“Hard Times: An Artist’s View” at the Salmagundi Club
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“Hard Times: An Artist’s View” at the Salmagundi Club

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Is it uplifting enough to count as art if a painting stirs the soul to compassion?
Does that kind of upliftment via images of impoverished or disenfranchised people create beauty?
Does evoking the deeper sense of the degradation and pain of our shared humanity–‘there but for the grace of God go I’–catapult the viewer out of the stupor of our daily lives into a state where transcendence and transformation can occur?
These questions came to mind last night as my husband Sabin and I attended a panel discussion at the Salmagundi arts club. Our friends dancer Lori Belilove and musician John Link accompanied us; Lori had suggested the outing.
Sabin was quick to dismiss most of the paintings: “They are illustrative.” He meant that as “merely illustrative,” criticism indeed from an artist of Sabin Howard’s caliber. He was right: most of them are illustrative. This exhibit at Salmagundi is uneven, though ambitious in scope: “Ask artists to paint instant history, to reach into their souls and put onto canvas their expression of the toughest economic times since the great depression.”
Then there were Burt Silverman’s paintings, which were informed by intelligence and grace, so that even the ugliness of the subject matter did attain something, some higher metabolism of representation and humanity.
The panel discussion ranged from from curatorial matters and historical imperatives to practical ones: Who buys these paintings? There is always that scourge of investment hanging over the art market, the real or imaginary perception that a piece of art is a safe place to store value. Artist Max Ginsberg mentioned that taste is too often made by someone who is promoting something for sale, and that when people see an abstract piece that doesn’t move them, the trend is to say, “I don’t understand it” rather than “it doesn’t move me.”
From me, novelist Traci Slatton: Honest people, who aren’t afraid of pissing off the emperor by mentioning his nakedness, will say, “It’s ugly crap.”
Burt Silverman (yes, I am a huge fan of his work and his eloquence) was asked about the political nature of this exhibit. He said that he resists the categorization and politicization of art because those are temporal and transient labels. I agree that art should resist time. It was most fascinating to hear him come out and claim, “I am uncomfortable with the increasing dominance of photography and the corresponding abdication of the artist’s personal human vision.” He talked about the importance of the “fulcrum of discovery” in art.
These are matters of some importance. The exhibit, though uneven, is worth seeing. These are not modernist nor post-modernist pieces; they are not done with sneering irony, denigration of beauty and value, and adolescent mockery of the common humanity that twines us together. Are they the next step in the evolution of art? Sabin says “no,” that an integrated vision of the heroic ideal and oneness of life comprise the “next step.” But these are an important part of the transition, as the collective consciousness grows out of silly modernism.
The Salmagundi Club is located at Fifth Avenue and 12th street.

Salmagundi Club

The Italian cover of IMMORTAL
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The Italian cover of IMMORTAL

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The Italian cover of IMMORTAL

Italian cover of IMMORTAL

It’s that time of year for me: warm weather and sunshine, an urge to wear silky dresses that breeze around my thighs, fantasies about travel and escape and the Pinacoteca Vaticano and a lover who keeps me occupied for the whole hot lunch hour, when everyone in Rome goes inside. Nowhere on Earth is the sky bluer or the cypress trees more fragrant or the skin more delectably open to touch than in Italy.
Such naughty thoughts can only come from Caravaggio, that mad but brilliant painter of the late Renaissance. Murderous sociopathy aside, he knew better than any artist in history how to portray the rotting of the spirit. Sometimes I hate him for that. Other times, I am compelled to stare. Makes me think of that moment when fruit is just a little too ripe and soft, a little too sweet for the tongue and perfumed for the palate, a little bruised and burnished from the sun, but it hasn’t yet dropped off the vine.
So imagine my delight at this cover for Marco Tropea Editore’s Italian version of IMMORTAL: Caravaggio’s Narcissus! A wonderful painting. A pleasure to behold, and a feast for the senses.
Time for a plane ticket!
Symbolists
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Symbolists

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I am a fortunate woman: my four daughters, three biological and one step, are among my most favorite people. They are such wonderful fun to be with, each in her particular way.
Last week afforded a few days for me to spend quality alone time with my eldest daughter, who is now an anarchist. She spent a lot of time quoting Foucault, Lacan, and George Carlin to me. She stayed up all one night reading Obama’s DREAMS FROM MY FATHER and then spent the next day haranguing me mercilessly about the evils of racial disparity. I was stuck by her despair at ever rectifying the terrible wrong of racial inequality. She’s completely correct, of course, that it is a foundational evil. But I think we can restructure things for the betterment of all humans. I am bolstered in this opinion by her passion.
Years ago I took her to see MUNICH, starring the amazingly gorgeous Eric Bana. “Your generation will both inherit and solve this conflict,” I told her, when we walked out. She gave me a stricken look, but she seemed to agree.
And when they do, the solution will arise out of the passion that she and her peers have for true equality, for real tolerance.
Over a lavish dinner one night: “And what is the sociological implication of this meal?” I asked.
“That we have so much, that this kind of luxury exists, only because there exists people who have so little, who live in unimaginable poverty,” she said, flatly. She described a ghetto in Africa. I tried not to let it ruin my enjoyment of the meal.
“I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction,” she quoted Carlin. But, with four children, I am invested in the survival of the species. So we fell into a debate about humanity: Are we worth saving?
“No,” she said, fiercely. The politics of power and inequality are too deeply ingrained for us ever to create a just society without the toxicity of racial inequality. “Maybe if 90% of us are killed off and the rest of us start over from scratch, that’s the only way,” she insisted.
But I beg to differ. Not because I believe in masses of humanity. Pretty much, from what I’ve seen, groups are evil, institutions are codifications of, at best, apathy, and at worst, vindictive Naziesque murder. Think of the Catholic church and the Inquisition. Think of McCarthyism. Actually, there’s no end of institutional evils to think about. Nope, I don’t like institutions.
But I do like individuals. I don’t know if society will change itself. But I do think that impassioned individuals–like my daughter–will stand forth to proclaim a new and better way of being, a more just way of cooperating, and that humanity will resonate with that better way.
I believe in the power of the individual to effect change. As an example, a friend of mine is the investigative journalist who, decades ago, broke the story about the dangers of asbestos. This he did despite threats and persecution from asbestos companies who had billions of dollars at stake. Thanks to his courage, fewer people now die of asbestosis.
It requires a refusal to go along with herd-thinking. It takes the resourcefulness, the stubbornness, to filter out the chaff, think for oneself, and hold onto unpopular ideals. One person, or a small group, is all it takes. In this thinking, I am like Abraham. Abraham bargained with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah: and if Abraham can find ten good men, God will spare the cities.
Of course, it didn’t work out so well for those two cities. That doesn’t diminish my faith in the individual.
My beautiful daughter and I went to some museums. She was delighted by Odilon Redon. He’s not the kind of artist of whom my Renaissance-obsessed husband approves, but I get it. Redon with his fantastical creatures and renditions of mythos was aiming for another universe, another realm: akin to the kabbalistic realm of Beriah, the world of thought and creation that comes from the realm of Atzilut, which is changeless. In Beriah, which is a kind of heaven, we find duality. It’s a world of essences, principles, and ideas. It’s a realm that can effect rectification.
So perhaps my daughter’s anarchy is inspired in Beriah. And it is individuals like her and Redon who can access those higher realms who will bring transformation to the rest of us.
To Bouguereau or not to Bouguereau?
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To Bouguereau or not to Bouguereau?

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I got my ass kicked by Jacob Collins and Jim Cooper last week in a debate about Bouguereau.

This pleasant drubbing occurred at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation’s annual award dinner. This year painter and teacher Martha Erlebacher was honored.

It was an amazing evening. I was seated at a table with Martha Erlebacher, painter Philip Pearlstein, sculptor Sabin Howard, painter Jacob Collins, author Ann Brashares, and critic Jim Cooper. I was in the company of my artistic betters and was glad to be included. It was a treat to just listen to the conversations going on around me, let alone participate.

Of course, being me, with plenty of brash and engaged opinions, I had to contribute. Before dinner, I walked into a discussion Jacob Collins, one of the pre-eminent realist painters, was having with Jim Cooper, an art critic who runs Newington-Cropsey foundation. They were talking about the French Academicians.

Now, what is it with the French Academicians? Candy-assed painters, all surface sweetness and no structure, the lot of them. Look at Bouguereau. It’s like fluffy pink cotton candy. You might go into a diabetic coma. If I see one more painting of a shepherdess, I might barf. Why settle for sugary trifle when, with, say, Raphael or Fra Angelico, you get lamb chops with a side of asparagus and a hunk of chewy bread?

But no, Jacob and Jim said. I have a problem of taste. Jacob pointed out that we in the 21st century view Bouguereau through the lens of the myriad second-rate copyists who come after him. We can’t judge Bouguereau on his own terms because a thousand imitators followed him, and they did not have his immense talent.

This was a point well-taken, and has given me much to contemplate. Collins is no idiot. He certainly knows his way around a figure on canvas.

Jim, whom I adore, took me to task rather mercilessly. No one does hands like Bouguereau, he pointed out. Then he lectured me about Corot, with whom I have a love-hate relationship. I find Corot lazy and self-indulgent. He lacks the spiritual might of, say, Turner, while playing with light in similar fashion. But I do love to look at Corot’s paintings, despite him being one of those second rate French Academicians. But no, Corot is not an academician. Jim contends that Corot is the first of the great modernists.

It’s true, I have been brainwashed into revering the Renaissance by my Michelangelo-esque husband Sabin Howard, who, I might add, has also scolded me for dismissing Bouguereau. Et tu, Brute! This when I have to sneak off in secret to the MOMA to see the Edvard Munch exhibit, feeling as much shame as if I’d been meeting an adulterous lover! Before I come back into our apartment, I have to check myself and make sure I have no MOMA tickets or brochures sticking to my person, lest I draw the wrath of Sabin.

So, Bouguereau? Or not?

Award for Excellence in the Arts: Martha Mayer Erlebacher
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Award for Excellence in the Arts: Martha Mayer Erlebacher

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Award for Excellence in the Arts: Martha Mayer Erlebacher

Last night my husband Sabin Howard & I attended the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center event honoring Martha Erlebacher. Martha is a realist painter and teacher. She taught Sabin twenty-seven years ago at the Philadelphia College of Art, and Sabin credits Martha and her deceased husband Walter Erlebacher for giving him the tools with which to create beautiful classical art with a powerful modern sensibility.

It was a wonderful, heart-warming evening. Sabin and I picked Martha up at her hotel to take her to the Lotos Club. In the taxi, I asked about Sabin as a young art student. He had, at one point, sported a gigantic thatch of a beard that would have made ZZ Top proud. Martha laughed, told me that in all her decades of teaching, there were maybe 5 students who had serious, big talent as artists. Sabin was one of them.

She and Sabin fell into a conversation about the draughtsmanship of drapery. I shut up and listened. When two artists of the caliber of Martha Erlebacher and Sabin Howard are discussing drawing, Leonardo, and the play of light, I want to hear every word that comes out of their mouths.

Martha and Walter had to re-invent the Renaissance system of proportions and of how to structure the figure. Walter Erlebacher had been a darling of the art world when he was an abstract expressionist showing at the Whitney Biennial; when he turned to the figure, to the human body, they dropped him. Sad commentary on the lack of taste and vision in the art haute-monde.

No one was doing realism and the figure back in the 60’s, when Walter and Martha understood that the human body is the greatest expression of truth, beauty, and narrative that human beings have. Against a condescending environment in the art world and a disembodied academia that had forgotten the perceptual power of art in favor of heady conceptual babble, they reinvented the proportional system. Martha was the painter and Walter was the sculptor.

“The sculpture of human form is the metaphor for the human desire to live forever,” Martha told me, as we spoke later in the evening. She was telling me how her husband was a genius.

“Don’t underestimate yourself and your contributions,” I said, gently. She shrugged. But this evening was about her. Sabin introduced her, and it was an intense moment for him, because he got to publicly express his gratitude to someone who had, literally, changed his life. Who had set him on the path he lives. “Martha gave us the manual on how to make awesome, powerful, visceral classical art!” he said, with tears in his eyes.

Noah Buchanan, a painter with a big following in California, also spoke. Noah related some funny anecdotes about Martha’s classes, how her words had stayed in the heads of her students who went on to be teachers themselves.

It was a joy to behold the praise being given to a woman who has made such a quiet, fierce contribution to the world, to both the joy and the discipline of art. She’s also a beautiful painter. The painting shown above is her “Dream of Eden.”

TED.COM & The Young Michelangelo
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TED.COM & The Young Michelangelo

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My husband Sabin Howard has become enthralled with the inspiring video lectures on ted.com. I understand why. Sabin and I are seekers of enlightenment, and that spark is the intention behind the website. I usually don’t mind when Sabin brings his MacbookPro to the bedroom and insists that I watch. Although I wish he wouldn’t do it on Monday nights at 9:00, because I am really invested in Jack Bauer saving the world.

The latest two videos were Ben Zander on classical music and Sir Ken Robinson talking about how schools kill creativity.
I had reason to ruminate on Robinson’s words in light of a lecture I attended last week at the New York Academy of Art on The Young Michelangelo, given by a professor who has a forthcoming book of the same name.
Now, this professor meant well. He tried to enliven his speech by mentioning sodomy several times. Usually sodomy is a provocative subject. This time, the unfortunately pompous academician managed to make both sodomy and the young Michelangelo Buonarroti boring. It was an accomplishment that made my husband seethe with fury. Not because of the former subject but because Sabin, as the finest living figurative sculptor, considers himself a direct heir to Michelangelo, and the sculptor poised to rebirthe classical figurative statuary into the modern mind as a living, breathing, urgent topic of thought. For Sabin, the boringization of Michelangelo is a catastrophic evil.
He got so mad that I wiggled out of the dinner invitation with a group of NY Academy folk and the professor. I didn’t want to watch Sabin get into a fight. Sabin’s the pale German/British/Northern Italian genotype and there was an uncharacteristic red flush on his cheekbones. It didn’t bode well for a civilized dinner.
And I got an earful in the cab on the way home. Good thing I bowed us out of dinner.
But I sympathize with Sabin. I’ve seen this distressing academic syndrome before. Professor Zollner, whose books I revere, managed to make Leonardo Da Vinci boring, in a talk a few years ago at the NY Academy. How, you may ask, could anyone make Leonardo, one of the top 5 most fascinating human beings in human history, boring? Well, it takes talent.
And a sense of oneself as an entitled gate-keeper who is generously doling out information to the special few out of the largesse of one’s brilliant scholarly achievements.
George Bull, the translator of Vasari’s Lives Of the Artists, succeeded brilliantly in transforming Vasari’s commentary into something dry, dull, and off-putting. This is just an egregious violation of all things holy, good, and true. Vasari was one of the early PR legends and a genius of a gossip monger. Lives Of the Artists should be rendered in the juicy, salacious style of US Magazine. If it were, everyone would want to read it. Everyone would love and hate Benvenuto Cellini, that stormy and sociopathic artist who, it is rumored, threw his assistant into the furnace to get it hot enough to cast his sculpture.
I stand for the democratization of art and ideas. Great art belongs to everyone. It cuts across class, caste, and education levels. This is one reason why post modern art isn’t art. It’s merchandise. Worse, it’s a shame that the 20th/21st centuries will have to live down: that ridiculous crap (by which I mean Dung Madonna, Piss Christ, anything by Jeff Koons, etc.) doesn’t appeal to anyone who isn’t getting a PhD or doesn’t have a monetary interest in it. That is, art dealer$ and gallerie$ will swear to you it’s great, but that’s only because they want to $ell it to you.
When Sabin loads his heroic scale APHRODITE into a truck to transport it, everyone stops, awestruck, to admire. Everyone responds to beauty. Firemen, school teachers, garbagemen, the women running the florist shop, lawyers, bankers, the restaurateurs on the corner–they all comment. Random people in cars pull over, get out, and admire.
This is what great art must do: strike people like a lightning bolt and uplift them. It doesn’t require a PhD to behold and be uplifted by Michelangelo!
How would I have given a lecture on Michelangelo? I’m a storyteller, and I want everyone to love Michelangelo. I would have pushed the lectern out of the way, grinned, and said, “Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists ever. He was also a mean son-of-a-bitch and a liar, so cheap that he’d wear his leather pants until they cracked and fell off his stinking body.”