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- [00:10]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College online Learning podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan, joined again by Professor Emeritus of art, Sam Knecht. Today we're discussing lecture three of American Everyday Americans. So we start the course, Sam, with a lecture on American heroes. Famous Americans, statesmen, presidents, war heroes. But we dedicate a whole lecture to you, explaining paintings of ordinary Americans, people who are merely exercising their freedom, laboring for their property, defending their rights, loving their neighbors. What's this one about?
- [00:49]
B
I really warmed up to the opportunity of this lecture, even though I was excited and deeply involved with the other three. But in this one, it felt like I had an opportunity to introduce people to portraits of Americans that they might not otherwise encounter. You know, these courses overall, in a mundane sort of way, will make you really great at answering Jeopardy. Questions, but in a nobler way, hopefully they will excite you to learn more about American art and what it's like to be an American in general through the eyes of painters. So with Ordinary Americans lecture, we, we see a farmer here, a blacksmith there. We see what some might at first glance consider to be a very unattractive middle aged woman with a stray eye even. But I have felt that there is beauty in the truth that American painters find in their subjects, be they neighbors or newcomers or whom have you. One of my favorites from that series is one of the first ones in the lecture. And it shows a blacksmith, a guy from Philadelphia called Pat Lyon, and a guy who.
- [02:16]
A
Great painting.
- [02:17]
B
Yeah, it's so fun too, because when you read about it, not only reading the picture and the clues to his story that are in the picture, but you read about him in a text, you realize, oh, this is an ex con now, mind you, he was wrongfully thrown in prison, accused of forging locks for a big bank in Philadelphia in the 18 teens or thereabouts. And but he, he's exonerated. And when the real culprits that cracked the safe or the the vault of the bank were rounded up and put in prison, Pat Lyon gets out, becomes prosperous, back at his trade of blacksmithing, inventing firefighting equipment and more, and he decides to have his portrait done by an up and coming artist who really did a bang up. Great job of representing this guy in a very non aristocratic manner too. This is a guy who really has his sleeves rolled up. With Paul Revere, his sleeves were not rolled up, but they were present. But in this one, the guy is working at his forge. It must be 120 degrees in the room, never mind what your hand might feel like if you're pulling a piece of molten iron out of the mouth of the forge. This is a painting that shows strength, resolve, resiliency after he is exonerated from his wrongful imprisonment. And he is heroic.
- [04:01]
A
Yes, he has just the hint, a whisper of a very knowing kind of wry smile. And you, you get the feeling that this is a man who went, who's comfortable with the tumult of a free society in which citizens are responsible for playing a role in, in law. And that means they make mistakes. So he's wrongfully accused, wrongfully imprisoned, and yet he emerges and he's not, he's not expressing great, great grievances against the. He's a man who picked himself back up because of the good sides of the free society. He's able to be prosperous, as you say, and he's made it. And he's kind of like, see, look what I did.
- [04:42]
B
Yeah, but he's not flipping off the viewer either. He's proud and he is strong and he's gonna make it. And, you know, that's a lesson for us all, to rise above that kind of adversity.
- [04:58]
A
You mentioned the middle aged woman who doesn't meet the classical ideal of beauty. And that's Ana Christina by Andrew Wyeth. Why did you choose to include this painting in the lecture?
- [05:11]
B
Well, I was intent upon getting a Wyeth in somewhere and it seemed natural here because Andrew Wyeth, he was a master of seeing the poetry in the particular to the dignity in an everyday person. Ana Christina was someone whom he had painted in a legendary work that a lot of people are quite familiar with, Christina's World, which is done in the late 40s. But about 20 years later, Andrew decides to make this painting, which. It's arresting. She does have a straying eye. One eye seems to be looking in one direction, the other one is focused upon us as viewers. And she is a little world weary, she's kind of overweight, she's wearing a flowered dress which is sort of homespun looking, very unremarkable and unfashionable. It was like Wyeth was deliberately saying, look at this person. Experience their humanity, their resolve, their sense of being a survivor. Ana Christina was somebody who lost the use of her legs due to polio in her youth. She got around by dragging herself on a floor or on a little chair and just stumping along in her house. This is a painting which is, I won't say brutally honest, but it's surgically honest, but done with loving care. And I think that really shines through the work. Some people might find it a little hard to look at, but the more you look, the more you sense the real existence, the kind of combination animal and spiritual soul that's present in the.
- [07:08]
A
Work and worthy of taking the time to examine.
- [07:11]
B
Exactly.
- [07:12]
A
There may be out there the sense that an appreciation of painting is something for highbrow people, for elites, and it's really a realm that is exclusive to everyday Americans. But this entire lecture and the paintings that you discuss and that you portray in it seem to turn that narrative or that position on its head.
- [07:35]
B
Yeah, well, one of the challenges of the course was to try to give the audience a sense of real highlights in American painting that you really should know, but then also throw in some works that are not in the so to speak, official canon of what you find in standard textbooks on American art history. So it felt like, okay, we need to have some things that people may be familiar with, like American Gothic by Grant Wood, but let's pull back the curtain and look at some of the great Indian portraits by George Catlin or, you know, Grant Wood's American Gothic or Harvey Dinnerstein, scene of a mother and daughter on a New York subway, for example. So it's all part of our American canvas.
- [08:29]
A
And to help you keep track of that canvas, because Sam features dozens of paintings in this course, we have assembled, as we always do for our courses, a study guide. These are a little bit different, though. They have a depiction of each one of the paintings that Sam discusses with the timestamp of when he discusses it within the lecture. And regular listeners will be familiar with this. I appreciate those of you who learn with us on podcasts, and I'm very glad that you do so. Occasionally I'll say you really need to watch this one. And that's true, you really need to watch this one and access the supplemental materials like the study guides. So to enroll in American Paintings, go to historical Hillsdale Edu course and create a free account or log in if you have one already and put your eyes on these beautiful paintings. That's Hillsdale Edu course. Sam, thanks so much for joining us again.
- [09:21]
B
Thank you, Jeremiah.
- [09:22]
A
Now let's turn to Lecture three of American Everyday Americans.
- [09:33]
B
Welcome back. So far in this series of lectures, we've studied patriots and presidents, we've looked at the American scene, its beautiful broad landscapes. Now it's time to balance the scales and see paintings that deal with common folk, the common man. After all, this is a country where all men are created equal. I want to show you the great variety and ingenuity and dignity with which American portrait painters have dealt with our populace. We'll start with a painting titled Pat Lyon at the Forge. It was done between 1826 and 27. The artist here was a young 21 year old painter named John Neagle. So the title character, Pat Lyon, who was he? Well, he was a blacksmith, an iron monger, so to speak. He was well known in Philadelphia, where he lived and worked for fashioning iron padlocks for bank vaults. He was the best in town for that. And all was going well in his business until a huge bank robbery took place. And of course, they pointed the finger at Pat Lyon, who had made the locks, suggesting that he had kept a key, an extra key, for himself. He was thrown in jail and he languished there for a number of months. But eventually they found the real culprit who confessed. So Pat Lyon was set free, but he lived going forward with a grudge toward powerful people, toward wealthy types that had seemed to conspire to put him into jail. So, as his career resumed and he was redeemed, he became an inventor, getting patents for building iron machines for portable firefighting equipment, some of the best at the time. And with his newfound or newly recovered wealth, he decided to have his portrait done. Let's take a closer look at Pat Lyon. Now, I'm sure that as your eyes see this painting for the first instant that you're drawn to his head, magnificent head, and it'll call also his shirt gleaming white. But let's start with his head. This is an amazing likeness of an amazing man. He is proud. He looks at you straight in the eye and notice the level of his head compared to where you are. He's looking down on you ever so slightly. I think the artist took a little lower vantage point, which makes the figure look even taller and more impressive. As a result, the lighting here is so strong that it creates definite shadows, deepening shadows that model the sculptural forms of his face. Eye sockets, nose, the planes around the mouth, and so on. As his head turns into shadow, you'll notice that the deepness of those shadows is. Is strategically where its border is concerned. From light into shadow occurs so that the shadowing is a very narrow, almost like 10% or 20% of the face. But that's enough in its deep tones to sufficiently make this head look three dimensional. The lower part of the face projects nicely due to the shadow cast by his chin and jaw. And notice the border of the shadow is very soft, but the tone Changes are sufficient. But in other words, this artist is using a lot of blending as well as crisp definition of features. And that exchange of treatment creates a much more believable optical image than you'd ever get in if you were an amateur doing paint by number. You might notice that he has long sideburns. Fashion of the day. His hair is slightly tousled. After all, he's a working man. And the setup here is that we're catching him in his shop while he's at work, and he just takes a pause to look at you. Notice that his. His nose is slightly reddish. Cheeks as well. Well, it doesn't mean he's a drinker. It means he's working in what you might consider a sweatshop. After all, the forge he's working in front of here has to heat iron to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine the heat just billowing out of that forge. Anyway, back to this region. I'd like you also to notice that, unlike amateurs, when they try to draw a head, that John Neagle here has delicately softened the outlines of the head so that we're kept focused on his eyes in the forward areas of his face, while the perimeter regions just sort of melt into that dark background. Very savvy. Very wise of the artist to do that. The lighting is strong, coming from some overhead, unseen light source. Doesn't matter about that. But what he does here is create this powerful spotlighting that makes the figure of Pat Lyon pop out unmistakably. Next, the shirt. A plain white shirt open at the chest. Again, it's really hot in there, so we can't blame him for being so casual. So sleeves are rolled up, and then our eye trails downward into this arm. What an arm. This is. A guy who doesn't have to work out in a gym. Every day at work is a workout. Nigel describes the anatomy of the arm with great precision to the musculature. He understands those forearm muscles, the protrusion of an elbow bone. Veins are standing out as well. Continuing further down to his hand. A nice relaxed grip here, but a sure and strong grip on a hammer, which itself is resting on his anvil. All a part of the tools of the trade. A few scatterings of iron rods perhaps, ready to go into the forge and be melted down. Notice that he stands firmly and erect, one hand on a hip akimbo, as we call it. I love this little catch. Light of here. A light from the flames of the forge. And as we look at this region, notice how well that hand is Spotlit from behind, silhouetted really by the light and red orange flames that issue from the forge. In turn, we see smoke rising from all of this. I feel like when you look at this, you could almost smell the red hot iron and hear the crunch of his feet on a sand and gravel strewn floor. Feel the texture of everything too. It's very substantial. And that's one of the magics of oil paint that you can make areas struck with light very, very physical seeming. It's not smooth like a glossy photograph. There is almost a sculpting of paint that can occur in a canvas such as this. Now, everything around him has been toned way down. Some of the light from the forge and then the unseen light source on the figure. Now in the painting too, we get a little glimpse of the Walnut street jail that Pat Lyon was incarcerated in during his fraudulent imprisonment. And so overall, the effect of this, the staging of this, which is very intentional, is Pat Lyon having his comeuppance. Basically, he's not an upper class man. He insisted with the artist that he not be treated like a gentleman, because he's not a gentleman, he's a working man, but a self made man who has his own sense of confidence and pride because of how he has become an expert in his trade. Next we have a self portrait of the man who shows himself standing there. The title of this is the Artist in His museum, painted in 1822 by someone whose work we've already seen, that is Charles Wilson Peale. Now, in addition to being an illustrious painter, Peale had wide ranging interests and an impulse to educate Americans. Forty years before this painting was made. And by the way, Peale was 81 years of age when he did this self portrait. But decades earlier, he had started to collect natural specimens. He, together with his children, who he was training to be artists, started stuffing birds and mammals and so on and putting them on display in his Philadelphia home. As the years went forward, he invited people from the community to come and see these and learn about the strange things that were found well beyond Pennsylvania, in new areas of the Ohio territory and so on. By 1802, the collection had grown so large that he needed to find a real venue for it. The second floor of Independence Hall. Imagine that. I've been to that second floor. It's long and spacious area of the building. Peale set up shop there and together with his sons and even some daughters, they continued to move specimens in, collect more, build cubicles for them that you can see in the painting, create natural habitats, paint backdrops that were appropriate to the habitat of the animals. And in the top strip above those cubicles, you can just dimly make out some portrait paintings. Peale had been fond of painting the heads of famous Americans, presidents, patriots, business leaders, and so on. And so he was creating a static zoo by all these stuffed specimens and the painted portraits of famous Americans. One of the highlights of this collection of was a fully constructed mastodon skeleton. It's dimly visible behind the curtain to our right as we look past Wilson Peale. Now, what about Peale himself? He stands there inviting us to join him and tour this display. You could almost imagine this painting parked outside the entrance door or the. The top of the stairs at Independence hall where he would beckon you in. He reveals the collection with a tantalizing glimpse of what we can see beyond. And with his left hand, seems to reach forward to invite us in. Notice on the floor in front of him, there is a wild turkey waiting to take its place in the collection. So, overall, this is a painting which is quite remarkable and suggests that Peale had a personal mission to enlighten American citizens, at least anyone that could make their way to Independence hall and feel the history and see what America had to offer more broadly. And finally, on the right of this painting, we. We see an artist palette readied with paint with brushes, showing. That's Peale's way of signing this and indicating his pride as an artist and how his belief really is that art and science must meld together and that a scientist and an artist alike should use reason, close objective observation, and all of their skill to understand nature and to replicate it and inform the public about it. Now, I want to show you how an artist who works in oil goes about setting up his palette, doing some paint mixing to get ready to begin a portrait. And for this, I'm going to use four colors. A white, a tan that's called yellow ochre, then a brilliant red cadmium red medium, and finally black, ivory black. Those four colors make up something that's called the Zorn palette, named after a Norwegian artist. So let's begin. I'm going to squeeze out a generous amount of white. Interestingly enough, that's why I have such a big tube. That's the thing that we use the most. I don't want to call it a color because white is not a color. It's the absence of color. But we're certainly going to add plenty of color to it in these paint mixtures. Get those lined up. I like to place them not exactly rainbow fashion, but from light to Dark. We'll end with the black over here. And I just noticed that the black is a little squishier than the other colors. That's. That's quite normal. Not. Not every color is the same viscosity coming out of the tube. Okay, so here we go. I'm going to start a chain of mixtures with the white and the yellow ochre using a palette knife, as you see here. Just get that going and pick up a little more ochre for that first mixture. And then going down the line, I'll add more white increasingly for different lengths in this color chain. And the end with one that I don't need a lot of. But if there was the need for a bright white highlight, can't make it pure white. It needs to be mellowed somewhat with color. Next, my red chain. And now I'm going to take and actually mix a hybrid of the ochre and this cadmium red. The blue, more ochre. Always a kind of a balancing act to determine how much color is in the mix. That gives us something that's trending a little bit rusty. Just going to be handy for the middle third of the face, which tends to have more ruddiness in it. Sometimes I like to think of the mixtures for flesh tone involving dirt and blood. The dirt from the earth colors like ochre and of course the blood from the cadmium red. Gonna get another little amount of that going here. And now tip in a little black. And in so doing, I can start to get a kind of a Hershey's chocolate brown. And then I'll get last chain that I want to use in this setup. That will be some mixtures of black and a little bit of the other colors. So I get a colder, really, really dark brown here and have a few variations on that simply by adding more white. Now when I'm working on a commissioned portrait, I have the luxury of a great deal of time. I will get more mixtures out with more earth colors, several different reds, a rusty brown called burnt sienna, and just get more keys on my piano, so to speak. And now I'll just demonstrate a really super fast beginning of a portrait where I might do a minimal amount of line work, tipping the brush into some mineral spirits to smear things around. Actually what I'm thinking about, since I'm not looking at a person, I'm nevertheless thinking about a recent portrait that I did of a friend and colleague, Joseph Jeremiah Regan. And now what I'm attempting to do is to create a blocked in shadow. The process is pretty Much like starting from the inside and going out. And instead of being an outline, fill in, approach, paint by number approach, this takes us into a realm where these aggressive, bold beginnings nevertheless can lead to a good start to a casual portrait. All right, well, I've got some shadows blocked in. And this reminds me of something that Van Gogh said in a letter once, that the biggest problem the painter has is dealing with what we call white paper fright, or white canvas fright, as the case may be. It's as if the blank canvas stares at you and dares you with making even the first mark. So it's helpful to break the ice to plunge in and get going. And I find that even background tones are an aid to drawing that getting the form of the head, or any object for that matter, is as much a matter of inside information as it is the outside. Just using a little paint thinner to do what we call washes. Get that behind the head to continue the background. Okay, so now just going to test a few things here and start working in areas of light, working in the region that we painters like to call the half tones. Okay, just a little bit of broad paint here in the forehead. Big important set of planes don't turn that much, but they do operate together for a big region of light. So it becomes, in essence, a kind of dark to light procedure. And pulling the light strokes back into the shadows if you have to do any blending. So right now I'm just trying to kill the white. Some artists like to call this blocking. I'm just going to soften that edge a little bit because soft edged edges tend to turn very nicely into depth. If you have a sharp edge that's on the perimeter of the form, it's liable to flatten things out because sharp edges want to come forward where soft edges will go back. An artist such as John Singer Sargent, if he were here, I believe that he'd be tempted to say that the features of the face are like spots on an apple, that they are not the apple. You've got to build the apple first, the big shapes and forms before proceeding to the smaller details. Now, as I, as I look at this, I feel like, okay, I could get a little bit more tone in the eye sockets and maybe deepen that and so on. But by keeping the whole painting moving, you stand a better chance of winding up with a. With a head that looks organically unified. Well, that's enough, I think, to give you a good idea of how to launch a painting by blocking in broad shapes of dark, medium, and light. I think this gives the artist a chance to get a more organic, unified product, a head that reads in totality instead of looking like it's made up of lots of little pieces like a mosaic. Well, Charles Wilson Peale was not alone in his impulse as an artist to educate the public, to make them aware of aspects of America they might not ever see otherwise. That brings us to our next artist. Who is George Catlin? You see an Indian from the Great Plains region, and we know his name from Catlin's artist notes. This is Buffalo Bull's back fat, painted in 1832. Well, who is this character? He is probably a Blackfoot chieftain and painted from life. What you should know about George Catlin is that he himself, as a young man, felt a mission to go west and follow the path forged earlier by Lewis and Clark. Catlin visited many tribes trekking over 2,000 miles. Once he had made five different journeys out West. He always took his paints and brushes along and did scores of small portraits of Indians, men and women alike. You know, painting them from life and somehow getting them to pose and hold still for the time that it took a portrait to be painted. Now, looking at the face of Buffalo Bull, notice the red paint on the chin and jaw of Buffalo Bull. Where does that come from? Because bright red colors that we can work with as painters nowadays were not available back then. However, there was a kind of rusty reddish clay that Indians could use for some red makeup, such as we see here. We don't know if this was considered war paint. I have a feeling it was more of a ceremonial feeling as he's completely decked out. Now, looking further down into the shoulder and chest region of Buffalo Bull, we see a lot of decoration here. There's this concentric circle medallion on his chest, and there are little feathers attached just above it. The light and dark circular shapes are the result of taking porcupine quills, flattening them, and then stitching them into place in a decoration. It was called quilling. More quilling is shown on his shoulders where the sleeves meet the broad garment of his body. And incidentally, the garment was not woven, but rather deer skin. And then what about that object that slants across his chest? That is a very long pipe whose shaft has been likewise decorated with quilling. So imagine hundreds of paintings like this, as well as paintings of Indian villages, their bark lodges, as well as their teepees. All of this that Kaplan had done with the idea of creating a gallery. He even took all of this to Europe in a kind of a traveling show. You could Certainly think of this as a forerunner to Buffalo Bills, a Wild west show, but done decades earlier. And he took it to England. He even took Indians along to do dancing. So it was really quite a production. We go now to a point painting called A Ride for the Fugitive Slaves. This was done by painter Eastman Johnson, and it purports to be an eyewitness account, something that that Johnson saw in 1862 when he was going along with the Union army getting ready for the Battle of Manassas. He even wrote notes on the back of the painting, which he happened to fashion on a piece of cardboard, of all things. But that was what artists often did when they were having to take a lot of equipment on location. Just cheap and easy prime some cardboard with white paint, and then it's all ready to go. Well, he made notes on the date of seeing this escapade. It involves what might be a stolen horse on which is riding a family of three. A man whose hat has its brim blowing back because of the speed of the horse. In his lap is a little boy, and behind him is presumably his wife, the boy's mother. And curiously enough, she's riding side saddle, which seems rather awkward and precarious, but I have a feeling that escaped slaves such as this trio were hardly going to be concerned about correct riding posture. Now you see that this is a dark and dusky scene meant to be understood, that it's pre dawn. There's a little bit of glow of light in the high foggy clouds overhead at the break of day. A foggy glimpse of a distant hill and woods, and then some glints near the nose of the animal. Are those campfires or are they flames issuing from cannons or rifles? We don't know. But it's a painting that gives us a startling glimpse of something that was seen before all the chaos and fracas of a battle began. The artist has dealt with dark silhouettes that can't be missed. It's one of those paintings that you could see from 100 yards away and understand what's going on. If there was any worry about where Eastman Johnson stood on the question of slavery, I think this painting sums it up. He had great sympathy for the desperate plight of these slaves. Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this week's program, we talk with Susan Crabtree. She's senior White House and national political correspondent for Real Clear Politics. Her new book is Fool's the Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us. All more on Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris and many more. And Jeremiah Regan, executive Director of Online Learning here at Hillsdale previews the brand new online course documentary Colonial America. All that this week on the radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to Podcast Hillsdale. Edu subscribe. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. If you thought power of light and dark shapes were a feature of the fugitive slaves painting that we just saw, consider this one. Now, it's a very large painting entitled the Gross clinic, done in 1875 by Thomas Eakins. Now don't get me wrong, the Gross Clinic. Well, some like to look at this and joke that, well, it is Gross because it shows in, in no uncertain terms, a bloody operation. But in fact the the title comes from the main subject, the man with the tufts of hair around the dome of his forehead. This is Dr. Samuel D. Gross, an internationally renowned physician and surgeon. This is a post Civil War period now in the mid 18th 70s, and he's shown conducting an operation in the medical amphitheater of Jefferson Medical University in Philadelphia. Philadelphia happened to be the hometown of Thomas Eakins, and Eakins actually attended anatomical dissection courses taught in that very amphitheater by Samuel Gross. This episode that he witnessed. Eakins had begun his training as an art student in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which incidentally was America's first ever art school, and it was started by none other than Charles Wilson Peale. Again, in his mission to educate Americans in many ways. Well after the Pennsylvania Academy training, Akins decided to go further and study in Paris in the finest renowned art school there. And while he was there, he saw what the illustrious French painters were doing with big paintings, doing historical subjects, mythological subjects, and big canvases of what was happening in the Middle East. Eakins came back home and resolved that he himself would do big paintings of a heroic nature, and he looked around and looked for subjects in real life, contemporary life that he could consider heroic and worthy of his brush. He started with doing paintings of athletes and then with the 1876 Centennial Exposition looming, Eakins conceived of doing this portrait. Let's move in and take a closer look at the Gross clinic by Aikens. Without a doubt the focal point, not centered but the focal point of this painting is the magnificent head of Dr. Samuel D. Gross. This is a cranium which is well defined with strong lighting yielding to deep shadows. Notice how his eyes are in deep shadowy eye sockets. The nose projects and the fringe of hair around his head. Head bristles with energy. When I see that, I'm reminded of trails of electrons in a Van de Graaff generator just sparking around there. And all of that is handled with very quick strokes. But that activity takes nothing away from the power and resolve of his head. This lighting comes from an overhead skylight in the medical surgical amphitheater of the Jefferson Medical School. And so Eakins wisely took advantage of the quality of light and the movement of light in this painting. Of course, so much happens here in light and shadow. Almost super high contrast of white versus black to put it broadly. But notice something strange here when we look at this from present day eyes. The men are all wearing dark suits. They're in street clothes rather than surgical whites. It would be a few decades before concerns for antiseptical surgical whites would be worn in an operation like this. But that doesn't trouble Eakins because he likes the dark contrast of their apparel, their dark hair and the dark background. The amphitheater seating stacking up behind the scene that shows med students looking at the painting. Overall we have this ensemble of figures from Grosse's head. We we travel down to the unmistakable importance of his right hand. But this is the most important detail of the painting. His fingers are stained with blood. It must be still wet even in it. It shows up on the end of his scalpel that he has just used to make a new incision in the leg of this patient. That was a sort of accent that completely horrified some people with sensitive temperaments. But notice also as an artistic device, it not only pops out unmistakably, but the blade of the scalpel starts to move our eyes down to this head. And inevitably we start moving around and observing this space. The heads of the surgical attendants as their hands are busy in various procedures. Like this one who holds a wad of cotton batting filled either with ether or chloroform. They were using anesthetic at this time. This may be a hard view of a person's body to understand, but take a little closer look. It is drastically foreshortened. We're actually looking at the legs and buttocks and feet of the patient. And again, this is something that is unprecedented in the history of American art, indeed, world art, for that matter, to have such a honest and unsparing view of an operation on a human body. Two of these assistants are holding forceps or probe that are opening a new incision in the leg right there. This procedure is all about Gross's intent to educate, to explain new procedures that he was innovating with, using surgery strategically to deal with cancer situations and to avoid amputation. There was plenty of amputation going on during the Civil War, just 12 years or so before this. So advances in medicine are happening here. And as a result, Akins has struck upon this to find his hero of modern times, of actual times, rather than reverting to a fictional past. If you would look at this region of the painting almost as abstraction, you see that it has shapes that prong out in different directions. It's a very striking set of bright shapes here that might compete with Gross's head, but it doesn't really. But it does bring our attention to this area where Eakins has sharply defined the forceps and probes. And then down in the lower portion of the painting, serving really as a base of a figure triangle, there is a tabletop here strewn with more surgical instruments. I mentioned figure triangle here. If you look at all the bright spots here together, those forms so important to the meaning of the painting are, well, confined within a triangle shape. And I don't want to neglect mention of the woman that's on the far left here really could be thought of as that triangle ensemble. See that hand? It's clenched in horror, in dread. And this adds to the drama of the painting. Now, in the aftermath of this, reporters certainly saw it and some remarked favorably about it in their writings. A few suggested this is not the kind of painting you would allow your wife or your child or sensitive family members to see. But see it they had. We have. And it's the kind of painting that has prompted one eminent modern art historian to declare that this is the finest painting from American art, there's this kind of recurring American trait of honesty which is exemplified in Thomas Akin's the Gross Clinic. Well, even though I've suggested our group of paintings today are of forgotten Americans, well, this pair is not exactly forgotten. This painting, American Gothic by Grant Wood, is probably familiar to the vast majority of Americans. Grant Wood, who hailed from Iowa, painted this in 1930. In it, we see, presumably, a farmer who stands soberly staring us in the eye in very plain clothing, a Black jacket and simple white shirt with buttons, no collar. He wears denim overalls beneath the coat and he's clenching a pitchfork, holding it as if it was like a bishop's crosier, now looking a little apprehensive. Next to him is a younger woman. It is suggested that this is the farmer's daughter, not his wife. At any rate, she looks a little nervous with her eyes glancing to her left, perhaps, perhaps even in deference to the taller, older father figure. The title American Gothic. This refers to the wood farmhouse that we see in the background behind the pair. It's a board and batten farmhouse, very plain, were it not for the pointed arch window above the front porch roof. That pointed arch is stylistically the hallmark of medieval Gothic churches in Europe, but also an inspiration for a whole period of so called Gothic Revival architecture from the mid 19th century here in the States. It is something that suggests that there is a kind of pious overtone to this painting. You can imagine a farmer. Why would you go to the trouble of a more expensive pointed arch window with the carpentry and cutting glass involved when you could just have a simple rectangular window? But I feel it's a quiet symbol of the sober faithfulness of this pair. Now back to the pitchfork. Notice how it's held parallel to the picture plate. In other words, the flat surface of the painting. This is just seemingly illusionistically tucked behind the front of the painting space. And it's held very adroitly in a vertical pose. Now, look to the right of that and the denim overalls of the farmer. There is a crisscross seam there, which some think, oh, that's another clever symbol of Christian faith. Make what you will of that. Now, in terms of the design of this painting, notice of course, the cranium of the farmer, that round balding head in a smooth semicircular arc above his head. And that you might notice, is echoed in a distant view of trees beyond the woman's head. This is sort of Grant Wood's hallmark to take forms and make them look quasi realistic, but then to streamline them, to kind of pretty them up almost in a little bit of a doll like fashion. When I see those green trees, I'm forced to think of lollipops. But kidding aside, this is a painting which was meant to be bedrock. It portrays types of people. We're not meant to see them as named individuals, but rather types, archetypes that stand for countless homesteaders and farmers sprinkled throughout the Midwest. When this was painted in the 1930s, World War I was in the past. World War II was yet to come. Artists and writers and playwrights looked to the Midwest, to the Plains states, as the heartland of the country. As if somehow the real soul of America, its virtues and character traits, were to be found there rather than on the East Coast. Now we see a painting that might be off putting for some of you. It's titled Anna Christina was done in 1967 by Andrew Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth happens to be one of my all time favorite painters. I love his work for its unflinching honesty. But many of you might be repulsed by the image of this woman. Wyeth actually considered her one of his closest friends. He had known her since his turn when he was first introduced to her, and he painted her many times over his career until he outlived her. Now Wyeth had painted her in his best remembered painting called Christina's World. That was where he had posed her when she was younger, wearing a bit of a skirt and crawling across a barren looking open field, seemingly headed in the direction direction of the house in which she lived. That painting happens to hang in the Museum of Modern Art. But back to Anna Christina. She apparently has a wandering eye. It's a little disconcerting when you look at the picture and feel a little bothered by that. Uncomfortable. And Wyeth has deliberately, painstakingly recorded all of the facts of herself. Scraggly hair, the wrinkles in her face, a bit of a wart on her cheekbone, sagging flesh of her neck, and a floral print blouse which has seen better days. But every little detail of the blouse, every wrinkle in shadow, every seam, every aspect of light and shadow playing across her face. The chair behind her and the blouse are recorded with what I consider to be loving care. Wyeth considered her a very shrewd person with a lot of insight into other people's character. At one point, Wyeth even remarked that he felt that she was kind of the essence of New England witchcraft. Imagine that. But despite those imaginative overtones, I feel that this is an arresting painting. Fascinates me in the way that the figure is posed on a slant into space. And yet she turns warily to make eye contact with us. A real gem of an American painting and far from the glamour of the kind of painting that John Singer Sargent, whom I also admire, would produce in his portraits. Well, to balance the scales, after we've looked at two paintings of rural subjects, let's go at an urban scene. Now, this is a painting called Linda and alicia, done in 1992 by Brooklyn artist Harvey Dinnerstein. Dinnerstein was a well trained artist going to a high school in New York City, especially for arts and sciences, and he trained at a major art school in New York. But he elected to live his life out in Brooklyn and became enthusiast of riding the subway, carrying along his sketchbook. And he did many paintings based on things that he observed in subway rides. I consider him a great humanitarian looking for fascination and dignity in ordinary people that were subway riders. Here we see a scene that surprisingly, is uncluttered. Normally you would expect to see a jumble of subway passengers crowding around and getting in each other's way. But in a way as if this were kind of a final stop, we see a very quiet tableau. Mother and daughter are seated, mother glancing to her right in a very striking profile, which suggests her ethnic character. But they make a kind of triangle of figures. Again, we see that sort of device of a triangle enclosing the major figures in the composition. In her lap rests a sleeping daughter whose arm hangs limply between the legs of her mother. It's a scene which is utterly ordinary. It might remind you of the ashcan painters and their quest to find art in everyday life. When I notice this, I feel that the dark shapes of the blacks of their jackets, as well as black in a door window and a car window off to the right, all of those give a certain contrast and punch to the picture as things that lead our eye around from one black spot to another. But then their faces also shine out and dominate the composition, especially the mother. And there's this kind of linkage of bright shapes between the mother's face, her off blue blouse and the face of the daughter. Now, color is playing a role here. It's not bright, garish color, but subdued colors, especially playing with what we painters know is a pair of complementary colors. Those are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. In this case, it's blue and orange. So as you scan this carefully, you see blue in the map. You see some blue shapes in the right window. Blue of blue jeans and light blue of a blouse. But what about orange? Well, well, obviously there's an orange seat of the car next to the pear. Very toned down orange, but unmistakably orange. And I feel that that big chunk of almost flat orange as well as the gold color next to it, are counterbalanced effectively by a little cluster of bright yellow orange flowers very close to the left edge of the painting. I think it's an interesting situation where a Little accent on one side of the painting creates a relationship with and a counterbalance for a color block on the opposite side. When it's all said and done, I think this painting is one that shows great sympathy, finding dignity in these ordinary people. Now let's look at a color mixing situation where the artist plays with complementary colors. Complementaries are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. Typical pairs include red and green, Christmas colors, yellow and purple, and also orange and blue. I'm going to work with orange and blue. Here you see them on my palette. I had to pre mix the orange from some yellow and red. No big deal there. Now I'm going to get some orange on the canvas, block that on with a knife so it's nice and solid. Keep some on the palette. And now opposite that, I'm going to put some blue back to the mother lode and just rich, get that blue a little richer. And now I'm going to do some intermixtures of the orange and blue. I'm going to start with a little bit of blue added into the orange, and that starts to dirty up that orange. But I'm going to put it right next to the block of orange on the canvas and then increasingly add blue to this almost is taking on a little bit of a green cast. And we'll make this fast. We'll get now a case where we started heavy on the orange, light on the blue, and now we'll wind up heavy on the blue and light on the orange. Now you can see as these go together, there is a harmony to them. It's a great kind of harmony that creates all kinds of possibilities for subtle tone shifts and beautiful relationships which are best seen where those colors are next to each other. By now, I think you're used to a certain idea of scale that most painters of people adopt when. When they're doing their picture, they will put the face on a canvas pretty close to life size. But what about an artist such as the one that did this painting, decides to break the rules of scale dramatically? This is a painting done by Chuck Close. It's titled Frank. Now, Chuck Close did paintings like this, copying them slavishly, meticulously from very large black and white enlargements. He just took every feature of the subject and recreated it with oil paint on the canvas. But the most striking thing here is that the head is so huge. It looks huge on your screen, but it's even more huge in real life. The canvas is something like 8ft tall. There's that 8ft, canvas thing again. Well, imagine walking into a gallery and being confronted by this face. It's astonishing and commanding of our attention. This is part of a movement that started in the 1960s called photorealism. And it is what it says it is. It's realistic painting based on photographs. What Chuck Close would do would be to take a picture of his subject facing frontally. And there's a little bit of a tilt here, but very much a head on view. He would get those photos blown up in huge fashion and he would grid them with horizontals and verticals, equal squares, and then he would grid his canvas for transfer. So each small grid in the photo was faithfully replicated larger in the canvas. It must have taken hours, days, months to produce a single Chuck Close canvas like this. But it's the sort of thing which made a big stir in the art world and his reputation has been strong ever since. When in reality, you step close to a Chuck Close painting, no pun intended, you find yourself drawn into little areas of the picture where instead of just looking like individual hairs, pockmarks from acne, borders of eyeglasses and so on, it starts become an abstraction. Hundreds of little abstractions where you notice the paint going through contrast, through blends and shifts. So it's an unusual experience to see one of these because from a distance it is astonishing in its impact in looking so called real. But up close it starts to dissolve into a kind of fuzzy abstraction. This makes me think about how oftentimes I've heard people looking at a so called realistic painting and said, oh, it's so real, it looks like a photograph. As if looking like a photograph was the pinnacle of great art. It may be impressive, but it isn't necessarily great. In a kind of philosophical sense and even objectively speaking, this is a kind of painting which is both sort of fictional and truthful at the same time. See what you think of it. So there is a wonderful dichotomy here, a tension between the real and the unreal that we encounter in the work of photorealist painting such as Frank. You might ask, why do this? Why take an ordinary guy in street clothing, plaid shirt and so on, and exalt him in this enormous scale? I think this in a way is a kind of statement of type, of an American who is a citizen who has a serious answer about him and should be taken seriously by people of all rank in society. If we were to put the portrait of Ronald Reagan next to Chuck Close's Frank, see them side by side, I think we'd be struck by the difference in their appearance, certainly their difference in position in American society, but they are linked. The paintings actually were done not too far apart in time, and it could serve as a reminder that in America we honor our leaders, our presidents, and more. We expect them to protect the rights of individuals and on the individual side, we have people who have their rights and who need to participate in the body politic. I think it's of immense value that artists play a part in dealing with and portraying our leaders as well as common citizens. So there is a spectrum that links us all together as Americans and and I'm happy for that.
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