Taking a Moment to Linger Over Two Jean Biirkenstein Pieces

Woman and Man with Books

Jean Birkenstein (1926–2003) was a Jewish artist and fearless Civil Rights activist who, in the 1950s and ’60s,opened her Chicago home as a neutral safe space for rival gang members (Vice Lords and Cobras) to meet, while working as a teacher and “ambassador” for them at Marshall High School. An officer with CORE and the NAACP, she led protests for open housing and against school segregation, and was celebrated in a 1961 Jet magazine feature for her powerful paintings and profound respect for human dignity.
Having recently shared some of her artwork here a couple weeks back, I wanted to take a deeper look at a few individual pieces. Besides the fact that her work is interesting, I am also attempting to teach art viewers that increased engagement with another's art can yield some interesting, and occasionally profound, ideas.

Woman and Man with Books
This painting fits comfortably within the tradition of mid-century expressionism, with echoes of Paul Klee, Georges Rouault, and even touches of Lyonel Feininger in the angular treatment of faces. Yet it doesn't feel derivative. It has its own visual vocabulary.

Here are some things that immediately stand out. There's a geometric aspect to their faces. The woman's triangular nose, simplified eye, and sharply outlined jaw reduce the face to a few decisive forms. She is recognizable without being individualized.

This suggests Birkenstein was searching for emotional truth rather than anatomical truth. The black contour lines don't imprison the figures—they hold them together, almost like stained glass leading.

There is a psychological aspect to the painting which depicts two people reading in a cramped space yet different emotional spaces, each lost in what they are reading. The woman dominates the foreground, yet her head is bowed. She appears introspective, perhaps withdrawn into the book she is holding. Behind her is the bearded man.

He leans in, but not aggressively, almot hovering. Though he almost occupies another plane of existence, he is simulataneously near.

Notice how restrained the palette is. Soft greens, muted pinks, warm browns. Almost no saturated color. The effect is contemplative rather than dramatic, like the characters themselves.

The watercolor is wonderfully free. Rather than carefully filling shapes, Birkenstein allows washes to bleed into one another. Some passages are almost accidental, allowing a spontaneity that gives the work life.

  

Vermont Farmers 
This is an ambitious work that creates a world filled with symbolism while remaining rooted in ordinary life. The obvious subject appears to be two young farmers beside an old automobile or truck.

The title has to do with rural life, but its theme may be the human condition. The bull peering in from the upper right almost functions as a silent witness.

The drawing itself is technically fascinating.

The cross-hatching dominates the picture.

Almost every surface vibrates with directional marks, building atmosphere.

Notice how the darkest passages unify the composition. There is almost no empty space.

Everything participates.

The two young farmers wear serious, understated expressions.  Neither smiles, neither seems posed. Birkenstein avoids telling us exactly what they are thinking. That ambiguity draws us in.

A dominant image here is the wheel, which anchors the lower left quadrant. As a symbol the wheel can have many meanings: progress, modernity, work and (esoterically) the wheel of life. 

There's an emotional tone present in the story pictured here. It's not despair, nor does it convey sentimentality. It's not even resignationb exactly. Perhaps it's quiet endurance in the face of a conundrum. It makes you want to inquire further of the author. Something has happened. What preceded this moment? What follows?

That's the cool part of engaging a painting or drawing. Here are the clues, what's the story? Every work suggests a narrative. Birkenstein compresses a lot of clues into a finite space. If I may quote Marvin Gaye, "What's going on?" 

 

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PostScript
Regarding the first piece, Man and Woman with Books, this weekend our family discussed an article in The Atlantic titled "The End of Reading Is Here," which presented some disturbing stats regarding our national decline in literacy and reading for pleasure. Kids can graduate high school without ever having read a book. How can this be?

"There Must Be Some Way Out of Here": Isaiah, Dylan, and the Sixties' Apocalypse

One of the joys of reading Scripture is discovering echoes where you least expect them. Sometimes they're intentional. Sometimes they're unconscious. Either way, they illuminate both the biblical text and the work that follows.

So it is with Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. The song has always sounded biblical, but its roots run deeper than a few borrowed images. Much of its atmosphere appears to arise from Isaiah 21:1-10, a passage that is itself an apocalyptic vision filled with dread, watchmen, horsemen, and the collapse of an empire. It also helps explain why Dylan's brief, enigmatic song became one of the defining statements of the late Sixties.

Isaiah's Vision

Isaiah's oracle begins with a storm. As whirlwinds in the Negeb sweep on, it comes from the wilderness, from a terrible land... (Isaiah 21:1) The prophet is overwhelmed by a terrifying vision.

My heart falters, fear makes me tremble; the twilight I longed for has become a horror to me.

Then comes the command: Go, post a lookout and have him report what he sees.

The watchman climbs his tower and waits. He scans the horizon. Finally he cries out: Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses... 

And then comes the unforgettable announcement: "Babylon has fallen, has fallen!"

This isn't merely breaking political news. Rather, Isaiah is describing history reaching a breaking point. It is the collapse of a civilization. 

Dylan's Watchtower

Now consider Dylan's opening.

There must be some way out of here,

Said the joker to the thief...

Immediately we're dropped into a world of confusion. There are no names, locations or explanations. Only two archetypal figures trying to make sense of a world that no longer makes sense.

Then comes the second verse.

All along the watchtower

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went

Barefoot servants too.

The watchtower is not a casual or haphazard image. In Scripture, the watchman occupies a sacred office. He stands between danger and the city. His responsibility is vigilance. He announces what others cannot yet see.

Dylan's watchtower feels like Isaiah's. Something is coming and everyone senses it. A few short years earlier Dylan sang, "The times, they are a-changin'" and there was a hopefulness there. Mr. Tambourine Man held up a torch for a new generation to light the way.  

"Two Riders Were Approaching..."

The song's final verse almost directly recalls Isaiah.

Outside in the distance

A wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl.

Isaiah's watchman also sees riders approaching from the distance before announcing Babylon's fall. Whether Dylan consciously borrowed the imagery or absorbed it through years of biblical reading hardly matters. Dylan knew the Scriptures extraordinarily well. The Bible shaped his imagination long before his public conversion to 1979 Christianity. Dylan used the Bible as a resource. (See 

That Thin Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders about the making Blonde On Blonde.)

In both Isaiah 21 and Dylan's Watchtower, the emotional landscape is the same. The watchman sees what others cannot. The world is unstable and judgment is approaching.

Apocalypse Before the Apocalypse

Today we tend to hear the word apocalypse as meaning "the end of the world." The Greek word actually means an unveiling—a revelation of what has been hidden. Isaiah unveils the fragility of empires. Dylan unveils the instability beneath modern civilization.

The Sixties were saturated with precisely this feeling.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

John F. Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy.

Malcolm X.

Vietnam.

Potential nuclear annihilation.

Race riots.

Burning cities.

Student revolts.

The Manson murders.

The optimism of the early Sixties slowly dissolved into something darker, as if history itself was becoming unmoored.

Heart of Darkness

In 1900 many intellectuals felt themselves on the threshold of a new era of enlightenment. Freud deliberately released The Interpretation of Dreams that year. Others rejoiced at the "liberation from Christian religion" spawned by Darwin's theory of natural selection and the elimination of any need for a God to explain how we got here. We were the product of time and chance. 

As in the Sixties, and like every era of human history, there were other voices being raised to question this optimismn at the turn of the last century. One of these was Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, the story of a journey upriver into the Belgian Congo in the 1890s. Civilization, Conrad suggested, is a thin veneer. Strip it away, and something terrifying emerges. 

When Conrad traveled to the Congo in 1890, he entered one of the darkest enterprises of the nineteenth century. The region was not yet a Belgian colony but the personal possession of King Leopold II, who had persuaded European powers at the Berlin Conference (1884–85) that his control of the Congo would promote commerce and humanitarian ideals. The reality was starkly different.

Leopold's Congo Free State became a vast commercial enterprise dedicated to extracting ivory and, later, wild rubber, commodities that generated enormous profits as European and American demand soared. To maximize production, indigenous communities were compelled into forced labor under the supervision of colonial agents and the notorious Force Publique, a mercenary army that enforced quotas through intimidation and violence.

The human cost was catastrophic. Villages that failed to meet rubber quotas were burned, hostages were taken, and mutilation—including the severing of hands—became a grim symbol of the regime's brutality. Disease, famine, exhaustion, displacement, and systematic violence claimed the lives of millions of Congolese during Leopold's rule. Conrad witnessed this reality firsthand while serving as captain of a Congo River steamboat in 1890. The contrast between Europe's lofty rhetoric about bringing civilization to Africa and the naked exploitation he encountered profoundly shaped his imagination. Those experiences became the moral foundation of Heart of Darkness, a novel that strips away the pretense of imperial benevolence to reveal greed, cruelty, colonial hypocrisy, and the unsettling capacity for  darkness within the human heart. 

Francis Ford Coppola understood this perfectly when he transformed Conrad's novel into Apocalypse Now. Vietnam became Conrad's Congo. Colonel Kurtz became the man who had crossed every moral boundary. The famous helicopter assault set to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries isn't merely spectacle, it's civilization announcing its own madness. The veil has been lifted. 

Dylan's Landscape

All Along the Watchtower belongs to this same imaginative world with no heroes or moral center. Only princes keeping watch, servants passing through, predators growling in the distance and riders approaching. "And the wind begins to howl."

I think it's great that Dylan chooses to not explain his songs, especially this one which is famously enigmatic. He puts it out there and if we choose to engage, it's almost like a labyrinth full of rabbit holes.

Jimi Hendrix's legendary recording intensified this apocalyptic atmosphere. The electric guitar  became a storm system more than an instrument. The swirling solos sound like civilization itself beginning to fracture. Dylan wrote the prophecy, Hendrix made it vivid.

Looking for the Watchman

What fascinates me is that Dylan's song never actually tells us what news the riders bring. Isaiah does: Babylon falls. Dylan, as I've noted, doesn't explain or interpret, which is a facet of his art.

 

Perhaps that's why All Along the Watchtower never grows old. Every generation imagines that the riders are approaching its horizon. Every generation feels that history is accelerating toward some undefined reckoning.

Isaiah reminds us that no empire is permanent. Conrad reminds us that darkness is not merely "out there" but within us. Apocalypse Now reminds us that technological sophistication does not guarantee moral progress. And Dylan reminds us that somewhere, on a lonely tower, someone is still watching the horizon listening for hoofbeats, waiting to announce what everyone else has been too distracted to see.

Related Links

All Along the Watchtower All Around the World... with Echoes

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2018/04/all-along-watchtower-all-around-world.html

All Along the Watchtower (2008)

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2008/08/all-along-watchtower.html

Dylan Often Sings About the Darkness He Sees: Trouble

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/03/dylan-often-sings-about-darkness-he.html

That Thin Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders Turns Readers into Blonde On Blonde Insiders

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/01/that-thin-wild-mercury-sound-by-daryl.html

Photo Caption: A Congolese man, Nsala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, cooked, and cannibalized by members of the Force Publique in 1904.

Looking for America: Paul Simon's Quiet Masterpiece of Longing

Inside the World Trade Center

Last week I listened to Paul Simon's "America" for the first time in a while. How interesting to hear it in conjunction with our nation's 250th anniversary. The song's deceptively simple narrative unfolds into profound reflection on the human condition.

In the 1960s Simon & Garfunkel recorded numerous songs that captured the angst of "my generation." Haunting songs like "Sounds of Silence" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" connected with young people living through that period of disruptions that included assassinations, race riots, burning cities, the Cold War and Vietnam. 

The song is essentially a short story. It begins with the playful, "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together / I've got some real estate here in my bag." The "real estate" is nothing more than what's in his suitcase or sleeping bag. They're young, broke, and full of possibility. After purchasing a pack of smokes and Mrs. Wagner pies they simply "walk off to look for America." Optimistic Sixties youth. 

In the second stanza we learn that the narrator's girl friend is Kathy as they board a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, something I myself have done twice in my life, both being personal turning points. Perhaps that's one reason this song has stayed with me. Certain songs attach themselves to the intersections of our lives and are never heard the same way again.

"Kathy", I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

Their banter on the bus is lighthearted. Who hasn't had these moments with someone you enjoyed being with, playing games with the faces.

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

Like children cloud-gazing, they entertain themselves by transforming ordinary life into adventure. After a while, though, the mood begins to change. I can imagine it as a movie soundtrack in which the first notes of a gloomier tune can be heard. 

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"

"We smoked the last one an hour ago"

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

 

I've been in all these scenes before, night settling in, moving through time looking at scenery and retreating into the thoughts in my head, and she retreating into her magazine. This line says so much with such brevity: "So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine..." No external drama here as the song shifts to a darker place.  

"Kathy, I'm lost", I said, though I knew she was sleeping

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They've all come to look for America

It's a heartbreaking confession. "Kathy, I'm lost. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

And perhaps the saddest part is how this kind of awareness, when it goes unshared, isolates us. We can sit beside someone we love, traveling the same road, and still find ourselves alone inside our own thoughts.

Simon avoids giving an answer as to why the narrator feels this way. Beneath the surface, he feels something he doesn't fully understand, an angst that is existential, not circumstantial. And the kicker, which is repeated at the end, is that this is something pervasive. While counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike he imagines that they are all in the same soup, lost but looking, yearning for something.

Thus, America is not a geographical destination but something much larger, an idea—a symbol of fulfillment, belonging, identity, perhaps even purpose itself. We're all searchers, seekers of a place where we belong, people striving to understand why we are here and what it means to be human.

Here we are, nearly sixty years later, with more technology, more entertainment, and more information than Simon's two travelers could have imagined. Yet the longing he captured has not disappeared.

Perhaps that's why America has endured. It's not really a song about highways or Greyhound buses or even the United States. It's about that quiet ache almost everyone experiences sooner or later—the feeling that there must be something more. Simon never tells us whether Kathy and her companion found what they were looking for. He simply reminds us that we are all fellow travelers, counting the cars on our own New Jersey Turnpikes, looking for a place to call home.