Dali House

Lots of people can point out on a map the exact place where James Dean crashed his Porsche Spyder into that Turnipseed fella’s car on the highway outside Bakersfield, California, at the end of September 1955. But how many know where Jackson Pollock wrecked his hulking Oldsmobile convertible 11 months later?

If you do, fill me in. Meanwhile, in the interest of mythology, as opposed to morbidity, I’m going to make an educated guess.

Pollock’s “Reflection of the Big Dipper”

There are websites that keep step with artists’ every breathing moment — the superb WarholStars.com is an outstanding resource, and I’ve used it extensively for this post. And then there are websites that say (or repeat without checking) that Pollock met his brutal demise after leaving his beloved Cedar Tavern on University Place and heading “further north on University Place to a more handsome venue”.

University Place is in Manhattan. Going further north would still be Manhattan. He’d have had to drive a long way east along Long Island to be in East Hampton, where he lived and where he actually left the road and whacked into a tree, killing himself and Edith Metzger. Photos from the scene and the Ed Harris movie version clearly place the crash in a more or less rural location, not Manhattan.

Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner

Am I being ghoulish wanting to know? Pollock was an obnoxious boor, but a lot of my heroes are when you manage to glimpse inside the inferno of their genius. And while I never have fully comprehended abstract expressionism, I know how important Pollock is in the apparatus of art history.

If I lived in New York I might consider seeking out the places he lived and died, but since I’m nowhere near, I’ll make the pilgrimage in my mind (and on Google Earth), and seek out shrines made of splintered wood.

See the rest.

Dalí’s collaborator Philippe Halsman took a series of photos of Sal’s divine whiskers for the 1954 book “Dalí Moustache”, including the Mona Lisa embellishment above (a real moustache, apparently), which I’ve lined up against Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “LHOOQ” from 1919.

At least one commentator has chastised Dalí for being far too late with this gag, regardless of whether this was intended as a mere pun or as a renewed declaration of war on old-school painting. But maybe Dalí knew something about Duchamp that still isn’t widely known.

“Parody” is the word most often used in describing “LHOOQ”. Others are hot bum, hot ass, hot arse and hot pants. Commentators do the jitterbug when they “translate” the title. Pronounce the letters aloud in French slowly, quickly, in a slurred fashion, with gusto, and you ought to hear Elle a chaud au cul, common street lingo for “She has a hot arse” or “She is hot in the bum / ass” or “She’s got hot pants” or, Duchamp once dubiously offered, “There is fire down below”, by which someone else presumed “She’s horny”.

Maybe “LHOOQ” is supposed to be read in English as “look”, said another, which is a good title for an artwork, after all. I suggest that, read in English when very, very drunk, the letters suggest, “Shhhe’s sooooo cute.” Any takers?

The most interesting thing about the postcard view of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that Duchamp randomly defiled in 1919 is that it’s apparently not a randomly defiled postcard of the Mona Lisa. See the rest.

Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi have a page of screed on the Web about Barney Newman that’s billed as an “online supplement” to the 2000 book “What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand”. Edited here for style and length, not inanity. See also A right old Barney.

Three decades ago Hilton Kramer proclaimed that abstract expressionism is among the outstanding achievements of American culture in this century, “by virtue of the worldwide critical esteem [its artists] have enjoyed and the crucial artistic influence they have wielded”. Although postmodernist scholars and critics have in recent years challenged such an exalted view, the work of leading abstract expressionists continues to occupy a pre-eminent status in 20th-century culture, and still influences contemporary abstract painters. See the rest.

I’m planning a string of posts on Canadian art, but I think I’ll begin with a Canadian art “scandal” that actually involved an American artwork.

In 1990, the National Gallery of Canada purchased “Voice of Fire”, a huge abstract painting by Barnett Newman, for $1.76 million. The media, the government and a big chunk of the public went postal for two months. We’ll get to my own take on the controversy, published at the time. See the rest.

“Une âme au ciel” (”A Soul in Heaven”) by William Bouguereau, 1878
Click the image to see it much larger.

Pretty feisty bunch down at the Art Renewal Centre, where they’re giddily passionate about the 19th-century realists and won’t spare a poop for anything more modern. Cantankerously building barricades in preparation for an anticipated jihad against the Establishment is Fred Ross, the centre’s chairman, who’s got a major rant going on that seems almost perverse in the way it’s trying to turn art history upside down. But, he has his points (and some terrific art to back him up). See the rest.