My Fellow Americans

 

After all the madness of politicizing a deadly epidemic, after all the efforts to hobble every effort by public health officials and medical professionals to stem the tide of infections, after the resulting death toll of over 600,000, I don't think I will be able look at my fellow Americans the same way ever again.  I certainly don't trust them anymore.  Legions of people all over the world are sick and dying from this disease and have no access to any vaccine or even masks, and don't have the room to socially distance or have access to clean water to wash hands.  And yet inhabitants of the richest empire in history who have all those things in abundance refuse to take a vaccine that could save their lives and spare their families and neighbors.  I have no sympathy for such people.  In fact, I blame them for the resurgence of the pandemic in this country.  All the deaths happening around the country right now are on their hands.  That we are going through another major disruption because of covid is entirely their fault.  

Yes, I'm very angry because none of this is necessary or had to happen.  The far-right white supremacist leader cult formed around Trump is now a suicide cult.  Prove your loyalty to the Beloved Leader and just say no to that Jew liberal vaccine.  If it was just among their own members I wouldn't care.  A Jonestown of dirty disease-spreading racists wouldn't be much of a loss as far as I'm concerned.  But, they are spreading disease and infecting a whole lot innocent bystanders, and they are killing them as surely with a virus as with bullets.

The USA that I have is a cruel and brutal country with a violent culture built on bloodshed, genocide and slavery that thinks it's God's darling.  The USA that I want is there behind the anger in James Baldwin's writings, in what he meant by the phrase "achieving our country."  The USA I want is in the hopeful and visionary letters of Abigail Adams to her dismissive husband.  It's there in the courage and enterprise of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.  It's there in the preambles to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It's there restated simply and memorably in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  It's in the erotic passionate verse praising democracy of Walt Whitman.  

And it's here in this painting by George Inness of the Delaware Water Gap painted in 1861 as the Civil War was just beginning, long a favorite of mine.  Inness paints a landscape at peace with itself.  It's not the lonely wilderness where Jehovah dwells, but long settled countryside made productive.  There are fields, cattle, and farmhouses.  A train passes on the left.  A raft of fresh cut timber passes down the Delaware river.  It is a landscape where people may live happily and freely at peace with their neighbors and mutually dependent on each other's work and protection.  All the people making the land productive and depending on that production are at peace with nature that makes all this possible and sustains human life and all other life.  The artist harmonizes a wide variety of colors into a beautiful passing sequence of warm and cool colors that further embody mutual peace.  The rainbow appears as a benediction and a small summary of all the colors used throughout the painting.

George Inness was an ardent Abolitionist who tried to enlist in a Massachusetts regiment when the Civil War broke out.  At age 36, he failed the physical examination for military service.  He spent the war speaking and drumming up donations and enlistment into the war effort.  He sometimes donated paintings to sell to raise money for the war effort.  During the war, Inness became associated with utopian reform movements such as the Eagleswood Military Academy that advocated reform through education and social contact between classes and races.  Inness was invited there to teach drawing.  Inness all his life was interested in Swedenborgian spirituality with its conceptions of spiritual harmonies and correspondences, a faith that I think informs many of his decisions about form and color in his painting.

My photo taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on July 26, 2021, and freely available to anyone who wants to use it.

Thirty Years in New York

 As of this month, I have lived in the Big City for 30 years.

Thirty Years in the Big Apple

 

It's just occurred to me that as of this month, I've lived in New York now for 30 years, longer than any place else I've ever lived including Texas where I was born and raised.

"The Most Beautiful Canary in the Coal Mine": Martin Johnson Heade's Gems of Brazil.

 

Amethyst Woodstar

In 1863, the American artist Martin Johnson Heade sailed to Brazil to work on a project inspired by John James Audubon's Birds of America.  Heade obsessed over hummingbirds, the tiny nectar-feeding birds unique to the Americas with brilliant iridescent plumage.  Heade was hardly alone.  John Ruskin yearned to see a live hummingbird in flight but he never did.  The stuffed species on display in London were all Ruskin saw of the birds.  There are no nectar-feeding bird species in Europe.  Hummingbirds were an industry in Europe and America, in demand for their brilliant feathers on everything from hats to greeting cards.  British hat makers imported tens of thousands of corpses of the tiny birds every year.  Heade worried that he would live to see the end of the hummingbirds.  Partly out of ambition to rival Audubon's accomplishment, and partly out of love for these tiny amazing birds, Heade spent a year in Brazil's rainforests collecting species and making observations for a magnum opus he planned to title Gems of Brazil, the gems being the hummingbirds.   He painted a series of over 40 paintings in Brazil most of them about the same size and format, about twelve inches by ten inches.  He intended to have chromolithograph prints made of the paintings and sell them in book format.  The enthusiastic reception by the Brazilian public of an exhibition of these paintings in Rio de Janeiro encouraged Heade to pursue publication. The Emperor Dom Pedro II knighted him for his achievement.

The book Gems of Brazil never happened because of Heade's dissatisfaction with the color quality of chomolithography in the mid 19th century, and because of dwindling funds and lack of a sponsor or patron.  

Black Breasted Plovercrest

Black Eared Fairy

Black Throated Mango

Among the many bird painters and artistic ornithologists of the 19th century, Heade stands out because of his decision to paint his hummingbirds in their environment with the flowering plants they depended on for sustenance.  He shows the moist rainy weather of rain and cloud forests where they live, the daily shifts between sunshine and rain.  The birds seem to become natural extensions of the vines and plants they dwell among, as inevitable as the flowers.  Heade's paintings still have the sharp silhouetted forms common to a lot of 19th century bird painting including much of Audubon's work.  Perhaps the elaborate Victorian taxidermy displays in glass bell jars influenced this format.  However Heade shows the environment that these taxidermy displays used to imply.  

There is some speculation that Heade may have been aware of Charles Darwin's work on South American orchids and his observation on the close mutual dependence between specific flowers and specific pollinators, especially hummingbirds.  Bird and flower evolved together into so exclusive a mutual dependence that the extinction of one would risk the extinction of the other.  Perhaps.  Heade shows a dependence between bird, flower, and larger environment that is unique for his time, and speaks directly to our time where we are now acutely aware of the tangled web of mutual dependence upon which all life depends including ours.

Brazilian Ruby

Crimson Topaz

Fork-Tailed Woodnymph

As in so much 19th century American painting, there is an imperial subtext to these paintings.  Before and during the Civil War there was much talk of extending American imperial ambitions southward to Cuba, Nicaragua, and ultimately South America.  The Confederacy was particularly enthusiastic for a South American empire.  It's sad to discover that so many early 19th century pioneering ornithologists including the great John James Audubon were Confederate sympathizers.  

But the obsessive eccentricity of Martin Johnson Heade's work mitigates some of that chest-thumping imperial ambition.  His work seems to me less imperial than Victorian.  For example Heade shows a family of Fork-Tailed Woodnymph hummingbirds above with male and female parents tending to their young in the nest below, a model family.  In fact, the male hummingbird usually plays no role in nest building or chick raising.

Frilled Coquette

Hooded Visorbearer

Ruby Throated Hummingbird

Ruby Topaz

Snowcap

Martin Johnson Heade enjoyed limited success in his lifetime.  He was an eccentric outlier of the second generation of the Hudson River School.  Perhaps that came from his early apprenticeship to another eccentric outlier, the Quaker artist Edward Hicks.  He certainly had ambition.  He kept a studio in the Tenth Street Studio building where Frederick Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt kept their studios.  After he died, Heade was largely forgotten and his work scattered.  Before the 1920s, you could buy Heade's paintings in antique furniture shops in New York and London.  His work enjoyed a revival of interest in the second half of the 20th century.  It's the peculiar strangeness of his work, that quality of stillness before the storm pervades much of his work beyond his storm paintings.  The hummingbirds, flowers, beaches, and marsh landscapes that make up most of his work have a strange obsessive and alien quality about them that is unmistakable but hard to describe.

Heade feared that he would live to see the end of the hummingbirds, and those remarkable small birds (among the smallest and the fastest in the world; an Anna hummingbird clocked in at 385 miles per hour in a mating dive, the fastest of all vertebrate animals).  And now in our sad age, we fear seeing the end of all birds.  Over the last 50 years, the bird population of North America declined by about 30%.  Many hummingbird species verge on extinction due to loss of habitat and climate change.  

The quote in the title is from the photographer and natural history writer Jon Dunn from his book The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds.

Few things give me more pleasure and hint at paradise than the glimpse of hummingbirds.  I can't imagine a world without them, but everyone from Martin Johnson Heade to Jon Dunn warns us of their imminent end.  Their end would be a harbinger of our end since in so many ways we are far more delicate creatures than the hummingbirds.

Stripe Breasted Star Throat

Tufted Coquette

White Vented Violet Ear

Blue Morpho Butterfly

Heade intended to publish this with his hummingbirds.

Orchid, Hummingbird, and Waterfall

Two Hummingbirds

Hummingbird and Two Orchids

The Brazilian Forest

Photo of the artist

Roy DeCarava

Man Coming Up From the Subway Stairs, 1952

Roy DeCarava is a new artist to me, but only me since he had a long and distinguished career as a photographer who counted Edward Steichen and Gordon Parks among his mentors.  He was a native of Harlem born there in 1919.   He came to photography relatively late in life after an extensive career as a painter and printmaker, only in the late 1940s.  He worked for the Works Progress Administration as an artist during the 1930s, and served in the military during World War II in the very segregated South where he had his first experiences of racism and discrimination.  He took up photography after the war and embarked on a flourishing new career.  He published a number of books of his photography, photo essays mostly.  He photographed many music notables including Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and many others.  He established workshops to help young and up and coming photographers.  He taught for many years at Hunter College in New York.  He died in 2009 at age 89. 

DeCarava spent a lot of time in the darkroom on the photo above of a man coming up the stairs out of the subway station.  He worked very hard on getting the darks just right.  So much of his best photography uses very dark tones in ways that are very poetic and evocative, and also very original.  DeCarava was his own unique act in modern photography.  He didn't quite do narrative photography as Gordon Parks famously did in his photo stories from Harlem.  But neither does his work fit into abstract photography created by such artists as Aleksandr Rodchenko and Edward Weston.  De Carava's work even at its most formal is ultimately about people, what the photographer Alan Thomas called his "gentle humanism."   

Darkness in most imagery implies some kind of dread along the lines of evil and death.  That's not quite the role of darkness in DeCarava's work, though sometimes it can suggest dread or sorrow.  Most of the time, it plays the complement of light.  He embraces darkness positively whether it's the shade on a hot summer day, or the splendor of dark skin.  Many of his best compositions are starkly simple and suggest abstraction while not quite being abstract.  The subjects in DeCarava's photos still matter in a way they don't in Rodchenko photos.  

DeCarava's photos are a happy discovery for me, and I hope to learn from them for some of my own work.

Self Portrait, 1956

Man in a Phone Booth, New York, 1956

Sun and Shade, 1952

Boy, Hand on Shoulder, 1952

Shirley Embracing Sam, 1952

Child Playing on a Curb, 8th Avenue, 1952

 

Bartolomeo Cavarozzi

 

Madonna and Child, 1625

I recently discovered the work of Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, a 17th century Caravaggisti, a follower or imitator of Caravaggio's style.   He came from the city of Viterbo about 50 miles north of Rome.  He attached himself to a Roman noble family, the Crescenzi especially to Giovanni Battista Crescenzi who dabbled in painting.  While living in the Crescenzi family palace near the Pantheon, Cavarozzi studied at the Roman Academy of St. Luke nearby.  In 1617, Cavarozzi joined Giovanni Battista Crescenzi on a journey to Spain.  Cavarozzi worked for two years making paintings for the Escorial. It was while in Spain he created his own individual variation on Caravaggio's work.  Caravaggio's drama and violence did not interest Cavarozzi.  Instead, Cavarozzi's paintings use Caravaggio's theatrical lighting to spotlight scenes of great tenderness expressed with an emotional reserve.  The emotion is all the more gratifying for being so carefully doled out.

Cavarozzi's work in Spain may have influenced the early work of Jusepe de Ribera, though he would have seen Cavarozzi's work in Italy, probably in Rome.  I can see a little of Cavarozzi's influence in the earliest work of Diego Velazquez.

Cavarozzi's career was short.  He died at the age of 35.

The Holy Family

The Madonna and Child with Angels, c1620

The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, c1618

Cavarozzi copied his own work frequently, not an unusual practice of the day.

The Sacrifice of Isaac c.1603

(This painting is sometimes attributed to Caravaggio, though I doubt it)

A painting based loosely on Caravaggio's of the same subject in the Uffizi.  Cavarozzi's version is a lot less violent.  It looks to me like the angel and Isaac in this picture are the same model.

The Supper at Emmaus, c1615-1625

Still Life with Grapes, Fruit, and Three Wagtails, c.1615

Cavarozzi like Caravaggio started as a still life painter.  He made some strikingly original still lives like the one above in the Metropolitan Museum that uses a kind of all-over composition unexpected for a painting of that time.

reproduction from here.

Some scholars believe that Bartolome Cavarozzi and the Master of the Acquavella Still Life are one and the same.  Above and below are two still lives attributed to that anonymous master.  The identification of the Acquavella Master with Cavarozzi remains controversial, but these sure look like the hand of Cavarozzi to me.

The Museum of the Bible.

 
The Museum of the Bible is an institution continuously plagued by scandals from purchasing looted artifacts to Dead Sea Scroll fragments that turn out to be frauds. For all its claims to being “non-sectarian” board members and directors must sign a pledge stating that the Bible is “true.” The major funder of the museum is Hobby Lobby that makes no secret of promoting a very literalist and politicized understanding of the Bible that serves a right wing political and cultural agenda.

I think the central problem of the museum that opens it up to so much fraud and scandal is an idea near and dear to the hearts of Christian fundamentalists, that the Bible as we have it now was passed down intact and unaltered through the ages from around the time of Christ. The problem with that idea is that it is demonstrably untrue. There was nothing like what we would recognize as the Christian Bible until about the 6th century. Even so, the Book of Revelations so central to American fundamentalist orthodoxy did not enter the Biblical canon until after it was officially closed at the end of the 7th century. The Eastern Orthodox Churches still refuse to recognize Revelations (or the Apocalypse) as canonical and do not include it in their Bible or liturgy. 

[Correction:  Eastern Orthodoxy does include Revelations in their Biblical canon, but not in their liturgy.]

 The Christian Bible in its present form came out of generations of argument and conflict, some of which remains unresolved. How many Gospels would be included? Which Gospels? In what order? What are the criteria by which decisions are made? Should the Jewish Scriptures be included? Which ones and in what order? Which Epistles would be included? Why? Who wrote them? All these questions were fought over for centuries before they were resolved, sometimes arbitrarily. Some books that were very popular and widely read among early Christians did not make it into the Biblical canon such as The Shepherd of Hermas and the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch. 

 The problem with the Museum of the Bible is that it searches for evidence to prove a pre-conceived idea instead of letting the evidence speak for itself.  This leaves them open to all kinds of fraud peddled by con-men who tell them what they want to hear.