A smart column last Thursday in the New York Times lifted my spirit for the whole day.
To explain why the situation is becoming more and more tense between Obama's and Clinton's supporters, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof refers to a "terrific new book", True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Wiley, 2008), by a young author, Farhad Manjoo (He calls it the best political book of the year so far): We tend to accept the evidence supporting our opinions, and reject the contrary evidence. The effect is to reinforce our views and to make us more passionate about them. Another bias is that we are more willing to gather information supporting rather than opposing our prejudices. "This resistance to information that doesn’t mesh with our preconceived beliefs afflicts both liberals and conservatives, but a raft of studies shows that it is a particular problem with conservatives," adds Mr.Kristof who concludes:
"The situation isn’t hopeless. Similar psychological processes govern our perceptions of race, yet we’ve made great progress in revising our views and reducing prejudices. The same is true of attitudes towards gays.
The only solutions I see are personal ones, to work out daily to build our mental muscles. Just as we force ourselves to nibble on greens and decline cheesecake, we should seek an information diet that includes a salad bar of information sources — with a special focus on unpalatable rubbish from fools. The worse it tastes, the better it may be for us.
If that’s why you’re reading this, congratulations! And thanks!"
As I mentioned in my last post I discovered Charles Demuth, by chance, after reading a small article in the New Yorker.
Charles Demuth (1883-1935) is an American watercolorist who spent most of his life in his native Lancaster, a small town West of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania. During the last years of his life he turned to oil painting and used a style which became know as Precisionism , producing sharply focused images of architectural topics. Between 1927 and 1933 he produced the seven paintings which are considered the masterpieces of his last years, and are the substance of the exhibition at the Whitney (only 6 are on display): Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster (until April 27th). The exhibition was organized by the Amon Carter Museum (Fort Worth, Texas).
The paintings are, no doubt, remarkable, with their very personal style and their intriguing titles for works depicting otherwise uninspiring industrial sites: My Egypt, And the Home of The Brave, After the Fall (from a poem by Whitman)... As writes Ken Johnson, praising the exhibition, in a New York Times article dated February 27th, "other, less overt emotions add to the aura of the series." This is really what I found fascinating.
Demuth was diagnosed with diabetes in 1921 and his health deteriorated rapidly. Insulin was discovered in 1922 in Canada and one of the American experts in the disease had established a clinic in Morristown, New Jersey, where Demuth was treated, thanks to financial aid from Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the rich American inventor who set up the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Barnes had known Demuth for several years and had been acquiring a substantial number of his paintings. "It is a profound fact that without the temporary restorative effects of the recently discovered insulin with which he was treated,Demuth would never have lived to create [his] late architectural masterpieces," claims Betsy Fahlman in the captivating exhibition catalog.
Charles Demuth was also gay. He used to travel regularly to New York City where, in addition to mingling with the group which gathered around photographer and collector Alfred Stieglitz and other avant-garde artists, he immersed himself in the gay subculture flowering in Greenwich Village. From these experiences he produced watercolors featuring men, sailors in explicit homosexual activities. Two demure examples are displayed at the Whitney (and none, shamefully, are reproduced in the catalog), but a quick search on Internet brings back amazing, more unrestrained, paintings. Of course the immediate questions which come to mind (to my mind...) are: What was the purpose of these paintings? Who were they destined to? Where are they today? How out was Charles Demuth? Unfortunately, Ms Fahlman's text in the catalog does not provide any answer...
As a trade-off, I cannot resist quoting Ken Johnson's provocative conclusion in his article:
"In her essay Ms. Fahlman speculates that despite the more liberal sexual attitudes that prevailed among American avant-garde artists, Demuth might have felt marginalized by the mainly heterosexual art world. If true, that interpretation casts the Lancaster paintings in another intriguing light.
You could read the series as Demuth’s attempt to shuck off any stigma of effeminacy that might have accompanied his career as a watercolorist and flower specialist. Certainly the Lancaster paintings represent an ambition that his critics at the time would have favorably regarded as more virile.
Having entertained that notion, you reconsider those unmistakably phallic water towers and smokestacks. What was Demuth thinking? Marcel Duchamp was his good friend; Freud’s ideas about the possible meanings of inanimate objects were in the air. Could Demuth have been unaware of the thrusting urgency in his pictures?
I like to think he was having a bit of fun with the expectations of his day, that he said to himself: “They want manly paintings. I’ll give them manly paintings!” What he couldn’t help doing was to make them beautiful."
2008.04.20
