I
realized recently that most young people today may have no idea that
Pablo Picasso's Guernica
resided in the United States for many years, hung, in fact, in New
York's Museum of Modern Art for over 40 years from 1939 to 1981. I
saw the painting many times during the early years of my art
education. MoMA was much smaller and intimate back then, the
exhibition space more traditional, and I loved visiting the museum.
By the way, I hate their current lodgings, renovated multiple times
until now it reminds me of an airport terminal or a corporate
conference space. I hate the ever-present crowds, composed mostly of
individuals who have no interest in art, and I hate the exorbitant
entry fees the museum charges. The environment sort of disgusts me.
The place reeks of money and power. And I only go there, at this
point, if there is a show I absolutely have to see.
I may
have been a bit delusional, but, back in the late 70's / early 80's,
I felt there was still something vaguely subversive about modern art,
that it wasn't quite sanctioned by society in general. Informing
your old Aunt Tess at the family's Thanksgiving dinner table that you
painted abstractly might garner the same response that you would
receive today if you announced over the stuffing and corn casserole
that you had gotten a nipple piercing. Of course, there was an
ever-expanding educated elite that embraced the new art, but your
average truck driver or cocktail waitress had no patience with the
childish scribblings of a handful of talentless madmen. Modern Art
was nonsense, and it pissed people off. So visiting MoMA always made
me feel pretty good, like I was in on a secret that others didn't
know about. I had some favorite paintings that I stopped by to study
on every visit like old friends that I hadn't seen in a while, taking
great pleasure in renewing our acquaintance. There were van Gogh's
The Starry Night
and Kirchner's Street,
Dresden and Boccioni's The
City Rises. If my memory
serves me correctly, toward the end of your passage through the
museum, there was a room which solely housed Picasso's Guernica
and a number of preliminary studies for the painting. I always took
a good number of minutes to examine the painting. Though it's not my
favorite Picasso, I loved the painting for its startling invention
and robust execution. It's truly an amazing work of art. But my
fascination with the painting had little to do with its subject
matter. My experience was almost exclusively aesthetic.
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| Pablo Picasso - Guernica - Oil on Canvas - 1937 |
First,
permit me to provide a little history. In the late 1930's, Spain was
in the midst of a civil war which pitted Republicans, defending
representational government, against the Fascists led by dictator
Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Franco wished to crush the
opposition by decimating the Basque city of Guernica, considered a
bastion of Republican resistance, and Adolf Hitler was looking for an
opportunity to test the effectiveness of aerial bombardment on urban
centers. So on April 26, 1937, for a period of four hours, Germany's
Condor Legion bombed Guernica, a city mostly devoid of combatants at
that time, leaving it populated by women, children and the elderly.
The city was leveled.
Picasso
was approached by the Republicans who hoped that he would document
the assault in a mural which would be displayed at the 1937 Paris
World's Fair. Picasso accepted the commission and executed an 11.5”
X 25.5” mural in house paints on canvas. The painting documents
the suffering of humans and animals presented in a Synthetic Cubist
idiom. The mural was intended to bring to the world's attention the
atrocities and suffering endured by the Republicans at the hands of
the ruthless Fascists, and, hopefully, sway the public's perception
of the conflict to such an extent that governments would put pressure
on the Fascists or even intercede in the dispute. After being
displayed in the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair, Guernica
toured Europe throughout
early 1938 before being shipped to the United States where it was
used to raise donations to aid Spanish refugees.
Let's
stop for a moment to consider this. The Republicans, seeking to
expose the atrocities committed by Franco's forces, did not turn to
documentary photography and film to deliver their message to the
world; they turned to art. And the artist they selected to deliver
that message was not a Realist or a Propagandist or a Satirist; no,
they chose Picasso, an avant-garde modernist known for painting
fragmented and distorted images of old men smoking pipes, musicians,
nymphs accosted by lascivious satyrs and toreadors in arenas. Often
Picasso's Cubist translations of form were so extreme as to render
his subject matter almost unrecognizable. Clearly, the Republicans
believed in the power of art and were willing to employ its most
contemporary idiom to communicate with the people. Whether true or
not, they must have felt that the public was aware of and focused on
developments in the art world, that Picasso's interpretation of
Guernica's violation would create a sensation.
Guernica
toured the United States throughout 1939 and 1940. By the end of
1940, France had fallen to Germany and Franco had defeated the
Republicans, and Picasso entrusted the mural to the Museum of Modern
Art in New York with instructions that the painting should not be
returned to Spain until freedom and democracy were reestablished
there.
Guernica
continued to have an impact, touring in the US, South America and
Europe after the end of World War II. Eventually, the painting
resided primarily in New York. During the Vietnam War, protesters
occupied the Guernica
room at MoMA several times, and after the My Lai massacre the
painting was vandalized in protest. (Fortunately, it was easily
restored.) Starting in 1968, Franco repeatedly requested that the
mural be returned to Spain, but MoMA refused, stating that the museum
had to honor Picasso's instructions. I'm not sure what Franco would
have done with Guernica
had it been turned over to him. Display it? Hide it away? Destroy
it? Who knows? After Franco's death, Spain once again requested the
return of Guernica,
and initially MoMA was inclined to refuse on the grounds that the
monarchy subsequently established in Spain was not a “democratic”
institution; but ultimately the museum was obliged to surrender the
mural.
That's
quite a history for a single work of art. Guernica
has traveled the world, challenged dictators, impacted on
international relations and galvanized a generation of antiwar
protesters. For an artwork to assert such a powerful influence on
society is pretty rare but not unique.
Between
1810 and 1820, Francisco Goya executed a series of 82 aquatint prints
which documented the Peninsula War of 1808 to 1814, a conflict which
resulted from a popular insurrection by the Spanish people against
Napoleon's occupation of their nation. The series, now known as The
Disasters of War, provides
an unflinching glimpse at the results of that conflict, a conflict
Goya witnessed firsthand during his travels in Spain. There are no
heroics portrayed here, no glorious deeds to be celebrated. Goya
only presents the barbarity and suffering that resulted from a
protracted guerrilla war that offered no resolution.
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| Francisco Goya - Bury Them and Be Quiet - Etching - 1810 to 20 |
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| Francisco Goya - Great Deeds Against the Dead - Etching - 1810 to 20 |
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| Francisco Goya - Por Que? - Etching - 1810 to 20 |
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| Francisco Goya - With or Without Reason - Etching - 1810 to 20 |
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| Francisco Goya - This Is Bad - Etching - 1810 to 20 |
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| Francisco Goya - This is Worse - Etching - 1810 to 20 |
It's
difficult to determine Goya's intention in executing this series of
prints. Clearly, he was not commissioned to make The
Disasters of War. It would
seem to me that he was motivated by a very personal necessity to
express his reaction to the war. Keep in mind that Goya retained his
position as court artist throughout the French occupation, that he
produced during that period portraits of members of Joseph
Bonaparte's government. Goya must have been conflicted about his
role as court painter. Perhaps the series represents an attempt to
expiate the guilt he must have felt about conspiring with his
nation's enemies, to earn his living from serving them. These prints
were not produced on a whim; the size of the series is large and was
executed over a period of ten years. It is thought that Goya only
shared these works with a circle of trusted intimates but intended
ultimately to publish them. Unfortunately, with the restoration of a
Bourbon monarchy in Spain after the defeat of Napoleon, these prints,
which were critical of the monarchy and clergy and documented an
uprising of the general population, were too controversial to be
published. It wasn't until 1863, 35 years after the artist's death,
that The Disasters of War
was finally published. The very fact that it took so long for these
works to be made public is a manifest indication that Goya had
created a potent and dangerous concoction here. His message was not
welcomed; no, it was feared as being too radical, too progressive.
But once the series was disseminated, it had a powerful influence on
its audience, particularly later generations of artists confronted
with the horrors of war.
Near the
end of World War I, John Singer Sargent was invited by the British
prime minister to create a painting on the theme of American and
British cooperation in the war effort, which was to be shown along
with the works of other commissioned artists in an exhibition
sponsored by the British Memorial Committee. Sargent was probably
selected to explore this specific theme because, although born to
American parents, he lived most of his life in Europe, primarily
England. On the other hand, he may not have been the ideal choice
for this commission. Though Sargent was a famous and successful
artist, he was predominantly recognized as a painter of flattering
society portraits and impressionistic paintings documenting historic
sites and tourist destinations.
Sargent
struggled to arrive at an appropriate subject for his painting.
Although he was 62 years old at the time, Sargent insisted on
visiting the Western Front in France. In the field, he executed many
studies which he felt were insufficient to convey the epic nature of
his theme. But when he witnessed groups of blinded soldiers, mustard
gassed in a barrage at Le Bac-du-Sud, being led to a dressing
station, he knew he had found the subject for which he had been
searching.
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| John Singer Sargent - Gassed - Oil on Canvas - 1919 |
I must
confess that, upon seeing Sargent's response to his commission, I
expected to read that the work was rejected by the committee (which
was actually a division of the British Ministry of Information).
Certainly, the committee must have anticipated a heroic image,
perhaps British and American soldiers emerging, side by side, from a
muddy trench in a valiant assault on enemy lines. Instead, Sargent
presents the aftermath of a battle: helpless, wounded men being led
like children away from the front. It's a testament to the utter
brutality of the war that not only was this painting not rejected but
it was displayed prominently in the exhibition and was ultimately
voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. The
painting certainly made an impact. It's been recorded that visitors
to the exhibition fainted before this work.
Gassed
did excite some controversy, strangely enough from popular media and
intellectuals. The
Athenaeum, a British arts
magazine, accused Sargent of presenting a uni-dimensional
interpretation of the war, while The
Observer, a weekly
newspaper, opined that the painting wasn't gruesome enough, that
Sargent had sanitized and prettified his image. EM Forster
complained that the painting was too heroic and naively patriotic.
Virginia Woolf felt that Gassed
was specifically designed to elicit an emotional response from the
viewer, that it utilized crude visual devices to manipulate the
perceptions of the public. Evidently, after four years of a
horrifically destructive and deadly war, many members of British
society were unwilling to accept a work that disregarded, however
slightly, the ghastly and shocking toll that the war had imposed on
the participants and might be perceived as inflaming patriotic
fervor.
Let me
indulge in a momentary digression to state that I consider the
painting to be very satisfactory. Sargent has presented an image
derived from his personal observations, one consistent with
documentation from the war. He exposes just one unique facet of the
conflict, one that could easily be forgotten amid so many more
sensational aspects of the war. The soldiers, rendered anonymous by
their blindfolds, form a series of olive-drab horizontal bands across
the picture plane. Only a small group of the wounded on the right
assert a sense of three-dimensionality to the composition. It could
be said that these blindfolded soldiers represent the perspective of
most of the combatants who had submitted to the imperatives of the
war unaware of its real objectives and without any say on how they
would be sacrificed. I particularly appreciate that, while this
moving drama unfolds, soldiers engaged in a soccer match can be
glimpsed in the distance. This illustrates how inured the men had
become to the horrors of the war and also exposes the harsh reality
that, regardless of the travails and suffering that the individual
endures, the mass of humanity will strive to focus on pleasures and
distractions. In a nutshell, life goes on. It brings to mind that
during the recent coronavirus outbreak, while our hospitals were
inundated with patients struggling to breathe and we witnessed the
death count rise exponentially each day, there were frustrated mobs
insisting that they had a unalienable right to congregate at the
beach or get a manicure at the local nail salon. Empathy only goes
so far.
Otto Dix
had a very different perception of World War I. He enthusiastically
embraced the war, seeing it as a rare, powerful event in which he was
eager to participate. Dix enlisted in the German armed forces at the
start of the war and served as a machine gunner on the front lines
until the end of the conflict. During his years of service, he
experienced firsthand all of the horrors of trench warfare. The
First World War introduced many new innovations including tanks,
warplanes and poison gas. Artillery barrages left many soldiers
crippled and bizarrely disfigured. Perhaps one of the most gruesome
developments of the conflict resulted from trench warfare: the
establishment of a No Man's Land between enemy lines. After attacks
and counterattacks, the dead and wounded could not be retrieved from
this No Man's Land which was under constant scrutiny by both sides,
and combatants witnessed the prolonged and agonizing deaths of their
wounded comrades and the grotesque decomposition of their corpses.
In 1924,
years after the war's end, Dix completed Der
Krieg, a portfolio of 50
etchings which documented his experiences at the Front. The
resulting imagery was shocking and repulsive. Dix was very clear
that he did not execute this series of prints to serve as an anti-war
statement; instead he felt an imperative to exorcise these
observations from his consciousness.
“I
didn't draw war pictures in order to prevent the war. I would never
be so insolent. The goal is to banish the war. All art is an effort
of banishment.” - Otto Dix
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| Otto Dix - Corpse of a Horse - Etching - circa 1924 |
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| Otto Dix - Gas Victims - Etching - circa 1924 |
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| Otto Dix - Mealtime in the Trenches - Etching - circa 1924 |
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| Otto Dix - Skull - Etching - circa 1924 |
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| Otto Dix - Stormtroops Advancing Under a Gas Attack - Etching - circa 1924 |
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| Otto Dix - Transporting the Wounded in Houthulst Forest - Etching - circa 1924 |
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| Otto Dix - Crater Field near Dontrien Lit Up by Flares - Etching - circa 1924 |
Dix
didn't believe that his prints could have any impact on future wars,
but he felt compelled to confront the false and antiseptic perception
of the war that was being promulgated in popular media. He believed
that the government and military sought to soften and conceal from
the public the awful destructive impact that modern industrialized
warfare could effect on the human body.
I can
only imagine how disturbing seeing these prints could have been for
the parents, siblings and spouses of soldiers who did not return home
from the Front. But Dix had no patience for lies and civility.
These experiences were his own, and he had earned the right to expose
his truth. The movement that Dix and other similarly-minded postwar
artists initiated was called Neue Sachlichkeit or The New
Objectivity.
Although
Dix was no pacifist, he agreed to have Der
Krieg distributed
throughout Germany by a pacifist organization. The cycle of prints
was criticized severely in the press and was considered an insult to
all veterans. When the portfolio was presented in book form,
booksellers were reluctant to display it in their shop windows lest
their windows be shattered. When the cycle was shown at Berlin's
International War Museum in 1924, it created such a storm that the
police intervened, confiscating the prints at bayonet point. Upon
the rise of the Nazis, Der
Krieg was censored, and
Otto Dix's work was featured in the Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art
Show (an exhibition of work considered morally sick and
intellectually moribund by the Nazis) held in Munich in 1937. Dix
lost his teaching position at the Dresden Academy, and his work was
purged from all state-owned museums. During World War II, he was
permitted to continue to paint as long as his work did not convey a
political or anti-war stance. By the time of his death in 1969, Otto
Dix must have been overwhelmingly convinced that art can have a
powerful impact on the public and that as a weapon of protest and a
beacon of truth art had a critical role to play within modern
societies.
Certainly
during and immediately after periods of conflict, when emotions are
high and nerves frayed, the response to artwork that comments upon
that conflict will be amplified and hypersensitive. When I started
this blog entry, it was my intention to conclude it with the
observation that I can't envision any artwork today eliciting the
kind of response and asserting as powerful an influence as the works
I've addressed above. Currently, there exists an enormous gulf
between the “real” world and the art world that is impossible to
bridge. If you were to walk up to someone on the street and ask them
to name just one living artist, my guess is you would receive a blank
stare as a response. There are a number of reasons for this
disconnect. Some people might suggest that by violating the common
man's concept of what art essentially is and how it should function,
modern art alienated the public, but history doesn't support this
contention. It was not uncommon in the early twentieth century for
the authorities to shut down exhibits because the work was considered
indecent or was inciting too violent a public reaction. The Dadaists
considered a show a failure if it didn't get censored. Picasso and
Matisse were luminaries in their day, asserting an influence in
realms that far exceeded the confines of the art world. You would
have thought that the rise of Abstract Expressionism would have
irreparably alienated the public interest in the activities of the
artistic elite, but it didn't happen. Images of Jackson Pollock at
work on his drip paintings, a cigarette dangling precariously from
his lips and a can of enamel house paint in hand, were featured in a
1949 LIFE magazine article which changed the way Americans defined
the quintessential counterculture hero. I remember as a kid seeing
Andy Warhol being interviewed on the evening news fairly regularly,
and he was featured prominently in weekly gossipy rags. Though the
average individual may not have approved of developments in the art
world, he or she would have been aware of what was happening there.
Art was still a component of popular culture. Art could still
influence the public. It still had the power to incite and offend.
Something
changed during the 80's. The modernist rebellion had run its course,
and the thrust of artistic innovation fragmented. I welcomed this
change at the time, thinking that it opened up the art world to wider
possibilities and offered greater freedom to artists, but it came
with some serious drawbacks too. Once artists felt free to dip into
art history higgledy-piggledy and borrow and mix imagery and styles,
their artwork necessarily began to comment primarily on aesthetics –
on art itself. And like a Russian Matryoshka doll, a painting or
sculpture offered layers that could be penetrated only to reveal
infinitely more layers to be penetrated. For the initiated artistic
elite, this offered great fun; to the general public it offered
alienation. As a result of this change, art critics had to develop a
new way of talking about art that was so sophisticated and so
all-encompassing and so noncommittal that art criticism evolved into
unintelligible gibberish that employed an arcane vocabulary only
understood by a handful of aficionados. I subscribed to a number of
art magazines at this time because I was interested in learning of
new developments in the art world and wanted to keep track of
reevaluations of older work. I swear, even as a working artist with
a fairly broad knowledge of art history, I would give up on most
articles in these magazines after reading only a page or two, feeling
completely lost or bored – most often both. But, by far, the most
critical change that occurred at this point was that art was
transformed from a vehicle of communication into an article of
investment. Of course, there was always money to be made from
investing in art, but the return on one's investment took many years
to realize. Collectors purchased work they appreciated, thought
worthy of serious consideration and put on display – commonly in
their own homes. They took pride in the quality of their
collections, and tried to build a cohesive body of work that asserted
a coherent statement. Often wealthy patrons, unwilling to see their
carefully amassed selections scattered, donated their collections to
institutions. That changed in the 80's. The work of an
up-and-coming artist, which may have sold for a few thousand in the
early years of the decade, could increase in value tenfold or more in
just a couple of years and, within ten years, be selling for hundreds
of thousands of dollars. Art became a commodity. It was traded like
real estate or barrels of oil. The market determined what was good
and bad. The educated and perceptive collector was replaced by the
crass investor. I've actually read about buyers of contemporary art
who don't bother to uncrate their purchases. What would be the
point?
So, art
no longer played a role in the life of the average individual. It
was replaced with more easily digestible media: TV shows, movies, pop
music and social media; which means that today, if the public is
going to get stirred up into a frenzy over some piece of revelatory
commentary, that message is more than likely going to be delivered by
a pop artist. For instance, on March 10th
2003, while the U.S. geared up to invade Iraq, Natalie Maines of the
Dixie Chicks said the following to her audience at Shepherds Bush
Empire Theatre in London:
“Just
so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We don't want this
war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the
United States is from Texas.”
When her
comments were reported back in America, a firestorm erupted. Country
music stations refused to play Dixie Chicks songs. Erstwhile fans
pulverized their Dixie Chicks CDs. There were protests. Natalie
Maines even received death threats. It's pretty clear that, in times
of conflict when emotions are peaked, the public retains the capacity
to respond intensely, even violently, to words and images that
confront their attitudes concerning that conflict or expose facets of
that conflict of which they would prefer to remain unaware. I was
going to end this entry with the observation that it's pretty sad
that art has abdicated its role as the people's informer, critic and
agitator, but then I remembered something that occurred back in 2002.
I'm
certain that no one needs to be reminded that on September 11, 2001
the United States suffered a series of terrorist attacks which
included the destruction of both towers of the World Trade Center in
Manhattan. Like many people who worked in NYC at that time, I had
visited the WTC on business. The buildings were a defining element
of the city's skyline. Back when my wife and I lived in Brooklyn, I
recall many a time pushing my son in a baby swing in a park on the
Brooklyn Heights promenade and marveling at the enormity and austere
beauty of those structures across the East River. I was at my
midtown office working when the two airliners crashed into the towers
– was actually watching the news live with a friend when the South
Tower was struck. All activity in my office ceased. Some people
wept; some just stared blankly in disbelief. No one knew what to do.
Televisions were set up in some conference rooms, so those who
desired to watch the news coverage could do so. At one point on that
morning, I exited the building to look down Lexington Avenue to see
black plumes of smoke trailing toward Brooklyn from the still
standing towers. Events unfolded sequentially that day: one plane
crashed into the Pentagon, another was brought down in a field in
Pennsylvania and then each of the WTC towers collapsed. It seemed to
me that the carnage wasn't going to stop, that this was just the
beginning of some enormous conflict. Although my office closed, I
was hesitant to leave; at that time I commuted on the MetroNorth
Railroad to NYC daily from a northern suburb, and Grand Central
Station struck me as an ideal terrorist target. I waited at my
nearly empty workplace, too fraught to do much of anything. I left a
message at home for my wife, letting her know that I was safe and
expected to board a train later that afternoon. I occasionally
meandered up to our office's conference rooms which offered a broad
view of Lexington Avenue and saw, now and then, bizarre figures
covered in ash stumbling north away from the disaster. As if I
didn't have enough to be anxious about, my wife was pregnant with our
fourth child, had reached her due date and was visiting her midwife
that morning. Though she was usually late going into labor, I was
prepared to be summoned home at any moment.
My
memories from the following weeks are fragmentary. On several
occasions, women boarded our morning train up in Dutchess County to
walk from car to car, handing out photocopied pictures of their
husbands and asking the commuters if anyone had seen them. Their
spouses had left for work on September 11th
and vanished, in most instances leaving no trace of their existences
behind. Later, when I eventually ventured downtown, I saw billboards
and bus stops and walls plastered with hundreds of photographs of the
missing. People were hoping for some word of a loved one who had
simply disappeared that morning. Sadly, though the city had prepared
for a massive medical response, there was no one to treat. The
expected rush of injured survivors never materialized – in fact,
Ground Zero workers recovered very few intact bodies from the site.
Every morning when my train made its stop in Harlem (nearly ten miles
north of the WTC), the second the doors opened, the smell of burning
filled the car. If someone put a package or suitcase on the overhead
racks above me, I would nervously watch his or her movements –
might even change my seat if another was available. Soldiers armed
with submachine guns were posted around the exterior of the Citicorp
Center across the street from my office – something I had never
seen before in America. At one point, the Chairman of the Board for
our Agency gathered all of the employees in our conference rooms to
provide us with an update on developments since the attacks. He did
so wearing military fatigues – a pretty surreal experience.
I've
related my firsthand experiences of that time in the hope that I can
convey how emotionally charged the atmosphere truly was. And
consider this: I was one of the lucky ones left relatively unscathed
by the disaster. I worked in midtown, comparatively far from the
wreckage. The event didn't have a negative impact on my workplace;
in fact, my Agency became very active in the initiative to bring
investment and development back to lower Manhattan. And, unlike a
lot of the people I've talked to about 9/11, I didn't know a single
person who lost his or her life in the attacks. But all the same,
the experience had a huge effect on how I functioned each day and how
I perceived the world. Many others had suffered far more than I.
Some had lost family members. Some had seen their lives dismantled.
Some lost their homes or businesses. Some had rushed to the site to
assist survivors or to comb through the debris and had witnessed with
their own eyes the enormity of the disaster. Trust me, nerves were
raw and emotions ran high.
Eric
Fischl, a painter and sculptor considered a participant in the
Neo-Expressionism movement, was raised on Long Island and established
his artistic reputation in the Manhattan art scene. The events of
9/11 inspired within him a desire to make a work of art that
commemorated the tragedy, one that he believed would have a
therapeutic effect on viewers. Though primarily a painter, Fischl
had already created several public sculptures which were displayed
prominently at active locations, and he determined to fashion a
bronze sculpture that memorialized the “jumpers”, individuals who
chose to leap to their deaths rather than succumb to the fire and
smoke engulfing the towers. Of the 2606 victims who died in the WTC
disaster, it is believed that at least 200 jumped to their deaths.
Fischl
created a 14 foot long bronze statue of a nude female caught in an
instant of her descent through space which he called Tumbling
Woman. The statue was
installed in Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan for display starting with
the first anniversary of 9/11.
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| Eric Fischl - Tumbling Woman - Bronze - 2002 |
Many
people were offended by Tumbling
Woman and were immediately
vocal about the work. The general public responded very negatively.
Though there were a few supporters, most people interviewed were
shocked by the work and felt that it was disturbing. Andrea Peyser,
a columnist for the New York
Post wrote an incendiary
piece about the statue, inaccurately describing the piece and
belittling the artist. She called the work “shameful”. I've
read some criticism that suggested that Fischl was looking to
reinvigorate his flagging career by creating a public scandal. I
think the final straw for Rockefeller Center was when they began
receiving bomb threats. The statue was promptly draped in a cloth
and hidden behind a partition, and then, within a few days, removed
and returned to the artist.
Fischl
was surprised by the reaction to a work that he saw as bringing the
focus of the disaster back onto the individual, the human experience,
and away from the material and economic losses and the political and
military ramifications - which he saw as overshadowing the suffering
of the victims. Fischl terribly misread the American public. To
start with, any attempt to transform the emotional response to the
disaster into an aesthetic experience was a risky venture. At such a
time, could the viewpoint of an artist matter? Did the events of
9/11 have anything to do with art? Though the images of individuals
jumping from burning towers may have etched themselves indelibly on
our memories and may in truth be, as Fischl judged, the defining
facet of that day, such images were considered too gruesome and
intrusive for public consumption and were ultimately suppressed by
the media. And Fischl chose to portray his jumper nude. Anyone who
grew up in this country must have understood that Americans are
extremely uncomfortable with nudity, that putting a nude statue in a
public place alone would be considered controversial. And, although
male victims of the 9/11 attacks outnumbered females by about a 3 to
1 ratio, Fischl decided to make his jumper a fit, young woman, a
decision which would leave his work open to accusations of being
salacious. But, by far, the most critical element in the public's
response to his sculpture had to do with timing. It was just too
soon after the event for people to react rationally to any work that
seriously commented on the disaster.
And,
surprisingly, Fischl proved that art, even postmodern art, still had
the power to incite a powerful reaction from the public in times of
crisis. Though in interviews he still seems a bit dismayed at how
Tumbling Woman
was received, he should feel pretty satisfied that the public cared
at all.
Personally,
I find Tumbling Woman
to be an elegant and moving ode to the victims of the disaster.
After reading of the statue's installation, I intended to walk from
my workplace to Rockefeller Center to see it, but it was removed
before I got the chance. By the way, in the nearly two decades since
Tumbling Woman
was first displayed, Fischl created several versions of his statue.
One is displayed on his Sag Harbor property. Collectors were willing
to purchase the sculpture. Versions of the statue are in the
collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian
American Art Museum. And, remarkably, Tumbling
Woman was displayed at the
9/11 Memorial and Museum. I would have to say to Andrea Peyser that
what is considered “shameful” is relative.
So, in
conclusion, I think we can all agree that throughout history art
imagery did have the potential to elicit a powerful response from the
public – especially at times of conflict. But I must also concede
that since the 80's art has relinquished its traditional role in
influencing and inspiring the people. Art has moved to a realm that
is no longer accessible to the general public – physically,
financially, emotionally and intellectually. On the other hand,
Tumbling Woman
can serve as proof that on rare occasions art still retains the
potential to incite a passionate reaction from the people, but, let's
be real, that connection between art and the public remains a tenuous
one. The vast majority of New Yorkers offended by Tumbling
Woman had never heard of
Eric Fischl and were completely unfamiliar with his oeuvre. If they
had known more about his work, they probably would have been more
outraged. I don't believe that this alienation from the public is
necessarily a permanent thing. Children will still, unprovoked,
translate their world into imagery. That need is hardwired into the
human psyche. And, even as adults, we do react intensely to imagery
– though today that imagery may be delivered in advertisements,
news articles and pop movies. Imagery is too immediate, too
universal, too powerful, to be ignored. The climate right now may be
too bleak to nurture fine art, however history teaches us that
societies change in ways we could never imagine. Art will become
relevant again.
As
always, I encourage my readers to comment here, but, if anyone
prefers to respond privately, I can be contacted at
gerardwickham@gmail.com.
