The most famous painter you never heard of

Moonlight, c. 1883-1889, Ralph Albert Blakelock, courtesy of the High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia

With the time change, the rhythms of the night are all wrong. Between that, the full moon, and the low-pressure system that is bearing down on us, I’ve spent too many hours up during the long reaches of the night.

Whenever I watch moonlight, I think of Ralph Albert Blakelock, the most famous painter you never heard of. In 1916 he managed to set a record for the highest price paid for a painting by a living American artist ($20,000). Sadly, he was in an insane asylum at the time.

Blakelock was born on Christopher Street in what is now Greenwich Village, in 1847. He was just too young to have served in the American Civil War, at that impressionable age of boyhood where war is glorious and terrifying.

He started studies at what is now City College of New York, intending to be a homoeopathist like his father. After three terms, he dropped out.

Moonlight, c. 1885-1889, Ralph Albert Blakelock, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

After the Civil War, many artists traveled through the American west under the auspices of the Federal government or trading companies. From 1869-72, Blakelock did a similar thing, but as a free agent. Traveling alone in the west at that time was a very dangerous matter. Blakelock lived among the Sioux for a time, traveled down the California coast to Mexico, and returned to New York via a fruit boat from Panama.

Almost completely self-taught, he began producing landscapes and scenes of Indian life based on his notes and sketches. His work was recognized and lauded, and he produced a show at the National Academy of Design. In 1877, Blakelock married; he and his wife had nine kids.

Moonlight, Indian Encampment, 1885-1889, Ralph Albert Blakelock, courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Blakelock may have been a great painter, but he was a financial incompetent and plagued by doubts about the worth of his work. He was simply unable to establish any kind of business to support his family. Profoundly depressed, he began to show signs of mental breakdown. Meanwhile, his wife and children lived in acute financial hardship, which was amplified by the Depression of 1893.

Blakelock suffered his first complete breakdown in 1891. For eight years he suffered from schizophrenic delusions until he was committed to the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital in Orange County, New York. At the time, that was the backwoods. He would live there almost until his death.

And that’s where his story went from tragic to sordid. The 19^th century romanticized mental illness. Rich people visited asylums for fun, watching the antics of inmates with great interest, or inviting them to be entertainment at their parties. Newspapers printed stories of the odd adventures of lunatics. Blakelock, with his quirks, his odd way of painting, and his weird behavior, was perfect fodder for this cruel mania.

Enter the swindler, in the form of one Beatrice Van Rensselaer Adams, née Sadie Filbert. Her questionable charities were outweighed by her political and social credentials. Blakelock was a perfect lamb to be led to slaughter. Adams established the Blakelock Fund to support his family, but of course, its purpose was to enrich her.

Moonlight, 1885-1889, Ralph Albert Blakelock, courtesy of the Corcoran Museum. Are you detecting a theme here?

Harrison Smith, a reporter for the New York Tribune eventually convinced Blakelock’s keepers that he was, in fact, a famous artist with work in a major retrospective in the city. When taken to New York to see the show, Blakelock confided to Smith that several of the paintings on exhibit were forgeries. Since the man was a diagnosed lunatic, however, Smith kept this information under his hat.

At the time of his death on August 9, 1919, Blakelock was hailed by the London Times as “one of the greatest of American artists.”

Blakelock painted in the style we now call tonalism. Popular between 1880 and 1915, it emphasized mood, myth and spirituality, in landscapes that were rendered in dark, neutral tones. Tonalism was in part an emotional reaction to the profound, heartbreaking damage of the Civil War. It was the perfect métier for a fragile, broken man.

Sneering and sniggering to the bank

Naked, 1988, by Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons has been found guilty of plagiarizing the work of a popular French photographer. A French court has ruled that Koons’ Naked (1988) ripped off a black-and-white photograph by the late Jean-François Bauret (1932-2014). Although unknown here in the United States, Bauret was successful enough to have earned the Ministry of Culture’s Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His 1975 postcard picture, Enfants, was a popular seller in France.

Bauret’s widow was awarded a penalty payment of €44,000. That translates into US $46,937.88. Half of it, roughly, will cover her legal fees. That doesn’t compensate for seeing her husband’s endearing portrait of children turned into a sniggering, sexualized bit of American camp culture.

Enfants, 1975, by Jean-Francois Bauret

Ten months ago, Naked sold (or didn’t sell, to be more precise) for $5.7 million at Phillips’ 20th century and contemporary art sale in New York. When pressed on the subject, Phillips’ CEO Edward Dolman admitted that the porcelain sculpture went to the artwork’s third party guarantor. The fact that vast sums of money are exchanged for works nobody wants is the first hint that what we’re talking about here is fungibility, not creativity.

This is the fifth time Koons has been taken to court over his Banality series, which purports to show the dullness of the objects of our modern life by making equally dull, but really pricey, copies. In fact, the whole point is to sneer at the working and middle classes, who can’t afford to surround themselves with exquisite objects.

String of Puppies, 1988, by Jeff Koons

In 1989, photographer Art Rogers sued Koons for stealing an image for his sculpture “String of Puppies.” Koons was sued over the sculpture Wild Boy and Puppy, which was clearly a rip-off of Odie from Garfield.

Both times Koons claimed the fair use exemption by parody. Both times, he lost. The court held that he could have made his general statements about parody without copying those artists’ specific work.

String of Puppies, by Art Rogers

Fashion photographer Andrea Blanch sued Koons for using an image entitled Silk Sandals by Gucci, published in Allure in 2000. There, Blanch lost because the courts held that he did not own the image copyright to the sandals themselves. The resulting work, Niagara, is also substantially different from the original photo.

French adman Franck Davidovici filed a counterfeiting lawsuit over the artist’s 1988 work Fait d’Hiver. According to Le Monde, the penalties, if Davidovici prevails, will be quite a bit higher than in the Buaret case. The plaintiff demands the sculpture itself, along with an additional €271,000 in damages. “Even if that the claim is only brought against the edition of Fait d’Hiver currently in France for the Pompidou show—there are three other copies—the total requested damages could theoretically stretch well into the millions,” wrote Alexander Forbes. He then went on to mention the issue that bedevils this all: that the works in question are no longer owned by Koons himself, but are being hustled on the aftermarket. They’re commodities.

Fait d’Hiver, 1988, by Jeff Koons

Koons is an appropriation artist, so naturally he takes the broadest possible view of the fair use exemption. And appropriation art sells, which is why Koons gets millions for work of dubious intellectual and technical quality.

There is no consistent answer to the question of where artistic appropriation becomes copyright infringement. It sometimes seems to have mainly to do with which end of the stick you’re holding.

The original ad by Franck Davidovici. The penguin makes all the difference.

In 2011 Koons sent a cease-and-desist letter to a San Francisco store and gallery for selling balloon dog bookends. Attorney Jedediah Wakefield responded, “As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog, and the shape created by twisting a balloon into a dog-like form is part of the public domain.” He then went on to skewer Koons as, “a retired stockbroker whose sculptures and other works are well-known for copying pre-existing forms and images from popular culture.”

Meanwhile, it is still unwise to appropriate another person’s photograph for your reference material. The Bauret case reinforces that. But if you’re thinking that the rich and famous get richer and more famous by flouting the law, I can’t argue with you.

George Stubbs, hipster

Whistlejacket, 1762, George Stubbs. (National Gallery, London)

“Why did George Stubbs not paint in a background in Whistlejacket?” is one of the most commonly-asked questions of art history. The short answer is, because he was such a good draftsman, he didn't have to.

Stubbs himself related that he had placed the unfinished painting against a stable wall when Whistlejacket saw it. Thinking he was seeing another stallion rising to attack, the horse began “to stare and look wildly at the picture, endeavouring to get at it, to fight and kick it,” raising his handler off the ground. At that moment, Stubbs decided the painting was done.

That’s a great story, but it glosses over the fact that oil paintings are not usually developed as discrete subjects floating in empty space. The medium isn’t amenable to this kind of treatment. Oil paintings are generally developed as whole pieces, from the bottom layer up. Disregarding this requires the highest mastery of drawing, because there is no way to hide pentimento on a plain background.

Mares and Foals Without a Background, 1762, George Stubbs

Whistlejacket was one of several equine portraits Stubbs painted in 1762 during a stay at Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire. He was there on the invitation of Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham. A leading grandee of the Whig party, Rockingham had been educated on the Continent. In short, he was a rarified British peer, separated from the rest of us by money, education and breeding. According to his wife, his primary interests were gambling and horses.

Stubbs painted at least three paintings without backgrounds while at Wentworth Woodhouse. Mares and Foals Without a Background and 'Whistlejacket' and Two Other Stallions with Simon Cobb, the Groom are both arranged carefully on long empty canvases. Whistlejacket continues that formality, rising in a classical dressage air. Since Whistlejacket himself was a notoriously temperamental racing stallion, the pose is almost certainly a fiction.

Pangloss (“Rufus”), c. 1762, George Stubbs. (Indianapolis Museum of Art)

What strikes us as so modern about Stubbs’ horse silhouettes was probably a nod to classicism on his part, homage to the architectural friezes of Greece and Rome. This would have appealed to men of letters during the Age of Enlightenment. Stubbs went on to use the device in later animal and human portraits.

George Stubbs was born in Liverpool in 1724, the son of a currier. He worked with his father until the latter’s death in 1741, whereupon he was briefly apprenticed to a minor artist named Hamlet Winstanley. From then on, he was self-taught.

Stubbs was fascinated by anatomy, both equine and human. He spent six years studying anatomy at York County Hospital. Among his early works is a set of illustrations for a text on midwifery, from 1751.

Plate from The Anatomy of the Horse, 1766, George Stubbs.

In 1756, Stubbs embarked on a quixotic quest for equal knowledge about horse anatomy. Hanging a series of horse carcasses from the rafters of a barn in the village of Horkstow, over the course of 18 months he flayed and sketched layer after layer of equine tissue.

Stubbs created a set of frontal, lateral, and posterior views that would become the basis of his book, The Anatomy of the Horse: including a particular description of the bones, cartilages, muscles, fascias, ligaments, nerves, arteries, veins, and glands. This treatise was hailed as a groundbreaking work of artistic and scientific merit and was the foundation of his future career.

Stubbs was curious about anatomy to the end. His last unfinished project, begun in 1795, was A comparative anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common fowl. It was unfinished at the time of Stubbs’ death at the age of 81.

A family affair

Natalie MacMaster is touring with her husband, Donnell Leahy, playing in the hotspots of Caribou, Rockland and Brownfield, ME before heading off to the bright lights of New York and Boston. We jumped at the opportunity to see them in the intimate Strand Theatre in Rockland last night.

MacMaster is a member of a famous Cape Breton fiddling family that included the renowned fiddler, Buddy MacMaster, among others. Cape Breton fiddling is the older brother of Highland fiddling, transported to Nova Scotia after the Highland Clearances. Once you’ve heard it, it needs no further introduction.

Leahy, who’s Irish, toured extensively with his seven siblings. His style of playing is more emotive, throatier. “I grew up in Ontario without that kind of [Cape Breton] style around me. But I listened to my father play the fiddle. I listened to the radio. I listened to accordion music because I had a friend who was an Irish accordion player,” he said.

As you can imagine, they’re both superlative players. But they were not the stars on the Strand stage. That honor went to their five eldest children: Mary Frances, Michael, Clare, Julia, and Alec. (Baby Sadie sat out the show.) The kids played the fiddle. They step-danced. They sang The Mary Ellen Carter. Their teenaged cousin has extended his winter break from school and is traveling with them, playing the pipes.

The Painter and the Buyer, 1565, was a self-portrait by proud paterfamilias Pieter Bruegel the Elder

 With such a family legacy, it’s no surprise that the kids are about ready for their first big break. That’s coming soon, with an appearance scheduled on Steve Harvey’s Little Big Shots later this year.

Artistic dynasties like the Leahy-MacMaster clan are now rare, but that hasn't always been so. There was the Booth family, who are now remembered mostly for their ignominious assassin. The family of Johann Sebastian Bach included 50 musicians of note for two centuries. The same is true for the descendants of the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. For women like Artemisia Gentileschi, a family workshop was a safe space to pursue an unconventional career. And there is, of course, Maine’s own Wyeth family. I could go on for pages.

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1638–9, is by Artemisia Gentileschi, who had the advantage of being trained in her father’s workshop.

What has changed? Public education tends to dilute parental influence even as it democratizes knowledge. Children are in school while their parents are in offices far away. Fewer children are being trained in any craft now, as we educate a nation of generalists. Moreover, we expect our children to self-actualize, to make and follow their own dreams rather than go into the family business.

Watching the Leahy kids on stage with their parents, I’m inclined to think we need more of that, and less factory education. I look forward to their future careers.

Our obsession with parts

Northumberlandia and her oddly erect breasts, courtesy of Wikipedia.

We face our first morning trip downstairs with trepidation. The elderly hound tries his best, but he hasn’t got control of either his bowels or his bladder. He’s confined to a small space, but some mornings the mess he makes beggars belief. It can take a while to get him and the floor clean again. All that happens before our second cup of coffee.

That miasma is a good metaphor for the other mess I see most mornings: friend requests from strange men on Facebook. If I let them in through the net, almost immediately I get a message like this:

“You are so beautiful! I’ve been looking for a woman like you. Thanks for accepting me as your friend. I'm a US Army General presently serving in Afghanistan. I'm 52 years old, and widowed. Please email me or send me your email address. I will send you my pics. My email is XXX@gmail.com.”

We all know what these bots are looking for: intimate photos, and then money. At first I thought about sending them pictures of my incisions. But then, I thought, why not send them something truly intimate? My medical file contains images of the tumors and growths that have been removed from my nether regions over the last two decades. And colonoscopy pictures are pulsating, pink, and dang fascinating.

“I need regular wound care for my ostomy,” I would write in confiding tones.

Map of Northumberlandia, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Northumberlandia is a geoglyph that somehow reminds me of the modern obsession with our breeding parts. She was designed by American landscape architect Charles Jencks, and built on the Blagdon Estate.

That’s the hereditary home of Matt Ridley, fifth Viscount Ridley, author of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. This book argues that all human behavior must be understood through the window of sexual behavior, since we’re just a product of evolution, anyway. Northumberlandia is made from excavated material from a nearby open coal mine, shaped in the form of a woman’s torso.

Anthropomorphic landforms exist pretty commonly in nature; there are Sleeping Giant, Sleeping Warrior, and Sleeping Princess mountains all over the globe.

Cerne Abbas Giant, courtesy of Pete Harlow.

Britain is especially partial to geoglyphs. These include the ancient Uffington White Horse, the newer Long Man of Wilmington, and many more modern examples. The Cerne Abbas Giant is ithyphallic, so I suppose Northumberlandia evens up the score a bit.

It’s her boobs I object to. They’re clearly silicone-enhanced. As an argument for Ridley’s thesis that sex drives everything, and as an image of what is considered sexually attractive in 2017, Northumberlandia is a perfect motif. It's also a great example of what peers of the realm used to get up to when unconstrained by job or money. PG Wodehouse would have had a field day with the Viscount's Folly.