Time and Family Treasures

Wednesday, January 29, 1997

My dad’s twin brother once told me, “Your dad will walk by all the new stuff in the world, straight to the back. He’s always looking for the junk.”

When his family broke up housekeeping in Seattle, my dad came home with boxes of junk. He gave me a couple of the small boxes full of old letters, broken watches, union pins, a musketball. I shrugged. Typical.

https://brettbridgeman.wordpress.com

But, recently I’ve started sifting through these boxes, evaluating what to keep, what to consider bringing back to life, checking online for identities and values. Dorsey has a box, Maude has one, and Lowell.

I enjoyed Rangewriter’s essay about the watch collection she recently acquired https://rangewriter.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/a-bag-of-time/. I’m thinking about having Dorsey and Maude’s old watches restored. I always liked winding my own watch. I might like looking at my wrist and thinking, Dorsey, Maude. But, even if I don’t do anything more than occasionally open the boxes and handle those variously kept but also abandoned items inside, something about it keeps those treasured people a little closer, a little more alive.

Questions: Has online marketing ruined antique and collectible values? Is old stuff less interesting to young adults than it has been t, to our parents?

Grant Wood with the WPA, Support for Artists, and Byron Anway at The Joslyn Museum in Omaha

Jim and I visited the Tucson Museum of Art during our visit to that city in April. We saw paintings and drawings created during The Great Depression by a group of artists who were working on The Federal Art Project, part of larger government program created to boost employment in the suffering country. The show included works by famous artists–Grant Wood, Ben Shahn, and Marsden Hartley.  According to the information at the site, more than one hundred thousand paintings and murals were created between 1935 and 1943, the years that program existed. https://www.tucsonmuseumofart.org/exhibitions/the-wpa-connection-selections-from-the-tma-permanent-collection/

It’s common knowledge that most professional artists have always found it difficult to earn a comfortable living wage. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that kind of commercial support existed today for working artists?

wpa poster grant wood landscape

One of the WPA murals designed by Grant Wood.

http://www.inkfreenews.com/2015/02/02/art-in-action-the-works-of-the-wpa-grant-wood/

While I was looking around online for other WPA works by Grant Wood, I came across a blog praising the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

Grant-Wood-Stone-City

The writer mentions Stone City as an example of why he likes that museum so much, http://www.jsharf.com/view/?p=1562…

Which has reminded me to mention that works by Byron Anway are included in an upcoming show at The Joslyn. http://byronanwayart.com/home.html

Art Seen, A Juried Exhibition from Lincoln to Omaha opens June 21st at the Joslyn. Click on the attached link and watch the video. http://www.joslyn.org/

” Don’t think about making art, just… “

This may be the only quote. What do you think?

Art of Quotation

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding make even more art. “

– Andy Warhol, painter, printmaker

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More on Degas and the Ballerinas

Looking around at the Degas ballerinas online I came across an art history article in The-Toast, 500 Years of Women Ignoring Men as Art. http://the-toast.net/2014/06/10/women-ignoring-men-as-art/. The article includes an image of a ballerina ignoring the lurking figure of a man in a tuxedo. The image came up when I searched for Degas’ ballerinas painted in 1880. It does not resemble Degas work, is not identified further, and unlikely one of his paintings. The image is accompanied clever quips about what the dancer and the man might be thinking or saying to each other.

Ballet Class
Edgar Degas

Degas-Mix-3

ballet-class-the-dance-hall-1880.

The luckier girls were always accompanied at practices and performances by their mothers. The luckier girls received financial support from their families. According to Cathy Marie Buchanan and other versions, girls who ignored possible Patrons were likely naive about the possibilities. Part of life for working class girls in the Academic Royale often included seeking “support,” from an interested and wealthy, “Patron.” The article linked below indicates, “Female dancers were seen as the echelons of prostitution giving the term ballet girl a sexual connotation until the mid-twentieth century,” much like the term, “Beach girl,” meant to us when I was a girl in Oregon. https://mccartec.wordpress.com/category/ballerinas-in-the-19th-century/ I meant to include the link to Cathy Marie Buchanan last week:  http://www.cathymariebuchanan.com/books/the-painted-girls See you again real soon.

“We Don’t Choose What We Write.” Larry Sutin

The Painted Girls
by Cathy Marie Buchanan

Jim and I have been listening to another audio book. Illustrated above, The Painted Girls, is a fictionalized story of Marie van Goethem, Degas’ model for his statue, La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, which I mentioned in this blog only a couple of months ago.

It turns out blogging is a form of education. As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I love Degas’ dancers because my mother decorated my childhood bedroom with them. The statue that caused my emotional reaction when I saw it at The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark turns out to be one of twenty-nine bronze reproductions. Apparently, Degas’ wax and mixed media original wasn’t well received back in The Eighteen-Eighties when the artist included it at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.

With his realistic rendition of Marie van Goethem, Degas shifted away from the accepted and expected representation of the female form, exemplified by Renoir, for example.

dance-at-bougival-1883
Renoir

People didn’t like it. Marie van Goethem’s build and features did not fulfill the accepted image of beauty. Her hairline was too low on her forehead; her chin jutted out at an unattractive angle.

Little dancer, fouteen years old, front

Yet, when I came around that corner and saw that statue, so personal and so real, I wept.

During my first class in the Creative Writing Program at Hamline University, Larry Sutin said, (to paraphrase), We don’t choose what we write. I’m thinking about what he said again now because I don’t know why that was her novel and not mine.