Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture:

After philosophy, much of my college study (1970-74) was dedicated to the fine arts. I immersed myself in painting and drawing, as well as continuous rummaging of the art books housed in the school library, which was almost the nearest building to  my dorm. Though captivated by much of what I saw, and at times sought to emulate, there was plenty that I wasn't really attracted to. I did, however, have a great love for the process of laying paint on canvas. I found the process of creation magical.

During that time I had a friend who periodically told me, "The artist is the vanguard of the revolution." His meaning was clear. Art was to be subservient to political ends. My friend Walter Urban created powerful works of this nature, a life-sized soldier on a cross (protesting Viet Nam), a family in the future taking a walk in the park wearing gas masks.

I myself saw many ends that art could serve. After the death of a best friend in high school art served a therapeutic function for me. There were dark things in my heart that words seemed inadequate to express. Beyond the grief there were other emotions and art was a means of working it out.

As one stepped back and surveyed the previous 100 years, one could see that art also served as a mirror of the culture. This is the theme tackled by Dutch author, professor and Christian scholar Hans Rookmaaker.

 

Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970) explores how the development of modern art reflects the spiritual and philosophical collapse of Western civilization. Writing as both an art historian and a Christian thinker, Rookmaaker argued that art is never created in a vacuum—it mirrors the worldview of its time. As Western society drifted from its biblical foundations, art, he says, became a visual record of man’s alienation, fragmentation, and loss of  meaning, themes taken up by mid-century existentialists like Camus and Sartre.

Rookmaaker traces the story from the harmony of classical and Renaissance art, where beauty and order reflected divine creation, through the Enlightenment’s turn toward human reason, and finally into the modern era, where faith in transcendence eroded. Artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, and Pollock emerge as prophets of a disintegrating world: their work cries out with spiritual yearning but lacks the hope once rooted in a Christian understanding of reality.

For Rookmaaker, the “death” of culture meant more than a shift in artistic style; it pointed to a deeper moral and spiritual drift. When God is no longer at the center, both art and life begin to lose their unity and meaning. Yet he did not fault the artists themselves. In their confusion and despair, he saw an honest reflection of the human condition. His response was not condemnation, but invitation—a call to recover beauty and, through it, a renewed sense of order and purpose.

[This seems to be a good place to insert a couple of comments by my eight-year-old grandson who visited New York's Museum of Modern Art this week. My daughter said, "He was so funny at the art museum with his sort of pithy, harsh reviews of the art: 'So, um ... How did this get so famous anyway?' and (no doubt responding to Pollock)  'Huh. It kinda looks like they just splattered paint on the paper.'"]

Ultimately, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture is not an argument against modernism but a plea for spiritual reawakening. The book invites readers to see that the renewal of art depends on the renewal of belief—that culture can be reborn only when it again recognizes its source in the Creator.

                                         "Red Star"  

Now that we are more than fifty years removed from Rookmaaker’s diagnosis, the story of art has not reversed itself so much as it has unfolded along the very trajectory he observed.

The boundaries are gone. The gatekeepers have loosened their grip. What once required training, patronage, or institutional approval is now open to anyone with a vision—and sometimes even to those without one. From installations and performance pieces to digital art and street murals, expression has multiplied in every direction. In this sense, there has indeed been a kind of liberation.

And yet, with that freedom has come a curious diffusion. Without a shared center—without a commonly held sense of the true, the good, and the beautiful—art often speaks in a thousand private languages. Some works are deeply personal, even therapeutic. Others are expressions of love. And then there is art that is simply functional, enriching us more than endless halls of empty walls.. And we still have the overtly political, echoing my friend’s conviction that the artist stands at the vanguard of revolution. Still others seem to revel in irony, fragmentation, or shock, as though meaning itself were suspect, though what shocks some seems to miss the mark because many of of oldsters have seen it all before and, yawn...

But beneath the variety, one thread persists: art continues to tell the truth about us. It reveals our longings, our confusions, our search for identity and transcendence. If the last century showed us the fracture, the past fifty years have shown us what it is to live within it.

Which leaves us, perhaps, where Rookmaaker left us—not with a neat conclusion, but an invitation.

If art is a mirror, then what we choose to create—and what we choose to behold—matters. The question is not only what art has become, but what it is for. And whether, in the midst of all this freedom, we might yet rediscover not only expression, but meaning… and perhaps even beauty in its myriad forms once again.

Related Links

The Painted Absurd

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/05/painted-absurd.html

A Century of Rebellion: Exploring 20th-Century Art Movements

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-century-of-rebellion-exploring-20th.html

Here's an Example of What Google's Gemini 2.5 AI Can Do

Over the past few years I have experimented a bt with various AI graphics programs and writing programs. I thought it my be fun to share some images showing what Google's Gemini AI can do (version 2.5 Flash)

Most of my pantings begin with a background. Backgrounds vary based on intentions. Some are very intentional while many are exploratory, in which I let the brushwork dictate the direction the painting goes. This is a medium sized canvas, 24"x 36". I began with these brushstrokes and colors, unsure where it would take me. A few years ago when I visited the studio of abstract painter Elizabeth Kuth, I saw how she would paint in layers, periodically rotating the canvas 180 degrees, bringing new elements into view, which she would highlight or bury beneath more visual elements. After a few rotations and layers I painted the following incomplete form of a man. Unsure of where to go with it, this has been siting on one of my easels since late last fall.

Last night I shared the above image with Gemini and 

asked that the AI to paint Vincent Van Gogh's face on my 

incomplete piece. Two minutes later I had the following,

which jumps fromthe canvas while retaining 

the original abstract aspects.

It's a collaboration.

This second sequence shows a common technique I had used for years. As anyone knows who knows me I am fascinated by faces and have been drawing them since  pre-school. 20 years ago or so, I began using Photoshop to break faces into contrasting patterms of light and dark.

I used to draw high contrast faces in high school. I loved the way the contrast would amplify the features while simultantously simplifying the elements. You can see how this works here on the cover of Meet the Beatles.

So I took my original painting and fed it to Gemini. [Gemini is a family of multimodal large language models (LLMs) developed by Google AI that can understand and operate across different types of information, including text, code, audio, image, and video.]  My prompt was: Paint this woman in the style of Rembrandt but in this color scheme. Have the face itself emulate that of Marlene Dietrich.

This was the result.

My next prompt was:

Change the background to a Dutch interior 

from the time period of Vermeer.

My final prompt was:

Change the background to be a starry night 

in the style of Van Gogh.

 Each image took less than two minutes to generate.

To try it yourself, go to https://gemini.google.com/

Press the little + symbol to upload an image and 

write an instruction prompt for Gemini to work on.

1966-07-29 Bob Dylan Hurt In Motorcycle Accident Near Woodstock, New York

ON THIS DAY
THIS STORY WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PUBLISHED YESTERDAY

There were three big stories in 1966. One of them was Bob Dylan's World Tour, a fast and furious even that contributed to his icon status.

The second was the release of Blonde On Blonde, the third in a trio of remarkable albums unlike anything ever produced beforehand, or even since. (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited being the two others in this trilogy.)

The third was his famous motorcycle crash, 55 years ago yesterday. 

Dylan was living in Woodstock at the time with his wife Sara. His album Blonde On Blonde was just beginning to ascend the charts. He went out for a ride on his Triumph motorcycle and what really happened we will never know. How badly he was hurt we don't know. How it happened, we don't really know. 

I say that only because some have concluded, after analyzing a lifetime of interviews, that anything Dylan says is suspect. 

Dylan in Woodstock. Even as a recluse,
the press could not stop talking about him. 

What we do know is that he stopped touring for a while. During this period of hibernation, the legend of Bob Dylan continuously grew. The recluse was talked about as much as when he were out in public.

I read somewhere that one of the reasons the Woodstock Festival of 1969 was held in Woodstock was because promoters were hoping Dylan could be induced to return to the stage. As it turns out, while Hippie Nation was descending on Woodstock, Dylan and family were packing their bags for the Isle of Wight Festival in the British Isles. 

Painting by the author.

* * * 

Other big events that have taken place on July 29 include the release of The Beatles' Help movie one year earlier, and the death of Vincent Van Gogh in 1890.

Related Links

Anniversary of the First Rock Double Album, Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde

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

Matthew Kluber @ Joesph Nease Gallery: SFX

Our June Downtown Duluth Art Crawl was once again rewarding, as noted here yesterday. Here are snapshots of the Matthew Kluber exhibition at Joseph Nease Gallery. Titled Friday, I'm In Love, Kluber's work is a continuation of his optical explorations and work with projectors.

It's interesting that the elevation of art as something significant is nothing new. Here are some comments from ancient philosophers, followed by a handful of more recent statements and observations about the arts.

It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize,
And to be swift is less than to be wise.
'Tis more by art, than force of numerous strokes.
--Homer

Ars longa, vita brevis est.
--Hippocrates

Painters and poets have equal license in regard to everything.
--Horace

More recent philosophers recognize the importance of art as well.

"I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream."
--Vincent Van Gogh

"A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean."
--George MacDonald 

"Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life… "
--Friedrich Nietzsche,

* * * * 

Any harm in inserting a selfie here?

Artists getting into it.... L to R: Kathryn Lenz, Kathy McTavish, Bruce Peckham,
Matthew Kluber and Dawn Kluber.

* * * *

Gallery manager Amanda Hunter shows Dale Lucas (Studio 101) some of the
work from previous shows.

* * * *

At the end of the day, art doesn't need to be explained. It needs to be experienced.

--L. E. Newman

Awed by Two Van Gogh Paintings at the National Gallery

Green Wheat Field, Auvers

For midwest artists there is probably nothing more fun and inspiring than to get a chance to visit some of the major galleries out east. Works that most of us only see in books can be found inches from your face. I first saw Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and upon standing before it I fully understood why Vermeer became Dali's inspiration and standard when it comes to painting.

This past Thursday I had an opportunity to visit, albeit briefly, the National Gallery once more. It was wonderful.

I quickly found my way to the Impressionists, the painters who opened the doors to modern art. There I found famous paintings by Matisse, Gauguin, Monet, Toulous Lautrec, and others of importance. Here I wish to share two pieces by Vincent Van Gogh.

What is it that gives Van Gogh's paintings such power? In part, it's undoubtedly because as you study the work you can feel the energy that was emanating from the man himself as he produced these pieces.

The first piece is here is Green Wheat Fields, Auvers.

Close up of cloud on the horizon.

During Van Gogh's lifetime he painted in the neighborhood of 1100 paintings over a ten year span. According the those who know better than I, this painting was likely painted in spring or early summer in 1890 after the artist had spent time voluntarily checked in at the asylum of Saint-Rémy, which is located near Avignon in Southern France.

The painting itself is 28 3/4 x 36 5/8 inches and was painted in Auvers-sur-Oise, in the countryside north of Paris. Most of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings featured objects from life or working people, peasants, potato farmers, etc. This piece was from a series of "pure landscapes" as well as some of the thatched roof houses and other structures in this town.

The left foreground.

According to his letters Van Gogh's return to northern France was something of a homecoming, "a peaceful restoration in which the vibrant, hot colors of the south were replaced by cool, gentle hues in green and blue. Van Gogh's energetic strokes describe the movement of grassy stalks in the breeze, their patterned undulations creating a woven integral form anchored at the right by a juncture point between field, road, and sky."*

If this were true, that he was more at peace with himself here at this time and feeling good about his recovery, then Steven Naifeh's suggestion that Van Gogh did not shoot himself may have more merit than is generally recognized.

As for the painting itself, several thoughts come to mind simultaneously. Chief of these is the thickness of the medium, the manner in which he applied the paints. Note, too, the movement of the clouds, those swirls of splendor. Another thought I had, however, upon noticing cracks in the aged surface, was how very difficult it must be for a forger to re-create this kind of work. Those guys have to be incredibly talented, or the authorities incredibly flawed.

And then, there's this powerful Van Gogh Self Portrait.

Van Gogh painted as many as 36 self-portraits. This one in the National Gallery is quite stunning. Was it vanity that provoked him into producing so many slef-portraits? No, I do not believe this. I think he was simply interested in studying how to paint faces, capture the panels of light and shadow that form, and perhaps capture the interior of the subject.

That, for what it's worth, is my speculation. Were I to read his letters I might find other reasons. He painted this one while at the asylum in St. Remy. According to the National Gallery he stated that this one captured his true character. Look at those eyes, and the expression, the play of light and the energy. This is a beautiful painting, and in person it's magnetic. Located in a room filled with great paintings it captures and holds.

Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853, seven years before the American Civil War. He died in 1890, 37 years later.

For additional background, read this NYTimes story, Van Gogh’s ‘Green Wheat Fields, Auvers’ Goes to Washington.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Get into it.

*National Gallery website.

Throwback Thursday: DAI Member Show Exceptional As Always

TONIGHT is the Closing Reception for the Duluth Art Institute Member Show and the opening for three new shows--Gezielt (Carla Hamilton), Rooted Expression (Elizabeth Kuth) and Emerging Photographers 2017. 5:00-7:00 p.m. at the Depot. Join us. 

Meantime, for Throwback Thursday here's a blog post about the opening reception for the 2010 Member show seven years ago. 

* * * *

It's an awesome thing to be a young artist in the vicinity of New York or San Francisco or other flourishing cultural centers, nourished by the variety of aesthetic experiences exploding there. Truth is, wherever you go across the land, by whatever ribbon of highway you travel, you will discover pockets of creative energy displayed. There are artists everywhere doing some very cool things.

Last week, the Duluth Art Institute Membership Show opened here, filling the Great Hall of the Depot with a wide array of works by local artists. During my lunch hour yesterday I had a chance to check it out, having missed the Opening Reception the previous week because I was in L.A. The show consists of a single entry by any member desirous to contribute, and one readily sees there are a lot of people making some very interesting things. I saw that someone else has been painting Dylan, and I saw one of Adam Swanson's bicycles.

“Even though the work is un-juried, this show is a testament to the incredible array and quality of visual art in the Arrowhead region,” said Samantha Gibb Roff, DAI executive director.

Here's the mission of the DAI, according to their website: The Duluth Art Institute enriches daily life with dynamic, innovative arts programming that upholds excellence and promotes active community participation. From talking with the executive director and others, I have come to understand that the last phrase is probably the DAI's most important feature, promoting community participation. Through a range of programs the organization nurtures an interest in the arts among young people, and helps closet artists expose their creative passions to wider audiences. The DAI also has workshops to help professionals find more venues and to develop their careers in the arts.

In short, it is a small but energetic non-profit organization that is dedicated full time to community enrichment and appreciation of the arts. At the very least, check out their show at The Depot. And when you have a few minutes, check out their website as well.

Art appreciation isn't just for stodgy old folks with money. It's for everyone.

PICTURED here are scenes from the current show in The Depot's Great Hall. My own entry, A Postmodern Man, is in the lower portion of the photo at the top right.

* * * *

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced." --Vincent Van Gogh

Rejecting the Myth of Artists As Madmen

"Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully." ~ Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo.

We remember him as somewhat of a madman. And to a certain extent his behavior warranted this. He cut off his ear, for love. A bit excessive, though it made for an interesting self-portrait afterwards. On another occasion he was determined to see the girl he loved but her parents would not let him in. To show them how intent he was on seeing her, he held the palm of his hand over the lamp flame and said he would not leave till he saw her. The smell of burnt flesh was not very convincing and ultimately he passed out from the pain.

This story reveals that he was indeed a man of intense passions, which poured out of him into his works, works now valued in the millions of dollars. During his lifetime he sold almost nothing, and died in a mental institution in his thirties by his own hand.

As for the source of his mental illness, psychiatrists by the score have studied his behavior and his work to identify its root causes, whether from schizophrenia or syphilis or some other variety of experience. What we know is the notion of "artist as eccentric" found a home in the pop psyche, a notion that treats artists as kooks and social misfits. Or rather, that to become a great artist you have to be a kook or misfit.

Dorothea Brande, in her outstanding volume Becoming A Writer (1934), assaults this notion head on. "The picture of the artist as a monster made up of one part vain child, one part suffering martyr and one part boulevardier is a legacy to us from the last century, and a remarkably embarrassing inheritance. There is an earlier and healthier idea of the artist than that, the idea of the genius as a man more versatile, more sympathetic, more studious than his fellows, more catholic in his tastes, less at the mercy of the ideas of the crowd."

OK, so Salvador Dali comes along and portrays this vain child-madman to the extreme and makes a fortune doing it. No comment. Brande went on to explain that there really is "an artist temperament" and it is not the same as the accounting mindset.* The book goes into detail about left brain/right brain thinking, a concept which became excessively popular in the 1980's and has filtered its way into business books, consulting, education and psychology. The notions have been with us a much longer time than many folks realize.

What Brande argues is that you do not have to be mentally unstable to be creative. In this instance she is speaking to young writers, but the same applies to creative souls in the visual arts or music as well.

Vincent Van Gogh once said, "A good picture is equivalent to a good deed." If you are in Duluth this month there are plenty of venues where you can see some good pictures... and probably there are plenty of places in your home town, too. Check out the Duluth Art Institute at the Depot. Or make your way to the Tweed up at UMD, especially if you've never been. Open your eyes and engage.

*The Myers-Briggs personality tests, developed in the 1920s and fine-tuned over time, demonstrate that indeed artists and accountants have differing personality traits that result in their engaging the world differently. It is not insanity that makes people creative.

The picture at the top of this page, titled Blue Van Gogh, is currently available as a giclee reproduction. $85 plus S&H for a limited time.

Throwback Thursday: Thoreau's Journal

“A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

I don't mind repeating the statement, "If a man is worth knowing at all he is worth knowing well." And one of the best ways to know people well is through their letters (Van Gogh) and journals, especially when they have been dead for some time. In fact, journals are possibly the most intimate way to know a person, because when you meet "in person" you seldom get to the deep things in one encounter. If at a party, art opening, a lecture or passing on the street you only exchange niceties, and perhaps encounter the spirit of the person. Even then it is the spirit of the person for only that moment in time.

A journal gives you years of intimate insights as you follow the flow of a person's thoughts as it weaves its way around circumstances, experiences, the most nebulous and the most mundane fragments of a life.

It's been my pleasure to read a number of writers' journals over the years. Thomas Mann and Andre Gide were both Nobel prize winning authors and one can glean much, much, much from a writer's journals and notebooks. If you're serious about a writing career I would recommend Gide's especially. All four volumes.

I myself have endless journal entries with which I stained dozens of notebooks over a period of thirty years. Unlike Gide, or Mann, or in this case Thoreau, the "good stuff" would probably amount to a very thin book in contrast with the volume recently edited and assembled by by Damion Searls. And Searls' version of Thoreau's Journal, while a hefty volume itself, is but one tenth of the original 7,000 pages of material.

To a journal writer like myself, this is quite an output, considering that his journal work lasted only 24 years. Then again, he didn't punch a time clock from eight to five like most of us.

Thoreau's life and world were not like ours. There was no Internet. And though the industrial age was flexing its muscles he stepped back from there, retreating to space where he could become acquainted with, even intimate with the natural world. But he was not a monastic. At Emerson's house in 1857 he met John Brown, who led the raid on Harper's Ferry, one of the powder keg events preceding the Civil War. This fateful meeting caused Thoreau to take up the abolitionist banner. And though Walden is his most well-known book, his book on civil disobedience and the obligation to follow one's conscience was probably his most influential.

As nearly all journal writers do from time to time, Thoreau made entries on the process of journal writing. “We should not endeavor coolly to analyze our thoughts, but, keeping the pen even and parallel with the current, make an accurate transcript of them. Impulse is, after all, the best linguist, and for his logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, it cannot fail to be most convincing.”

I've often considered journal writing a place to hone the skill of capturing nebulous and ethereal ideas and transforming them into concrete words. Or like a man with a butterfly net whose specialty is ultimately pinning these beautiful "finds" in boxes so others can appreciate them.

This excerpt from an Amazon.com reviewer of the book explains how this particular volume was assembled. "The primary objective was to have it read as a representative version of the full journal rather than as a collection of excerpts. The editor therefore tried to balance material among the seasons and months, including keeping one of each month relatively unabridged. Another goal was to make it readable, so there is very little in the way of notes. Entries were chosen by personal preference, not historical importance. As you read, the date appears on the left page and Thoreau's age on the right so you always know where you are both in time and in his life."

Here are some of the headings for various entries:
Composition
The Loss of a Tooth
Rivers
The Dream Valley
Drifting
Aeschylus

His fragment on poetry includes this beautiful thought. “No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself.”

Here's another excerpt, which I recently shared on my Facebook page. “Men see God in the ripple but not in the miles of still water. Of all the two-thousand miles that the St. Lawrence flows – pilgrims go only to Niagara.”

What's impressive, and surprising even, is how good the writing is. Like other writers, he used his journal to polish his craft. He appreciated the value of a good sentence, and the two million words he penned were selected, chosen, not simply thrown down to fill space in a notebook.

You can read what others have to say about this book at Amazon.com or go for the overview of his life at Wikipedia. Either way you'll be rewarded. Or you can download it to your Kindle or Nook and take it with you on your next trip.

As you embrace the day, take time to stop and smell the roses.

THIS BLOG POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2012

Is the Art Dealer Scene Out of Control? What Next?

On this day in 1890 Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh died from a gunshot wound.

When avant garde art dealer and collector Ambroise Vollard died, he purportedly owned 10,000 works of art by many of the leading painters of the previous half century, including Van Gogh, Cézanne, Renoir, Roualt, and the prolific Picasso. With Van Gogh's Vase with Sunflowers selling for more than $80 million, one wonders what Vollard's collection would be worth today.

Vollard purchased 27 canvases from Picasso in 1906 and continued a relationship with the effervescent artist till the dealer caught an early death in a freak accident on the road to his chateau in 1939.

The Second World War was just around the corner and I'm curious to know to what degree these works were successfully whisked out of the country before the Nazi occupation. I recall reading somewhere that after his death efforts were made to send the collection to North America and the first boat, with 500 pieces aboard, had to be routed to Canada.

No doubt Vollard knew the treasures he had. But I am totally convinced that he'd been apoplectic to learn the kinds of prices such pieces have been obtaining in the new art market.

In May, Forbes magazine had a story about this sea change in art valuations that has occurred since Warhol arrived on the scene. The article is something of a sketch in that without filling in all the details it shows us with a few deft lines how things changed. Leo Castelli, himself a collector of avant garde artists' works, was in the center of it -- the center now being New York. After the Nazis set their jackboots on Parisian soil, many of the most talented and intelligent artists and thinkers made a break from the Continent, and a new power center formed in the heart of Manhattan.

Counterfeit Warhol portrait of Ennyman

Caleb Melby's piece, titled Larry Gagosian, Andy Warhol And The Rise Of The Superdealer, shows how the Vollard eye combined with a new collector culture  has made an immense difference in valuations. What changed isn't the interest by some in collecting, but rather, "the explosion of the global nouveau riche, the proliferation of international fairs like Art Basel and, most critically, the fetishlike cult of contemporary art, a phenomenon that has metastasized over the last 50 years."

Interesting word: metastasized. Is Melby calling today's art collecting the new internet bubble? All three definitions of metastasize carry ominous overtones, the first being its association with cancer. The second  is simply, "to spread injuriously." And finally "to transform, especially into a dangerous form."

When Pablo Picasso died in 1973 Andy Warhol read, or heard (I don't have my fact-checker up yet this morning), that Picasso had produced 4,000 masterpieces. Warhol quipped, "I can produce 4,000 masterpieces in one day." Indeed, his screen print presses did crank out volumes. His "work alone accounts for roughly 20% of the value of the contemporary art market."

* * * *

My take is this. You like a piece of art? Don't buy it in the hopes it will increase in value. It's real value is in your relationship with it, your ability to appreciate and cherish it, not just for a few moments in a gallery, but on a wall in your home or office... for the rest of your life.

* * * *

For what it's worth, next week on August 5 I will be giving a talk on Picasso, Storytelling and The Unknown Masterpiece at the Tweed Museum of Art here in Duluth. Never been to the Tweed? They have a great collection. Check it out sometime.... You will be impressed.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it!

DAI Gallery Celebration Makes For Memorable Evening

Last night's Duluth Art Institute Gallery Celebration at the Depot revealed just how vibrant the Twin Ports art scene is becoming. The quantity and variety of visual works on display showed just how much inebriating fermentation has been going on here in the Northland. Tangier 57 was on hand to provide the perfect melodic accompaniment for this night dedicated to the arts.

The Duluth Membership Show seemed more extensive than ever, crawling over every available surface in the Depot's Great Hall. Inasmuch as one of the rules for displaying your work is that it has to have been created within the past year, it just seems remarkable how many patrons of the arts were exhibiting this year, from passionate beginners to lifelong professionals, and everything in between.

Many of the names are familiar from Tonja Sell, Gary Reed and Scott Murphy to Lee Englund and Tonya Borgeson. But there are countless new faces as well. For example, this was the first time Aaron Kloss has participated, contributing a painting titled Twilight Birch Triptich (right).

Many of the pieces show the artist's appreciation of our natural surroundings with themes like Lake Walk Snow, Winter's Blast, Woodland Art, North Lake Cairn, Lake Superior, Lester River Waterfall, Ode to a Flower and Over the River, Through the Woods.

Some pieces reference art history, like Teresa Kolar's 3 Birds with Kandinsky Circles, and Kris Nelson's Van Gogh's Chair Emerging, which I found particularly fun. (Fun is perhaps the wrong word when discussing the sensitive and anguished Van Gogh, but the piece itself was delightful to encounter.)

Upstairs there were additional exhibits. In the balcony area known as the John Steffl Gallery you could take in Steve Read's (un)natural reactions, a cross between minimalist sculpture and the expressions of nature, particular in relation to the North Shore. Kathy McTavish's Birdland filled the George Morrison Gallery with evocative sound and imagery.

To sum up, even if you missed the opening, the work will be on display through March 1, and you owe it to yourself to check it out. And for those who want to do more than simply see the pieces, you may wish to engage the artists themselves. Kathy McTavish will be leading an artist dialogue on February 2 at 5:30 p.m. and Steve Read will conduct the same on January 26, again at 5:30 p.m.

Whatever your taste, there's something for everyone. Maybe you look at something and don't "get it" but then you walk around a corner and it's an "Aha"... Art can do that to you. Sometimes it can even change your life.


CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

Van Gogh Revisited: Was It Suicide or Was It Murder?

When I was young my friend's dad worked at a factory that pressed vinyl into records. One weekend we visited the place and took a tour. I saw 55 gallon barrels of rejects and in one waste bin saw a Rolling Stones 45 rpm that had been tossed because label had a misprint on it. (Quality Control)

When we left I brought with me an unlabelled album that turned out to be all instrumental. I never learned who made the music but my younger brother came up with a title for the first song, "Was It Suicide or Was It Murder."

This memory came to mind when I was reading an article in this week's Time magazine titled The Stranger. A new look at van Gogh's life -- and death. It was a review of the latest book on the life of Vincent Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. According to reviewer Richard Lacayo this is the definitive bio on the famous artist. It is not only a compelling read, it is also extremely well researched and includes a new interpretation of the artist's death. Or rather, Naifeh puts forward the proposition that Van Gogh may not have died by his own hand, that our picture of the despondent painter shooting himself out in a field while painting is wrong.

As you read the account of his death it's easy to see how a good researcher might begin to ask questions. Unfortunately, the events are more than a hundred years old and we can no longer go interrogate the parties involved.

The notion that he died by suicide has been easily believed because he was indeed a troubled man. Not that many people I know cut off their own ear after an argument, or at any other time for that matter.

You have to be a Time subscriber to read Richard Lacayo's review but you can read a small collection of segments from other reviews here, or if you have a Kindle you may download the first segment of the book itself and taste for yourself. The book is available in hardback, paperback and eBook formats from Amazon.com.

For still more background on this important artist, here's a link to my previous essay written when the collected letters of Van Gogh had been made available online to the public.

Very Cool Van Gogh Slide Show

Today is "Self Portrait Day" with two of my own self-portraits here and a third on my Many Faces of Ennyman blog. But the important link is the one at the end of this blog entry, to a very cool Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait Slide Show.

Last fall I wrote about a new book that had compiled all the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. It was a monumental work. Even more monumental, however, is the online version of this epic effort in which you can do searches for words and themes, find exactly how many time Mr. Van Gogh wrote about the pain in his head or his heartache for the suffering of his friends. At the end of that blog entry I had a link to a Wikipedia page that had compiled in one place a lifetime of Van Gogh self-portraits. My hope was that the faces would be studied, because each really does tell a story.

Within the past two weeks I came across such a cool find on someone's blog that I have been wanting to share it. It is a slide show that takes these portraits and by means of modern technology shows the troubled artists transformations from one era to the next. I found it quite fascinating, and I thought you might enjoy it as much as I. It's less than a minute in length. Check it out.

http://denverartsygal.blogspot.com/2009/06/various-van-gogh-paintings.html

And have a great day.

Top Right: Self portrait as Dark Knight

Left: Self portrait, Mexico 1981

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

"If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well." ~Alexander Smith

A book that has garnered a fair share of buzz this year is the six volume Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luitjen and Nienke Bakker. It is a work into which a team of scholars invested fifteen years of their lives to produce.

This is not the first attempt to translate the world's most famous impressionist's letters. An earlier English translation appeared in 1952. This one, however, includes the accompanying drawings which appear on many of the sheafs. And to the delight of art lovers, the results are accessible online.

David Ng of the L.A. Times introduces his readers to this find in a Nov. 3 story: "File this under impossibly cool art websites. In what is perhaps the first project of its kind, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has put English-language translations of 902 of Vincent van Gogh's personal letters on line."

I myself got turned on to this site via an article in the current Economist.

THE story of Vincent van Gogh’s life is more heartbreaking, and heart-lifting, than the romantic myth that has enshrouded him for decades. It is told, in his own words and works, in the six-volume “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters”. His 819 surviving letters (and the 83 addressed to him) form the core.

The site itself enables you to dig with a variety of tools. For example, you can go chronological and read the letters by periods of his life, from the Hague to London to Paris etc. Or you can read the letters by whom he corresponded with, from brother Theo to Emile Bernard to Betsy Tersteeg to Paul Gaugin. If preferred, read the letters by place... and finally, see the letters themselves with sketches.

The site has keyword search capabilities as well, so you can look for themes. But it is not a perfect search tool yet. For example, I typed in the word "pain" and within seconds I was delivered links to 88 letters where he mentions pain, which is more than 10% of his correspondence. But when I examined the first letter, it had highlighted the first four letters of the word paint or painter. In other words, 10% of his letters mention painting. No surprise there. These were not about pain.

Not to let go of it, I did a search for the word suffering. And this time there are 94 letters found, even more than in the search for pain. When you hold your cursor over the link, a little box opens and extracts the sentence in which the word that you have searched for appears. A quick review of ten of these showed that he was often conveying to brother or friend or relative the sufferings of others. Examples, from letters to brother Theo:

...him as a worker with signs of sorrow and suffering and fatigue on his face, without form or glory...

...finally be an end to that long and terrible suffering. Goodbye Theo, write soon, old boy, if you...

Oh, how much sadness and sorrow and suffering there is in the world, both in the open...

...and what shall I say? It was a long and terrible suffering that was his lot.

...and sensitivity in her; one can see that suffering and going through hard times have refined her...

But sometimes it is of himself he speaks:

...it’s the shortest hours in which one dies of suffering...I’m broken, I can’t go on; it doesn’t...

...feel cowardly in the face of anguish and suffering – more cowardly than is justified, and it’s...
...I have, I think of so many other artists suffering mentally, and I tell myself that this doesn’t...
...I am not indifferent, and in the very suffering religious thoughts sometimes console me a great...

The website -- vangoghletters.org -- is a treasure... and it's free.

If reading letters is not your thing, but you still want a portrait of the artist, he did many, possibly more than thirty, and every one is wonderfully evocative. You can find a very nice collection of Van Gogh self portraits here on Wikipedia. Each one is worth further study and every picture tells a story.

Portrait of Van Gogh at top is from the Whitney collection.

"Creativity takes courage." ~Matisse

One of the hardest things in writing is a blank piece of paper. Much has been written about it, as the mind races around trying to decide what to put down as the all important first sentence.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he dislikes seeing a blank canvas, and when he sees one he feels obligated to smear paint on it. And I know exactly what he means.

In painting, before you can really do the work you have to do the prep. Once you get the surface ready (if canvas, with gesso) you still want to paint a neutral undercoat of some kind. At least, this is one approach that is common. It certainly doesn't apply if you are pouring stain onto a canvas like Louis Morris, but in traditional painting, that background undercoat helps set the tone.

So, I am staring at a box here where I am to write today's blog entry and I don't know where to go with it. Should I jump outside the box and write a string of absurd sentences about colons and dashboards or steering columns and carcinoma? Or do we follow this train we're on to some kind of logical conclusions?

I just deleted one direction this could have gone. Let's head southeast for a moment. No, wait, maybe west. Oh, never mind.

So, I am having an art opening this week on Tuesday evening. One of the pieces is a Tribute to Duchamp who said, "I am interested in ideas, not merely visual products." Thus was born the concept of conceptual art. The Tribute piece is an item I found at a garage sale for a buck, which if I were famous might garner ten thousand. The current price is, "To Highest Bidder."

The irony is that young people, and maybe even older ones, have never heard of Duchamp, or the urinal on display in a Philadelphia gallery (found art). They do not know Magritte, Matisse or any of the most prominent artists who initially steered the direction of 20th century art away from representationalism.

Another irony: I began my college studies moving in the direction of philosophy (ideas) but found art more appealing because you ended up with a visual product. So Duchamp pushed art in a direction, but pure idea as an end has to return to earth in some form... whether it be paintings or perhaps in acts of service to one's neighbors, community, etc.

Think about it. Then express yourself.