The Power of the Political Cartoon

Though subjects here will clearly be reminiscent of the current political climate they merely reflect life in America since the white man arrived from abroad.

My interest was sparked by the cover story, “Win, Lose & Draw: The Power of the Political Cartoon”, in our local newspaper’s Pasatiempo weekly magazine. The article was about the renowned cartoonist Pat Oliphant who is a long-time resident of Santa Fe. An Oliphant cartoon from 1970, when the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and rising inflation and unemployment as well as Nixon’s diminishing approval rating, shows numerous Democrats leapfrogging to be Presidential candidates.

When I set off researching, I found that the first political cartoon published in an American Newspaper is credited to the Pennsylvania Express of May 9, 1754. It was created by none other than Benjamin Franklin. It was his call to the British colonies to unite against their enemies the French and the Indians. It shows a snake cut in eight pieces each with the initial of a colony at the time.

Some 40 plus years later we are no longer fighting the French or the British but rather amongst ourselves. This was a fight on the floor of Congress between Vermont Representative Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold of Connecticut. The controversy was over the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. These were a series of laws passed by Congress in that year that restricted the free speech and the rights of non-citizens.

It is hard to find anything amusing from the Civil War, period, though I did have to chuckle at this image of General Ulysses S. Grant whooping the rear end of General Robert E. Lee. It refers to the Wilderness Battle during the Overland Campaign.

Illustrated in this 1924 cartoon is Senator William Borah giving a speech to Congress about corruption in campaign contributions which the Senate was investigating. Cartoonist Clifford Berryman responded thusly to his words.

In 1934 the country (not to mention the world) was still suffering the results of the Great Depression. FDR is shown as a doctor with a bag of New Deal remedies for an ailing Uncle Sam while Congress is a nurse wringing its hands with worry over whether Roosevelt’s grandiose plans can work.

The political cartoonists’ addition of humor to current controversy often allows us to consider two points of view. In this cartoon, the leaders of Israel and Egypt pointed their peace signs in opposite directions when President Jimmy Carter greeted them. Carter ultimately worked out a peace treaty between President Begin and President Sadat which was signed in 1979 known as the Camp David Accords.

Here is another controversy over which a great deal of ink has been spilled and I fear may be coming up again. I do not believe it requires any more explanation.

To prove there is nothing new under the sun I will conclude with a cartoon about the currently hot issue of immigration. Of the many cartoons I found on the subject over our nation’s history, here is one from over 150 years ago.

Joni Mitchell’s song "The Circle Game" keeps coming to mind, as the chorus goes:

"And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game."

Putting It Together

I love it when people make suggestions of what to write about. After 15 years of weekly Missives, it is not always easy to come up with an idea. Recently a friend wrote, “… I was again reminded how difficult it must be to design the hoped for collection, get permissions to move the objects, packing those objects, moving them, insuring them, unpacking them, and displaying them, while assuring their safety. Then you must produce the catalogue and sell the tickets.”

All these issues are what goes into an exhibition, and I probably have answered the question over the past 15 years in bits and pieces but never in one Missive so here goes: Here is a list which covers the entire process so, obviously, there is no way to give the process its due:

-The Concept
-The List
-The Contact
-The In-Person view
-The Deal
-The Catalog
-The Packing and shipping
-The Installation
-The Opening
-Did I forget Funding?!
-The Crossed fingers

An idea is not enough. You need to think of how you turn it into the museum visitor experience. Is it possible to get the cooperation of those who will be involved which starts at your own institution? Possibly they will want to form a committee which makes the curator’s job more complicated but may or may not make the concept clearer. The larger the committee the greater the risks.

Then you make a list or, cull a list if it is a one artist show, for your ideal exhibition. Inevitably this will be adjusted along the way. Will the museum or collector lend the work you believe is the best work for your exhibition?

Most exhibitions, unless they are done exclusively from your institution’s collection, will require some travel. If possible, you need to see the works in real life. When my wife was doing international exhibitions, she was continuously flying abroad to deal with the art for the show and the possessors of it.

The desired work may be too fragile to travel or the insurance value the owner wants on the work sounds prohibitive. How long will the exhibition be on? Are there plans to travel it? Will there be a catalog? All considerations of the owner deciding if they will lend the work, and it is your job to convince them it is worth the risk and for that owner to be missing that work for that length of time. If you are dealing with another institution they may ask for a specific work from your museum when they do an exhibition two years from now. You can be sure there will be hiccups along the way, and you will have to compromise your original “ideal” list.

You will probably enlist outside experts to contribute to your catalog well ahead of time. You really want that catalog to arrive from the printer before the show opens. If the catalog happens to come from abroad you may have to deal with U.S. Customs which, of course, goes for the art works as well.

You will work with your registrar on the arrangements for packing, shipping and insurance. Is there a packer in Timbuctoo that you and the owner will trust with that work of art, or can you send a registrar to pick it up in person? Museums will sometimes ask to have a curator accompany the work of art even if it means flying on a cargo plane… an official escort. Works of art are installed and must be taken down again when the exhibition closes. This image from the Bowes Museum in County Durham, England.

Meanwhile, the installation must be worked out. The art must be fitted into the available gallery space and installed in a way that tells the story you wish to convey. You need to work with a museum exhibition designer, here I will refer you to a previous Missive.

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2021/06/the-designer.html

You have to prepare a schedule with your partners within the museum needed for the project. As the works of art arrive at your institution, a conservator will be needed to check their condition. Maybe you made a prior deal to have your conservator clean or restore a work for the owner in advance. Did you agree to have protective glazing on the picture before it was being shown? Damage during travel as minor as a chip on a frame has to be addressed. Skilled mount makers and additional art handlers may be needed. You may still be putting up the labels when the crew of lampers arrive for the critical final step of lighting.

Hopefully, your institution has left enough money in the till for advertising and a great opening… did I forget to say that the funds to do the exhibition have to be raised? You needed to have worked with your development department to accomplish this.

Obviously, each bit of what I have written could easily be a chapter in a book, so this is merely a gloss. I will leave it to you to think of all the issues that can come up in each circumstance!

Tacita Dean

We were in Houston, Texas a couple of weeks ago with an afternoon free, so we decided to go to The Menil Collection. In 1954 John and Dominique de Menil established a foundation whose stated purpose was “to foster greater public understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, culture, religion, and philosophy”. The museum, beautiful in its simplicity, built to house their collection by the famed architect Renzo Piano, opened in 1987.

It is designed with pods usually consisting of 2 exhibition rooms each. When we were there, in one was a wonderful show by surrealist Max Ernst and another of ancient as well as indigenous arts. However, what especially grabbed us on this visit was the exhibition of a contemporary artist, Tacita Dean.

Clearly, we are not with it, as they say, because the artist was new to us. Ms. Dean is represented, for one, by the esteemed Marian Goodman Gallery. Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, England and the biography sent me by the Gallery refers to her as “British European”. Today she splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin. She received her MFA in painting from The Slade School of Fine Art in London. There is a long list of awards and solo exhibitions going back to 1994. In 1992 she created a 16mm, 16 mm, color, optical sound, 8 minutes; continuous loop called The Story of Beard.

This exhibit at The Menil is her first major museum survey in the U.S. though she has had shows at the National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, and also in Basel, Switzerland, in Mexico City and Sydney, Australia.

The show we saw was called “Blind Folly”. A short pamphlet that is available in the exhibition has a quote from the artist which says in part, “I have allowed the making of my work to be open to interpretation and redirection by chance …” and that is what I found particularly intriguing. My wife and I saw different but similar things in the works.

There was much more to the show than I will give examples of here, but these are images that really struck me. A fantastic (including all of that word’s meanings) work is The Montafon Letter, 2017, lent by the Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. It looks to be a photograph but it is actually a white chalk drawing on black board. It measures 12 by 24 feet. Montafon is a 39 km long valley in the westernmost Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg and Dean’s image is a scene of its icy Alpine peaks. The artist says she based it on an account of a fatal 17th century avalanche in the Austrian Alps in which 300 people died and one priest survived making it a symbol of hope. The story goes on and may be historically interesting, but for me, who lives in the mountains of New Mexico and has loved Switzerland since I was a child, I prefer to see mountains and not tragedy. Here you will see the image in the installation and a photograph of the work alone. (images gallery shot Montafon 1 and image solo Montafon 2)

One of my wife’s favorite works was the Delfern Tondo, 2024. Delfern refers to an estate in Los Angeles. The work is 10 feet in diameter and again looks like a photo but is not. It is chalk on blackboard and paint on Formica. In preparation, however, the artist did lie on the grass and point her camera upwards for inspiration. Living outside of town we often look up but at night we do not see clearly the cloud patterns we are able to see during the day. Dean evokes those magical moments that are so difficult if not impossible to capture with a camera. The close up is from the frontispiece to the catalog.

An image that the curator, Michelle White clearly loves since it is the cover of the museum brochure, and the press release, is “Beauty 2006” lent by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It represents a barren tree. Here Dean did use a photograph blown up to roughly 12 by 12 feet but she isolated the tree from its surroundings and enhanced its image by painting in gouache with a small brush around its limbs. This was one of her first in a series of what is called in the catalog “portraits of trees”, sometimes in color, that she found in different locations around the world. (image Beauty, 2006)

This is such a multifaceted artist! Dean has made 16mm films which are being shown in rotation at The Menil. She believes in creating works with found objects and her unusual surfaces include abandoned locomotive windows. One series in the show is composed of found postcards where she has painted mirror images to mount next to them. I was tantalized by the thoughts she left in partially erased notes in her larger drawings. She says she does not know what she will create until she serendipitously sees and does it. How do you capture that?

The exhibition will be on view at The Menil until April 19, 2025.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

When I received the press package from the Metropolitan Museum for “Siena:
The Rise of Painting 1300-1350. I immediately regretted not being able to get to New York to see it. For those who are or will be in New York, it opened October 13, 2024, and runs until January 26, 2025. The reviews since confirm my reaction.

According to Director, Max Hollein’s introduction to the catalog, “Siena was an epicenter of artistic innovation and ambition in the 14th and 15th century. Its impact on the development of European art and the development of painting cannot be emphasized enough.” Siena was also situated on a major route from Northern Europe to Rome and on to Naples and hence was a major artistic influence.

During the first half of the 14th century Siena became a hotbed of creativity, that is, until half the population of Siena perished in the plague of 1355.

The exhibition includes paintings by four of the greatest artists of their time. Duccio di Buoninsegna (1278-1319), Simone Martini (1284-1344) and the brothers Pietro Lorenzetti (1280-1348) and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290-1348). Though the Press Release emphasizes the Paintings, the over 300 page catalogue indicates categories including Sculpture, Goldsmiths’ Work, Illuminated Manuscripts and Textiles from over 40 lenders from at least 10 countries. With over a hundred works in the exhibition and most of them stellar examples, it is impossible to do full justice to the exhibition here.

Since, for better or for worse, we have a pecking order for categories let us start with a couple of paintings. The Frick Collection, just half a mile away, lent their wonderful Duccio of the “Temptation of Christ” to the show, but this is a show with more than one Duccio! The exhibition created in conjunction with the National Gallery in London, lent this small tryptic by the artist representing The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Aurea, and Patriarchs and Prophets (ca. 1312-15). The first image is the picture from the Frick and the second from the National Gallery.

These four small panels by Simone Martini form the Orsini Polyptych (ca. 1335-1340) that are today split between the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, the Louvre in Paris and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin are reunited here. Each panel is painted on both sides. This one is my first choice, “Going to Calvary,” with Jerusalem depicted as a medieval city. The building has a central plan symbolizing the temple of Jerusalem. I love the individual faces where you can imagine what they are all thinking. Imagine these panels hinged and folded together so as to be portable for private devotion. A second illustration shows them installed at the Metropolitan.

A few fragments survive of a great wooden crucifix created by Lando di Pietro as a personal gift to a Sienna confraternity. The nearly life-size crucifix was all but destroyed in an Allied bombing of the Basilica di San Bernardino all’Osservanza in 1944. Exhibited in the show, a damaged head of Christ in polychromed wood was lent by the Museo Castelli in Siena. It was only through the destruction of the rest of this work that parchments secreted in its fragments were discovered, revealing its author, who had previously been known only as a goldsmith and architect, was a sculptor as well!

There are several amazing ivory pieces in the show. This Tabernacle Polyptych of the Virgin and Child and scenes from the infancy of Christ created in the 1280s in Paris is a great example, lent by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Some of the original polychrome and gilding remains. It too could be folded and taken along for private worship … today we carry our computers!

Oh, so many more riches to view but I am going to leave it at that. Hopefully, I have given you a taste of this artistic caviar.

Now, I have a surprise for you. The Met created a video tour of the exhibition with the curators responsible for putting it together and others who were involved with putting it on. The accent is on the paintings but some of the objects are visible along the way.

An Unfortunate Comparison

For those who have not voted early, within the next couple of weeks you will cast a vote that will affect our lives and possibly change our country irrevocably. Unfortunately, we seem to be taking history far less seriously in our schools. If it is seriously taught it is only U.S. history and, as we have heard, may only be history that will not upset our children. This leaves those on social media to teach whatever they want without fear of contradiction.

A well-educated friend recently told me that he did not understand the reference I made to how recent times in the U.S.A. mirrored what happened in the 1930s in Germany. I have a different background since I am Jewish and the product of German parents who had to leave the country they loved. I am writing what I could not have as of 1933 in Germany. My father was thrown out of university in that year. Every word I write below can be fully documented but if I included all the details this Missive would go on for many pages.

Here are a few examples of parallels that concern me. The Reichstag Fire,1933, a few weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, was used as an excuse to abolish a number of constitutional protections and this paved the way for Nazi dictatorship. In the U.S. right-wing protesters stormed the Capitol and looked to hang those they said were taking over the government because of what they saw as a crooked election.

In the same year, 1933, university students in Munich started the Book Burning. In the U.S. we don’t burn the books; we ban them by taking them off library shelves at schools and public libraries denying our students education in many areas including the history of our own country.

Hitler called for a nation of a pure Aryan race. In the U.S. there are calls for a Christian Nation. From day one Hitler worked to expel those who did not fit into the Nazi concept of a master race. While mainly about Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a few of the others that were to be expelled one way or the other were Black people, Gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with disabilities.

CNN reported regarding the 2024 race that Trump said of immigrants: “They’re poisoning the blood of our Country”. The former President also has said he wants to create “camps” where all immigrants should be kept until they can be sent out of the country. Starting in 1933, long before his use of the ovens for the “final solution”, Hitler created concentration camps for those he did not find fit or spoke against the Third Reich.

There are many examples of Trump’s contempt for the handicapped. Former Marine Corps General and one-time Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, said that Trump did not want to be photographed with military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.”

The Third Reich spoke of mainstream news as “Lügenpresse” (press of lies). Sound familiar? The term “fake news” comes directly from there. The former President recently has stated that he wishes CBS to lose its license because of the network’s interview of Kamala Harris, which he skipped out on. While he was still President in 2019 the New York Times wrote that he referred to it as “a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” That is fascism 101.

Hitler had his enablers who started planning already in the 1920’s. Here there is Project 25. The Fuhrer and the Maga party are in lock step in first delegitimizing existing government departments, and then forcing them to do their bidding.

In his rise to power Hitler affiliated militias with his Nazi Party, the SA (paramilitary “brown shirts”) and SS-( an elite Aryan sub-group). Trump encourages self-recruiting militias like the Proud Boys who he urged to “stand by!”.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS … VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT!

Falling in Love with an Art Object

My children were out here for a birthday celebration, and we went with my daughter and her husband to Canyon Road (the street with the most galleries in Santa Fe) to look for a sculpture for their garden. Though I have been with my wife for a half-century, this search reminded me of a bronze I had bought with my first wife. That was a good memory, but I did not miss the object itself. Of course, one thought always leads to another, and it reminded me of a small painting acquired back then. I believe it was of a girl sitting by a pond, and suddenly I missed it. Why does that work and not the other?

That is what started me on this Missive. The painting was by an artist who is somewhat known, but the market value of this work would not be significant. It is a pretty picture but that’s it. So, why do I miss it? Because it was given to us by my father’s classmate from Frankfurt, who I thought of as a dear uncle.

There are lots of scientific reasons given as to why, as a species, humans love art. They all run along the same lines, more or less, and here is one example from the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine: “Why do people enjoy art? Scientific research shows that viewing art can release dopamine. This natural neurotransmitter creates a feeling of calmness and improves your overall feelings of well-being. As such, embracing art can serve as a natural pathway to alleviate stress and elevate your mood.”

On a personal level the scientific definition makes sense in terms of a certain category of art or a specific work. Many, new to the art world as well as seasoned veterans, love the Impressionists. Their works are easily accessible, and appeal to many. You can get lost in works painted in that genre. That is not what happens to me when I listen to atonal music. On the other hand, I can accept that definition when I hear folk music. For my wife, it is classical music.

I told the story at the beginning because I think what we often like about art is where it comes from or how old the object is. Would you like to own a cave painting? You may be able to draw a horse better than this one from the Lascaux caves in France estimated to be 17,000 years old. Putting it in context, however, you become in awe of it.

A great deal of the attraction of an object can be how you relate to it. Maybe a painting reminds you of your mother, your daughter, or an uncle. Then there are objects that relate to where you come from and other family members. These German Baroque gilt bronze lions were probably the feet of a clock or cabinet. Both my wife and I admire them as beautifully made imaginative creations from a historic period but for me, they are precious as they belonged to my parents.

Then there are works that relate to one’s own personal history. For instance, this Art Nouveau inkstand and the inkwell. (A removable wave crest covers the original glass inkwell.) It was part of the Art Nouveau collection we assembled over the years in our New York home. Most of it went to museums and auctions but there are always objects like this that you simply cannot part with.

Most of us buy souvenirs on a trip. You might have traveled to Kenya and bought a traditional gourd or a contemporary painting there. When you bring it home you not only enjoy the work for its own sake, but it is also a reminder of your enjoyable adventure in another world.

In a similar vein, there was a tradition in Europe of making a small purchase when an art dealer would visit another. In France that was known as “pour marqée le passage”, literally to mark the passage. It was a token of respect for the colleague whose time you took up. It was not required but often done.

In conclusion, we fall in love with a work of art in the same way we fall in love with an individual. Many factors combine to make each a different experience.

Discoveries

Everyone loves discoveries, preferably one’s own, but we can also enjoy the luck of others in the hopes that the same will happen to us. I don’t like to gamble, but a discovery is different, you were not looking to win, it just happened. What are usually called “discoveries” in the art world are misattributed works or rather works that some scholar in a specific field has researched and declares, to be by a famous artist and therefore worth further attention. More adventurous and fun is the serendipitous discovery which does not just rely on expertise but is an unexpected find.

A story that I just read, reported by Sarah Gascone on Artnet about Sally Robinson from Missouri who was interested in photo documentation of indigenous peoples. As she started to collect photos for her research, she fell in love with many of the black & white prints of Native Americans. In the process she bought photos from the granddaughter of a Santa Fe Railway advertising department employee who worked there in the 1940’s. The prints were unsigned, but she began her research and came to believe the prints were by the famed photographer, Ansel Adams. She consulted Adam’s grandson, Mathew Adams, at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite, California, who confirmed that Adams had done commercial work for the Santa Fe Railway. She believes she discovered 50 original lost prints Ansel Adams shot for the Santa Fe Railway. But their authenticity has still not been confirmed!

Another Ansel Adams saga was traced by Alan Duke for CNN in 2010. Ten years earlier Rick Norsigian bought 2 old boxes of glass negatives in a garage sale while looking for antiques. Norsigian had worked at Yosemite and recognized the scenes. He just put them under his pool table where they languished for a couple of years. Eventually he realized that some of the images were very similar to others by Ansel Adams. They were all taken in Yosemite early in Adams’ career, between 1919 and the early 1930’s. In 1937 a fire in his dark room destroyed 5,000 of his plates. Norsigian spent years researching his treasure trove and believed that Adams used the surviving plates to demonstrate stages of photography and what fire damage can do and how to improve your work when he was teaching. Experts, not only in photography but also in forensics, weather, and even an FBI agent, testified to their age and similarity to Adam’s work. He planned to tour the plates to universities and museums and had begun selling prints from the negatives when the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust sued. In the resulting settlement,   he was allowed to continue selling the prints but could not use Adams’ name or likeness. The disclaimer of authenticity that was required does mention the artist’s name!

An example of Adams’ Yosemite series

In another article for Artnet Eileen Kinsella reported another discovery, this one with a known result. When he was 11 years old, Mat Winter found an old engraving in the back of a car at a rubbish dump. He just loved the intricate detail. When he asked the owner whether he could take it she readily agreed. Even though the image was the famed Knight, Death and the Devil and was signed by Albrecht Durer and dated 1513, he doubted it had value until years later when he showed it to experts who recognized it as an original Durer engraving. Eventually, the work brought $44,800 at auction. See how important an art history education is😊?

Knight Death and the Devil with its now older savior

I have kept an article, again from Artnet that has been sitting on my desk for over a year about a teacher in Israel who took her first-grade students to Tel Azekah a site that has been said is where David met Goliath. Picking up a piece of pottery she told her students that there were ancient objects on the ground. She noticed one of her students lagging behind to show a friend something she had found. Studying it herself the teacher saw that it had the incised marks of a scarab. In Israel found antiquities are considered as belonging to the State so the child agreed to give it up and the teacher got in touch with the Antiquities Authority. Determining that it was a scarab seal 3,500 years old that demonstrated Egyptian presence in ancient times, the education director of the Authority presented the child with a certificate of appreciation. (image Scarab)

There are more reports on archeological discoveries, and it is interesting how some discoveries take a long time to come to light… like 60 years! According to a Miami Herald article by Aspen Pflughoeft dated March 11, 2024, two Norwegian brothers, one being 7 years old, went treasure hunting back in 1964. Crawling in the dirt under their local church on an island 250 miles northwest of Oslo where they found some silver coins. They did not think other than that their discovery was cool and stashed them in their treasure box. When they finally showed them to archeologists this year the coins were identified as 600-700 years old and rare. The final disposition of their discovery has not been determined.

While I was writing this, yet another discovery appeared on my screen: a possible Picasso double portrait of himself and his mistress Dora Maar. The father of the present owner found it in the cellar of a villa on the island of Capri which Picasso had in fact visited in the 1930’s. Authentication studies have begun to determine if the picture that hung for decades in this Capri family home is original.

As they say, Seek and ye shall find … possibly!