This Day in Art History (Death of Benvenuto Cellini, Celebrated, Scandalous Renaissance Man)

Feb. 13, 1571— Benvenuto Cellini, an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, and musician who chronicled his multiple creative interests and tumultuous escapades in a frank and celebrated autobiography, died at age 70 of pleurisy in his native Florence.

“Renaissance man” has come to be shorthand for a prodigiously talented individual who engages in multiple pursuits. But, aside from Michelangelo, who wrote commendable poetry, and Giorgio Vasari, a pioneering biographer, no other great craftsman of the period besides Cellini left a literary record that could be mentioned in the same breath as his visual one.

Unlike Michelangelo (who wrote verses on an unnamed love) and Vasari (who focused on other artists), Cellini was a born raconteur, holding forth in characteristic hot-tempered, boastful, witty, and loyal fashion on himself and, to a lesser extent, his views on the theory of art. He vented about his adventures voluminously, over nearly a decade, in his La Vita di Benvenuto di maestro Giovanni Cellini (“The Life of Benvenuto Cellini”)—and still hadn’t completed the project at his death, as he interspersed this with more than one hundred poems, two treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture, and several discourses on art.

Ironically, while defending his visual primacy among his peers (at a time when his contentious personality had sidelined him from new commissions), Cellini furnished a strong counterargument: that his real talent lay with the written word, rather than with his products as a goldsmith and sculptor.

In one chapter of his autobiography, Cellini catalogues his meticulous preparation for his bronze “Perseus” sculpture, followed by a description of how he save his creation from destruction by fire and was congratulated by his assistants for helping them to have “learned and seen things done which other masters judged impossible.”  

But the artist can’t leave it at that: he must also write how the two men he suspected of trying to sabotage his latest masterwork said “was no man, but of a certainty some powerful devil, since I had accomplished what no craft of the art could do; indeed they did not believe a mere ordinary fiend could work such miracles as I in other ways had shown.”

At this late stage of the Renaissance, readers are beholding a new kind of artistic consciousness: a man unapologetically basking in his personal glory. Cellini has presented not just an advertisement for himself in his own time, but for his undying fame in the eyes of posterity.

His autobiography offers up a new persona: a creator passionately committed to his art, cynical in his fashion (“When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs,” he recalled the wife of a rich Roman banker telling him), and defiant of conventional morality. He even surpassed Caravaggio, whose aggressiveness (hitting waiters, slandering rivals) climaxed in flight from Rome for killing a man in a street fight. Cellini openly admitted to three killings: of his brother’s murderer, a rival goldsmith, and an innkeeper. Only the protection of Popes Clement VII and Paul III saved him from punishment.

(There were some limits to Cellini’s alarming candor: contemporary mores meant that he could cop to vainglory and murder, but not to bisexuality, even though several indictments and even convictions for sodomy were path of his rap sheet in both Italy and France.)

Other Renaissance artists have inspired novels and/or films (Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, Caravaggio in Derek Jarman’s 1986 movie named for the painter). But how many such figures have become the subject of operas?

Yet Cellini has—not once, but twice, in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Ascanio and Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. The dramatic, even over-the-top, elements of the artist’s personality lend themselves to the genre. Nevertheless, it would have disappointed the ego-driven Florentine that neither opera has entered the canon of musical theater (though the overture of Berlioz’s work is frequently performed in concert halls by orchestras, as seen in this YouTube clip).

For a fascinating overview of Cellini’s life, see Harold Sack’s November 2019 post from the blog SciHi (i.e., “Science, Technology and Art in History”).

(The self-portrait of Cellini in the image accompanying my post is a sketch now held in the Royal Library in Turin, believed to have been drawn sometime between 1540 and 1543.)

This Day in Art History (N. C. Wyeth, Painting Patriarch, Dies in Tragic Train Accident)

Oct. 19, 1945—Forty-three years to the day that the creative, adult part of his life began when he stepped off a train in the Brandywine River Valley, painter and illustrator N. C. Wyeth died when a train collided with his car a few miles from his home and studio in Chadds Ford, PA.

A powerful, sometimes overwhelming influence in his family, the 63-year-old Newell Convers Wyeth left his survivors—a wife and five grown children—devastated by the loss of him and the grandson/namesake in the car with him. 

For years, they—and local residents who had grown used to his longtime presence—wondered to what extent the accident represented a culmination of his last few years of mounting melancholy and self-doubt over an inability to be taken seriously as a producer of fine paintings rather than of popular commercial art.

Above all, several questions lingered afterward about the passing of this patriarch with three children and a grandson who followed him into the painting trade:

*Why did he take his grandson out of the car, point to two men husking corn in the morning light, and tell him, within earshot of onlookers: “Newell, you won’t see this again—remember this”?

*Had he been conducting an affair with daughter-in-law Caroline? If so, was a child conceived from that relationship, as local rumor had it?

*When Wyeth came to the railroad tracks, had he been blinded by the morning light, suffered a heart attack—or intentionally committed suicide?

Growing up in the 1960s. I never imagined that the artist behind the Scribner illustrated classics I was devouring (Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Jules Verne) could have been involved in an incident easily a match for the mystery and drama I was reading. 

Nor could I imagine in the mid-1980s, when I read the breathless accounts of the secret cache of nude “Helga” paintings by son Andrew, that the whiff of scandal had clung not only to him but to his father and even grandmother?

The mystery surrounding Wyeth’s death is ironic, considering that so many other aspects of his life were so extensively documented. Not only is his Chadds Ford studio intact, but he left a trove of correspondence culled by Andrew’s wife Betsy and published as The Wyeths:The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945—a thumping volume of more than 800 pages.

Figuring out what led to the accident is difficult, as the following needs to be weighed:

*Wyeth, when he pointed out the cornhuskers to his grandson, may have been urging him to absorb the physical elements of every experience—something he constantly urged his sons to do—or he may have been voicing his last desperate thoughts;

*Wyeth may well have been having an affair with Caroline, but a pregnancy was less likely, concluded David Michaelis in his 1998 biography of the painter—and, in any case, a child from that liaison would not necessarily have led Wyeth to take his own life;

*Wyeth may well have had a heart attack, since, with more than 300 pounds on his 6-ft., 1-in. frame, he had become badly overweight; but, on the other hand, the additional pounds may also have contributed to a helplessness that preceded suicide.

Moreover, suicide would not have been out of character for a man traumatized by a mother who was overprotective and chronically depressed. When not boosting his artistic inclinations, Hattie Wyeth manipulated him into feelings of guilt, and N.C. adopted the same behavior with his own children—instilling his artistic precepts on the one hand while building more space for his children on his property even after they married so he could control their destinies into adulthood.

So far, what I have written explains why Wyeth’s life was tragic. But we remember him because, despite his fears about its ultimate merit, his work was indeed distinguished.

For starters, the lucrative commissions that Wyeth disparaged (“You’ll grow out of that,” he responded when Betsy told him how much he admired them)—his illustrations for Scribers—enriched the texts on which he worked, adding elements not always readily apparent from the written word. For instance, Robert Louis Stevenson described Jim Hawkins’ departure from home tersely in Treasure Island. But Wyeth’s illustration of the scene depicts Mrs. Hawkins looking away in tears, while Jim walking into the foreground with a blank expression that scarcely conceals his anxiety for the future.

This and other works benefit from a realism so powerful that, for example, Wyeth kept costumes, cutlasses, and flintlocks in his studio for reference and inspiration. The works show up to even better advantage on the walls of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, as the book illustrations are at heart smaller reproductions of larger paintings.

Like his teacher, Norman Pyle, and Norman Rockwell, Wyeth was a master of narrative art whose work, unlike that of so many contemporaries, endures more than a century after their original creation. His versatility extends beyond the printed page, as he also created murals on display in the Federal Reserve Bank, Boston, Hotel Roosevelt and Franklin Savings Bank, both in New York City, as well as magazine advertisements and calendars.

It may take a while, but in time Wyeth may also be remembered for his late-career paintings as well, and not just indirectly, as the father of Andrew and grandfather of Jamie Wyeth.

This Day in Art History (Benjamin Franklin Waggishly Laments Bald Eagle as Symbol)

Jan. 26, 1784—Watching the rise of an American fraternal military organization with a mixture of trepidation and mockery from his diplomatic posting in France, Benjamin Franklin put his thoughts to paper about the bird symbol that the group chose for itself, inadvertently giving birth to an amusing story that has become an urban myth.

If you’re like me, you tried to catch the musical 1776 whenever it came on TV when you were growing up. If you weren’t lucky enough to see the show about the creation of the Declaration of Independence onstage, then, like me, you bought the soundtrack album and played it constantly. You might, in that case, recall one especially spirited scene created by playwright Peter Stone and lyricist-composer Sherman Edwards. 

In “The Egg,” Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as they contemplate “playing midwives to an egg” (i.e., “the birth of a new nation,’ Franklin translates), hash out their differences over the bird to be chosen as the symbol of America. Jefferson, the junior and quietest member of the trio, is quickly drowned out when he suggests the dove. In a microcosm of the main action of the musical, the loudly insistent Adams carries the day for the eagle, “a majestic bird,” despite its rather fierce qualities.

But in the 50 years since the musical premiered on Broadway, audiences have chortled over Franklin’s defense of the turkey. Only one problem: Perhaps more than any other element in the show (even more than its depiction of the solemn Richard Henry Lee as a grinning Southern idiot), it’s a distortion of actual events and motives. 

One element in this comes from the thinnest of historical justifications: On the same day that the resolution for American independence passed in the Continental Congress, Franklin, Adams and Jefferson were commissioned by the other delegates to design a seal for the new nation, and, as they did onstage, each had his own ideas for it. But none involved a bird of any kind. 

The proposal they submitted in August 1776 went nowhere, as did others submitted by a second and third committee over the next six years. (Hmmm…nothing happening among our nation’s lawmakers. Stop me if this sounds familiar!) 

In 1782, Charles Thomson, the longtime secretary of the Congress, submitted a proposal that combined elements of the three committees’ work. But the bald eagle we know was not the handiwork of Franklin, Adams and Jefferson.

A 1962 New Yorker cover illustration by Anatole Kovarsky substituted a turkey for the bald eagle in the Great Seal. That planted one seed for the stage actions that took place by the end of the decade.

The basic rationale (though not the exact verbiage) used by Franklin in the play derives from his letter to daughter Sarah Bache, written 235 years ago today. When you read the first half of that explanation, it will certainly remind you of the scientist-politician’s denunciation of the eagle in the musical:

“Others object to the Bald Eagle, as looking too much like a Dindon, or Turkey. For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: the little king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the king birds from our country…”

Okay, stop right there! What’s this “Cincinnati” stuff?

With the American Revolution winding down, Henry Knox, Washington’s Chief of Artillery, helped found The Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal organization composed of veterans of the Continental Army. While one of the group’s aims—assisting former soldiers who had fallen on hard times—was charitable, another provision—heredity membership, to be passed down to descendants of veterans—struck observers such as Adams and Jefferson to be a portent for nobility and, therefore, an undermining of the republic in its crib.

But irony was Franklin’s dominant spirit, so rather than take on the group itself, he decided to mock its seal. With tongue in cheek, he went after all the reasons why the bird in the seal, the bald eagle, was so wrong for a group of veterans: notably, that it was cowardly. Why couldn’t the Cincinnati have tried a different bird?

“[I]n truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours, the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the ninth. He is besides, (though a little vain and silly tis true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”

This letter to his daughter was never sent: a Frenchman to whom Franklin showed it persuaded the 78-year-old diplomat to avoid involvement in another controversy. In fact, its contents would not be revealed until 1817, another 27 years after his death. In time, the dust-up over the Society of the Cincinnati faded, too. And there matters stood, for nearly another century and a half, until creative types, hoping to have some fun with our nation’s history, took Dr. Franklin literally.

For more details on this whole thing, I suggest that you read this post by Emily Sneff from the Declaration Resources Project blog, run by Harvard University.

This Day in Art History (Birth of Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic Rebel)

Apr. 26, 1798— Eugène Delacroix, a French Romantic painter who moved his country in a different artistic direction through works abounding in exotic, extravagant color, was born Charenton (Saint-Maurice), Val de Marne departement, in the Ile de France region near Paris. 

Instability marked the painter’s youth and early manhood. In short order, France experienced Napoleon Bonaparte, at his zenith, in defeat and exile; the overthrow of the revived Bourbon monarchy; and the acquisitive desires of a bourgeoisie unleashed after the French Revolution and a quarter-century of war with the rest of Europe. 

The fortunes of his family mirrored the national unrest. It was widely believed that his father, Charles Delacroix, was infertile, and that his real male parent was Talleyrand, successor to Charles as minister of foreign affairs. With his debt-ridden father dying when Eugene was seven, his mother following nine years later, and Eugene himself suffering from various medical conditions that would plague him for years, it was no wonder that the boy grew up solitary and intense.

Make that solitary, intense and independent. Though excelling in his studies of the classics and drawing at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, he left to pursue painting. A short stint with the influential painter Pierre-Narcisse Guerin likewise left little impression.

Widespread notice—bur hardly the approval of the French artistic establishment—came to him in his twenties with two paintings that caused scandals: The Massacre at Chios (1824), which alluded to the repressive Bourbon restoration, and The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which depicted a decadent Assyrian king ordering the murder of his servants, concubines and animals. 

Anti-monarchical sentiment also informed what might be Delacroix’s most famous painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which the Goddess of Liberty, triumphantly holding aloft France’s national flag, leads a vanguard of French citizens moving forward, even as soldiers lying dead in the foreground demonstrate the tumult and cost of freedom. 

Before long, an alternative source of non-French, non-classical subject matter began to appeal to Delacroix. Unlike prior French artists, who traveled to Italy for their models, he went in another direction, toward Morocco, where he found an atmosphere that spurred his interest in sensual environments. (He met with less success in convincing women of this region to pose for him, because of traditional Moslem strictures mandating that women be covered.)

A contemporary of Honore de Balzac, the painter gave the novelist through his work an example of how to use color in the short novel La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes) that formed the final portion of The History of the Thirteen. Yet, while Balzac acknowledged the debt by dedicating the novella to him, Delacroix did not reciprocate the affection, at times scathingly criticizing him.

“I dislike rational painting,” Delacroix once observed—and, indeed, intense emotion burst beyond the frames of his paintings. It wasn’t only in his sensational, even melodramatic, subject matter (e.g., massacres), but also in the bold brush strokes that anticipated Van Gogh and Gaugain.

Because much of  Delacroix’s work—particularly in the latter part of his career—consisted of public art, a visit to France is still the best way to view much of his work. But New Yorkers will soon get to experience firsthand a large portion of it, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts an exhibit of 180 of his works that had been first on display at the Musee du Louvre. The exhibit will run at the Met from September 17, 2018 to January 6, 2019. 

There, we should understand anew what Delacroix meant by “The great artist roams his own domain, and there he offers you a feast to his own taste.”

(The image accompanying this post is Delacroix's self-portrait, painted in 1837.)

This Day in Art History (Birth of Andrew Wyeth, Brandywine Painting Prince)

July 12, 1917—Andrew Wyeth, a member of an artistic dynasty who received popular attention for his own distinctive portraits and rural landscapes drawn from the Brandywine River Valley and Maine, was born in Chadds Ford, Penn.

Andrew’s father, N.C. Wyeth, became famous for his vivid illustrations of adventure tales by Stevenson, Defoe, Cooper and Verne. His son, Jamie Wyeth, created more abstract work in his early years, though one venture into the realistic style, a portrait of President John F. Kennedy, gained much notice for him while the artist was still only a teenager, and served notice of the eventual mode he would adopt. Even two of Andrew’s sisters, Henriette and Carolyn, became artists, at a time when that was more unusual than it is now.

For people who don’t follow art closely, Andrew may be best known for reasons associated more with scandal than with achievement. I’m speaking of his “Helga” paintings, a series of renderings (frequently nudes) of neighbor Helga Testorf that were created in secret, with not even Andrew’s wife-business manager Betsy aware of them for a long time. (Or so the story went. See my prior post on the background of this controversy.)

In this and other instances, Andrew’s imagination fed on unconventional sources. One of these, I learned from a visit to his studio, was film. At age eight, he became fascinated by director King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and would go on to see the antiwar silent masterpiece 200 times. He would even consider it his strongest single visual influence.

Helga was not the only neighbor that Wyeth caught on canvass. The paraplegic Christina Olson, who lived on a Maine farm near Wyeth, became the subject of Christina's World (1948, pictured), which shows her crawling in a field below her house. Created with egg tempera and, with the model’s face away from the viewer’s gaze, it is suffused with mystery and has become one of the central holdings of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

For years, Wyeth was hardly a darling of critics. They regarded his realistic style as unoriginal and out of step with the avant-garde movement; aside from the “Helga” cache of paintings, they saw little of the notorious or transgressive in his work; and those of a bohemian bent regarded Andrew's known votes for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan appalling.

More recently, however, the critical pendulum has swung toward Wyeth, wrote Daniel Grant in a Huffington Post piece in March. The qualities that the public perceived—meticulous attention to detail, compositional balance, and subdued tones that make the viewer curious about this world—have finally become more apparent to the critical establishment.

Above all, the artist’s intense identification with his subjects can no longer be derided as merely sentimental. “Know it spiritually,” N.C. advised his son on how to approach a subject. “Be a part of it.”

Andrew learned his lesson well.

This Day in Art History (Armory Show Delivers Shock of the New)

Feb. 13, 1913— Avant-garde paintings and sculptures, from Europe as well as on native shores, first hit the United States with maximum impact in an exhibition mounted at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan.

Many cultural critics believe that the Armory show did for art what Igor Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring and James Joyce’s Ulysses did for literature: inaugurate an age of modernism that might have scandalized many, but which could not be ignored.

It is a bit hard, at the distance of a century—and at the end of an absolute revolution in American art—to convey the impact of the exhibition, formally called the “International Exhibition of Modern Art.” The streets around the building, on Lexington Avenue and 25th Street, were packed with double-parked cars, and porters used megaphones in an attempt to tame the crowds.

Inside, onlookers found an equally unusual setting: 300 artists with 1,600 works represented, all mounted in an immense space that dispensed with the normal walls of museums or galleries in favor of screens covered in fireproof burlap, with each of the resulting 18 rooms decorated with pine branches and live potted trees.

The European part of the show, featuring painters and sculptors such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Renoir, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, and Marcel Duchamp, attracted the most notoriety, even though the American rooms outnumbered those of the major European contributors (France, Britain, Ireland, and Germany) by almost three to one. Coming in for the lion’s share of attention were the foreigners, often labeled “Cubist” even if their work had no relationship to that art form. In particular, Gallery 1, where many of the foreigners’ works were displayed, became a special source of jibes by both critics and the great mass of viewers.

Not everyone was enamored by what they saw. Theodore Roosevelt walked through the show on March 4, giving the former President an excuse for not attending the inauguration ceremony of the man who defeated his attempt at a third term, Woodrow Wilson. As it happened, TR—far better versed in politics, history and literature than in art—had as little use for much in the exhibition as he did for the Democratic candidate for the Oval Office.

Some works—including a walking nude, as well as an explicitly lesbian depiction by Jules Pascin—so affronted his Victorian sensibilities that he simply avoided the room. In his review of the exhibition the following month in the publication Outlook, he helped to popularize a phrase that has come to be used in politics perhaps even more than in popular culture: the “lunatic fringe.”

Roosevelt’s notion of proper sexuality, not to mention damaged vision (courtesy of a boxing match in the White House that left him blind in his right eye), did not make him an ideal observer of the Armory Show. But one group of artists did appeal to him. They were not only American and little influenced by Continental artistic norms, but their social realism and use of gritty urban settings struck a chord in this politician who had accompanied journalist-photographer Jacob Riis in documenting (and staring unflinchingly at) dire slum conditions. This group of artists had become known as “The Eight” for their collective participation in another show five years before. But they are also known to history by another nickname, one that, like the Impressionists and the Cubists, was originally meant to be pejorative. This was the “Ashcan School.”

The informal leader of this octet (consisting of Arthur Davies, Robert Henri, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan and Everett Shinn) was Robert Henri, who had taught four of them. They took to heart his advice, “Forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you in life.” They captured the scene as it was lived in alleys, tenements, even taverns. It was a far cry from the society portraits of John Singer Sargent (whose portrait of T.R. was virtually the first thing seen by Wilson after the latter entered the White House), but they now found a public more receptive to their work.

The group was instrumental in the formation of the new professional coalition, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which organized the Armory Show. The exhibition, after causing a stir in New York, did so again when it moved on to Chicago and Boston.

 

In time, the armory show became such a locus of modernity that some people made erroneous claims of association with it. One of these was William Carlos Williams, who wrote in his autobiography that he had attended the event. In actuality, biographer Herbert Leibowitz has shown, the poet, writing nearly 40 years after the fact, had confused it with another modernist exhibition. But such had become its totemic power that the imagination had supplied the details that the memory couldn’t.