I returned to Cebolla in early June while driving with my family to my son’s college graduation in Washington State. (Yes, we took the long route). I left my family in the car while I photographed the somewhat forlorn church which replaced the adobe structure painted by O’Keeffe. (Note to memory: in my earlier blog post I mistakenly described this later church as made of brick. It is in fact faux adobe.) The church was locked so I was limited to peering through the windows. I was pleased to see that several windows had potted plants on the sill, though none resembled the lavish foliage of the “thing in the window.”

In the fall of 1944 in the fifth year of the Second World War Valentiner wrote an essay in the Art Quarterly on the reclusive visionary artist Morris Graves.

Our whole existence has been weighed down by the horrors of war to such a degree that we have forgotten how necessary to the balance of our life is the aspect of untouched nature, of nature unaware of and unconcerned with human struggle.  There is only one thing that can save man from himself—his contact with nature. When we look up from our work at a bright moment nothing grips our heart more than a glimpse of the splendor of her colors and her forms, than the awareness of the power of her growth.  It does not need to be a glance into the crater of a Mount Vesuvius….  It is sufficient to become conscious that in the beauty of a flower, in the song of a bird, there is something more wonderful than all the mechanization of the world of which we are so proud.  But we people of the cities where wars are conceived, believe this truth only if it is explained to us by the artist-prophets who with their deeper insight into nature speak so convincingly that we cannot help but listen.

W.R. Valentiner, “Morris Graves,” The Art Quarterly 7 (Autumn 1944), 251.

Manship was the most successful American sculptor of the first half of the 20th century. He specialized in subjects inspired by classical mythology, which he treated in a sleek, graceful style, very linear, highly patterned, that echoed Art Deco design. He is best known as the sculptor of the gilded Prometheus at Rockefeller Center in New York.

However, Manship’s most accomplished sculptures are a pair depicting the Roman goddess Diana and the hapless mortal Actaeon. In classical mythology Diana (or Artemis in Greek) was bathing with her nymphs in a forest pool when Actaeon chanced upon them while hunting in the woods with his dogs. The fiercely chaste goddess was so incensed that she cast a spell on Actaeon, transforming him into a stag. The hunter thus became the hunted. Not recognizing their master, Actaeon’s own dogs attacked him, teeth bared.

It is this gruesome tale that Manship depicts in the pair of sculptures now on view in the American Galleries. He tells the story as if it were a ballet. Diana leaps into the air, at the same time twisting around to let fly a deadly arrow at the poor hunter. Actaeon, already sprouting horns, bounds away from the goddess as his confused hounds bring him down. I’m convinced that this athletic figure in dramatic extension was at least partly inspired by the great Russian dancer Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes.

Manship links the figures by the implied arc of Diana’s arrow. Note how Actaeon clutches his side—a direct hit! (You will note in the gallery how the pedestals are angled so that Diana aims straight at the man’s side.) Visitors might appreciate the startling differences between Manship’s figures and those of Auguste Rodin. Where Rodin is all about emotional turbulence, Manship is about grace and an almost blissful disregard of drama. Even the doomed Actaeon succumbs with magnificent aplomb.

Diana and Actaeon are promised gifts to the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Art history not only provided an occasional foil for Rockwell’s comic riffs, it also gave him a deep well of images. Forced by relentless deadlines to be prolific, Rockwell often borrowed ideas from other artists. (No shame in that. All artists filch, crib, plagiarize. If they’re good at it they leave few fingerprints.)

Norman Rockwell, Girl at Mirror, 1954, © 1954 SEPS: Curtis Publishing

One of the most intriguing instances of artistic “appropriation” by Rockwell relates to a painting that appeared on the cover of the March 6, 1954, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Girl at Mirror depicts a young girl, maybe 10 or 12 years old, playing alone in the attic. Dressed in a lacy slip (or nightgown?), perhaps a cast-off of her mother’s, she sits on a  stool and considers her reflection in a mirror. Now note the props. Resting in the girl’s lap is a magazine, open to a glamour photo of the reigning Hollywood sex kitten, Jane Russell. A doll is tossed aside. At the girl’s feet are a brush, comb, and coral lipstick, uncapped. And we see that the girl has glossed her lips and pinned up her braids in an effort to look like … Jane Russell. Can it be? Can it be that Norman Rockwell—our Norman Rockwell!—has discovered sex?

The Rockwell exhibition catalogue is annoyingly brief in its discussion of this painting. The author only speculates that the artist may have been inspired by Picasso’s famous Girl at Mirror at the Museum of Modern Art or by Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun’s portrait of her young daughter, Julie LeBrun with a Mirror (1787). With all due respect, you’ve got to be kidding! There is a much more obvious, though less polite, source for this painting.

Gerald Brockhurst, Adolescence

Anyone familiar with the graphic arts of the early 20^th century? Anyone who enjoys browsing through boxes of matted etchings, drypoints and lithographs (I’m raising my hand) would recognize the uncanny resemblance of Rockwell’s painting to a once-notorious etching by the English artist Gerald Brockhurst (1890−1978). Now little known outside of print collecting circles, Brockhurst enjoyed a considerable reputation in the 1920s and ’30s as a superb printmaker, specializing in portraits of young women. His women—often girls—inhabit an antique world, half Florentine, half Dutch. Of all Brockhurst’s etchings, the acknowledged masterpiece is Adolescence, dated 1932.

As in the Rockwell painting, the girl sits with her back to us so that our eyes rove past her to her reflection. The big difference is that Brockhurst’s girl—actually his soon-to-be wife—is explicitly naked. She contemplates the unwanted maturity of her body with fierce, frightened eyes. It is a moment of terrifying awareness. Her private turmoil is made shockingly public, and it is this voyeuristic aspect of the image that is most disturbing. We clearly shouldn’t be there, peeping over her shoulder. We should close our eyes, close the door. But we can’t.

Rockwell would have known Brockhurst’s print. It was widely exhibited and reproduced in the American art press. He would have appreciated the print’s clever contrivance: after all, perceptual games were among Rockwell’s favorite ploys. He certainly understood the potency of the image, the silent drama, all the more intense for being surreptitiously observed. Of course, it would have been unthinkable to be so frank on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. (In Eisenhower’s America movie couples still slept in twin beds and Elvis’s pelvis was too risqué for Ed Sullivan.) And in any case, Rockwell wasn’t interested in shock. He was content to slyly insinuate. His little miss is still a child, still blessed, still dressed. Neither girl nor young woman, she’s a “tween,” staring at her “adulterated” image with a blend of longing and self-conscious anxiety—not yet the fearful awakening of Brockhurst’s adolescent. That will come soon enough.

Through tireless volunteerism, generous and wise philanthropy, and the warmth of his personality, this respected physician, scholar, and educator made a singular contribution to Raleigh’s cultural landscape and to interfaith understanding throughout the state through the establishment of the Judaic Art Gallery at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

All very true, but too short by a thousand words. Ten thousand words. After all, the man lived 95 years. He witnessed and participated in the whole of the twentieth century. He deserves a biographer. However, until one arrives I offer the following remarks written several years ago and only slightly edited:

This morning I was making a final check of the Judaic Art Gallery. I halted in front of the Chinese Torah Case, its surface embellished with delicately wrought flowers—an allusion to the beauty of life and perhaps also to the first Garden when all was yet right with the world. And I thought of Abe Kanof and how he would have delighted in seeing this case here in Raleigh, half a world from its origin.

First-time visitors to the North Carolina Museum of Art are invariably surprised to find a gallery devoted to Jewish ceremonial art. How it came about is directly attributable to the vision and bullish tenacity of Abe Kanof.

Like the Chinese Torah Case, Abram Kanof’s life began far from Raleigh in a backwater town of the Tsar’s empire. He was born in 1903 in the same month as the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. Rampaging cossacks forced his family to flee to America, where they settled in New York and began to climb rung-by-rung the immigrant’s ladder.

Fast forward 60 years.

In the late 1960s, Dr. Kanof retired from a successful medical and teaching career in New York and moved to Raleigh. Thirty more years lay ahead of him. Retirement freed Abe to pursue his bliss, including the scholarly study of Jewish art and symbolism. He wrote books. He traveled. He involved himself in the affairs of the Triangle’s small Jewish community. And he joined the North Carolina Museum of Art. In 1974 he convinced Director Moussa Domit to let him organize an exhibition of “Ceremonial Art in the Judaic Tradition.” The unexpected success of that show inspired Abe with the grander dream of a permanent collection of Judaica at the Museum. Domit and the Museum didn’t say no, but it was made clear that Abe would have to raise the funds and assemble the collection himself. Abe welcomed the challenge. (“It was my crusade,” he told me, laughing when I winced at the joke.) For years he traveled the state, lecturing to civic and religious groups, all the while wheedling, coaxing, and cajoling potential donors. Abe and his wife also donated many objects from their own collection. By 1983 when the Museum opened on Blue Ridge Road, one of the most remarkable galleries featured not Old Master paintings but glittering Torah crowns, Hanukkah lamps, and Sabbath candlesticks.

From the beginning the Judaic Art Gallery expressed Abe Kanof’s ecumenical vision. He knew that his audience was predominantly not Jewish. What he hoped to create was a place accessible to all where the spiritual and cultural life of the Jewish people could be both celebrated and shared through memorable works of art. Believing that the vitality of Judaism was best reflected in ceremonial art of contemporary design, he also insisted that equal attention be given to objects in modernist styles.

Until his death in 1999, Abe Kanof was the Judaic Art Gallery. He never tired of giving tours to visitors and was always in demand. He once confessed to me that Baptists were his favorite group: they knew their Bible! A natural teacher with a driven need to share his life, he enjoyed performing before a group, whether five or 50. I see him in his well-worn jacket of green corduroy, his hand resting lightly on the shoulder of a young boy as the two of them count the number of lights on a Hanukkah lamp. I see him at the center of a visiting church group holding forth on the heroism of the Maccabees or the symbolism of the foods served at Passover Seder. His gestures were slow and professorial, the pauses between thoughts like deep breaths. When he was past 90 he and I led a small museum tour to Israel. We were visiting the archaeological site at Kfar Nahum (Capernaum) on the Sea of Galilee. Abe had been sleeping on the bus but sprang to life as we arrived. Walking behind, I watched as he entered the precinct of the ruined synagogue, the square of sun-white sand enclosed within broken walls and columns. He’d been there before but was still moved to silence. After a few moments he walked over to a toppled stone from the sanctuary doors. His finger slowly traced the eroded image of the Menorah. Then, turning toward us, he commenced to teach.

From the NCMA video archives, here’s a 1992 video of Dr. Kanof guiding us through the Judaic collection:

From the NCMA video archives, here’s a 1992 video of Dr. Kanof guiding us through the Judaic collection:

A Tour of the Judaic Gallery with Dr. Abram Kanof from The North Carolina Museum of Art on Vimeo.

Thomas Moran, "Fiercely the red sun descending / burned his way along the heavens," 1875, oil on canvas, 33 3/8 x 50 1/8 inches, Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest), 1952 (52.9.34)

Growing up in Raleigh in the early ’60s, I would sometimes bicycle downtown and stop at the old North Carolina Museum of Art. (The Museum was air conditioned). One of the paintings that always attracted me was a landscape with a sunset. But it was not just a sunset. It was volcanic. Krakatoan. Looking back, I don’t think I saw a sunset at all. It was a blinding flash, igniting the sky. (Remember, this was the era of Cuban missiles and “duck and cover.” Neighbors down the street had built a basement fallout shelter that the father of the family promised to defend with a shotgun. But I digress . . . the painting fascinated me. It still fascinates me, though less as a premonition of “Dr. Strangelove” than as an image of absolute evil.

The artist Thomas Moran had a thing for “The Song of Hiawatha,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem recounting the heroic exploits of an Ojibway chief. The poem and its vivid imagery inspired Moran to paint several pictures. Our painting depicts an ominous moment in the story when the hero is about to set out to avenge the death of his ancestor at the hands of the murderous magician Megissogwon. To direct his journey, Hiawatha’s grandmother Nokomis stands on the shore of Lake Superior and points westward, where:

Fiercely the red sun descending
Burned his way along the heavens,
Set the sky on fire behind him,
As war-parties, when retreating,
Burn the prairies on their war-trail

For this painting the artist was challenged to imagine a land of pure evil. Faced with such a challenge, Moran habitually asked himself “what would Turner do?” The great British landscape painter Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) was Moran’s idol. His influence was so pronounced that Moran was known widely as the “American Turner.” For his Hiawatha painting, Moran had in mind a specific Turner painting: the horrific Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Painted in 1840, Slave Ship was Turner’s response to a widely publicized incident in the transatlantic slave trade. He heightened the malevolence of the story by marshaling all the forces of nature—a roiling, inky sea, a livid sun, and an angry, incendiary sky—creating a setting fit for the Apocalypse.

Moran, who undoubtedly saw the Slave Ship in New York, understood what Turner was doing. He saw that Turner’s fire-and-brimstone vision was precisely what was needed for Longfellow’s epic. And so in an act of homage, if not plagiarism, Thomas Moran appropriated the vicious world of the slave trade for his realm of the “mightiest of Magicians.”

When I recently walked a group of Governor’s School students around the American art galleries, we stopped at Moran’s painting. Several of the kids—not much older than I was when I first saw the picture—were clearly agitated, one asking me what it was all about. Rather than talk about Hiawatha, which none of them had read, I had a flash. Pointing like Nokomis at the picture, I declared, “that, that is Mordor!” (Peter Jackson also plagiarized Turner.)

Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman, Red and Yellow Background, 1952

Alfred Sisley, The Bridge at Moret on an April Morning, 1888

Maurice de Vlaminck, The Bridge at Poissy (Le Pont de Poissy), 1905

Emil Nolde, Fishing Boat (Red Sky), 1916

The Museum will be the recipient of a major donation of paintings from the collection of Julian and Josie Robertson of New York City. The paintings are four works by late 19th- and 20th-century European masters. In 2001 and again in 2008 we presented an exhibition of works from the Robertson’s collection. The star of both exhibitions was a striking portrait of a nude, pensive woman by Pablo Picasso (Seated Woman, Red and Yellow Background, 1952). That portrait of the artist’s soon-to-be ex-mistress Françoise Gilot will be coming to Raleigh, first as a loan for the Grand Opening of the new gallery building, and later as a gift.

Two other paintings in this promised donation feature similar river towns and an arching bridge, but they could not be more different. One by the Anglo-French Impressionist Alfred Sisley (The Bridge at Moret on an April Morning, 1888) is all sunny tranquility. In contrast, The Bridge at Poissy (1905) by Maurice de Vlaminck is stridently colored and agitated as though the artist had drunk five too many espressos. The fourth painting is a Wagnerian seascape by the German expressionist Emil Nolde (Fishing Boat [Red Sky]), painted in 1916 in the midst of World War I.

The Sisley joins our two Monets (The Seine at Giverny, Morning Mists and  The Cliff, Etretat, Sunset) and one Pissarro in giving us a strong core collection of French Impressionists. The Nolde contributes a bold new subject to our group of German expressionist paintings. The Vlaminck leaps beyond Impressionism into the wilder territory of the Fauves where things are as strongly felt as they are seen. And the Picasso gives us our first Picasso. Enough said.

Together, these four paintings constitute one of the most significant gifts of art in our history. So, sound the trumpets!

Superlative in craftsmanship, Dutch Judaica of the 17th and 18th centuries testifies to the great flowering of Jewish cultural and intellectual life under the Protestant Dutch Republic. (The Netherlands was the first nation in modern Europe to grant Jews a large measure of economic and religious freedom). Great examples of Dutch Judaica are rare on the art market and many of the objects have suspect provenance due to the rampant looting of synagogues during the Nazi occupation. It was, therefore, an exceptional, not-to-be-missed event when in December 2006 a large collection of very fine Dutch Judaica was offered at auction in New York, consigned by the Jewish Community of Amsterdam. The most desirable objects in this collection were several pairs of exquisite 18th-century Torah finials (or in Hebrew rimmonim). In the Ashkenazi (or Central and Eastern European) tradition, such ornamental finials are used to cap the protruding staves of the Torah scroll when not in use. Often they are hung with bells that tinkle when the Torah is carried in procession. In affluent Jewish communities like Amsterdam the Torah ornaments could be quite sophisticated, reflecting the taste and status of the congregation or individual donor. Dutch rimmonim often take the form of tiered towers, reminiscent of Baroque church architecture.

Our pair was originally made for Amsterdam’s Grote Synagoge (Great Synagogue), the first and most prestigious of four adjacent synagogues built by the city’s Ashkenazi Jewish community. In 1943, during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, the Great Synagogue was closed and its treasures plundered. Most of the congregation perished in the Holocaust. After the war the synagogue was deconsecrated and later converted into the Jewish Historical Museum (Joods Historisch Museum). Of the ritual objects looted from its treasury only a fraction was ever recovered. After reserving some of these pieces for the museum’s collection, the Amsterdam’s Ashkenazi community sent the “surplus” to auction. The bidding on the floor was robust-this was before the economic downturn. Enthusiasm was fueled not only by the superb quality of the objects but also by their unimpeachable provenance. Still, thanks to the frenzied last-minute fundraising of the Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery, the North Carolina Museum of Art prevailed in our bid for one of the finest pairs of finials.

In the parlance of the auction house, the finials were bought as is, meaning their condition was not perfect. Far from it. Mistreatment–almost certainly by the Nazi looters–was glaringly obvious. The silver shafts were bent, balustrades and other architectural elements were crushed, and a number of the gilt bells were missing. One easily imagines the plunderers of the synagogue carelessly, perhaps maliciously, tossing the finials in a sack or box with the rest of the loot and throwing the whole into the back of a truck. The condition of the finials prompted a lengthy discussion among the curators and conservators. Among the questions raised:

Do we leave the finials in their damaged state, thereby calling attention to their desecration at the hands of the Nazis?

OR

Do we judiciously restore them to their original splendor and thus advance more hopeful story line, one that celebrates the beliefs and aspirations of a once vibrant Jewish community as well as the artistry and dignity of objects dedicated to the divine service?

Is it falsifying history to smooth over the traces of violence? Or is it recovering history to return the finials close to the condition when they were used and cherished? In the end we elected to restore the finials. Weighing the options, we decided that the depredations of the Nazis should not be the principal or even a major aspect of the story these objects tell. We contracted with a highly respected conservator expert in the restoration of fine silver. Over several months he carefully disassembled each finial, straightening the structure, reconstructing damaged parts, fabricating bells and other missing components, and finally reassembling the pieces into a dazzling whole. As may be seen from the photographs, the wounds of war have been mended and the restored finials have reclaimed all of their original ceremonial grandeur.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Cebolla Church, 1945, Oil on canvas, Gift of the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest), in honor of Joseph C. Sloane, 1972 (72.18.1)

But what most intrigues me about this painting–puzzles me to the point of irritation–is that thing in the window. What the heck is it? Look at the rest of the painting, how the artist smoothes and simplifies the forms into broad shapes like some adjective-averse copyeditor. It is all spare and succinct. But just when we are primed to appreciate the image as a deadpan statement–like an apple or skull–the artist goes and puts something strange and arresting in that window. What the heck is it? It obviously was important enough to the artist that she suppressed her editorial instincts and kept it in the picture, the one touch of mystery in an otherwise obvious painting.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Cebolla Church (Detail), 1945

A while back I thought I had a chance to solve the mystery. I was driving my son out west to college and the road took us through New Mexico. We turned north out of Santa Fe along Route 84, past Abiquiu, where O’Keeffe lived, past the Technicolor cliffs of Ghost Ranch, and on a little ways to the town of Cebolla (map), population: 94. We looked around for the Church of Santo Niño. We were directed across the road to a low brick building that resembled O’Keeffe’s church only in its modesty. I learned later that O’Keeffe’s adobe church was torn down soon after she painted it. Sadly, there was nothing strange in the windows of its replacement. I showed a photograph of our painting to some men at the local roadhouse, but no one even remembered the old church. One guy stared at me and asked “you didn’t drive all the way from North Carolina to ask about that thing in the window, did you?”

When I got home I wrote to the curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. As the author of the definitive catalogue of O’Keeffe’s paintings, she would surely know the identity of that thing. Alas, no. In her e-mail reply, she confessed to being as clueless and curious as me.

I then corresponded with several scientists at New Mexican universities, asking if the thing reminded them of any local plant, a cactus flower perhaps, pressed against the glass. No one offered a suggestion. My letter to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe went unanswered. I’ve now hit the brick wall.

So now I appeal to my readers. Can anyone identify that thing in the window?

Andrew Wyeth, Winter 1946 (Detail), 1946, Tempera on board; 31 3/8 x 48 in. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina (72.1.1)

The death of Andrew Wyeth today has reminded me of a story…

I met Wyeth only once. In the mid-1980s I was working as the curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. Early one summer the ladies at the Museum’s reception desk fluttered into my office, whispering that Andrew Wyeth and his son Jamie were in the galleries. Everyone in the building found some excuse to pass through the galleries and say hello. I too walked out and introduced myself. Jamie was smiling and gregarious, easy with a handshake, but Andrew held back, obviously uncomfortable with the attention. I offered to take them through an exhibition I had organized of contemporary Maine art. Although none of the work was sympathetic to the Wyeths’ style of realism, Andrew gave each painting a careful look. One picture absolutely delighted him. It was a large surrealist composition with floating tables and chairs and photographs seemingly taped to the canvas. The photographs and tape were actually painted illusions, but Wyeth wouldn’t believe it. Waiting until I was distracted in conversation with Jamie, he sneaked up to the painting and quietly tried to pick the tape off the canvas with his fingernail. “Well, good damn!” he giggled, amazed at being tricked. It was the unguarded giggle of child and startled me. I turned towards him. Seeing he was caught, he lowered his eyes and stepped back from the painting. Of course, I should have sent him to sit in the corner for time-out. But he was Andrew Wyeth.

Many people, including Wyeth’s biographer, have noted the man-child dimension of the artist’s personality. Sheltered and at times suffocated by his family, he never fully grew up. Imaginatively, he remained an adolescent, frightened by death and loss, rattled by sex, and compelled towards the outlaw and outcast edges of society. I would argue that it is Wyeth’s peculiar “immaturity” of vision that gives his paintings that memorable jolt and separates Wyeth from his legion of weak imitators.

That said, when I am in the Museum’s galleries, standing in front of that magnificent trio of Wyeth paintings–Weatherside, Winter 1946 and Sea Dog–I still find it hard to reconcile their stark and troubling seriousness with my memory of that giddy gray-haired kid who just had to scratch a painting.

Andrew Wyeth’s Weatherside, Winter 1946 and Sea Dog are currently on view, side-by-side, in the Modern Gallery.