Meanwhile, the original version, the one the Artist’s created & approved slips into oblivion, only to be found in the hands of astute collectors who spend time and money seeking out the original version.

IS THIS WHAT IT’S COME TO?

Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece, Brazil, in the Director Approved Special Edition DVD set from the Criterion Collection.

In books, 1st editions are the copies most valued. In Film, companies are issuing “Director Approved” versions and they receive the highest respect. This doesn’t always happen in Music. Why?

Simon & Garfunkel, Old Friends compilation and rerelease with extra tracks. I’m showing this without condemning or recommending it as an example of the difficulty the buyer faces in trying to understand just exactly what they’re buying.

When you buy an album, CD or digital album, look carefully at the fine print. You often have to look VERY long and hard to find out exactly who created the copy you hold in your hands. The Artist’s name may be on the front of it, but it’s the “other names” on the back, or inside who produced it and mixed it that are important, too, in my view. In 1995, I recorded a live Jazz quartet: alto sax doubling on flute, piano, bass and drums. When I shopped it to record labels, one very respected Jazz label (run by a Musician) offered me a considerable sum for it. On one condition. They wanted to replace the drummer. The drummer happened to be a “name” in Contemporary Jazz who won a Playboy Poll a few years earlier and had 11 solo albums out under his name. The Music was recorded in, basically, a one room studio with baffles set up to allow separation in the recording. The album was recorded live in the studio! The sax was in a separate booth, but there was still bleed from each instrument into the mics of the others. HOW was this label going to extract the existing drum track and substitute heaven knows whatever they had in mind? I refused out of hand. Frankly, it was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard! Their wanting to put “their stamp” on it was the only reason I could ever come up with. In the end, the label the drummer had been recording for subsequently picked up and released the album.

Detail of the hype sticker on the upper right of Old Friends. Read it carefully.

Now, I wonder…What will the record companies be re-releasing in 50 years? “New mixes by the son of the son of someone who knew a guy who was next door when they made the record?”

All the while, the most important thing is being lost. As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to find those original mixes- the mixes the Artist’s created and/or personally approved.  Pick an Artist. Now, look for their original recordings, on whatever format you prefer. If you are into “vintage vinyl,” it’s easier to find them. Most pop/rock records in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 1980s were initially released on vinyl. Look for the first release and you’re gold.  If you listen to CDs, it begins to get tricky.

Notes from the Old Friends reissue producer who wasn’t involved in the original recordings.

There was an initial outrage when CDs came out because many of them sounded inferior to the original vinyl release. They usually retained the original mixes because the remix fetish hadn’t taken hold yet, but they often used 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation 2 track master tapes to produce the CD with, resulting in inferior products. Whatever format you’re buying, spend a moment to look for the technical credits. It should be spelled out somewhere in the liner notes or credits. You have to compare the credits side by side (or listen to them A-B) to know for sure. 

The fine print. Rerelease credits on Page 34 of the Old Friends Booklet. According to Discogs, Vic Anesini has been at Columbia Records since 1988. Simon & Garfunkel’s last studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was released in 1970.

In my view, there is a lot to be said for finding the original mixes. Most importantly, THEY ARE WHAT THE ARTIST INTENDED WE HEAR! If you love that Artist, in my opinion, you should respect their wishes and seek out what they created.

Legendary Blue Note Recording Engineer Rudy van Gelder was so involved in all steps of a record he often inscribed his name in the dead wax of Blue Note Lps as evidence of his involvement. He has done so here, on a copy of Andrew Hills’s classic album, Judgement. Many years ago I wrote to Mr. Van Gelder to see if I could work for him. He never replied.

Age is a fact of life. Every one and every thing gets older. Nothing stays new forever. Sooner or later every piece of Music ever recorded is going to sound “old” compared to the latest technology. The record companies are selling “new” in the face of this. With each passing day, every record ever made gets older. There’s nothing anyone can do about that. Listener priorities need to change. Technical limitations are not the point. Expensive audio equipment will make these recordings sound as good as possible, but they may pale alongside recordings made in 2023. Of course, recordings made today should sound “better,” but in all honesty, due to the mastery of the brilliant producers and engineers of the past, like Sir George Martin, Rudy van Gelder, or my Grammy Award winning friend, Engineer Benjamin J. Arrindell, they often don’t, at least to me.

Three version of an etching by Rembrandt. Over time, he was fond of changing his Prints, as you can see here, particularly in the backgrounds. This also highlights an Artist’s changing view of his work over time! Rembrandt’s etching plates survived him and some are now in private hands, 350+ years after his death in 1669! Suffice it to say that prints made now from Rembrandt’s plates are not taken seriously by Art historians. I believe that once the dust settles and people assess what’s going on, the same will be true of remixed albums made by folks who had nothing to do with the original recording. Seen here shown in a darkened gallery to protect the light-sensitive Prints at Rembrandt’s Changing Impressions, in 2015 at Columbia University.

My concern is that these changes will start to erode the cultural legacy these Artists have created. How many pieces can you add to, say, Michelangelo’s David, before you diminish what it was? Even adding a fig leaf did that. Record companies are playing to the desire for “new releases” by Artists who may be long dead. I remember the day Jimi Hendrix died and, along with the towering loss of the man and his genius in his prime,  the incredible sadness that there would be no more new Hendrix to go with the 3 studio albums he recorded and released by the time of his death. You wouldn’t know that from looking at his catalog now! A steady stream of releases have come out under his name ever since, and no doubt will for Prince, too. Personally, I’m not sure any of them have added to his stature. In my opinion, the release of material possibly already rejected for release by an Artist can serve to diminish their overall accomplishment.

It also brings up a bigger question- DID JIMI HENDRIX, or any Artist this has happened to, WANT THIS MATERIAL RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC?

So, LET THE BUYER BEWARE! There are many albums reissued each year. Every case is different and needs to be carefully assessed. For me, I’ll listen to the Artist approved recordings & mixes on the best equipment I can, and I’ll be perfectly happy with it because I’m listening for the Music. Everyone else can decide what their priorities are and make educated decisions accordingly.

Business, as usual. A local record and book store in action, 2023.

“Industry rule number four-thousand-and-eighty; Record company people are shady So kids, watch your back ‘cause I think they smoke crack I don’t doubt it, look at how they act.”*

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Check the Rhyme,” byPfife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest from their classic album, The Low End Theory, 1991.

I’m pleased to announce that you can support NighthawkNYC by buying Lps and CDs from my personal collection 40 years in the making! Mostly Jazz Lps are listed here. Mostly CDs of all types of Music are listed here. Art books & Fine Art from my collection may be seen here. NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 7 years, during which over 275 full length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate to allow me to continue below. Thank you, Kenn.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. He had been experimenting with multi-track recording using discs in the 1930s. ↩
  2. More recently, in the digital era, this is less of an issue, but it still is one. Digital copies are supposed to be exact copies. People assume the digital master copy, which won’t disintegrate but it is subject to shortcomings of its own, was made from the original master tape. In many cases in the CD era, it has come to light later that in the rush to market it wasn’t. ↩

Jean-Michel Basquiat, At 62

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

Show Seen: Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure

King Pleasure is now a ghost, a shadowy figure in Jazz history. Born Clarence Beeks in Tennessee in 1922, one night in the early 1950s he heard the great Eddie Jefferson sing lyrics he (Mr. Jefferson) had written to James Moody’s recorded tenor saxophone solo on “I’m in the Mood for Love.” Putting words to a recorded, improvised, solo was something no one had done before.

Clarence Beeks, aka King Pleasure (seen here in a rare Photo on the back of a rereleased Lp in my collection), smiled all the way to the bank. In spite of the record company labelling, Eddie Jefferson was HIS source.

King Pleasure was so taken with it, he learned it himself, brought it to NYC, recorded it, and had a hit with it in 1952 (i.e. he stole it). Mr. Pleasure achieved the fame that escaped Eddie Jefferson, who continued to set lyrics to Jazz solos until he was tragically shot and killed as he left a nightclub one night in May, 1979. He bemoaned Mr. Pleasure’s theft, but said “…in a way it opened it up for me1.” Still, the beauty of Mr. Pleasure’s and Mr. Jefferson’s records endure to charm listeners to this day- as they, apparently, did Jean-Michel Basquiat (J-MB henceforth). 

A peak inside a previously unseen world. Partial installation view of the large area devoted to a recreation of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Great Jones Street Studio as seen in Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.

As I walked through the doors of Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure (J-MB: KP hence) on the far west side on an April Tuesday during the show’s first week, greeted by the wooden sign in the first Photo, I wondered how many of my fellow show-goers knew that the title of the show referred to a Basquiat Painting with the words “King Pleasure” on it, and that those words were the stage name of an actual person.

Jean-Michel Basquiat in a cloud of smoke in his Great Jones Street Studio with his Painting, King Pleasure, which the show is named after, partially seen in the back, left of center, in 1987, the year he Painted it. As near as I can tell, it currently resides in a private collection- like most of J-MB’s major works. From the Basquiat Taschen XXL, P.442-3.

As I left Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure, I wondered how many visitors noticed the Painting the show was named for was not included in it!

Installation view.

So, if the Painting is not in it, what’s the point of naming the show Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure? Is it a riff on the words “king” and “pleasure?” While there were some major Baquiat works on view, most of the “200 never-before-seen pieces” advertised2 were not “major,” in my opinion. So, the show wasn’t the “king” of Basquiat “pleasure.” Of the NINE major Basquiat shows I’ve seen (which is more than the total shows I’ve seen by ANY other Artist. It stuns me to realize this. I wasn’t interested in his work for most of my life!3), the 2019 Brant’s Basquiat came the closest to that in my opinion. So, the name was borrowed from a Painting the Artist created but that is off in a private collection somewhere.

Partial installation view of the large area devoted to a recreation of J-MB’s Great Jones Street Studio, his final home. Quite a few pieces were installed in this large space which also included ephemera and (his, I assume) Artist’s supplies. From what I could make of them from behind that barrier, the pieces in this space were uneven in terms of quality. Showing them in the context of a studio space allows them license for possibly being “unfinished.”

A bit like King Pleasure, himself, borrowed “Moody’s Mood for Love” from Eddie Jefferson?

Recreation of the Basquiat family home living room, his first home.

Though I didn’t count them, I’ll take the organizer’s word for it that the show included “200 never-before-seen pieces.” Being it opened 33 1/2 years after the Artist’s death, and given his level of popularity, it’s pretty remarkable there are that many never-before-seen pieces left. It goes without saying that the chance to finally see the previously unseen work J-MB left that is now in his family’s collection is a landmark opportunity for the countless fans of his work. The show was so well installed it had a museum exhibition-quality feel to it (though it was not installed in a museum). The entire exhibition interior was custom built. Galleries of Art were interspersed with spaces devoted to recreating the Basquiat family home living room, J-MB’s Great Jones Street studio, and and a final, surprise, installation at the very end. I felt the quality of the work, overall, was “good” to “very good” with a few (5-10) major pieces, though a number of other pieces left me puzzled.

A wall of items that puzzles me. Look at the top row, for example. WHAT exactly are these? Pieces like these (and NOT these) are one reason why authenticating original Basquiats is likely to remain a hot topic.

The show was so well installed it was “smart” enough to down play, almost “hide,” some nebulous pieces. A wall of smaller works, seen above, seemed to be scraps of ripped paper with writing or a Drawing on it. Each becomes a “work of Art” and is displayed as such, but there was no information as to what it is (beyond the ubiquitous “Untitled, Ink on paper,” or whatever the case may be). Was it found like this? Where? Was it torn from a larger sheet with more on it? Did the Artist intend for it to be seen? All the things Art historians need to know to properly assess exactly what is here, and, eventually, to determine the Artist’s place in history. Pieces like this, without clarification, could possibly serve to bring down the impression of the whole oeuvre in the eyes of some. Also included was also a lot of ephemera, which was better described.

Part of a large case containing personal belongings. Unlike the previous wall, above, cards explained their significance to the Artist.

Some of it related to the Artist and events in his life, as above, and some part of his ongoing studies (in the Studio recreation). The ephemera led to the show being touted as “revealing the man.” Yes, he owned a bike, and it’s here, but it seems to me, the books in J-MB’s collection need to be read, the videos need to be seen, to glean their import and influence on the Artist. Only the Art historians or the VERY interested will have the time and patience to do that. Visitors pass through displays of hundreds of these items, lucky if a few titles remain in their memory.

Among those remaining in mine, I spotted a number of Jazz books J-MB & I both owned. Books on John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and this classic biography of Charlie Parker, Bird Lives! by Ross Russell, on top of the boxes, center. I owned this same paperback edition that J-MB reportedly bought by the case and gave to friends. Unavailable in the US, I had to buy mine from a store in Canada in 1982. Seen in the Studio recreation area.

My thoughts went to the care the Francis Bacon Estate and curators took in 1998 when Mr. Bacon’s equally legendary 7 Reece Mews, London, Studio was dismantled, the 7,000 items it contained catalogued, moved to the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in Dublin in the country where the Artist was born, and reinstalled EXACTLY as it has been left by Mr. Bacon when he died. Was something similar done with what remained at his Great Jones Street Studio after J-MB died? Maybe it was. I don’t know and I can’t tell.

Installation view of “THE IRONY OF THE NEGRO POLICEMAN” gallery. Edgar, N.D., left and Jailbirds, 1983, right.

While the nebulous work I mentioned doesn’t help his case, in my opinion, overall, the work on view does serve to fill in some holes for those trying to assess his place in Art history. Almost all of the work is related to themes that will be familiar to those familiar with J-MB’s work. This was highlighted by separate galleries devoted to some of them- “ROYALTY,” which included some Charlie Parker pieces and some sports pieces, “THE IRONY OF THE NEGRO POLICEMAN,” with pieces like Jailbirds, 1983, above and below, that speak for themselves, bringing the Artist’s ever-present focus on race to a boil, and, the final room, “THOSE WHO DRESS BETTER CAN RECEIVE CHRIST.”

Untitled (Cowboy & Indian), 1982

Virtually all of the Art on view consisted of Paintings & Drawings, which were hung on the walls. There was only one free-standing piece.

Untitled, 1983, Acrylic and oil stick on wood. The very first piece in the show. A major work in my view, perhaps the most important piece in the show.

Among the pieces I thought were “major” works were Untitled, 1983, the very first piece in the show, and the very last piece in the show- another indication of how well the show was conceived and laid out. Putting a major piece first immediately raises the bar and removes the “quality” question from viewer’s mind (i.e. “Will there be any ‘great” work on view, or just a bunch of fair to middling pieces?”). Installing one last leaves them on a high. As viewers were leaving the show proper, on the way to the exit, off to the left, a black wall contained the word “PALLADIUM” at the top in silver letters. ?

What is this? Around this wall would be one of the most remarkable experiences I’ve ever had in an Art show…

Walking around it I was astounded to find a recreation of the infamous Michael Todd Room on the top of the legendary, now lost, Palladium Nightclub on East 14th Street. To the right, above the bar, was the Mural, Nu-Nile, J-MB had created for the space in 1985, which I had no idea had survived! What a shock! Seeing it again I felt I was standing in front of a piece of history- a real piece of a now lost NYC at one of its many peaks- the peak of nightlife in the City that had been building for decades, that was soon to be lost under Guiliani, as well as a major work in J-MB’s oeuvre.

Nu-Nile, 1985, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas. I still can’t believe I saw this again.

I had been in the real Michael Todd Room a few times over my many visits to the Palladium back in the day, walking around the space, which included another large Painting from the Todd Room, the recreation of the space, though simple, wasn’t all that bad. I could actually feel the original when I was in it! A wonderful feeling.

When I did finally leave the show, I began to wonder about it. Today, December 22, 2022 (the date I am publishing this), had he lived, Jean-Michel would be celebrating his 62nd birthday, and very possibly still creating Art in mid-career! Early death is, unfortunately, WAY too common in Art & Music history. Being left to wonder “What if?” is no substitute for being able to see a complete body of work created over a full life time.

Part 2, titled Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now You See It. Now You Can’t looks at Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood, another major Basquiat show that was up at the same time as J-MB:KP, and concludes with my thoughts on where to for his Art in 2023 and beyond. 

*-“James Moody, you can come in and blow now, we’re through…” the final lyrics to the Soundtrack for this Post- “Moody’s Mood for Love,” by Eddie Jefferson, recorded by King Pleasure in 1952.

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  1. Here. ↩
  2. per the show’s site. ↩
  3. The 9 are- J-MB: KP and Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad in 2022, the four I saw and wrote about in 2019, the Brooklyn Museum Basquiat Retrospective in May, 2005, the large Jean-Michel Basquiat show at Gagosian in 2013, and the Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks show also at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. ↩

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now You See It. Now You Can’t.

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Part 2 of my look at Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure also includes Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad Contemporary. Part 1 is here.

Untitled (Easel), 1983, Acrylic, oil, chalk, and oilstick on wood easel. Seen at Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad Contemporary.

When I did finally leave Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure (J-MB: KP henceforth), I began to wonder about it. Today, December 22, 2022 (the date I am publishing this), had he lived, Jean-Michel (who I will refer to as J-MB) would be celebrating his 62nd birthday, and very possibly still creating Art in mid-career! In thinking about J-MB’s Art, his life and early death, two figures repeatedly come to my mind.

Untitled, n.d., Acrylic and oil stick on canvas. Is this Charlie Parker? The figure’s mouth/nose seems to morph Into the mouthpiece of the sax, looking almost like a beak. I find the fingers interesting. It almost looks like blood is pulsing through the figure’s right hand. Seen at J-MB:KP.

First, his life and Art career mirrors that of one of his great heroes (one of mine, too): Charlie “Bird” Parker (August 29, 1920-March 12, 1955). Consider-
-Both achieved sudden fame with styles never before seen (in J-MB’s case) or heard (in Bird’s).
-Both lived high on the hog only to drink and/or drug much of their money away.
-Both were hugely influential on much that came after them in Art & Music respectively. Jean-Michel created many Paintings that were inspired by or related to Bird, and some were included in the show. Bird’s style, “Bebop,” took over from Swing by 1944, but its reign at the top of Jazz was fairly short-lived. In 1949, Bird’s former sideman, Miles Davis, created the “cool” style and Jazz changed once again. Still, Bird’s disciples were heard from for decades after his death. Among them was a singer named King Pleasure.
-Both worked for most of their careers in Manhattan.
-At one point, J-MB lived with Alexis Adler right around the corner from where Bird had lived on Avenue B on Tompkins Square Park- a few hundred feet away.
-Both wound up victims of their addictions far too early- Bird at 34 (his death the subject of at least one J-MB Painting), J-MB (December 22, 1960- August 12, 1988) at 27.
-Neither had given much, if any, thought to what would happen to their work after their death. Well, they were still young. As a result, the estates of both were thrown into chaos when they suddenly died.

From the ROYALTY gallery- a piece for Jesse Owens, left, and three for Charlie Parker, 2 center and 1, right. When I get past the content, what stuns me about all 4 is how different they are from each other compositionally. In fact, that’s the reaction I have to most of Jean-Michel’s Art- most of his compositions are different- from each other, and from what anyone else has done. I can’t think of another Artist I could say that about1 Seen at J-MB:KP.

When I think of J-MB’s Art, there’s one Artist I think of as a parallel- Vincent van Gogh. There are some striking similarities-
-Both were largely self-taught.
-Both worked as Artists for about a decade.
-Both were extraordinarily prolific.
-Both had another major Artist as a close friend. (Andy Warhol for J-MB, Paul Gauguin for Vincent.)
-Both had relationships with their fathers that were less than they wanted them to be. Both struggled continually to try and improve them (according to Phoebe Hoban’s biography, and John Lurie’s Autobiography, in J-MB’s case.)
-Both died young. Vincent at 37, Jean-Michel at 27.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, 1887. Seen at The Met. From my 2018 piece on Vincent, here.

Then, there are some major differences-
-Unlike J-MB, Vincent never used words in his Art. He did, however, create one of the most extraordinary bodies of letters any Artist has penned.
-Jean-Michel sold A LOT of his Art during his lifetime. He was one of the Artists who inspired the “boom” in Contemporary Art in the 1980s.
-Vincent sold 1 Painting by some accounts, or only a few, during his lifetime.
As I thought about the show, this is a key distinction.

After Vincent died on July 29, 1890, with his beloved brother, Theo (an Art dealer), to follow 6 months later on January 25, 1891, ALL of his work was left to his sister-in-law. She sold some of it, but most of it remained with her. As a result, decades later, there was enough to found and open the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. A lot of Art and ephemera remained when J-MB died on August 12, 1988. This all went to his family. However, by this point, most of the major pieces had been sold to collectors around the world by his string of dealers. The museums passed on his work while he lived, and since his death have been priced out of the market IF they have changed their minds about it. It would come as a donation if they were to acquire any at this point. 

Installation view of the allway at J-MB:KP leading to galleries along the left and videos along the right.

As I walked through it, I wondered if Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure was the family’s attempt to see if their holdings could be turned into a museum. A trial balloon. In my view, it’s not strong enough to be viable on a long-term basis as it is.

Partial installation view of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad Contemporary, June 6, 2022..

It should be noted that at the time J-MB:KP was up, there was another major Basquiat show going on in NYC- Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad uptown, which struck me as both important and very strong. It is pretty remarkable that there was a show with 200 never-before-seen pieces up at the same time as ANOTHER show with 30 or so strong works- all by an Artist who’s career lasted about a decade!

Untitled (Football Helmet), 1981-4, Acrylic and human hair, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s?, and his signature, on the back of the Football Helmet piece seen on the right in the previous picture. Seen at Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad Contemporary. While there are Photos of J-MB wearing the other helmet, that has AARON Painted on the crown, I have not seen one of him wearing this one.

There was no checklist available for the Nahmad show. Though the family is listed among those involved in it, I don’t know if they lent any works, and if so, which. It seems fair to say the family owns more work than we see in J-MB:KP and this may include some important pieces.

Jazz, left, and Black, right, both 1986 and Oil, graphite, crayon, and Xerox on wood, look like figures with shadow legs on the wall. Since they are Painted on all sides, it looks like they also be displayed laid flat on a table. Seen at Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad Contemporary.

Still, based on that assumption, my feeling is a Basquiat museum is not imminent. Will a few major collectors get together with the family and combine forces to open one? So far, 34 years on, they haven’t. The shows that have been mounted have been largely independent. So, Basquiat’s King Pleasure, the Painting (shown in Part 1), is a bit emblematic. If J-MB had been able to hold on to his most important Art (and I’m not saying his King Pleasure is among them), maybe there would be a Basquiat museum now. But, like most Artists, he needed the money from the sale of his Art, like King Pleasure, to survive.

Installation view J-MB:KP

It’s pretty rare in Art history post-1800 that an Artist’s work winds up virtually exclusively in private hands. Until J-MB, most Artist’s work was divided between collectors and institutions/museums, with the latter winding up with the bulk of it. For Artists who were beneath the radar of the public during their lifetimes, like Hilma af Klint, or Vincent, their work stayed with them up through their passing. Other Artists, like Edvard Munch, selectively retained pieces which enabled him to make a very large gift upon his death to the city of Oslo, who created the Munch Museum. Today, it’s common for Artists to hold on to at least some of what they create, but this didn’t begin until after Jean-Michel’s passing, when Artist became more aware and more Art business savvy.

Brett as Negro, 1982, Acrylic on tiling glued on plywood. Seen at Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad Contemporary.

So, that begs the question- Where to with the Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2023, and beyond? 

J-MB’s former home & studio on Great Jones Street- the real one, where he died on August 12, 1988. That’s probably not his bike out front, though there is one in the show which might have been parked there once. Whenever I’ve been here, I haven’t been able to tell what, if anything, the building is being used for now. Seen in June, 2022.

Going forward, as the original owners age or pass away, like both of his parents who inherited all the work after J-MB’s death, have, it’s only a matter of time before some dispersal begins. Some of it may wind up in museums- IF the museums want it. Think that’s crazy? Consider this- Early on, the museums passed on his Art, apparently not believing it was “Art,” or that it hadn’t stood the test of time. 34 years after his death, there have been very few U.S. museum Basquiat shows beyond those at the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Defacement show (I wrote about here), and the 1993 Retrospective at the Whitney Museum after he died. MoMA and The Met have NEVER had a Basquiat show2. I wonder if any NYC museum was offered the chance to show Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure. If they were, they passed. It was mounted in a space a bit off the beaten Art trail in far West Chelsea. So, it remains to be seen which and how many U.S. museums would be interested. Some of it, maybe much of it, will wind up at auction. To this point, a few major works have come up at auction and set records. High prices love scarcity. They also often respond to quality. If mostly “non-major” works come up, prices realized are likely to adjust. Nothing, not even Dutch Tulips, goes up forever. But thankfully, Art lives in a place beyond “value.”

While only the piece in the center is titled as such, each of these appear to be a Self-Portrait. Are they finished? At J-MB:KP.

Jean-Michel might have been “old beyond his years,” but his early death robbed him of something else besides a complete career- the chance to edit his oeuvre. From the beginning of recorded Art history, Artists have destroyed work they deemed not up to their standards. Michelangelo is famously reported burning Drawings near the end of his life so that “nothing less than perfect would remain from his hand.” J-MB never had this chance. And it shows. For better, or worse, it seems the curators decided to show everything. As a result, there are some questionable pieces on view in Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure. They serve to lessen the impression of the rest. Had he lived to edit his output I seriously doubt it would be as uneven as we see in the show. Some (maybe more?) of these pieces were, possibly, not meant to be seen by anyone but the Artist. He never had the chance to decide that. More pieces included means a bigger show, and a big show could be marketed as a “blockbuster,” with the possibility of charging people to see it.

Jeanine Heveaux, left, and Lisane Basquiat, center, J-MB’s sisters, at the J-MB:KP book release in NYC on April 12th.

When I heard J-MB’s sisters speak at the J-MB:KP book release, one said that J-MB:KP was “a gift to his long-standing fans.” Hmmm….a gift that costs the recipient $45 to get? Yes, I paid to get in. (If you find this piece, or my previous Basquiat pieces worthwhile, donations will help me continue. Thank you.)

Further on the money tip, it simply must be said that things could not have gone better for the early Basquiat collectors from the day they bought his work until now. They’re living the dream that fuels many collectors of Contemporary Art today, a “dream” that was largely realized because the Artist died at only 27 years old- decades before his career should have run its course- a career that could very well be going on full-strength right now! Then, other stars aligned for them-

-J-MB did create a lot of Art, but only for about a decade.
-The museums passed, leaving virtually all of it to private collectors.
-Prices for his major pieces that have come to auction have set records unheard of for 99% of Artists in Art history!
-Meanwhile, the public took to Jean-Michel and his work the way they have to no other Contemporary Artist. Still!

Shelves of J-MB T-shirts next to those of his friend, Keith Haring, another of the world’s most popular Artists, at Uniqlo, spring, 2022.

-In 2022, his Art is already on everything from candles to t-shirts to shopping bags to- you name it.

ALL of this is completely unprecedented in Western Art history! Keep that in mind, Art speculators!

J-MB:KP entry foyer. The weight of the (Art) world on his shoulders? Or, is he thinking back to his trip to Africa in 1986? Hard to know, there was no date given for this Photo.

In 2019, I wrote a piece about the 4 Basquiat shows in NYC that year titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat, at 59,” and the title for my piece on Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure is titled  “Jean-Michel Basquiat, at 62” since it, and this piece, are published on December 22, 2022, what would have been his 62nd birthday) to reinforce how young Jean-Michel would STILL be had he lived. So much has happened in the past 61 years that today Jean-Michel Basquiat already feels like a part of History. His influence is everywhere- world-wide. 42 years (since his debut in the Times Square Show, 1980, which also included Jane Dickson, subject of my last piece) is a long time for anyone to be this popular in this fickle, no-attention-span, age. How much longer will this continue? Most likely, someone else will come along and be “the most popular” of the near future. As we well know, levels of popularity are no indicator of quality.

The remarkable Kalik, Painted in 1988, the year the Artist passed away, in J-MB:KP’s  final room, titled THOSE WHO DRESS BETTER CAN RECEIVE CHRIST.

Beyond popularity is the impact and influence his Art has. A student of Art & Art history, Jean-Michel Basquiat rebelled against what Art and the Art world was right out of the box as the street Aritst SAMO©, which then exploded in his works on canvas, paper and objects, that flew in the face of everything that had been done to that point. Most importantly, it seems to me, he also put the fight against racism that had been going on in the Art of Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Gordon Parks, and others, front and center in his Art. His influence in this regard is already incalculable and will endure.

Self-Portrait, 1985, Acrylic, oilstick and bottle caps on wood. Seen at Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood at Nahmad Contemporary.

Jean-Michel Basquiat created some of the most powerful and unique Paintings of his time, like this one, and since Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, post-Picasso. (Interestingly, all of them, except Picasso, were not only alive and working during J-MB’s career, each outlived him. Mr. Johns is still working.) Then, he died at an age when most Painters haven’t “reached maturity,” yet another great Musical or Artistic talent who died too young, leaving posterity forever tantalized by “what if?”

Installation view. Great Jones Street Studio recreation at J-MB:KP.

Still, even with the uneven, unedited, oeuvre he left us, 9 shows and 400 pieces in, it’s undeniable to me that he was an important Painter of the 20th century, with possibly, a uniquely singular gift for composition. And, he was an Artist who took the ever-building fight for civil rights to centerstage in his Art.

Crisis X, 1982, Acrylic, oil, oilstick on canvas mounted on tied wood support, left, with a cross shaped canvas, and Gravestone, 1987, Acrylic and oil on hinged wood panels, right. Gravestone is a work that memorializes Andy Warhol after his passing, per the show’s curator. Note the word “PERISHABLE,” and the doors, which may be symbolic of death as a passage. Seen in Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art & Objecthood’s final room.

It seems now, 62 years after he was born, that enough time has passed that it’s clear, that love it or hate it, the Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat is here to stay. While the Art world will have its say over the next few hundred years as to where he ranks among the Painters of the 20th century, meanwhile, how will the people be able to see it? On t-shirts? Only in books? When he started as SAMO©, his work was public, available to be seen by anyone who passed by the spot he made it. Now, it’s ironic that almost none of it is public (i.e. in public institutions). To this point, the public has depended on collectors and foundations showing the work in one-off shows. Is that how it’s going to be?

While the historians argue about his position in Art history, everyone else wonders- Where can I see it to decide for myself?

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,” the title track from the album of the same name by the Peter Gabriel-era Genesis released in 1974. Of it, Peter Gabriel, who conceived the story & wrote all the lyrics, said-

“It was intended to be an intense story of a young rebellious Puerto Rican in New York who would face challenges with family, authority, sex, love and self-sacrifice to learn a little more about himself. I wanted to mix his dreams with his reality, in a kind of urban rebel Pilgrim’s Progress.” Quote, and lyrics here. Original complete recording here.

It’s fascinating and amazing to consider that Peter Gabriel’s Rael, the hero of The Lamb, is a Puerto Rican graffiti artist who wanders the streets of Times Square & NYC, presaging Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was born to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, who’s career as the graffiti artist SAMO© began a scant 2 years later in 1976! 

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  1. Also, in my opinion, too much is made of the possible influence on J-MB of Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly by Rene Ricard. I’ll leave it at that though there is much to say about it. ↩
  2. Online, The Met & MoMA show they own a TOTAL of 16 Drawings and NO Paintings between them! ↩

Diane Arbus At 99

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

Among Modern & Contemporary Photographers, perhaps no one’s Portraits have been discussed more than Diane Arbus’s, the late Photographer who would have turned 99 this past March 23rd. Much of the printed discourse devoted to discussing her oeuvre over the past 50 or so years has been collected in the new, 500-page tome, Diane Arbus Documents. Paging through it reveals that there has never been a consensus on her work. Opinions range from here to there and back again. Yet even with all of those words expended on them (with countless more to follow no doubt, starting right here) they remain deeply mysterious. (A slightly smaller number of words have been expended discussing her life, which also leaves the woman in the center of them mysterious.) Seeking “the answer,” myself, for over 25 years, I put the book down. As always, my answer if there is one, is not to be found in the opinions of others. My answer is only to be found in her Art. 

The Human Pincushion, Louis Ciervo, in his silk shirt, Hagerstown, Md. 1961, Printed by Diane Arbus 1966-1967.

Diane Arbus is one of the few Photographers, along with Robert Frank and Araki, I became interested in in the 1990s while I was exclusively a “Painting guy,” before and after my career as a musician/producer, then Music writer. My interest solidified when I saw the monumental Diane Arbus: Revelations at The Met in 20051, one of the truly great shows I’ve ever seen. The recent show, .cataclysm. The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, is the 5th Diane Arbus solo show I’ve seen-

-Diane Arbus: Revelations, The Met, 2005
-diane arbus: in the beginning, The Met Breuer 2016
-Diane Arbus: In the Park, Levy Gorvy, 2017
-Diane Arbus: Untitled, David Zwirner, 2018
-.cataclysm. The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, David Zwirner, 2022

A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968, Printed by Diane Arbus 1970-1971

So far, I have only written about her briefly, when I listed in the beginning as a NoteWorthy Show for October, 2016, here. I did, however, spend months working on a piece on Untitled, which I saw almost a dozen times. Beyond the other-worldly work, I was fascinated in comparing Diane Arbus’s lifetime Prints (i.e. those she Printed herself) with those issued after her passing by her estate (which have all been Printed by Neil Selkirk). I finally abandoned it primarily because Photographs were not allowed to be taken in it, or any of her shows. Up to now. Another reason is that I felt my thoughts on her work itself had still not congealed. The Untitled show was a wonderful chance to see her unique and powerful late series of the same name, shot in a center for the mentally disabled in Vineland, New Jersey, complete, but it didn’t give me the insights I longed for into her whole body of work, possibly because it is so singular. The wonderful in the beginning consisted exclusively of early work, again an outlier to the main body of her work between those two.

I missed the 1972 Arbus MoMA Retrospective. So, seeing .cataclysm, a “recreation” of it, was an unheard of second chance to see an important show. Being that it includes a good cross section of her mature work, originally selected by legendary MoMA Photography curator John Szarkowski, things FINALLY began to come together. 

Every time I’ve stood on the precipice of a Diane Arbus show, I’ve been greeted by a “No Photographs” sign. Until now.

As I walked through it themes recurred across time and place. However, the first thing that must be said is that Diane Arbus did not Photograph “freaks,” an offensive term, as some have called her subjects.

Albino sword swallower at a carnival, Md. 1970. Not one, but two swords.

She liked show people as subjects, which I feel is revealing, and took an interest in them beyond the stage.

Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C. 1963, There is so much to this Photograph, and so much going on, I find it one of the most captivating of Diane Arbus’s indoor Portraits. There is the layer of these performers as performers, who came to America with a circus in 19232 Here, we see behind the curtain and I for one just can’t stop trying to read each person’s expression, and what this image may say about their relationships.

She even gained access to a number of them at home, which provided another duality- the performer previously seen in performing guise removed from the stage and shown in his or her “real life” environment. Some of them, and her other subjects, were also what we now call GLBTQIA+. In Photographing them, she was ahead of her time, anticipating the work of Nan Goldin, Zanele Muholi, and others.

Girl with a cigar, Washington Square Park, NYC, 1965. “A blond lesbian smoking a cigar had sultry star magnetism…3.” I’m struck by the fact that at the exact moment this Photo was taken, Edward Hopper was living a few hundred feet away at 3 Washington Square Park. He & his wife frequented the Park. Too bad his path, apparently, never crossed Ms. Arbus’s.

Though she did some Street Photography, capturing the unsuspecting at random, in her most enduring work, her Portraits, the compositions are more direct. Many of these subjects are people she spent some time with, and are done with their cooperation, or at least their awareness. Though examples of the full range of her non-commercial work are included in .cataclysm, it is, again, her Portraits that stand apart. This may be because in any number of them, the Artist is directly in front of her subject pointing her camera directly at him or her in what results in one of the most powerful one on one confrontations in the history of Photography. In a number of her Portraits, it looks like Ms. Arbus was extremely close to the subject’s face, something rarely seen today.

Blonde girl with shiny lipstick, N.Y.C. 1967

As Diane wrote her friend Carlotta Marshall, “The pictures are getting bigger. Some are life-size or more4.” Germaine Greer, who was Photographed by Diane Arbus in April, 1971, three months before her suicide, recalled the experience-

“She set up no lights, just pulled out her Rolleiflex, which was half as big as she was, checked the aperture and the exposure, and tested the flash. Then she asked me to lie on the bed, flat on my back on the shabby counterpane.

I did as I was told. Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest. She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited. In her viewfnder I must have looked like a guppy or like one of the unfortunate babies into whose faces Arbus used to poke her lens so that their snotty tear stained features filled her picture frame (eg, A Child Crying, NJ, 1967), I knew that at that distance anybody’s face would have more pores than features. I was wearing no make up and hadn’t even had time to wash my face or comb my hair.

Pinned on the bed by her small body with the big camera in my face, I felt my claustrophobia kick in; my heart-rate accelerated and I began to wheeze. I understood that as soon as I exhibited any signs of distress, she would have her picture5.”

Germaine Greer from the book Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, P.151. (Not included in .cataclysm.)

Ms. Greer reports that “No permission for the reproduction of what is undeniably a bad picture was ever requested6.” It has subsequently seen as Feminist in Hotel Room. In Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, it is listed as “Unpublished, New Woman, 1970.” (Note- The Guardian article states twice that Ms. Greer posed for Diane in April, 1971. The Photographer committed suicide on July 26, 1971.)

This reminds me of what Edward Hopper means when he asserted that “An artist expresses nothing so much as his own personality in art7.” Regardless of what you think of her results, in many cases they can be a bit painful to look at. It’s hard for me to look at Ms. Greer’s Portrait and not see Diane Arbus in it.

A woman in a bird mask, N.Y.C. 1967. One, perhaps the most exotic, of many Portraits of a masked man or woman in the show.

In studying her Portraits of performers, at work and at home, and then moving on to the other Portraits nearby, I was struck by a commonality- a mask. A performer is one who dons another persona when they work. Diane Arbus shot a number of them either back stage or demonstrating their “act.” Then, she shows some of them at home, as in Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C. 1963, seen earlier.

Transvestite at a drag ball, N.Y.C. 1970.

We see the same person in two different contexts. Having seen them in the mask of performance, are they also “performing” at home? Are we seeing behind the stage mask? Showing them in two contexts is adding layers to what the viewer must peel through.

For me, perhaps no Diane Arbus Portrait sums this up than the one she took of my late friend Stormé DeLarverie, Miss Stormé De Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to be a Gentleman, 1961. I look at it and wonder how many layers there are to it. As someone who bent the lines of gender fluidly throughout her life, this Portrait can be seen as Stormé in her performing guise (multiple layers already), yet, it’s taken outdoors, and not on stage (or at home), adding even more layers. Then, the are all the layers of the woman, herself, who even in her late years, when our paths crossed, never lost her mystery.

Miss Stormé De Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to be a Gentleman, 1961, 45 years before I would meet her. Not included in .cataclysm. Stormé told me Diane had taken her picture. Seen here in 2015, in a darkened gallery, this was the first time I saw it.

Subsequent history would add even more layers. 8 years after Arbus, on June 28, 1969, Stormé may have been the one who started the Stonewall Uprising, the event that is widely seen as the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement. She told me she was, and I believe her. (She also told me Diane Arbus had Photographed her, but it wouldn’t be until after she passed that I saw her Portrait). She spoke emphatically against the term “riot” being used in referring to Stonewall! “The Stonewall Uprising” is what she called it. History, take note! Photographing her in the peace and calm of Central Park shows a side of Stormé her friends knew. However, Stormé was a VERY strong person- both in her inner fortitude and her physical presence and strength. She was lightning quick to speak up. After a career as a performer and M.C., she often worked as bar security later in her life. In fact, the first time I encountered her, she denied me entrance to one because I was not a lesbian though the female I was with was. I wasn’t about to argue with her! A decade later we met again and became friends. Many a late night I escorted her home to the Hotel Chelsea during the legendary Stanley Bard-era. In fact, Mr. Bard gave me his phone number and told me to call him anytime Stormé had a problem. More than once I called him at 4am. He always picked up. Stanley was one of the people who made Chelsea the legendary neighborhood Patti Smith immortalized in Just Kids.

Lady at a masked ball with two roses on her dress, N.Y.C. 1967

Beyond the performers, a number of her other Photographs show people wearing actual masks. Elsewhere, we see someone dressed in the face they show the world, “performing with a mask on” in a different way, on the public stage of life, which may or may not reflect who they really are. In all of these, the common denominator is a kind of mask- literal or figurative. In a number of instances across all of these “types” Diane Arbus captures her subject at the moment when the viewer can see behind the mask. It seems to me that Ms. Arbus, who herself wore many “masks” in public, according to Arthur Lubow’s biography, strived to see under other people’s masks.

Blonde female impersonator with a beauty mark in mirror, N.Y.C. 1958, Printed by Diane Arbus between 1958-1960. For me, this is an historic and revolutionary image- for so many reasons and in so many ways, The composition astounds me. The Printing adds incalculably to the effect.

In  this glimpse of someone behind the mask, of whatever kind, something IS revealed for a split second. But what? Is it an inkling of who they “really are?” Or…? We have no way of “knowing” for sure. It’s left to every viewer to read into it as they will.

 

Installation view.

Then, so armed with a glimmer of “knowledge” the rest of the puzzle looms. These images, like her Portrait of Stormé, are what I call an “Arbus onion,” with as many layers for the viewer to unravel as both women who created it had. The mirror in Blonde female impersonator with a beauty mark in mirror, N.Y.C. 1958 adds even MORE layers to all the others for the viewer to unravel. 

And this, it appears to me, is the crux of Diane Arbus’s Art. When one layer is finally peeled off, there’s another one under it. The “world” of her Art is an onion- one layer shows at a time, but there are many, many more underneath.

Underneath ALL of it, I’m left to wonder- “What’s left? The Artist, herself?”

“Happiness perplexed her.”

Untitled (11) 1970-71

“In the summer of 1969, she traveled to (a center for the mentally disabled in Vineland) New Jersey as often as she could to photograph the handicapped. Even before her first visit, she knew that she wanted to portray “idiots, imbeciles and morons (morons are the smartest of the three), especially the cheerful ones.” She wasn’t seeking out suffering, but rather joy in the face of terrible adversity. By artistic standards, a photograph of a severely disabled person with a smiling face would usually be more moving and mysterious than a conventional documentation of the afflicted and downtrodden. But her motives were not entirely aesthetic. As when driving through the hardscrabble backcountry of Florida, she questioned how people with so little could be this happy. Happiness perplexed her.

Untitled (7) 1970-71. Other-worldly. The power, and yes beauty, of Diane Arbus’s Untitled series has captivated me since I discovered them in Diane Arbus: Revelations at The Met in 2005. For me, Untitled is among the very few, if not the only, Photographic series I could speak of in the same sentence as Goya’s timeless Prints, including Los Caprichos, in therms of their mystery, power and compositional brilliance.

In the enervating summer heat, her mentally disabled subjects—whom she found “the strangest combination of grownup and child”—provided solace. Her pictures of their parties and processions convey a sentiment of acceptance and contentment. These people had stopped fighting fate. They had surrendered any pretense of control. And they seemed happy. Not all of them, of course. Some were angry or distraught. But those were not the ones she usually chose as subjects8.”

While making these Photographs which would become her Untitled series, Diane told a friend, “that one of the women, aboard a bus, touched her with an affectionate little hand. The exchange moved and depressed her. She loved these people, but they could lend her no strength9.” How utterly revealing. How utterly crushing.

November, 2022 marks the 6 year anniversary of my “deep dive” into Modern & Contemporary Photography. As time has gone on, I’ve found that most Photography doesn’t hold up to repeat looking like Painting, Drawing, or Sculpture, at least for me. Diane Arbus’s does.  

*- This piece is dedicated to Stormé DeLarverie. The Soundtrack for this piece is “Andryogny” by Garbage featuring Shirley Manson, an icon in my book, from their album Garbage 2.0. In it, Ms. Manson dons an outfit at one point hauntingly similar to those worn by Stormé in her publicity photos (a coincidence?). It’s seen here in its official Music video-

Also- I’m pleased to announce I’m curating a selection of Art, ArtBooks & PhotoBooks for sale! All items are from my collection or selected by me in my travels through the Art world. The complete selection of over 370 items is here.

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  1. A show that was only up from March 8 through May 30th, 2005, a pretty short run. ↩
  2. Arthur Lubow, Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, P.550 ↩
  3. Ibid, P.366 ↩
  4. Diane Arbus: Revelations Exhibition Catalog, P. 185 ↩
  5. Germaine Greer, “Wrestling with Diane Arbus,” The Guardian, October 7, 2005, reprinted in Diane Arbus Documents ↩
  6. Ibid ↩
  7. Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, P.42 ↩
  8. Excerpt from Lubow, Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, P.418. ↩
  9. Ibid, P.422 ↩

Barbara Kruger: Red & White And Read All Over

If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate to support independent Art writing. Thank you. 

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

Shows seen: Barbara Kruger @ 3 David Zwirner West 19th Street Galleries &
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. @ The Museum of Modern Art

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Whitney Biennial, the first time Barbara Kruger’s work was shown to the public1.

Over the past 50 years Barbara Kruger’s style has become iconic to the point where now A LOT of people either wish they could design like Barbara. Detail from Untitled (That’s the way we do it), 2011/2020 Digital print on vinyl wallpaper, seen at David Zwirner, July 12, 2022.

A lot of others simply rip off her style, including countless advertisers, most notoriously, possibly Supreme, according to StockX. This is NOT by Barbara Kruger. NYC Subway, August 28, 2022.

49 years later, Barbara Kruger is one of the most powerful voices in Art. Moreover, she is an Artist who is a powerful voice in the world beyond Art.

Detail of Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., which fills the 5 stories of MoMA’s Atrium. September 2, 2022.

Year 49 brings two formidable shows of new Barbara Kruger pieces and new versions of older work to NYC- one, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. fills the MoMA Atrium with the new site-specific titular work this fall/winter. Barbara Kruger, a show of new versions of classic work, filled 3 of David Zwirner’s West 19th Street galleries this summer. Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. was a traveling retrospective in its prior stops at LACMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sadly, the retrospective segment of the show, announced to be mounted at MoMA PS1 (site of a 1980 BK solo show) was cancelled due to pandemic scheduling issues2. Darn! New Yorkers will have to make due with the main building’s Atrium and the show’s excellent catalog, which includes 40 of the 60 pieces we could have/would have seen. 

Untitled, 1989, Public Art Fund installation, West 41st Street & 8th Avenue, April 3, 2001. A huge office building now occupies this space. Good luck cleaning it!

In spite of missing the retrospective part of Thinking of You. , New Yorkers have, probably, seen more of Ms. Kruger’s work over time than anyone, being she began here and has maintained a place here all along. While we missed another look-see at the depth of her work and the historical overview the retrospective provides, the impressive (and sad) thing about Ms. Kruger’s oeuvre is that her themes haven’t changed over these past 50 years. The retrospective would have shown her dedication to addressing these issues over time, and for all this time. 

“Issues about power, value, unfortunately do not grow old,” she told Art21.

Blind Idealism Is…, Paint on wall, the High Line Mural for 2016-17, seen February 5, 2017. An adaptation of a quote from Frantz Fanon. That’s “DEADLY” behind the trees, which I guess cannot be moved. Installed in summer, 2016, it eerily foreshadowed what was to come. Seen on February 5, 2017.

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark in early 1945 to a working class family. Her dad was a chemical technician, her mom a legal secretary3. After 1 year at Syracuse U, she took some classes at the Parsons School of Design with graphic designer/art director Marvin Israel and legendary Photographer Diane Arbus4. Though she never earned a degree, she credits her studies with Arbus & Israel with influencing her, and it was through her connection with Mr. Israel that she began her professional life at Condé Nast in the design department of Mademoiselle Magazine5. She became chief designer at 22,  before becoming a freelance picture editor and designer for magazines and books, including at stint at the Aperture Foundation.

“You know, it always gets me when people say I worked in advertising. I never did. I never had that experience of selling a particular product. When you work in magazines, it’s a serial process, it’s about seriality- and so is photography. Or Painting,” Barbara Kruger, Interview Magazine, 2013.

Instead, Barbara Kruger uses advertising’s methods and means including billboards, posters, pieces mounted on buildings, and short videos, while also being regularly featured in public spaces of all kinds all around the world. In her work, she lays bear the methods advertisers uses to manipulate viewers (as does Sara Cwynar more recently). The major difference is in her work Barbara Kruger isn’t “selling” anything. She wants her viewers to think.

Barbara Kruger’s David Zwirner show featured a number of older works that the Artist has reincarnated as short videos. In I Shop Therefore I Am, the work comes together on the screen as a jigsaw puzzle gradually falling into place. Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987/2019 Single-channel video on LED panel, sound, 57 sec. David Zwirner, July 12, 2022.

After forming “I shop there fore I am,”, the “I Shop” is replaced with other words making new phrases.

“These are just ideas in the air and questions that we ask sometimes- and questions that we don’t ask but should ask.” she told Art21.

In the 1970s, she began showing her work, then took a year off late in the decade to consider what she was doing and what she wanted to do with her Art. Now, her 1970s work has all but disappeared- I can find no trace of it anywhere. In the 2010 Rizzoli Barbara Kruger monograph, the largest and most comprehensive book on her work so far, the earliest pieces included date from the 1980s. During her break, her time with the Artists Meeting for Social Change proved critical in helping her focus her ideas, which she combined with her graphic design expertise to develop the unique text & image style that has become instantly identifiable as hers. In the 1980s, a steady string of gallery shows began, continuing right up to this summer with Barbara Kruger, her first show with David Zwirner. The museums came on board with the 1999-2000 MoCA, Los Angeles, mid-career retrospective. Her work has since been on view in numerous museums around the world (with the text in her work in the local language), up to Thinking of You I Mean Me I Mean Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. now at MoMA after prior stops at the Art Institute of Chicago (Sept, 2021- Jan, 2022) and LACMA (March – July, 2022). Such has been the demand for her work, her Zwirner CV runs 31 pages.

Partial installation view of one of the three Zwirner galleries, July 12, 2022.

The images that appear in her work are often sourced from mid-century catalogs6. But, Barbara Kruger has issues with Photography- particularly Street Photography and Photo-Journalism.

“There can be an abusive power to photography,” she said7.

Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., MoMA Atrium, September 2, 2022. It won’t, but I think it should stay right here permanently. In the now 16 years this space has been here, this, and Adam Pendleton’s recent piece, are the best use of almost all of it I have seen. Unlike much of her earlier work, there is no Photography in this piece.

Her signature red on white pieces, which suddenly became black on white pieces, often pose tough questions that put the viewer on the spot. “You talking to me?,” as DeNiro said. Christopher Bolen walked readers through what happens next in Interview Magazine-

“The direct address is disarmingly direct. Certainly, the “you” implicates the reader—a shopper, a consumer, a part of the capitalist enterprise, guilty of impulsive buying habits. But the “you” is also a general composite—that annoying, far more guilty everyperson-and the reader sides with the artist in condemning this sector of the population who is greedy, wasteful, and irresponsible. So already—and almost always in a graphic Kruger text piece—a haunting repositioning occurs in the mind of the viewer: judged and also judging; agreeing with the charges even as she or he is charging others.” Christopher Bolen, Interview Magazine, 2013. 

The view of MoMA’s Atrium from the 5th floor, September 2, 2022.

If anything, her newer black on white style without Photographs is even more direct. There is nothing to distract the viewer from her text. Not even color.

Detail of Untitled (No Comment), 2020, Three-channel video installation, sound, 9:25 min. As she has used found Photography, Barbara Kruger may also use texts from others. “Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” is a quote from Voltaire. At David Zwirner, July 12, 2022.

“I want my work to create commentary,” the Artist told Art 21.

In doing so, she turns the methods of advertising on their heads, “to teach us how to the two languages of persuasion, photographs, and words, influence us. Believing that no message is neutral, Kruger would have us be critical interpreters, rather than passive consumers, of the media8.” In doing so, she allows the viewer to see how advertising works- how it manipulates and persuades, while helping the viewer understand the power of the media.

David Zwirner, June 30, 2022

At David Zwirner, some of the Artist’s most well-known pieces, including Untitled (Your Body Is A Battleground), 1989/2019, have been given new life as single channel videos on LCD panels. Originally created to support women’s reproductive rights for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington, it’s just one example of the unfortunate timelessness of Barbara Kruger’s work. Your body is a battleground is already 33 years old. I shop therefore I am, is 35 years old.

Detail of Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., MoMA Atrium, September 2, 2022.

As she prepares to enter the second half-century of her work, she finds herself in a world that is substantially more open to her voice, and that of female Artists, than it was when she began to show her work in the early 1970s. Barbara Kruger has been a substantial catalyst of that change. I’m not sure she’s gotten enough credit for it. Of course, there is still much to be done. Though her methods have evolved over time, the effect she’s had, already, is incalculable- in so many ways. Purely as Art, 50 years on, her work has more than held its own.

Detail of Untitled (That’s the way we do it), 2011/2020 Digital print on vinyl wallpaper at David Zwirner, July 12, 2022.

Based on all of this, leaving aside how her work will be viewed aesthetically, it seems to me that 100 years hence, her work will remain every bit as relevant as it is right now.

For better. Or for worse.

Untitled (Remember me), 1988/2020 Single-channel video on LED panel, sound, 23 sec. David Zwirner Gallery, June 30, 2022.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Color Synesthesia,” by Nik Bates, with the classic line, “And without Barbara Kruger, there would be no Supreme,” from his album Goodbye, San Diego, 2010.

Also- I’m pleased to announce I’m curating a selection of Art, ArtBooks & PhotoBooks for sale! All items are from my collection or selected by me in my travels through the Art world. The complete selection of over 370 items is here.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 7 years, during which over 275 full length pieces have been published!
If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate to keep it online & ad-free below.
Thank you, Kenn.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here.
Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them.
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  1. Barbara Kruger, Rizzoli, 2010, p.305 ↩
  2. This isn’t mentioned until the next to last page of the exhibition catalog’s text. ↩
  3. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/kruger-barbara ↩
  4. A life learner, the Artist has gone on to teach at a number of schools since her short period of formal study, herself. She has been a professor at UCLA since 2005. ↩
  5. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/barbara-kruger ↩
  6. Thinking of You exhibition catalog, P.153. ↩
  7. Interview Magazine, 2013 ↩
  8. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/kruger-barbara ↩