More on the Anderson Collection,Pollock’s Lucifer, and art pilgrimages

A couple of years ago a friend asked me: Why do you keep making all these art pilgrimages? It’s an interesting (and befuddling) experience being a person. We spend life looking outward through small and tricky orifices. We probably see ourselves the least clearly of all things. I didn’t know I made art pilgrimages. I’m still thinking about that question. But the fact someone thought I did became the final inspiration to begin blogging on the subject.

Museum Catalog

When we visited the new Anderson Collection at Stanford University a few weeks ago, my husband, Jim, bought the collection catalog, A Family Affair, as my birthday gift. Last week I wrote about the experience of viewing Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer, and remembering how I felt as a child growing up in the fearful and threatening Cold War United States. I’m including a link a great LA TImes article about the collection and Lucifer. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-anderson-collection-review-20140917-column.html#page=1

This morning, reading the introductory essay in my museum catalog, I got all weepy and teary-eyed over the description of the Anderson Family, and the enrichment they’ve experienced accumulating, enjoying, and endowing their collection. I still can’t answer my friend’s original question about my so-called pilgrimages, but (to quote Greg Kinnear in You’ve Got Mail), There is something…

Pollock’s Lucifer From The Anderson Collection at Stanford

Russell, my son, has long admired the work of Jackson Pollock. I’ve been slow to appreciate non-representational painting, and Pollock’s work, on my cursory evaluation, has always looked like so much paint spilled on canvas in a manner that anyone could copy.

Lucifer
Jackson Pollock

I changed my mind last month when I saw Pollock’s painting, Lucifer, on display at the new Anderson Collection at Stanford University.  https://anderson.stanford.edu/visit/

The following artist quote accompanied the painting:

“It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique.…”
* source, famous American people life quotes: interview by William Wright, Summer 1950 (meant for broadcasting, but never used, fh); as quoted in ”Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 17.

Returning to my original subject, “What Words Can/Not” from last January, it’s possible I wouldn’t have paused in front of Lucifer long enough to think about the painting or its impact, had the accompanying quotation not captured my attention and memory.

Sometime not many years after Pollock expressed the quoted view, my little brother and I accompanied our mother to her job as a civil defense volunteer. We lived in a small town near the Pacific Ocean. Leonard and I savored our large Butterfinger candy bars, while our mother watched the radar screen for incoming Russian bombers. So, I am still in favor of multi-media communication, especially for someone like myself who might overlook interesting and meaningful concepts and material if, like the donkey, I am left on my own to understand any kind of subtlety.

In the post World War II, aviation, atom bomb, and advanced communication world, as I remember it, the world was smaller than it had ever been before. Fear was the giant monster, grown into a new and universal body. Pollock expressed this view in that 1950 interview. His painting, Lucifer, and the world he was expressing melted into each other. I’ve been caught.

Shapes and Mysteries, More on Georgia O’Keeffe

Red Canna, 1924 by Georgia O’Keeffe

With Red Canna, Georgia O’keeffe (sic.) continued the tendency to distill abstract patterns from natural sources, but now vastly enlarging the fragment of the blossom to fill the thirty-six-inch canvas. As the shapes swell and taper across the plane, they pulse with color and energy, suggesting the artist’s continuing fascination with themes of natural vitality, translated to the microcosm of the blossom.

Despite the apparent dissimilarity in subject, the floral enlargements provided and (sic.) analogue to the forces of nature O’Keeffe had previously examined and are thematically related to her abstractions, her Texas skycaps, and her Lake George panoramas.

http://www.georgiaokeeffe.net/red-canna.jsp

You don’t have to know much about painters or painting to know that Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings have enjoyed a long history of Freudian associations. When I studied O’Keeffe’s work at Hamline University, we, students, were asked at the beginning of the term if we thought O’Keeffe had painted human anatomy into her flowers. I said, “No.” But I saw her husband’s photographs of the artist at the D’Orsay Museum in Paris during December, 2004, and by the end of the Hamline class I had easily identified O’Keeffe’s profile, lying on her side, in the mountain landscapes she painted later in her life, while living in New Mexico.

Hills to the Left
O’Keeffe

When I first decided to begin writing creatively (in my early forties), I realized immediately that I didn’t actually know anything to write down. Close observation is the first step toward any representation of our world, or even its smallest element. Georgia O’Keeffe refused to discuss this subject or admit to hiding any erotic shapes in her paintings. By nature, O’Keeffe was a keen observer of shapes and colors in the natural world, both of which repeat themselves, repeat…and this is what the artist herself did say.

“I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it. ”

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for. ”

– Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe, Shapes and Patterns

The first step toward knowledge is observation. At least that is how it felt when I first decided to start writing, and realized I didn’t actually think I knew anything assuredly enough to write it down. Lucid awareness of organic patterns and shapes result from careful observation. My cousin, Jennie, says my husband, Jim, and I are traveling in a spiral as we weave our way down into the Southwest, across, and up the Pacific Coast to Seattle, visiting our friends and family.

Besides the wonderful use of colors, repeating shapes are the best thing about Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting.

Red Hills Lake George
O’Keeffe 1927

Georgia O’Keeffe

O’Keeffe’s hands photographed by:
Alfred Stieglitz

Among Gray Line with Black Blue and Yellow
Georgia O’Keeffe

The Alfred Stieglitz photographs of his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, were on display at the D’Orsay Museum in Paris when our family visited there New Year’s weekend, 2005. (See one example above.) Many nude photographs were included in that display. And, as I remember it, a number of those photos were taken of the artist lying on one side with her arm draped in front of her. I’ve been unsuccessfully looking in the public arena for one of those images since I started writing on this subject three weeks ago. Imagine one here.

Georgia O’Keeffe
Red Hills and Bones

Hills to the Left
O’Keeffe

In addition to finding bones in the mountains, Georgia O’Keeffe found her own shape in the landscape.