Archives of American Art Blog

The Camera Does Lie

Fact and Fiction in a Famous Photo

Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker, 1948. ©George Platt Lynes II

On view in the exhibition Lost and Found: The Lesbian and Gay presence in the Archives of American Art is a photograph by George Platt Lynes taken between 1945-48 of the painters George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, and Jared French in a studio in Greenwich Village. In the foreground Cadmus is in the midst of painting What I Believe, an allegorical picture that, like Lynes’s photograph itself, conjures up an ideal artistic community.  (It is currently on view in the exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery.)  Behind him, in the next room, is Tooker at his easel, and in the far distance is French. 

Lynes’s picture seems to reveal three kindred spirits harmoniously working in harmony.  The only problem with this utopic vision is that, as Tooker wrote me in a letter, the photograph was a fabrication; Tooker never made art in this studio which was shared by Cadmus and French.  And yet knowing the fictive nature of the picture does not so much negate its message of artistic community, as make it more complex.  Any concept of community has to encompass shared aspirations and disappointments, conflicts and compromises, intimacies and betrayals. 

Above all, Tooker’s disavowal of the picture makes us wonder about the precarious position he found himself in that day, consciously posed by Lynes between two older and more experienced artists as if he were a bridge or barrier between them.  In fact, Tooker was Cadmus’s current lover, but Cadmus had been lovers with French and, despite French’s recent marriage to the painter Margaret Hoening, Cadmus and French continued to be intimate (supposedly Cadmus once boasted “I had Jerry in the daytime and George at night.”) Apparently neither Tooker nor French were as enthusiastic about the arrangement as Cadmus later claimed to be.  Tooker remembered that French refused to shake his hand when they met for dinner in public. Yet, as Tooker himself admitted to me, French’s painting was as crucial as Cadmus’s in forging Tooker’s own personal style.

This story about Lynes’s photograph is a perfect example of why archival material such as artist’s letters are so crucial to the history of art.  Without Tooker’s recollection of the circumstance of the taking of the picture we would assume that Lynes’s photograph documented the actual working habits of the three painters.

Artist and art historian, Jonathan Weinberg is guest curator of Lost and Found. He plans to donate his letter from George Tooker to the Archives of American Art.

I.J. Belmont Papers: Grist for the Musicological Mill

By way of introduction:  I am not an art historian.  Rather, I’m a musicologist, and I teach music history at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York.  Having focused much of my research during the past few years on the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), I became particularly interested in the reception of his famous Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis—perhaps his “signature” composition—in the United States in general and New York in particular. 

An expression from Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a theme of Tallis by I.J. Belmont, between 1929 and 1986. I. J. Belmont papers, 1929-1986. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Musical excerpt from Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia

One of the most fascinating aspects of that reception has to do with artist Ira Jean Belmont (1885-1964), who “translated” the Tallis Fantasy onto canvas in one of his many “color-music” paintings, as he called them.  To be honest, I had never even heard of Belmont before, so I was delighted to learn that the Archives had a rich collection of materials pertaining both to his life and to his works.  In fact, as far as I can tell, it is the single largest collection of Belmont materials there is.

What a joy to work at the Archives!  I came to feel so much at home there that I am seriously considering expanding my work on Belmont from the narrow perspective of his two Vaughan Williams paintings (he also based a painting on the Fantasia on Greensleeves) to a more comprehensive study on his color-music paintings as a whole, thus providing me with an excuse to keep visiting. 

But that is getting a bit ahead of myself, since a few words about Belmont’s translation of the Tallis Fantasy are probably in order.  First, Belmont was a synaesthetist; thus, if we take him at his word, he could not listen to music without involuntarily seeing colors and even images.  What was it about Vaughan Williams’s music that caught the artist’s attention to begin with?  I cannot say!  Belmont’s musical tastes were wide-ranging, and his ninety-some-odd “color-music expressions” (another one of his names for his works) translated music by composers from Bach through Beethoven and Wager to Sibelius and Ravel.  In fact, Wagner was his favorite, and it was Belmont’s self-assigned mission “to enshrine the dream of the great Richard Wagner, the union of the arts” (as he put it in his book The Modern Dilemma in Art, 1944).

Belmont’s painting poses further puzzles:

1. Why did Belmont draw his inspiration from two melodies that appear only in the interior of the work—Belmont generally inscribed the specific melodies upon which he drew on a brass plaque attached to the bottom of the painting’s frame—instead of the melody that Vaughan Williams lifted—and made famous in the process—from a psalm-setting by the sixteenth-century Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585)?
2. Why are the two most predominant colors in the painting white and a red-orange, when the first of these doesn’t exist in Belmont’s palette of color-pitch equivalents (he spells these out in The Modern Dilemma in Art) and the second is the equivalent of C sharp/D flat, which doesn’t appear in either of the two melodies that Belmont was purportedly translating?
3. What are those grim and glaring faces doing in the upper half of the painting?

We might argue that there are some dark moments in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia, but I am not quite sure that there’s anything quite so menacing as the upper half of Belmont’s painting.  Unfortunately (at least for those who like ready-made answers to things), Belmont’s reactions to the music he translated were both personal and private.  And except for a few instances in which the Belmont papers contain a tantalizingly vague explanation of a painting by Mrs. Elsie Kaye Belmont (as in the artist’s interpretation of Elgar’s Enigma Variations), or, as  in the “expression" of Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, where—you guessed it—there is a nice fat swan front and center, we are usually at a loss to say just what on the painting translates just what in the music.  And perhaps we should generally avoid even looking for one-to-one correlations.

As I noted above, I will likely head back to the Archives and dig into the Belmont papers with a rather wider net.  And I will, therefore, have more opportunities to say thank you to Marisa, Elizabeth, and Wendy for their generous help and hospitality!  

Allan Atlas is on the faculty at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York; his recent research focuses on both music in Victorian England and that of the 20th-century English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Arman + Yves Klein = BFF

Oral history reel box identifying the 22 April 1968 interview with Arman.

For the last year, I have been volunteering for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.  Since my mother tongue is French, I was entrusted to transcribe and translate interviews conducted with French artists in New York in the 1960s.  

My first task was to identify who the interviewed artists were in order to correct an old labeling error.  This lead me to do a great deal of research into the people, the places and the vocabulary of the period.  In the course of this research I deciphered which recordings belongs to the artists Bernar Venet or to Arman, and enjoyed learning about their art and their times through their own words.  The interview with Arman, in particular, lead me on an hour-long journey through wartime and post-WWII southern France, and through the defining artistic movements of the second half of the 50s and 60s.  

Fast forward to just last week, when I visited the Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers exhibit at the Hirshhorn.  I knew from listening to Arman that Yves Klein was his childhood friend, his travel buddy and his judo partner.  As I walked through the Yves Klein exhibit, I was delighted to see in pictures the faces of the people Arman had talked about.  I saw pieces of art, and read texts that referred to experience he had described in his interview.  And at the very end of the exhibit stood the sculpture of a man, tinted in Klein's characteristic deep blue—it was Arman, life-size, naked, greeting all the visitors with a knowing grin.  As I looked at his statue, I felt very thankful to him.  It took me a few months to transcribe and translate his interview, but he taught me so much in the process.  I was able to experience the Yves Klein exhibit with a new comprehension of his times and his art.

Read the full oral history interview with Arman conducted 22 April 1968, by Sevim Fesci, and view images of Yves Klein and his work on the Archives of American Art's website.

See Klein's Relief Portrait of Arman (1962) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden through September 12, 2010.

Guest blogger Gaston Lacombe is a Smithsonian Behind-the-Scenes volunteer for the Archives of American Art and a photographer based in Washington, D.C.

Romare Bearden's Map of Paris

Hand-drawn Map of Paris, undated. Romare Bearden papers, 1937-1982, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Bearden in Paris and his Unusual Map

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) is a major figure in American art. His long career encompassed many styles of painting, but he is best known for his collages and photomontages, begun in the 1960s, that deal with African American themes yet have universal resonance. He also had many other talents and interests. In 1950, through the G.I. Bill, Bearden attended the Sorbonne in Paris, where he took Ph.D. courses in philosophy with Gaston Bachelard.

The time that Bearden spent in Paris, when he was 39 and already an artist of some reputation, was an important step in his transformation into an artist of world stature. In Paris he became friends with artists such as Brancusi and Hans Reichel and saw Giacometti and Matisse. Paris in 1950 is where and when he also met the writer Albert Murray, who would become a close friend and collaborator.

This undated hand-drawn map of historic central Paris was included in a box of drawings that Bearden donated to the Archives of American Art as part of several donations he made between 1977 and 1983. Aficionados of Bearden’s work are certain to raise an eyebrow, since he is not at all known for making maps. As far as I can tell he made only one other one, a map of the world with flowers on it titled “Flowers of the World,” a highly uncharacteristic work (included in this book). Though his map of Paris is unsigned (as are many of the sketches he donated) and the names of places and streets are not written in anything like Bearden’s distinctive handwriting, it is certainly his work. One way in which the map can clearly be identified as Bearden’s is by the wavy lines representing vegetation in his representations of the famous Paris gardens. Compare them with the cloud, crown, doorway, and tree in his “Monday Morning.” Also, note the same wavy lines forming the borders of the gardens sketched on the green overlay.

Bearden’s map is quite accurate when compared to the same section of Paris on Google Maps. It seems to be more or less to scale and includes most of the major landmarks (though it omits The Pantheon). Notre Dame is sketched in a bit of detail. The life-long New Yorker once said that Notre Dame was “built in such accord with human measure that it seemed the most immense structure on earth.”

Henry Ossawa Tanner

1890 photo from Academy Julien, Paris. Henry Ossawa Tanner is standing in the top row, 4th from left. Henry Ossawa Tanner Papers, 1860s-1978 bulk 1890-1937, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Overlay to Hand-drawn Map of Paris, showing path from Tanner's studio to Academy Julien, undated. Romare Bearden papers, 1937-1982, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The most interesting features of the map (features that would not be found on most maps of Paris) are the locations of the studio and home of the painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), one of the first African American artists of international reputation and a man and artist whom Bearden held in the highest esteem. Tanner’s studio is shown on the Boulevard St. Jacques and Tanner’s home is shown on the Rue Fleurus. Overlay #2, pictured here, features a path traced in red from Tanner’s studio to Academy Julien, where he studied.

Tanner was born in Pittsburgh (where Bearden spent some formative years) and died in Paris, where he had lived since 1891. He suffered greatly for his art in the United States. According to Bearden and Harry Henderson, when Tanner was an art student in Philadelphia he was dragged into the street and tied to his easel by his fellow students. He found, as would many creative African Americans in the twentieth century, that France offered a better environment to live and work. Bearden’s map is a small but forceful and substantial tribute. It makes landmarks of Tanner’s home and studio, proudly situating the spaces important in the life of this great American artist alongside the most famous buildings in Paris.

Paul Devlin is a graduate student in the English department at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of the article “Albert Murray and Visual Art,” a chapter in the book Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation, published by the University of Alabama Press, June 2010.

A Hudson River School Diary

Jervis McEntee, ca. 1870. Miscellaneous photograph collection. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

If the quarter of a million pages in the Archives of American Art’s collection of diaries are any indication, the art world’s passion for expression readily spills onto the page. Some of the most captivating of these pages were jotted by a self-effacing yet central member of the Hudson River School of landscape artists, Jervis McEntee. As a Behind-the-Scenes Smithsonian Volunteer, it has been my pleasure to have been immersed in McEntee’s world for much of the last four years.

McEntee was trained by Frederic Edwin Church of Niagara and Andes fame, and was close friends with Sanford Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, and Eastman Johnson. He loved to paint the waning days of autumn. While other artists portrayed the majestic or the picturesque, McEntee’s artistic vision was subdued. He’s the Hudson River School in a minor key.

In 2006 I stumbled across McEntee’s diaries on the Archives’ website, and knew immediately that I wanted to read them. At that time, however, only a portion of the nearly 4,500 diary entries had been transcribed. I unsuspectingly inquired as to whether transcriptions existed for the rest of the entries, and in short order I was welcomed as a volunteer and engaged in transcribing them myself.

“Sometimes I ask myself why I keep this diary,” McEntee wrote in 1880, and then followed with an answer: “I have a talk with myself and it is a brief record of each day and often good for reference.” But it is obviously much more than that. When I read McEntee’s diaries, I am absorbed not only by the history, but also by the poignant personal story of McEntee and his family. McEntee could be despairing, contemptuous, partisan, maddeningly reticent, wryly humorous, wistful, and morose. Through it all, I find him likeable—and a faithful behind-the-scenes guide to the Hudson River School.

Guest blogger Paul G. Stein is a Smithsonian Behind-the-Scenes volunteer and art devotee living in the Atlanta area.