Recent visitors to the Museum will have noticed a new addition to the paintings in the American galleries. Dock Builders by George Bellows is the latest promised gift of Ann and Jim Goodnight. Bellows (1882–1925) was one of the most influential and beloved American artists of the early 20^th century. He dropped out of college to play semiprofessional baseball before pursuing a career as a painter in New York. There Bellows studied under Robert Henri and through him fell in with a group of young urban artists. The “ashcan school” advocated painting contemporary American society in all its gritty reality. Though more famous today for his boxing pictures, Bellows painted a wide variety of subjects, capturing the bustle of life around him.

Painted in 1916 during a summer in Camden, Maine, Dock Builders is one of a series of pictures depicting the hard laboring lives of Down East people. It gives a noble dimension to men and horses struggling to move logs into position. Bold, slashing brushstrokes give a sense of movement to this otherwise carefully ordered composition. Bellows’s painterly gusto spills out along the rocks at the bottom as his thick, churning splashes of color encrust the sunlit shoreline. There is a playfulness in Bellows’s handling of the brush. Perhaps the relaxed atmosphere of coastal Maine and the joy of working outside encouraged him to paint more freely. In a letter to Henri, he wrote, “I have done a number of pictures this summer which have not arrived in my mind from direct impressions but are creations of fancy arising out of my knowledge and experience of the facts employed.” Whether it was the sea air or a desire to try new things, it is exciting to see an artist enjoying himself in this “creation of fancy.”

For all the freedom of Dock Builders, Bellows was also experimenting with a systematic approach to composition. The smoothly contoured figures are carefully arranged in an underlying structure of intersecting diagonals. Also, along with several other members of the ashcan school, Bellows was intrigued by the color theories of Hardesty Maratta. Maratta devised a system that assigned each color to a corresponding musical note. He then directed artists to combine colors at prescribed intervals, using “chords” to achieve a harmonious effect. We do not know if Bellows used a color keyboard [see image below] when he was painting in Camden, though it seems likely that he had the balanced triads of the Maratta system in mind.

Combining freedom and restraint, Dock Builders adds something new to the Museum’s galleries. Celebrating men at work, the vibrant colors and innovative technique showcased in this landscape represent a pivotal moment in the history of American art.

Laura Fravel, Curatorial Intern

Hardesty G. Maratta’s color keyboard. From The Maratta Scales of Artists’ Oil Pigments, 1916. John Weichsel Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Image: George Wesley Bellows, Dock Builders, 1916, oil on canvas, Promised gift of Dr. and Mrs. James H. Goodnight

The piece itself is a photo of a large black family, probably an extended family, in their finest clothing, mourning what is presumed to be a murdered youth. In and around the photo are words written in yellow that play on the MasterCard commercials, with phrases like “Pistol: $80,” “Bullet: 10 cents,” “Casket: $6,000,” “Burying Your Son: Priceless.” This is a heartbreaking thought. Since those MasterCard commercials were usually so warmhearted and thoughtful, to see them turned by such a horrible event strikes me hard.

I wonder how much less effective the photo might have been if Thomas had not used the commercial element, because advertising is such a strong way to enter our consciousness, traveling down roads of thought like a river travels down a gulch. The piece is really powerful and affected me deeply the first time I saw it. Death always seems to have that effect on people. And so it should.

This post is one of a series on staff perspectives of 30 Americans. Nathan Johnson is a security guard at the NCMA.

Trotman calls his figures embodiments of a “dystopian America,” a foil to Rockwell’s utopian images of the American Dream. Toppled housewives and sinking businessmen make up his vision of 1950s cookie-cutter convention. He turns static material—wood—into figures that vibrate with tense energy, so confined by their roles that they threaten spontaneous combustion. The only interruptions in his pristine craftsmanship are strategically placed splits in the wood that call attention to the unease that is hidden beneath the starched shirts, sensible pumps, and strained smiles of his characters.

When we all stood looking up at Vertigo, Trotman’s first self-portrait and a new addition to the NCMA’s collection, Linda noted its reference to Yves Klein’s iconic 1960 photograph Leap into the Void. The visual and conceptual resemblance is clear—an ordinary-looking man in a suit triumphantly breaks free from life’s constraints as he plunges off a building. But a darker parallel exists underneath the obvious similarities. Klein’s photograph was fabricated, a lie. This “staged lie” is the truth behind Trotman’s Inverted Utopias—the uncomfortable reality that one cannot really leap off the building, sink into the ground, or hide beneath the sheets. There is no escape for his characters.

No escape. I went back to the exhibition with that in mind. Is it really that dark? Trotman has a beautiful way of exposing the sad realities of everyday life, our hidden agendas and concealed burdens, with just enough humor to help us pretend we only imagined that glimpse of ourselves in Arden or Martin. Am I Janet? I think I am wearing her shoes. Perfectly camouflaged in my badge and business attire, I can’t help but feel exposed by her presence, as if I, too, am beginning to spin off my axis into the Void. I turn away only to find myself scrutinizing the exhibition as if I were a member of Trotman’s Committee, ready to offer up my art-savvy intern input like the Cake Lady’s chocolate confection.

I think we, as museumgoers, often get caught up in the appeal of collecting experiences. Seeing works of art and high-profile exhibitions becomes a part of that pressing “better-yourself” checklist. We start darting around, snapping photos and referencing our list of the museum highlights without really seeing anything. Check, check, check. Bob Trotman’s characters do not allow this type of detached viewing. Instead, they mirror back to us that delusion of checkboxes against which we all measure ourselves and confront us head-on with solid, tangible personifications of our own flawed realities.

So, art nerd, housewife, professional, adolescent, and museum wanderer, unite—Trotman has something for all of us. Take a moment with Inverted Utopias to put down the checklist and help Olive Suit find his shoe, picture the faces under Cover Up, and wonder what Stu might look like, if he just opened his eyes.

Laura Ritchie, Curatorial Intern

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.

The latest installation features work by Raleigh artist Nancy S. Baker. You may be familiar with Baker’s work; her painting The Betrayal is part of the Museum’s permanent collection and is on view on Level A in East Building.

Nancy’s billboards are fun and funky, an interesting take on existing works. “Borrowing from three exalted artists from the NCMA’s American collection, mingling highbrow and lowbrow taste, I offer up three reinvented and reconfigured tableaus of the American tradition of landscape painting,” Baker says.

Her willing (or unwilling) subjects? Bierstadt’s Bridal Veil Falls, Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador, and Inness’s Under the Greenwood. But viewers might not recognize them—the paintings have been bisected and then digitally reflected back onto themselves, as if by a funhouse mirror or a kaleidoscope. Suddenly something familiar becomes something new, strange, and even a bit disturbing. Surrounding the altered landscapes is a border of jewels, flowers, staring eyes, and other strange elements, acting, as Baker puts it, as “a Looney Tunes memento mori, in stark contrast to the dreamy realism of the [original] paintings.”

Baker links this memento mori theme with the title of her billboard series: Home Sweet Home. As she notes, “The title, appropriated from John Howard Payne’s ubiquitous poem, reminds us that ‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’ However, the idea of home in [works such as] Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador has become an historical rendering of a world now on the verge of self-destruction. Through no fault of Mignot, this unreliable narrative of fecund nature is testimony to our desire for fantasy. Like the oeuvre of Norman Rockwell, art can be the greatest and most convincing propaganda.” Baker’s works allow us to ponder important questions of reality vs. fiction, and how that distinction—or lack thereof—affects the natural world today.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Our Bierstadt has a history in contemporary art! Check out this post from 2008, which links the painting to an artist at the Brooklyn Museum–Ed.

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.

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.)

Last week five other interns and I were led through the Contemporary and African art galleries by Curators Linda Dougherty and Kinsey Katchka. Before our tour we learned about the curators’ roles in the Museum and discussed the process of selecting art and displaying it in a museum setting. The curators intrigued me with stories of weekend trips to New York and Miami for various art shows, where they scout out up-and-coming artists. They answered our many questions and then proceeded to the galleries.

It wasn’t until we stopped at several photographs that I found a piece of art that really piqued my interest. Anthony Goicolea’s Still Life with Pig (2005) is pleasantly shocking. Two young boys huddle underneath a lean-to while a decaying pig lies lifelessly on a log before them.

Upon closer inspection I noticed blue and yellow war paint on the boys’ faces. Like Tom and Huck, the boys appear to be resting from adventurous explorations of the woods surrounding them. I almost lost focus of the photo when one of the curators mentioned a little-known fact: Goicolea’s photograph is actually a fabricated image, created with the help of Photoshop and a vivid imagination.

The objects in the picture are real, but the juxtaposition of them is not. Goicolea layered photos of the various objects on his computer, meticulously placing each layer so as to confuse the viewer into thinking that somewhere, somehow, this scene might have happened. Goicolea’s picture is indeed a work of art, a creation based on fantasy and reality. But in my world, Photoshop exists on fashion magazine covers and the advertisements that go inside them, not hanging in art galleries. Goicolea’s work, perhaps not as aesthetically pleasing as airbrushed starlets, had me questioning my perception of what is art.

Helen Rowe writes:

Udney Maria Blakely is a sort of distant relative of my husband’s. She married Joseph von Bretton, but she then died in childbirth or shortly afterwards the year after the marriage. Her baby daughter also died. However, some years later Joseph remarried, and he named his first born after his first wife (Udney Maria Blakely von Bretton). In researching the family history I had come across her story, and was therefore quite amazed to think that her portrait and the tea/coffee set have survived.

To which curator John Coffey responds:

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for dear Udney Maria. She never knew her naval hero father, but a grateful North Carolina made sure that the girl was brought up genteelly with funds provided by the public treasury. Thomas Sully’s adoring portrait, painted when the girl was fifteen, testifies to Udney Maria’s beauty and charm which would soon capture the heart of a Danish aristocrat. I love the story of the origins of the Blakely silver: in honor of her father’s gallantry, the State of North Carolina wished to present the Udney Maria with a ceremonial sword.  However, her sensible mother convinced the State that a coffee and tea service was more appropriate. And you have to marvel at the equanimity of the second Baroness von Bretton in acquiescing to the naming of her first child for her deceased predecessor. Udney Maria must have been an extraordinary young woman.

In the new American gallery, John has set the stage for this amazing story to be told again and again. Udney Maria’s tea service now sits just a step away from her lovely portrait. (It’s just one instance of where an interesting juxtaposition in the galleries sparks a whole new thought.)

Thomas Sully's portrait of Udney Maria and her tea service, at left

Photo by mjanssen via Flickr

“I’ve always wanted to go to Lucama” may not have the same ring as “I’ve always wanted to see the Loch Ness Monster and Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel”. But all three are equally true for me. Last week one of these wishes came true when I hit the road with a few colleagues to visit Vollis Simpson at his workshop outside of Lucama. Since Mr. Simpson’s wind machines are known and enjoyed across the state and country, we went to get video and audio of him speaking about his work to be used on new cell phone tours which will debut in April 2010. His Wind Machine is a sort of solitary beacon on the hill in the Museum Park, but there is much more where that came from at his workshop.

Vollis met us at the door when we arrived and helped us move buckets of propellers to make way for our seats. He talked about how he began making wind machines during World War II, how busy he likes to stay today, his many visitors, and the proper care for a wind machine. Whirligigs like grease!

On the way to his workshop we walked to an adjacent field where several of Vollis’ wind machines are set near a small pond. His shop is filled with hundreds of small sculptures and the working parts for his larger creations. Now in his early nineties, Vollis doesn’t eat as much ice cream and chocolate as he used to, but we all got a kick out of the twirling mechanism he built out of ice scream scoops.

With over thirty minutes of tape, we have a lot to work with to find the best minute to use for the cell phone tour. Be sure to visit next spring to hear the final cut on the tour. In the meantime, come visit Vollis’ Wind Machine in the Museum Park.