The Gee Bee carries its pilot, Jimmy Doolittle, to victory at the 1932 National Air Races after booming around the course at a record average of 294 miles per hour. Doolittle’s plane was every bit as dangerous as it looked, but the air races of the 1930s spurred technological innovations that would prove invaluable to its pilot and thousands of others in even more perilous endeavors ten years down the road.
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January 2011
Barrage balloons are so much a fixture of embattled London that it is rather startling to see a skyful of them floating above Los Angeles, but in 1942, when the Minnesota-born artist John Haley painted this watercolor, Angelenos had plenty of reason to worry about aerial attack. In fact, on February 24, they actually thought it was happening. The city’s defenses pumped 1,440 rounds of antiaircraft shells into the night skies, evidently at absolutely nothing.
By the time he painted “ Winter Moonlight in 1951, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) had moved beyond his depictions of small-town life and the decorative work he had done as a Buffalo, New York, wallpaper designer to loose, strong, wholly confident watercolors that combine the exact quality of light at a particular moment on a particular day with something very like religious ecstasy. In the blaze of sun through the leaves of a tree Burchfield saw “the eye of God,” and all his life he loved to go out into the weather. “Painted all day with vigor and forcefulness—” he wrote in 1955. “At times snow fell, and towards the last my sponge and water froze. What unalloyed happiness.…” His expressionistic abstractions always contained concrete truths, and in the cold radiance of his ringed winter moon above the choirs of bare trees we get both the moment itself and a sense of what Burchfield called “the unspeakable beauty of the world as it is.”
The Prussian-born artist Albert Bierstadt made a pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains in 1859, gathering material for the heroic Western landscapes that would soon make him famous. Along the way he sketched this threesome tearing into a meal and called the painting Grizzly Bears . Wiser heads have since concluded these are North American black bears, a less ferocious breed, but it hardly matters.
In Donna Richardson’s recent article on Classics Illustrated , a drastically inaccurate account of my views appeared. To set the matter straight: In 1988 I published in The Village Voice a memoir of how the childhood reading of “classic comics” powerfully influenced my early perceptions of literature and history. My interest was in the process by which cultural properties are recycled and transformed, and in the inadvertent radicalism of some of the formal devices employed by Classics Illustrated .
The tone of my piece, which might be characterized as affectionate irony, was entirely misrepresented by Ms. Richardson, who interpreted it as a high-minded attack on Classics Illustrated , and characterized a zealous Classics fan as “defending the series against the Geoffrey O’Briens of the world.”
Although flag imagery often appeared in sharp,bright relief on Indian clothing and other decorative items of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the purpose behind this ironic juxtaposition is hard to pin down. The beaded vest shown at the left is the work of a Lakota Indian, the initials at the top are the owner’s, and it dates from around the turn of the century. After that, speculation rules: The grouped flags may represent the Lakotas’ belief in the number four as sacred; the flag may offer protection; it may identify the owner as an ally of the United States. In an exhibit titled “The Flag in American Indian Art,” on view until the end of December at the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown, embellished gloves, bags, and rugs offer vibrant testimony to the melding of cultures, even as they raise more questions than they answer.
We know almost nothing about John A. Mooney. He was born about 1843 and died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1918; he was certainly not a formally trained artist, yet he added something genuinely new to the old and well-tilled field of military art. Mooney served with the Southern forces during the Civil War, and although he came safely through some of its grimmest battles, he was haunted by the conflict for the rest of his life. His very unsettling scene of a Surprise Attack Near Harpers Ferry , done from memory some three years after the war, suggests, as few paintings can, not only the vulnerability of being under fire but the fear and grotesqueness that in war always stand a hairsbreadth away from the sunny, the tranquil, and the mundane.
Born in rural Mississippi in 1892, the youngest son of a freed slave, Elijah Pierce spent most of his long life working as a barber in Columbus, Ohio. “I ran from the ministry,” he once explained. “I have to carve every sermon I didn’t preach.” Pierce sculpted Bible stories, visions of heaven, injunctions to obey God, but also animals, sports heroes, and political parables, including a pair of reliefs titled Nixon Being Chased by Inflation and Nixon Being Driven From the White House . In Music Box, above, dancers set inside a trim Deco commercial display cabinet move to the accompaniment of exuberant horns. A retrospective of the artist’s work, organized in his hometown by the Columbus Museum of Art, will travel next year to the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.
It’s been nine years now since our first Winter Art Show, and the editors feel that this one is as eloquent as any of its predecessors about the tenor of American life. As before, we drew its components from broadcast sources: the woodcarving at left, for instance, accompanied a story on its sculptor in Timeline , the beautifully produced magazine of the Ohio Historical Society; the frozen Gee Bee appeared amid the Deco dazzle of Sanford Smith’s annual Modernism show in Manhattan; the Moran was part of the art exhibit at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair and was retrieved for the Smithsonian’s centennial show called “The White City Revisited.” The works are as various as their sources- and, for that matter, as the nation that produced them.