The power to enrage

When art infuriates, it shows us how much art has engaged.

Aunt Jemima now and then. Her image has changed as American attitudes toward blacks have changed.

One of my regrets is that I never bought a Lenin statue when the Soviet Union collapsed. If they weren’t destroyed on site, they were sold as scrap metal.

Iconoclasm—the tearing down of art and symbols—happens with every great social change. During our own Revolution, we pulled down the statue of King George in Manhattan, melting it for lead shot.

That tells us how important art really is. “Watching the videoed scene of the mob toppling the bronze Sir Edward over the quayside last week, I felt a kind of thrill at the beating heart of human beings responding viscerally to a piece of art,” wrote Matthew Parris last week.

Empty pedestal of Edward Colston’s monument in Bristol, courtesy of Caitlin Hobbs.

“Just as it is good when art lifts, inspires, ennobles and pleases us, it’s good too when art infuriates, hurts or inflames. Good in both cases because art has engaged.”

I can’t entirely agree with Parris’ enthusiasm. History has shown how indiscriminate the mob can be. The iconoclasm of the Protestant revolution destroyed more great religious art than it left; the great Ghent Altarpiece only survived because citizens defended it. Iconoclasm is traumatic and divisive. It inflames wounds, rather than healing them.

Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, 1897, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, courtesy Rhododendrites.

But it does point out just how important art is to advanced society. The symbols we’re discussing today—caricatures of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, statues of Robert E. Lee—all started out at the nib of an artist’s pen. Their power to infuriate is tied to their former power to motivate.

I have no problem with rolling the statue of a former slaver into Bristol Harbor, but I’m often shocked by the cultural illiteracy of the mob. Among the monuments defaced this month was Boston’s Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment. Luckily, it’s shrouded in plywood for restoration, but it’s not the first time it’s been vandalized: it happened in 2012, 2015, and 2017.

The memorial is a masterpiece by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and it features both Shaw and his soldiers. Shaw himself was a staunch abolitionist, as woke as anyone in his time. Attacking the memorial confirms our worst fears about rioters, that they are nothing more than ignorant, dangerous thugs.

Robert the Bruce’s statue, defaced in Stirling, courtesy STV.

There’s a slightly different problem with spray-painting “Racist King” on a statue of Robert the Bruce at the site of the Battle of Bannockburn. The concept of race, as we understood it in the 19^th century and as we understand it today, meant nothing in 14^th century Scotland.

It’s in this small story from Red Hook, NY that I see the most danger. Slavery was abolished in New York starting in 1799. There is no way this woman, based on an image from 1899 and painted in 1996, was meant to be a slave. Nor does she even look black.

Mural in Red Hook, NY, that’s stirring cries of racism, courtesy John W. Barry/Poughkeepsie Journal.

But she’s clearly not white. If protesters have their way, she won’t be on that wall much longer, either. Therein lies the greatest danger of the current round of iconoclasm. In their zeal, protesters risk erasing people of color from our shared history.

Meanwhile, slavery is at historic high levels right now. Some 21-46 million people are currently enslaved worldwide. We’re largely silent on the subject.

“If people put the same energy into tackling modern slavery, I’d be more impressed,” said my pal Kenneth Barker. He recommends Anti-Slavery International. How about the next time you are moved to comment on race and racism, you put a hundred dollars in their kitty instead? I just did.

Pigment and race

We all know race is an artificial construct, yet we persist in using it anyway. It’s not even skin deep. It doesn’t exist at all.

Figure Commission, by Carol L. Douglas, private collection.

Yesterday I pulled out a chart that demonstrates how to mix a full range of skin tones. (There are darker and lighter people, of course; to catch their color, just adjust the amount of white you use.) This chart is ratty and worn, so I remade it for my students and now I’m sharing it with you.

There are cool tints in the left column and warm colors across the top. Mix them together in rows, and you get a wonderful array of skin tones. The solid warms are always the base; whether you use grey or violet or blue to modulate the colors depends on the underlying tones in your model.

Painting this chart is a great exercise in mixing colors.

Natural light hitting the human skin is far more variable than we see indoors. We live (and paint) under artificial light. That narrows the color range, which is why I hate painting figure under spotlights.

There are greens, purples, and yellows in every person’s skin. The ears, face, fingers and toes all tend to pink; there’s blood closer to the surface. Some of us have visible traceries of blue veins. There are lovely greens and mauves in shadows. In fact, the only difference between my landscape palette and my studio palette is that red always makes an appearance inside.

My studio copy is pretty worn.

The colors on my chart are likenesses, of course. Our actual skin color is based on just one pigment, melanin. Lighter people just have more blue-white connective tissue and hemoglobin showing through.

We moderns talk of Asians as having ‘yellow’ skin. That’s a modern lie. In the 13^th century Travels of Marco Polo, the people of China are described as white. Eighteenth century missionaries also called Japanese and other East Asians white.

The ‘yellow’ label can be laid squarely at the feet of science. The father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, first used the label fuscus (dark) to describe the skin color of Asians. Later, he began calling them luridus instead. That translates to ‘pale yellow’, ‘wan’, ‘sallow’, ‘lurid’—with a dash of ‘horrifying’ attached.

The father of comparative anatomy, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, used the word gilvus, which translates to ‘yellow’. (He’s also the guy who started calling Asians ‘Mongolians’.) By the nineteenth century, westerners were completely sold on the idea that Asians were yellow. Thanks, Science.

The Servant, by Carol L. Douglas

Yesterday’s class included half-Japanese and Chinese students. Both of them are as pink as I am. The student with the yellowest skin was a blue-eyed Northern European with an addiction to carrots. He has stained himself a terrific saffron color.

The farther down the Italian boot you go, the more you find genetic mixtures with Greeks, North Africans and Middle Easterners. That’s no surprise; the Mediterranean was the original melting pot. Southern Italians and Greeks are often very dark in color. 

It’s no surprise that neither were considered quite white in 19^th century America (although they had that designation for naturalization purposes). In fact the largest mass lynching in American history was of Italian-Americans. What’s more peculiar is that some people didn’t consider Irish-Americans white, either.

We all know race is an artificial construct, yet we persist in using it anyway. Paint-mixing shows us that the similarity in our coloration is far greater than the differences. Race isn't skin-deep; it doesn’t exist at all.

Is love really too much to ask?

Stanley Spencer didn’t paint violence often, but when he did, as in “Crucifixion,” he focused on our response.

Years ago I belonged to an anti-polygamy activist group. I broke with them when they published a photo of a suspected child molester sleeping with his infant granddaughter on his chest. Yank the troll’s chain all you want, I said, but keep the children out of it.

My friend’s nephew is going to be sentenced for a high-profile crime on Friday. Yesterday his picture was published on a racist website, with frequent bandying of the n-word. He’s an adult and can take it, but they also published photos of his two little boys. Their only offense was the color of their skin.

I sent the link to my programmer husband in the hope that he could identify the host. My husband overcame his revulsion and looked long enough to tell me that there wasn’t an open-or-shut identity. “There is some obfuscation employed,” he said.

Spencer’s “Christ Carrying the Cross,” 1920, is an image of bystanders enjoying someone else’s misfortune.

Beyond that, all I can do is to pray that God strikes the server with lightning and counsel my friends to ignore it. That’s easier said than done, I realize.

I am blessed with many friends. They are, on the whole, civilized people. “I hate that guy” is empty verbiage to us. I’m always shocked when I hear about real hateful behavior. And yet, if you believe our crime statistics, it’s not only all around us, but it’s increasing.

This week’s incident is race-based, but it isn’t always. Several years ago, my friend’s son was arrested for second-degree murder. The lad was (rightfully) acquitted, but that didn’t stop him from receiving death threats. His family—innocent in every respect—had to sell their home and moved to a different town.

“Knowing (the Beatitudes of Love),” Stanley Spencer

In some cases, the dangerous places we live are physical. In others, violence is a mental climate, fed in part by media and the internet. It’s a pity that these have become vectors for lies and hatred, because they have been a boon in so many ways.

The people who published those little boys’ picture obfuscated their service provider because they have been reported before. They know what they’re doing is wrong. My friend would like them to creep back under the rock from which they crawled, but to me that is only a short-term solution. They’ll just crawl back out somewhere else.

None of this can be blamed on the election or any other outside force. People choose to hate, just as they can choose to love.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus said.

Sir Stanley Spencer was a true naïf whose innocence was much abused. And yet his reactions to love and violence were very much along the lines of those suggested by Jesus. It’s why he is one of my favorite painters.

“Gardening,” Stanley Spencer

“I love them from within outwards and whatever that outward appearance may be it is an exquisite reminder of what is loved within, no matter what that exterior appearance may be,” Spencer said.

Is love really too much to ask?

Is there racist architecture?

Denver's Union Station with light rail development.

If you’ve taken the California Zephyr across the country, you’ve stopped at Denver’s Union Station. There’s been a station on this site since before the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed. The current one, designed by Denver architects Gove & Walsh, was built in the Beaux-Arts style and opened in 1914.

The station was built of marble quarried at Yule Creek Valley in Colorado. This marble is so white, uniform, and workable that it was also used for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

And how it looked to prior generations of rail travelers.

Perhaps it was the whiteness of the marble that caused the Denver Post’s Fine Arts Critic, Ray Mark Rinaldi, to accuse the building itself of being racist.

“The symmetry, arched windows, ornate cornice and stacked, stone walls have their roots in the glory days of France, England, Greece and Rome, in empires that were nearly absent of ethnic minorities and who felt fully at ease invading, exploiting and actually enslaving the people of Africa, subcontinent Asia and South America,” he wrote.

It’s ironic that he omitted the legitimate acts of racial oppression related to the Transcontinental Railroad: the abysmal treatment of Chinese workers both on the railroad and in the mines, and the displacement of indigenous Americans.

Denver in 1859, Collier and Cleveland Litho Co. If 'exploitation' means indoor plumbing, I'm all for it..

I went to kindergarten in a building that had separate boys’ and girls’ entrances. I wouldn’t even go so far as to accuse that building of being sexist.

“There's no traditional Mexican restaurant…” Rinaldi laments. Of course, had there been, it would have been built in another exploitative style, since Mexican architecture borrows heavily from Spain.

Al Khazneh in Petra.

People borrow from other cultures even when they haven’t been colonized or exploited by them. Consider all the paeans to “Asian simplicity” in modern architecture. Al Khazneh in Petra looks like a Greek building, but it was built by the Nabataeans while they were still independent of Rome. The Nabataeans just dug that Greek look.

Crofutt's Trans-Continental Tourist's Guide Frontispiece 1870

When Denver plopped its first rail station on that site, it was a “city” of fewer than 5000 people. When it started building the station that is there now, it was a boom-town of double-digit population growth. Its lovely train station was aspirational, not racist or exploitative.

Message me if you want information about the coming year’s classes and workshops.