Work of the Week
June 1, 2020: Cobi Moules, "Untitled (Playground)"
In honor of Pride month, I wanted to feature the artist Cobi Moules, an advocate and documentarian for the LGBTQ+ community. Through his paintings and drawings, he not only documents his self-journey as a transgender and queer person, but he also dedicates his practice to create better representation, provide a greater sense of belonging and interconnectedness, and generate more visibility for the LGBTQ+ community. Recently, he embarked on a new series titled Portraits of Affirmation in which the artist painted intimate, miniature portraits of non-gender conforming and trans people. The project gives “visibility, affirmation and love” to those figures whose lives have been controlled and endangered through legislation.
The aforementioned project is a newer development in the artist’s oeuvre, as he is best known for his self-portraits. Through self-portraits he examines his personal narrative and identity over time. Some of the self-portraits show him in isolation, while others present multiple portrayals of the artist in one picture plane, like this work. His multiple selves create playful scenarios to explore, revisit, and in some cases reinvent his relationship with his personal history and identity. He is pictured here as a thirteen-year-old in various ways on a playground, the ultimate space for discovery, imagination, and fun from childhood through adolescence. He is shown removed, pensive, inquisitive, free, explorative, spirited, and joyful all at once. This work not only conveys the complexities of the self, but also investigates a sense of belonging and exploration.
Though this work is based on his personal experiences, the concept can connect to so many people. He shows the freedom and ability to express different aspects of the self, and thus encourages all viewers to be whoever they are in defiance of societal pressures.
Elizabeth Coulter
Associate Curator of Education
May 25, 2020: John White Alexander, "Portrait of Annie Russell as Lady Vavir in Broken Hearts"
Sunday marks the 105th anniversary of the death of John White Alexander, an American painter whose portrait of Annie Russell as Lady Vavir in Broken Hearts is one of CFAM’s most recognizable works of art. This painting, which has belonged to Rollins since 1938, depicts not only a major figure in Rollins history, but also a key moment in Alexander’s career.
John White Alexander was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh. Orphaned at a young age, he was taken in by Edward J. Allen, a local luminary who would become his guardian and lifelong mentor. Like many artists of his generation, he got his start in commercial illustration, producing drawings to be translated into wood engravings for Harper’s Weekly and other periodicals, becoming a specialist on Pittsburgh subjects, in particular the city’s burgeoning industrial economy. With the money from his illustration work and the support of Allen, he spent several years in the late 1870s studying in Europe with the American artist Frank Duveneck. A particularly formative experience was in Venice in 1879, where Duveneck’s group overlapped with James Whistler, who had retreated to the city after his infamous libel trial against the critic John Ruskin. Due to the influence of Duveneck, Whistler, and others he met in Europe, Alexander would become a strong believer in the philosophy of “art for art’s sake,” working to create artworks whose chief concerns were aesthetic, rather than moral or philosophical.
Returning to New York in 1881, Alexander continued to work for Harper’s while establishing himself as one of the most in-demand portrait painters in the city. One of his specialties was portraits of luminaries of the stage, and he executed portraits of John Gilbert, Joe Jefferson, and Russell, including both the CFAM portrait and another work which is currently unlocated. Portrait of Annie Russell as Lady Vavir shows the actress in her costume, facing away from the picture plane and staring at a large glass bowl, from which a spray of pink flowers overflows. Though it is a portrait, Russell’s face is obscured, and the focus becomes more on the long, columnar form of her body, which seems almost to sweep upward from the floor. Her smooth angularity stands in contrast with the round form of the bowl, with which she is united by the pink flowers extending from her left shoulder.
This painting was most likely executed in 1887, months before Alexander’s marriage. After this event he would increasingly focus on purely aesthetic representations of women, rather than commissioned portraits. These works, perhaps best exemplified by his best-known work, Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1897, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), demonstrate many similarities with Annie Russell. Featuring women in abstract, largely two-dimensional spaces, these pictures seek to represent not so much individuals as aesthetic objects. The female form was frequently used in this purely decorative manner at the end of the nineteenth century, and Alexander developed into an expert at representing these private, slightly otherworldly visions of female beauty. CFAM’s Portrait of Annie Russell, with its shallow space and enigmatic picture of the actress, is a step in this direction. The portrait remained a prized possession of Russell’s, who evidently felt it captured something essential about her. It also, however, signaled a bold new direction in John White Alexander’s work, which makes it a perfect exemplar of both his early and late artistic styles.
Grant Hamming, Ph.D.
American Art Research Fellow
To read more on this work by John White Alexander, please visit our Collection page.
May 18, 2020: F. Holland Day, "Ziletta"
F. Holland Day, the creator of this work, would be considered something of an eccentric today. In fact, he was considered something of an eccentric in his own day, as well. Day was the son of a successful businessman in Norwood, Massachusetts, and early on showed an interest—nurtured by his parents—in art and literature. Though he did not attend college, Day quickly fell in with a crowd of bohemians in Cambridge and Boston, with whom he carried out wide-ranging discussions on art, beauty, and life, often over beers in one of a number of out-of-the-way taverns on either side of the Charles River (which divides the cities of Cambridge and Boston). During this period Day became fascinated by the work of British artist and social reformer William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press produced lavish editions of works by Romantic poets and copies of illuminated Medieval manuscripts, among other delights. Determined to follow in Morris’s footsteps, Day established the firm of Copeland and Day with a friend. They quickly made an impact on the American art book market, producing the first American editions of such important works as Oscar Wilde’s Salomé and the periodical The Yellow Book, both illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.
In addition to his work in publishing, Day traveled widely in Europe, North Africa, and West Asia, bringing back with him a large collection of traditional costumes, textiles, and furnishings. He became known for wearing these garments around Boston, cutting an extravagant and eccentric figure in the buttoned-up city. In the 1890s he became interested in photography, which had not yet become the artistic medium we know it as today. Photography was first popularized for the creation of portraits, and in the latter half of the nineteenth century became increasingly prevalent in various scientific disciplines. Day, who was entirely self-taught in the medium, was a pioneer in its use as an artistic medium. He is now recognized as one of the earliest and most important exemplars of the movement known as pictorialism. Pictorialist photographers self-consciously sought to make works of art, manipulating both the composition and development of a photograph to create an artistic image. Frequent elements of pictorialist photography include allusions to classical art; enigmatic subject matter; hazy, gauzy, and blurry images; and strong contrasts between light and dark.
Ziletta, this week’s Work of the Week, bears all the hallmarks of Day’s pictorialism. The young woman—perhaps a classmate of his from Boston’s Chauncy School—wears a head wrap, earrings, and dress that Day likely brought back from his travels. The origin of the name Ziletta is unclear, though one clue comes from an alternate title, Woman in Gypsy Costume. There is no evidence that Day knew any Romani people, and the title and accompanying costume are reliant on familiar stereotypes. The young women faces the camera directly, her luminous dark eyes staring intently—yet mysteriously—ahead. The light source is such that half of her face is brightly illuminated, while the other half is thrown into dark shadow. The background is a mottled blur, keeping the viewer’s attention squarely on her strong and beautiful face.
Day’s photographs of women gained him wide renown on both sides of the Atlantic, and he was invited to join the Photo-Secession by its founder, Alfred Stieglitz, another leading pictorialist photographer. Day refused, however, preferring to maintain his autonomy. Throughout the proceeding decades he pursued that vision where it took him, including to places which made others uncomfortable. He scandalized his neighbors in Norwood in 1896-1898, staging a series of outdoor Crucifixion scenes—inspired by the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau in Germany—in which he played the role of Jesus. He also made a number of strikingly beautiful, enigmatic male nudes, subjects which were controversial during his time. Eventually, Stieglitz and other members of Photo-Secession moved on from pictorialism, coming to favor a style they called “straight photography” which was supposedly free of the artistic flourishes and manipulations that characterized pictorialism. Day fell increasingly out of step with these currents and was largely forgotten as a pioneer of American photography, though recent scholarship has gone a long way towards reviving his reputation and historical importance.
Grant Hamming, Ph.D.
American Art Research Fellow
To read more on this work by F. Holland Day, please visit our Collection page.
May 11, 2020: Tom Peterson, "The Divine Comedy"
A new acquisition to the permanent collection of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Tom Peterson’s The Divine Comedy was donated to the museum by the family of the artist following his unfortunate passing. Peterson had a long history with Rollins College; he taught at Rollins as a Professor of Art from 1958 to 1992. Although initially trained in painting, Peterson expanded his artistic practice to include sculpture, photography, and printmaking, and frequently collaborated with other artists in the Orlando area.
This painting references the titular narrative poem by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a work of Italian literature originally published in 1320. Dante’s Divine Comedy chronicles the author’s supposed visit to the realms of the afterlife, narrated in first person. Towards the right of the composition, Dante the Pilgrim—the figure holding a book—traverses through Hell, indicated by the fiery orange background. Specifically, Peterson referenced the thirteenth canto of the Inferno, where Dante and his spiritual guide Virgil journey through the forest of the suicides in the seventh circle of Hell. In the Inferno, violence against oneself is punished by the transformation of the body into a tree where the mythical harpies nest. In the narrative, Dante plucks a twig from a gnarled branch, only to witness blood gush from the wound and the trunk angrily yelp at him.
Peterson indicated the grotesque transfiguration of humans into trees with the inclusion of two disembodied heads in the branches. However, according to Rima Jabbur—a current Professor of Art at Valencia College and frequent Peterson collaborator—the trees in the composition were also inspired by the sculptural artworks of Orlando-based artist Cheryl Bogdonovich. In a phone interview with Morgan Snoap, the Fred W. Hicks Curatorial Fellow at CFAM, Jabbur reported the critical response to Bogdonovich’s composite sculptures. Many viewers interpreted the branched creations as appearing “Hellish” or representing the mythical dryads.
On the opposite side of the painting, Beatrice--Dante’s deceased love and allegory of purity--is depicted in triplicate. Jabbur posed for Peterson as Beatrice, marking this canvas as a collaborative effort between numerous local artists. By repeating the vision of Beatrice, Peterson potentially underlined the importance of the number three in Dante’s source text as a reference to the Holy Trinity and the Judeo-Christian practice of Biblical numerology. Dante’s Divine Comedy is split into three cantiche—the Inferno (Hell), the Purgatorio (Purgatory), and the Paradiso (Heaven)—with each cantica containing exactly thirty-three cantos. Dante’s fascination with triplets even extended to the content of his Divine Comedy—at the end of the Paradiso, he recounted witnessing a triple rainbow, symbolic of the three arms of the Holy Trinity.
This obsessive and repetitive structure is subtly repeated in Peterson’s painting through the rough division of the canvas into thirds, each likely referencing a cantica of the titular subject. Save for a brief appearance at the end of the Purgatorio, Beatrice does not fill an active role in the story until the Paradiso, where she serves as Virgil’s replacement guide in the spheres of Heaven. Thus, the left side of the composition can be interpreted as representing the Paradiso, the right side symbolizing the Inferno, and the dark, recessed space between the two poles constituting the Purgatorio.
Ultimately, Peterson’s The Divine Comedy grapples with a literary behemoth that has pervaded the Christian imagination with its detailed, sometimes enthusiastic descriptions of eternal punishment and salvation. In one canvas, Peterson effectively chronicled Dante’s journey from Hell to Heaven, a journey that continues to captivate literary scholars to this day. Peterson’s The Divine Comedy faithfully represents select passages from its source text, standing as a carefully orchestrated yet spatially enigmatic contemporary reinterpretation of Dante’s 1320 masterpiece.
Isaac Gorres
Fred Hicks Intern
See Tom Peterson's work on our Collection page.
May 4, 2020: Cig Harvey, "Scout and the Clementines, Rockport Maine"
Surrounded by a pristine bright white interior, a little girl peers sweetly over the edge of the table, the vivid orange clementines spread across the surface slightly disrupting her outward gaze towards the viewer. The scene, simultaneously still and fleeting, features the artist’s daughter Scout. It is one among a few photographs from Harvey’s series You an Orchestra You a Bomb in which Scout appears.
Cig Harvey describes that the series examines her relationship with life itself, and it began after a critical moment in her life. Harvey was in a car accident, and though physically unharmed, she did not speak for six weeks after the event. She was overwhelmed with thoughts of what could have happened if her daughter had been in the car with her. The idea that anyone’s life can change drastically in an instant altered Harvey’s perspective significantly, especially with her role as a mother. She noted:
"I became a better photographer when I became a mother, and by better, I mean the work got more complicated and less decorative, because my world became more complicated. The world became more beautiful, and it also became more terrifying."
These extremes are illustrated in the title of the series You an Orchestra You a Bomb, meaning there are beautiful components that make an orchestra, and terrible things that make a bomb. Her photographs explore the in-betweens of the terrifying and beautiful, and particularly consider the magic in daily life seen from Scout’s vantage point.
In recent times, I’ve looked at this work with refreshed appreciation and it has encouraged me to find the magic in the everyday too.
Elizabeth Coulter
Associate Curator of Education
See Cig Harvey's work on our Collection page.
April 27, 2020: George Grosz, "City Lights"
Art is often a reflection of the circumstances in which it is created, and a powerful testament about the human condition that emerges from personal and collective experience. There are plenty of instances in modern history that evidence the need to create in moments of great upheaval. Avant-garde movements were born in Europe during WWI and major shifts in artistic style developed as the United States recovered from the Great Depression. Like literature, theater, and music, an artistic gesture can capture the gravitas of a historical moment in a way that, even decades later, resonates with contemporary viewers.
In these times of social distancing and stay at home orders, cities around the world have been transformed in a way that perhaps we haven’t seen in our lifetime. Through this situation, I have been thinking about works in CFAM’s collection that capture the effects of world-wide events on the urban environment and the artist’s experience. In City Lights, German American artist George Grosz depicts Houston Street, Manhattan in the 1940s. We see the street at an angle, as if we were crossing and approaching the sidewalk. Neon signs indicate the entryways to hotels, a barbershop, and other places of business. On the right, a solitary figure approaches in the viewer’s direction towards the overthrown trash bins in the foreground. Far from idealized, the scene conveys a sense of the mundane; the blotchy application of color emphasizes the ordinary in this city view.
Grosz lived in Europe during the First World War and experienced chaos and political upheaval before he emigrated to the United States in 1933. His work is characterized by bold criticism of the political class and military officials, and a pessimistic view of society; he had joined the rebellious Dada movement in Berlin in 1918 and later, together with artists Otto Dix (1891-1969) and Max Beckmann (1884-1950), they became known as Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. During the Second World War Grosz lived in New York where he taught at the Art Students League. His encounter with the metropolis is documented in numerous works from the 1940s, which focus on various aspects of the city. The war altered life in New York with many institutions temporarily transforming their facilities to accommodate production for the war effort and implementing the dimming of neon signs and lights to avoid potential enemy attacks.
More than 70 years later, New York, along with so many other cities around the country are being transformed once again by the measures implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19. I can’t help but wonder how the current experience of the city and the “new normal” will be represented in works of art for future generations to learn about this moment, just like Grosz’s works continue to resonate with us today. Looking at City Lights I try to imagine how an artist who left Europe after WWI to escape Nazi persecution arrived in New York in search of freedom and opportunity and experienced the changing urban landscape, transforming all around him as the U.S. entered WWII.
Gisela Carbonell, Ph.D.
Curator
To read more on this work by George Grosz, please visit our Collection page.
April 20, 2020: Albert Bierstadt, "Shoshone Indians Rocky Mountains"
Albert Bierstadt was one of the most famous painters of his day, a fame he earned for his monumentally sized compositions depicting the soaring mountain landscapes of the trans-Mississippi American West. These canvases, which are so large they can be hard to fit even on the larger-than-usual walls of art museums, are impressive for more than just their size. Bierstadt’s smooth handling of the paint, the way in which his landscapes blend together into seamless and coherent wholes, belies the preparatory work that went into his compositions. While many of Bierstadt’s preparatory drawings were lost when his palatial home and studio burned in an 1882 fire, a number of them survive. CFAM holds one of the best of them, which I have selected to be this week’s Image of the Week.
In 1859 Bierstadt accompanied a U.S. Army surveying expedition to Nebraska and Wyoming, commanded by Colonel Frederick W. Lander. The artist, who had recently returned to his native New Bedford, Massachusetts from Düsseldorf, had decided to focus his career on the American West. Düsseldorf, which was home to one of the best-regarded art academies in the world during the 1840s and 1850s, favored a smooth and highly finished style of painting, executed in the studio rather than out-of-doors, as would become the fashion later in the nineteenth century. This preference for studio work did not mean, however, that artists trained in Düsseldorf ignored their surroundings. Part of the success of the studio model was a reliance on preparatory sketches and drawings, ranging in quality from quick, crude pencil that captured basic forms to relatively finished compositions such as this one. Bierstadt executed this sketch while out in the field with Lander, perhaps at the end of a long day of riding and sketching on the plains. Then, when he got back to the East Coast, he moved to the famed Tenth Street Studio Building in New York and set to work turning this and similar sketches into a finished painting.
That painting, Rocky Mountain, Lander’s Peak, was not finished until 1863, and is part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The finished painting is huge—over six by ten feet—while this sketch is quite small, measuring 5 by 7 and 5/16 inches. In the sketch, however, we can see Bierstadt working out several of the compositional features of the finished work, including the relationship among sky, land, and water, as well as the integration of the Native American people into the landscape. Unlike colleagues like George Catlin and Charles Bird King, who presented portraits of named and recognizable Native American people, Bierstadt is not concerned with individuality. In both this sketch and the finished picture, he integrates the Shoshone into the landscape, representing them as part of the natural scenery rather. The pyramidal grouping of five individuals at center mirrors the shape of their tipis to the right, and the more distant mountains. The stability of this formation suggests the native people as immutable and unchanging features of the landscape, standing them in contrast to the dynamism that Bierstadt—along with most Americans of the time—believed characterized Americans of European descent. During his travels he wrote frequently to the East Coast press, urging his fellow artists to depict these people, who he believed would soon disappear from the landscape. Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak was a sensation, selling for $25,000, the most of any American painting to that point. It, and the large numbers of similar paintings turned out by Bierstadt and others during and after the Civil War, formed part of the visual culture of westward expansion, helping to accelerate the dispossession of indigenous peoples from the land. Shoshone Indians Rocky Mountains is thus not just a record of how the Rocky Mountains looked in the 1850s, but also of how white Americans thought and felt about them during the era of Manifest Destiny.
Grant Hamming, Ph.D.
American Art Research Fellow
To read more on this work by Albert Bierstadt, please visit our Collection page.
April 13, 2020: Lavinia Fontana, "The Dead Christ with Symbols of the Passion"
There are several reasons I chose this painting to start our “work of the week” series besides the obvious timing during the week following Easter Sunday. Even outside of my bias of having been trained as an Italienist, the painting is one of the most important Old Masters in our collection (as a mature work by one of the few female artists of the Italian Renaissance known to us today) and one of less than a dozen by the artist in American museums. Moreover, it was the one painting in the collection of CFAM that I was rather familiar with before I started working here, having requested it for a 2011 exhibition at the Museum of Biblical Art. Upon my arrival at Rollins, and finally seeing the painting in person, I fully understood why the curators of that exhibition had been so distressed when the loan was not approved.
Up close, the painting – its diminutive size notwithstanding – has immense power. The skillful composition with Christ at the center, his body surrounded by six attending angels whose stances, each mirroring another, create a delicate ballet-like movement while directing our gaze in all the right places for deciphering the iconography: the dead Christ, the cross from which he had just been taken down, the column of the Flagellation. The diaphanous pinks and light yellows of the angels’ vestments, as well as the stronger red and blue directly flanking Christ, emphasize the pallor of his dead body as well as marking him as the center of the composition. And yet, for all the narrative episodes clearly referenced (see also the Crown of Thorns and whip in the foreground), this is not a narrative painting, but rather a meditative piece – an aid to prayer and contemplation. This is reinforced by the angel to the right of Christ, robed in red, the only figure in the painting looking straight out, inviting beholders to think about what they see, and contemplate the meaning. This, together with the small size of the painting, suggests that it was intended for private devotion, likely in the private residence of the (unfortunately unknown) wealthy patron for whom it was painted.
The odds that Lavinia Fontana had to overcome to become a successful artist in 16th century Italy were enormous. And it was harder still, as a woman, to receive commissions for religious art – considered of a higher order than other genres, such as portraiture. Indeed, we know that Lavinia enjoyed both private and public commissions for mythological and religious works, and quite a bit of recognition in her time. Yet even an avowed admirer – and actual patron – of the painter wrote, a few short years after our painting was created, “This excellent painter, to say the truth, in every way prevails above the condition of her sex.” After her death, she descended into obscurity, to be rediscovered only in the late 20th century, with the ascent of feminist art history. Amazing, in this context, is the fact that The Dead Christ with Symbols of the Passion entered CFAM’s collection as early as 1936, the first important Old Masters painting to do so. I so wish I could ask the donors if they knew what an exceptional painting they had and thank them for giving it to our museum.
Ena Heller, Ph.D.
Bruce A. Beal Director
To read more on this work by Lavinia Fontana, please visit our Collection page.
