Can Aunt Jemima be Rehabilitated?

There is no question that earlier representations were racist and offensive. However she has provided the source for some famous art works during her rehabilitation. In 1963, Jeff Donaldson, later one of the founders of the AfriCOBRA art movement, revealed his confrontational interpretation in a battle – Aunt Jemima and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

This arguably is the first work where we have an empowered Aunt Jemima instead of an overweight mammy archetype.

In 1972 Betye Saar gave Aunt Jemima a rifle and a hand grenade in her famous assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.

In 1998 Renée Cox had her become a super hero figure in her collage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.

In 2014 Kara Walker morphed the mammy stereotype into a powerful sphinx in her installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, at the defunct Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn.

There are no weapons or battles. The monumental size and historical meaning of a sphinx gives her power. The thumb of her left hand is in the figa sign which in some cultures is an obscene gesture and in many countries is a sign of refusal.

The Quaker Oats Company is still using the same image that was on the 1998 package in Renée Cox's collage. If Aunt Jemima is going to stay with us, she could use an updated image.

Restoring an old Photo

Eberly asked me if I would restore an old torn photograph of her grandfather testing the Grumman G-164 Ag Cat. The Ag Cat was the first agricultural aircraft designed and produced by a major U.S. company.

Poor Positioning of Lights in Art Museums

When permitted, I usually take a non flash photograph of each painting and the information signage. It is surprising the number of "hot spots" there are on irreplaceable works of art.

The in camera light meter, although it is a reflectance meter, can give an estimate of how much additional light is falling on a specific part of the painting. If there is an area  in the painting with same color, the readings will be more accurate. Zooming in for a reading with the camera set for single segment spot metering will give even more accuracy.  The painting on the left recorded  almost 4 times as much light on the upper part of the portrait within the portrait compared to the lower half. The portrait on the right has dark background in both the hot spot and properly illuminated background. The meter readings is 3 times as much light in the hot spot. A more accurate assessment would require an incident-light meter. Exhibition rooms with high ceilings make it easier to protect the upper part of large vertically oriented paintings. Most of the following examples are not as severe as the above two portraits.

 

                                  

                                       

Restoring a Faded Photo

My friend Eberly asked if I could restore a photo of her and her sister from 1961 that had faded over the years. There also were some creases in parts of the image. I wanted to make the bluebonnets look a rich blue but naturalistic.

There wasn't much color to work with. Levels was the main tool that I used.

Using the database of the National Gallery of Art to estimate the frequecy of oil as a medium in Italian art before the High Renaissance.

•    The National Gallery Of Art , Washington, DC. has 145 Italian paintings made between 1400 and 1500.
•    None were made in Rome.
•    Omitting the 15 that were made between 1495 and 1500,  leaves 130 made before the High Renaissance.  
•    Only 28 paintings of the 130 paintings made before the 1595 used oil. It was in combination with tempera (14 Paintings) and oil alone (14 paintings).
•    15 paintings were made from 1495 -1500. 14 were oil and 1 was tempera. The one tempera piece was done in 1495.
•    Considering that the National Galley probably has a representative collection and that 130 paintings is an adequate sampling size, 1495 can be used as a watershed year when oil replaced tempra in Italian Renaissance art.

Bellini, Giovanni, Venetian, c. 1430/1435 - 1516

Madonna and Child in a Landscape 

c. 1480/1485 

oil on panel 

Lippi, Filippino,  Florentine, 1457 - 1504

The Adoration of the Child 

c. 1475/1480 

oil on poplar panel

Insights and Symbolism in Max Beckmann’s The Dream

The Dream. Max Beckmann, 1921

In the room of Max Beckman paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum, rarely does anyone stop at The Dream. It’s a walk by. The work is cryptic and not easily accessible without some familiarity of Beckmann and the dismal state of affairs of post war Weimar Germany. Picasso’s Guernica has more symbolism but with the plethora of web sites that decode Guernica, crowds gather in front of the massive image and in a polyglot of recitations, spout “their” interpretations.

The 5 people in The Dream are tightly packed into small room in an attic, the room of a building with the lowest rent and inhabited by the least socially acceptable. The three men are invalids. One has amputations of both legs, another of both hands, and the third man is blind. Men with amputations were a common sight in German cities after the war. During WWI the lethal advances in armament technology outstripped medical advances. Without amputations, mud contaminated shrapnel wounds with exposed bone would become infected with sepsis or gangrene. The prevailing use of occlusive bandages was part of the problem. Blindness often developed because of the use of chlorine and phosgene gasses as weapons. A street organ is hanging from his neck and he is wearing a sign to remind people to be thankful for the light in their eyes and not to forget the poor blind man. Most of the blind veterans were reduced to begging or selling pencils. The girl who is sitting on a trunk with labels for Lehrter, a Berlin railroad station, is most likely a newly arrived prostitute from a village. Her long straight hair is not bobbed in the fashionable flapper style or bubikopf that was seen in the cities. When Beckmann was working on The Dream, inflation was almost triple digits. The economic ruin of many middle class families meant that unskilled women employed as domestics were suddenly unemployed. The large number of prostitutes continued to increase as single women and widows moved to Berlin. Her left forearm and hand are in a position as if she were requesting money. She is the only person in the room with her eyes open. She stares at the bizarre events and her Kaspar doll claps his hands in approval. The yellow strands dripping out of the sleeping woman’s dress are the purulent discharge of a venereal disease. Beckmann wasn’t the only artist during the New Objectivity to overtly portray venereal disease. Two Victims of Capitalism (1923) by Otto Dix shows a prostitute with a syphilitic lesion on her face that looks like a bullet hole and a veteran with a large gaping shrapnel wound on his cheek that is shaped like a vagina.

The room is out of kilter because of the floor, which is unusual in paintings or set designs. The effect is usually because the ceiling or walls are not plumb. The floor is like one large stretcher that was used to transport the wounded from the battlefield to the crowded medical facilities where they were not likely to leave intact. The slanted picture frame behind the blind man is a dormer window that goes nowhere. The characters are trapped in this crowded space. The characters on the sloping floor and ladder unify this atypically tall and narrow painting vertically.

Beckmann was fascinated by Northern Gothic paintings, with their foregrounds packed with people with angular forms and no rules of perspective. During his post battlefield period of depression complicated with agitation and nightmares he painted several paintings of Christ’s suffering.

Descent from the Cross. Max Beckmann, 1917

Descent from the Cross (1917) has jagged, angular observers and an emaciated Christ with elongated arms. A large ladder towers over a small cross.

Self Portrait with a Red Scarf (1917)

Beckmann served from 1914 to 1915 as a medical orderly. He was released from service because of shell shock or what today would be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Crowded Claustrophobic works appeared in his work after he was released from the army. The colors are thin and light. Skin tones look like cadavers. His Self Portrait with a Red Scarf (1917) reveals himself with an ashen emaciated face, sunken eyes and prominent facial bones.

Self- portrait with Champagne Glass (1919) 

Self- portrait with Champagne Glass was done after series of political assassinations in January 1919 and a few months after he was in Berlin during street battles of the March Rebellion of 1919. He still has the same appearance but now he is able to hold the champagne glass upright while everything else in the painting is distorted. Alcohol could provide the escape and comfort needed in a violent distorted city.

Nailing of Christ to the Cross, Master of the 

Karlsruhe Passion c. 1450.

The Dream has been compared to Nailing of Christ to the Cross (c. 1450) by Master of the Karlsruhe Passion. Art historian and former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter Selz has noted that the boy kneeling on the cross and staring at the viewer is in the same location as the young girl in The Dream. The sleeping maid is in the same position as the soldier tying the rope on the cross. The man driving the nail into Jesus’ hand is in a similar location as the man with a bandage on his amputated hand. The fish partially lying on the ladder has been substituted for Christ lying on the cross. The ladder, a symbol for the ascension, a connection between heaven and earth, goes nowhere in this painting.

Beckmann’s use of somnambulists may be related to the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that was released in early 1920 and featured an insane hypnotist who commands a somnambulist to commit murders. The men in The Dream, two of them now wearing circus costumes, blindly marched off to war during the fervor of the August Madness, under the control of the folly of their Government.

The suffering of the German people after WWI doesn’t arouse the sympathy that victims of Nazi atrocities do. Future generations exposed to revisionist history are the ones who will realize that without a vindictive Versailles Treaty and the impossible reparations payments imposed on Germany, there might not have been a Guernica.

The signage next to the Beckmann paintings in Saint Louis is paltry and provides a pittance of information that doesn’t help much to decode his enigmatic works. The room will continue to be a walk by for most visitors. Wake Up Saint Louis and Show Me MOre information.

A Closer Look at Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party – some Design Elements and Principles

A digital image of her painting was traced in Photoshop for this project in an Art Appreciation class.

Parallel lines predominate in this painting. There are the lines of the seats in the boat, the shoreline and the horizon line beyond the low hills of green. Repetitions of parallel horizontal lines in the water that let us know that the water is not still. The line of the man's arm joins the lines of the oar forming an angle that points to the baby. The curved white lines of the gunwale of the boat unite the three people in the boat. The curved lines of the sail and the rigging point to the woman.  The man's trouser forms another line with the yellow seat. The woman’s dress has a crisscrossing pattern of three parallel red lines and the baby’s dress a pattern of red stripes.

Cool colors predominate with the dark blue of the man's clothing, the blue of the water, and the yellow–green of the inside of the boat. The sail, mother’s hat, shirt, and baby’s hat are a similar unsaturated, pastel like light green. The low hills are a more saturated green. It’s a very limited palette. The only warm colors are localized – the muted red pattern in her dress, the baby’s dress, and the flesh tones. There are some small red tiled roofs in the background. It is a sunny day and there is almost no reduction in value or saturation to the background.

The horizon line is extremely high in the painting. The position of the artist drawing the image or a camera taking such a photograph would have to be immediately behind the man and higher than his head because he occupies such a large space and his head is lower than the shore line. Taking an actual measurement from the man’s contact with the seat to his head is almost twice that of the woman. Although she is farther away from the camera or artist, the woman's head (not the hat) is at the shoreline while the man’s head is below the shoreline. The bow of the boat is not elevated out of the water enough to cause this discrepancy. Think when you go to the movies it's the person in the row in front of you who is blocking the screen and not a smaller person two rows in front of you. The woman is being drawn from a lower angle to obtain this effect.

The picture is highly asymmetrical with the man occupying a large portion of the foreground on the right. Balance is achieved by placing the sail on the far left. By not seeing the entire sail, we might wonder how far to the left it continues. The woman and her daughter are to the left of the man. There is a complex line of sight in the center of the painting. We only see a small portion of the man’s left eye and we might infer that he is looking at the baby. Societal proprieties and class structure of the Belle Époque would not have the boatman and this fashionably dressed mother looking at each other. For the mother to have hired the boatman was pushing the limits. The mother's shoulder line is oblique with her left shoulder as far as possible away from the man. The mother is looking below the man's eyes. The baby is looking at him. Trying to interpret the complex body language takes our attention to the center of the painting.  Also using the reddish colors for the pattern in the dress and the child's clothing tends to offset the cool colors on the right side.

The color of the back of the man's jacket and seat of his pants shows minimal variation in color. Most of his backside is flat like a drawing in a comic book. There are variations in the color of his waistband with several parallel lines. These repeated lines and color value variations of the waistband give a sense of texture to the fabric. The dark oblique line near the upper edge of the waistband reveals that there is a fold in the material. The repeating red lines in the dress give depth and form to the dress. The red line pattern is in the shape of an arch in the skirt to show that the fabric is draping over her thighs. The three lined pattern runs obliquely from the knees to the bottom of the skirt to show that the fabric is draped over her legs. The variations used in painting the dress pattern give the appearance of volume to the dress. 

The curved lines of the sail show the force of the wind billowing the sail.  In addition to the parallel broken lines in the water, variations in color value of the water let us know that the water is not flat or still. The man is leaning forward and bracing his foot against the seat. He is ready to make another stroke with the oar.


There is a lot going on in this painting and we only have discussed three elements of design – line, color, and motion, and two design principles – balance and scale.

Effect of Color to Balance Asymmetry

Mary Cassatt used a small amount of red color in the baby’s dress and in the pattern of the woman’s dress to contribute to achieving balance in the painting The Boating Party. 

If she had painted their clothing a similar color to the man’s clothes, our attention would tend to stay on the right side of the painting instead of on the baby. The red color adds, another principle of design to this work – VARIETY.



Effect of Shape to Balance Asymmetry

A large shape has a big effect to achieve balance. In The Boating Party the sail on the left is what is having the greatest effect on balancing the painting.

Here is how the painting would appear without the sail. The oar going off frame does provide some balance, but not as much as the sail and rigging pointing at he woman.