Dali House

When the Internet gets spinning, you always have to have a foot ready to jam it to a halt. One of the amusibots at TotallyLooksLike.com posted paintings of the liberation of Minsk and Baghdad side by side, generating many dozens of comments.

Most of them were, of course, inane or offensive — it’s that kind of website — but a few people wondered about the context: Was it correct to assume that an American war propagandist had copied the post-World War II painting of Russian soldiers liberating Minsk from the Germans to celebrate Yankee might in Iraq?

Having already posted one example of US self-righteousness from Totally Looks Like, I too assumed this was another, but I was wrong.

Californian muralist and satirist Sandow Birk copied the original (which I have not been able to find elsewhere online — is it even Minsk?) when he was in a characteristically sarcastic mood. He didn’t buy into the Cheney-Rumsey nonsense at all.

Birk’s painting was part of his 2007 series “The Depravities of War”, which began with monochrome woodblock prints “inspired by” Jacques Callot’s 17th-century “Miseries of War” etchings and concluded with several paintings depicting Iraq and Afghanistan and “The President” riding a flying carpet.

You can see the lot on Birk’s website, though the Flash wasn’t working when I was there recently, so no large images.

If you’re reading too much about Iraqi-style democracy and would instead like to find out what happened in Minsk during “Operation Bagration”, FlamesOfWar.com has a good write-up.

I was thinking gallery browsers must have been doing double takes ever since Vilhelm Hammershøi’s “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” first went on the wall in 1886, but I discover that people have been copying Whistler’s mom all along.

James MacNeill Whistler’s 1871 maternal homage was after all an exercise in painting and was given the frosty academic title “Arrangement in Grey and Black”.

Whistler was grudgingly allowed to show it at the Royal Academy of Art in London, and nearly two decades later (after Whistler pawned if off so he could buy some proper colour paints) the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris bought it.

Hammershøi quite likely saw it there on a vacation from Copenhagen and, having admired Whistler as a student, tried to meet him in Paris, but for some reason it couldn’t be arranged.

He should have had his mother, Frederikke, pop round with the picture to see Whistler’s mother, Anna, so they could compare notes on adoring offspring.

Anna would probably have confessed that she only posed for James because his model didn’t show up, the Cockney tramp, and even then he wanted her to stand for something like four hours.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, boy! Fetch my rocker.”

James spent much of the rest of his life trying to convince people to stop calling his “Arrangement” a “portrait”.

“To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?” he whined in a book.

It was a good thing he was long dead when the US Post Office issued a stamp in 1934 bearing an image of “Whistler’s Mother” and the dedication “In Memory and In Honor of the Mothers of America”.

At any rate, Whistler’s experiment in squares and shades of grey was a hit from the start, and lots of artists who could only afford two tubes of paint at a time copied the approach, right down to the posing.

American expatriate painters followed the lead of their countryman in particular, and they were joined by the Dane Hammershøi (1864-1916), who not only loved his mum unreservedly, he painted her picture a dozen times, twice seated in profile.

Primarily a landscape painter, Hammershøi deigned to do portraits only of people he knew personally. Here comes the missus, albeit from the back.

“Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife, Seen through a Mirror” offers more of the same muted tones he picked up from Whistler, but he’s giving all the light to Ida (Mrs Hammershøi) and keeps himself in the shadows.

The year is 1911. The setting, according to Sotheby’s, which is selling both of these Hammershøi paintings this season in London for maybe £120,000 apiece, is the “great hall” on the first floor of Spurveskjul, their rented country house in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen.

The prop is an oval mirror that appears in at least two other of his works.

The interpretation is wide open, unlike either artist’s portrait of his mother. Personally I can’t resist thinking he’s wondering if he should push Ida over the terrace railing, but that’s just me.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn was only 20 years past when F Otto Becker of the Milwaukee Lithographing Company turned Cassilly Adams’ painting “Custer’s Last Fight” into a swell advertisement for Adolphus Busch, the beer tycoon.

How a picture of men being scalped might sell beer is lost on modern marketing, but presumably it was a guy thing.

Adams depicted Custer and his men swarmed by Sioux, using a stretch of canvas from a covered wagon. That was in 1884. In 1889 Becker did a fresh painting from which the lithograph was made for the ad, and Busch gave the painting to the US Cavalry’s Seventh Regiment.

The cavalry hung it on a wall at Fort Bliss in New Mexico, where in the 1930s someone noticed that it was in pretty bad shape. Then there was a fire.

Somehow the painting, cut into pieces for the lithography process, ignored in an officers’ mess and then badly singed in a fire, was patched back together by Becker — who promptly sold it once more to Busch, or at least the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Assocation.

Cassilly Adams’ “Custer” lived to fight another day, and last month Sotheby’s New York invited bids for it in the $5,000 range. History marches on.

Sotheby’s sale of Old Master Paintings coming up in London tomorrow is relatively small but promises a very loud boom when the hammer drops on three of the works included. The presence of any one in a public auction might cause global tectonic quivers — to have all three is rather astonishing. And this is ignoring a pair of Brueghels also on the block.

Least of the three is “Storm Clouds over Hampstead”, a fine watercolour by John Constable, one of his wonderful big-sky pictures. Then there’s Francisco de Goya’s “Equestrian Portrait of Don Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia”.

Both of these have compelling stories behind them, which I’ll relate in an upcoming post, but the best yarn of all belongs to JMW Turner’s “Virginia Water”, seen above. The watercolour was loaned out for a show at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2004 — its first public appearance since the 1880s.

Dali House gave Turner a special welcome early on, and seeing a rarity like this painting emerge from a private collection seems historic. Someone needs cash badly. Someone else ought to have it. The price it’s estimated to fetch: £500,000 to £700,000.

In 1828 Turner hurled himself at the feet of King George IV and grovelled like a chimney sweep. He left his self-esteem hanging in the wardrobe back at his studio on Queen Anne Street and took the buggy out to Virginia Water so he could sit on the shore of the lake, swatting off the midges of late spring, and sketch the monarch fishing. He needed to sell His Maj a painting — badly.

Embarrassingly, this was not a new experience for Turner.

Six years earlier he’d trekked all the way to Scotland in the dead of August and filled two sketchbooks with glimpses of the king’s visit to Edinburgh and other spots. The plan was to do a series of engravings, but interest — royal or otherwise — was not forthcoming, and Turner abandoned the project in the form of four unfinished paintings.

Then in 1823 a friend at Windsor Castle pulled some strings and got Turner the job of painting HMS Victory engaged in the Battle of Trafalgar. The work was completed the following year, truly magnificent and the biggest canvas he ever produced.

The royal court said, “No, thanks.” It just wasn’t quite right.

So in 1828 Turner tried again to catch the king’s fancy, and he tried real hard. See the rest.

Picture Claude Monet in a farmer’s field, not far from his home in Giverny, early in the morning, a conductor waving his oiled baton before an orchestra of canvases perched on easels.

He strolls from one to the next as the sun curls the shadows on the watching grainstack, his subject and his audience. Instructing each canvas in turn and learning as he goes, Monet has an assembly line in operation, complete with gear-laden assistants scurrying in and out of the scene.

The canvases participating in Monet’s symphony of the winter of 1890-91 found immediate fame thereafter. Durand-Ruel showed them in Paris in May ‘91, probably just after the hillocks of hay themselves had been chopped up by the threshers, and sold most of them within days, each for as much as 1,000 francs.

The one shown here, “Grainstacks (Snow Effects — Sunlight)”, found immortality, or something like it, at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

For Camille Pissarro, Monet’s haystacks “breathed contentment”. “What lies beyond progress itself” is how the art critic Octave Mirbeau described the paintings.

They did not, however, halt progress, as some actually hoped. They could not save the old ways of the countryside from the inevitable industrial onslaught. The contentment would soon disappear into the noisy maw of combine harvesters.

Wikipedia has a nice entry about the haystacks, and never to be forgotten when the subject comes up is Alan Ritch’s dream-inducing website Hay in Art. The hi-res images of the haystacks come from the wonderfully wonky Art 4 2Day.