American Folk Art @ Cooperstown

Prison Art in the Late 19th Century

2012-02-11T09:54:00.000-08:00

Prisons across the United States were reformed in the mid to late 19^th century, with activists fighting for the humane treatment of inmates. As a result, many prisons developed new programs to encourage creativity; these programs included training in sewing, knitting, and art and painting. Some prisons chose to encourage inmates to contribute toward the cost of their imprisonment by enacting programs of manual labor. Prisoners worked on state-owned pig and dairy farms, in manufacturing plants, as janitors, and constructing furniture or other household items. Initially, the crafts and pieces created by inmates were sold to the general public. As the pieces had been made free via prison labor, the prisons greatly profited from the sale of goods produced within their factories. Eventually, prison-made goods were used only within the prison itself or other state organizations.

Auburn Prison in New York is credited with beginning a woodworking program that many other prisons imitated from the middle of the 1830s onward (see the Auburn Prison art blog post here). Inmates were able to utilize water-powered sawmills and tools to create a wide variety of furniture pieces, ranging in sizes from small checkerboard game sets to large tables and chairs. The Southern Illinois Penitentiary (now known as the Menard Correctional Center) in Menard, Illinois, also had a furniture manufactory for inmates to participate in construction activities. Built on the banks of the Mississippi River, it is likely that inmates at the Southern Illinois Penitentiary also used the nearby water source to power the tools and sawmills necessary to complete their furniture tasks. Marquetry and parquetry, also known as ‘male quilting,’ were popular forms of artistic expression for inmates in prisons with woodworking shops. Parquetry is a veneering process in which small pieces of wood or other materials are arranged in geometric designs; marquetry is the same technique, but combined to create figural or natural scenes instead of shapes.

This hall tree, measuring 80 ½” high, 35 ½” wide and 15” deep was recently sold at Garth’s Auction House in Delaware, Ohio and is now in a private collection. The hall tree was made at the Southern Illinois Penitentiary in the late 19^th or early 20^th century, and is constructed from walnut with wood and mother-of-pearl parquetry inlay design. The design on the piece is symmetrical, with motifs include starbursts, symbols that resemble compasses, and leafy designs – all rendered masterfully, and geometrically, by a former inmate. While no information exists on whether the piece was initially sold to the general public in southern Illinois or used in a state office setting, the piece is a striking example of beautiful folk art furniture by an often forgotten subset of our population.

by Jessica Mayercin, American folk art course, Cooperstown Graduate Program

Mr. Folk Art

2012-02-05T06:22:00.000-08:00

On my recent trip to New York City, I decided to stop by the American Folk Art Museum, which as you probably know had to vacate its 53rd building last year and return to its old location opposite Lincoln Center owing to financial difficulties. I must say it looks as good as ever in the space that I associated with the museum in the 1980s, and the exhibition, "Jubilation/Rumination," was a terrific exploration of the stellar permanent collection.

But the most nostalgic moment for me was happening upon an old acquaintance who, for me, represents the face of the folk art museum. His name is Ken, and he has been a guard at the museum for more than a quarter century. For most of that time, he has gone out of his way to greet me by name and chat with me when I happen to come by. And I must say, it was usually only once or twice a year. Ken knew who I was long before I knew his name.

I wish all museums had an ambassador as personable as Ken. People like him are such a valuable asset; they are a vital link between the public and the collection. And remember, he is a guard, not a docent. His enthusiasm for the subject is admirable, and, I'm sure for many, infectious. If there is a "Mr. Folk Art," I have no doubt that it is Ken the guard.

Early Photographs of American Folk Art

2012-01-28T07:35:00.000-08:00

Upon the introduction of photography to the United States in 1839, the daguerreotypy became closely associated with folk art. Painters such as Erastus Salisbury Field and Isaac Augustus Wetherby, even dabbled in the new art form of creating likenesses. According to Floyd and Marion Rinhart, “the charming simplicity of American primitive art exerted a powerful influence during the daguerrean era, especially in its first decade.”

Then what messages are conveyed when daguerreotypes depict folk art, as in the image of Field's 1840s portrait of a woman, seen above? There is no single answer to this question. Today, motivations are often indiscernible due to the ambiguity of daguerreotypists, folk artists of depicted works, and intended viewers of each individual piece. Some conclusions, however, are perceivable after scouring numerous primary and secondary sources, as well as studying several folk art daguerreotypes that were recently on the market. Folk art was reproduced in daguerreotypes for both public and private viewing, for reasons of commemoration, advertising, and insurance. The common denominator of these attributes is visual documentation.

A daguerreotype of Asa Ames (above) depicts the folk sculptor in an occupational setting. The image shows recent projects completed by Ames, including a carved baby dated June, 1849. Ames was known to have sculpted friends and family in his short career. It is possible that Ames is advertising his business in a tongue-and-cheek family portrait setting.

Folk art paintings, in particular, were often depicted in daguerreotypes. Paintings did not require a large amount of skill and choice on the part of a daguerreotypist to reproduce them. The best way to capture a successful likeness of a painting was to position it squarely in front of the camera in an environment with equal, diffuse lighting to prevent glare.

In the 1840s and 1850s, there was a large public demand for photographs of deceased relatives; thus, it was common to reproduce daguerreotypes of the deceased and distribute them to family members. For those who had lived before photography, their likenesses would have been in the form of paintings.

Innovation was a common theme commemorated in daguerreotypes of folk art. A painting of the New World attributed to J.J. Bard (above) and a weathervane of the Brookline locomotive (below) pay homage to the wonders of steam power and sensationalism in the United States. The New World was launched from New York harbor by Captain Ned Wakeman and his armed crew after a creditor’s lien was placed on the boat. The boat traveled from New York around the Horn to San Francisco. The Brookline locomotive was originally named “The Lion.” Built in 1835, it was the first locomotive to travel the Brookline Branch Railroad in Massachusetts. The locomotive was updated in 1853 to a 4-2-2 type and renamed the Brookline. The weathervane was most likely made in response to this event.

In sum, the motivations behind daguerreotyping folk art were specific to owners of the original artwork and the intended viewer of the reproduction. These motivations do, however, fall into categories of commemoration, advertising, and insurance. Daguerreotype reproductions of folk art serve as visual documentation of a by-gone era.

-by Laura Laubenthal, American Folk Art course, Cooperstown Graduate Program

A Niche for Folk Art at the Met

2012-01-20T05:59:00.000-08:00

I attended a fantastic opening reception this past Tuesday night, and thought it would be fun to share it with you. The event was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and celebrated the reopening, after years of renovations, of the painting and sculpture galleries of the all-important American Wing. The museum was decked out for the occasion, from the red, white, and blue votive candles sparkling on the Grand Staircase to the blue floodlights on the Temple of Dendur where the main reception (for about 1,000 people) was held.

Why is the American Wing so important? As the highest-profile and most-visited permanent installation of its type, it defines for millions of people the visual culture of the United States as expressed in art. One could also argue that it serves as the cultural port of entry for hundreds of thousands of international visitors to New York, providing them with their first understanding of the history of America.

The new installation is stunning in its quality and in its coherent story line. But for me, the highlight was the prominence on American folk art in that story. There is a gallery devoted to folk art, which is pictured here, and also a number of selected pieces throughout the other galleries enhancing the sense of inclusiveness in the exhibition. It was a reminder that the whole story of America cannot be told without the voices of the ordinary men and women who sculpted and painted their lives.

Jig Dolls, Lumberjacks, and Dancin' Dans

2012-01-13T08:51:00.000-08:00

During the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans had many forms of home entertainment. Many of these involved the playing and enjoying of music. Jig dolls, or limberjacks as they are sometimes called, are one form of folk art that came out of this musical tradition. A jig doll is a jointed wooden figure that was attached to a rod and panel, and could be manipulated by the player of an instrument or someone moving the doll to the tune of the music. The history of these dolls goes back hundreds of years, with the first being used by itinerant Italian street performers to animate their shows. Many European countries had their own version of the jig doll. This form was brought to America with settlers and immigrants, and it developed into a distinctive American form. Jig dolls could be carved or turned, and were often painted to reflect a character or stereotypical image. They usually had both jointed arms and legs which flailed either wildly when moved or in a dancing motion, depending on the skill of the handler! Jog dolls can be seen in folk art collections and have been recognized and collected as such.

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the ways in which Americans listened to and played music changed drastically with the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Alva Edison. The first phonographs played recorded music on wax cylinders. The more popular and commercially used phonographs used flat discs, onto which a groove was made which contained the music. Phonograph companies and inventors alike produced jig dolls and limberjacks that could be attached to the turntable or sound arm of a phonograph, that would vibrate to the tune of the music. As they became more mass produced, certain recognizable characters developed, including Ragtime Rastus, Happy Fanny, and Dancin’ Dan and Dancin’ Dina.

The question then arises, when do jig dolls stop being folk art, and start being part of popular culture? Is this transition and abrupt one with the introduction of mechanized production? Can relevant information about music and home entertainment history still be gleaned from the later jig dolls? I think so, but I guess that question will be left up to the material scholars of the future.

-by Kelly Mustone, American Folk Art course, Cooperstown Graduate Program

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

No Need to Shout

2012-01-10T11:55:00.001-08:00

This email just came across my desk, in big, bold type:

"Hi, I have missed your Emails on folk art. It is real joy to read about .I have been active in the market of folk art for some years now and find your writing very educational. I am not shouting at you,I just can't control my pc very well .Where is my eight year old Granddaughter when I need her?"

I'm glad the writer wasn't shouting, because he didn't need to. I realize that It has been too long since I posted anything here, owing mainly to the demands of my job as President of the Fenimore Art Museum and Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown.

I'll try to do better, starting with sharing some illuminating posts written by my grad students last semester. They're fascinating, and some touch upon subjects I had no knowledge of. The first of these will be up very shortly. Thanks for being patient and not shouting :-)

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More Treasures from the Katcher Collection

2011-11-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

Rachel Ann Maria (Overbaugh) Ostrander and Titus Ostrander

Attributed to Ammi Phillips (1788-1868)

Saugerties, New York, circa 1834-1835

Oil on canvas, 58 x 44 inches, original veneered frame

This is one of the greatest folk portraits ever painted. Ammi Phillips was one of the most successful and prolific portrait painters of the nineteenth century, plying his trade in New York’s Hudson River Valley and Western New England for more than half a century. This striking, elegant likeness of Rachel Ostrander and her son Titus is his largest known work and generally considered one of his best. The beauty and timeless serenity of the image belies the adversity faced by the principal sister in the decade following the completion of this painting. Rachel Overbaugh married Stephen Nottingham in 1827, when she was just seventeen. They had Titus shortly thereafter, and another child just after this portrait was painted (interesting to note how Phillips helped her hide her pregnancy). When Stephen died in 1840 Rachel married her first cousin, Solomon Overbaugh in 1842. Their child Peter was one year old when Solomon died in 1844, and Rachel married her third husband, Captain William Teunis Swart, in 1846.

Flying Fame

2011-10-05T06:34:00.000-07:00

Fame is fleeting. This magnificent weathervane from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana (made about 1890 and measuring 30" x 31") gets that message across in the plainest terms possible.

The Greek Goddess and allegorical figure of Fame, trumpeting a triumph and bestowing a laurel wreath, was actually a rare subject for commercial weathervane manufacturers of the late nineteenth century. The delicate figure was undoubtedly difficult to execute and has only a limited number of appropriate placements. It simply wouldn't work on a cow barn.

This weathervane is one of the only four known examples featuring Fame, and – despite the fact that Fame is a winged figure – the only ope depicted in a flying pose. Its maker is unknown, although the weathervane was probably the product of a major shop such as E.G. Washburne & Co., J.L. Mott Iron Works, and J.W. Fiske, all of New York. Attribution of these weathervanes is made difficult by the standard practice of borrowing designs or buying and reusing parts.

This weathervane is said to have been found on a building possibly used as a preparatory school for girls by a Catholic diocese in the Boston area. Since learning this fact I've been trying to imagine what the Nuns would say to the girls in relation to the weathervane. Was it aspirational? Or a warning about the pursuit of fame? Did the weathervane predate the school altogether?

Regardless of its original context, this weathervane is a killer piece, and its your to enjoy in our galleries for the rest of the year.

Sign of the Times

2011-09-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

Here's another great piece from the Katcher Collection of Americana that we will feature in the Fenimore Art Museum's upcoming exhibition, Inspired Traditions (see information about our related symposium on October 1 here). It's an exuberant sign proudly displaying its owner’s name and, perhaps, his highly abstracted likeness. From the looks of it, you would think that the business was thriving. The historical record tells a quite different story.

Morris Lord (1794-1849) inherited a portion of his father’s estate and for the time enjoyed financial success in real estate in and around Parsonfield, Maine. By the 1820s he briefly owned a store, presumably the business advertised here. Lord suffered financial losses by 1840, possibly as a result of the Panic of 1837, and moved with his family to Lowell, Massachusetts, where he ran a boarding house. Lowell was a thriving mill town where thousands of young women migrated to take jobs in the factories, and thus boarding houses were common. It was a place where many tradesmen and merchants found some measure of financial success.

Our Mr. Lord, alas, was not one of those who thrived in Lowell. When he died of cholera in 1849, his death certificate indicates that he was a laborer. This trade sign, therefore, documents an all-too-brief shining moment in a business career that had more than its share of setbacks. The bright side: because the store was not in business for very long, the sign here did not suffer long exposure to the elements, and thus survives in great condition for us to enjoy. I cannot imagine what Mr. Lord would think of this as his legacy.

A Story Unfolds

2011-09-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

I was just down in our galleries and had to share photos of our new quilt exhibition, "Unfolding Stories: Culture and Tradition in American Quilts," which is currently being installed for a September 24 opening. It is just stunning. We have not had our quilts out in any numbers since our 1996 exhibit "Uncommon Quilts." We did send about thirty five of these gems to Tokyo in 2004, where they were the stars of the International Great Quilt Festival at the Tokyo Dome and were seen by hundreds of thousands of people. But nothing of note since then.

This fall we will have about two dozen quilts displayed in "Unfolding Stories," a show that explains their cultural context in a variety of ways. Our guest curator for this show is quilt scholar Jacqueline Atkins, who curated our Tokyo exhibition. Take a good look at these installation shots, and if you can make it to Cooperstown before the end of the year, come see them in person.

The Truth Comes Out on October First

2011-09-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

It seems like every time I delve into a folk art painting the stories it reveals completely reshape the experience of viewing the artwork. This transformation is even more radical when on occasion I am asked to write an entire essay on a piece. Such was the case with a 1740 portrait of Annetje Kool, a young Dutch-American woman painted by Pieter Vanderlyn in the mid-Hudson Valley town of Esopus.

Annetje looks so unassuming. Looking at her placid likeness, you would hardly guess that she lived on contested ground; the frontier of two great European empires.What secrets is she hiding?

At the time of her wedding, Annetje had a six-year-old child by an unnamed father. We don't know whatever happened to the child, who is not mentioned in any period records.

The artist, Pieter Vanderlyn, has some secrets of his own. What connection did he have to the Dutch Slave Trade in Africa and the Caribbean? Why did he start preaching in the 1730s? Why were his sermons illegal?

Pieter's grandson, John Vanderlyn, was one of America's greatest history painters. What long-forgotten story from his childhood likely inspired one of his most famous paintings, Marius Amidst the Ruins of Carthage?

Unlike scores of other posts that I've presented here over the past two years, the answers to these questions will have to wait. I will give them in person at a unique new Symposium to be held here at the Fenimore Art Museum on October 1. Information about the Symposium can be found here. You can even register online.

This Americana Symposium highlights the stunning collection of American folk art assembled over thirty years by Jan Katcher, a retired pediatric radiologist. We will exhibit the collection at the museum from October 1 - December 31.

If you live in the Central New York area, please try to come. We will have a wide range of speakers who are leaders in the field, presenting on topics ranging from Shaker artworks to Jewish folk art to painted furniture to weathervanes. If you cannot come, please pass the word on to others that might be interested.

I do hope you can make it here on October 1 to hear some remarkable stories unfold. In the coming days I will post more pictures from the Katcher Collection to give you a sense of what you can see and hear about at the museum this fall.

Sulton Rogers

2011-08-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you have to drive 1500 miles to find something worthwhile in your own backyard. Back in the early 1990s I took a road trip south to Georgia and Alabama in search of contemporary folk art. I had a knowledgeable friend in Atlanta to helped me navigate the backroads of the rural South, where I had never ventured before. It was fascinating, as you might imagine, but one of the great finds took place toward the end of the trip as I was about to head home.

My friend and I were talking about folk artists worth pursuing, and he pointed to an image in a recent book and said, "you ought to try and find this guy." It was an artist originally from Mississippi who settled in Syracuse, New York, about an hour from my home in Utica. His name was memorable: Sulton Rogers; and his works were unforgettable, grotesque figures with twisted grins and crooked noses.

I managed to find Sultan by asking around, and visited him at his home. He was in the southern part of the city. A friend described how to get there but declined to accompany me, saying it was "not my neighborhood." With the prospect of finding a great folk artist, I went anyway.

It was a decision I won't ever regret. Sulton was very friendly, and there was little about the area that seemed threatening besides the general run-down look of some of the houses. I remember entering Sulton's home and being surprised at how dark he kept the entryway and the living room. The first time I went in he introduced me to some people who, I realized suddenly, were sitting right in front of me. We went into his basement, where he did most of his carving.

Sulton dscribed how he got started. He came fron an artistic family in Mississippi; his father was a carpenter and whittler and, if I'm remembering correctly, his mother was a great quilter. Sulton was born in Oxford, Mississippi in 1922 and settled in Syracuse in 1952. From about 1970 he worked for Allied Chemical, where his job of monitoring equipment left him with time on his hands. That's when he started to carve in earnest.

Sulton's favorite subject was people, especially if they had expressive facial features that he could caricature. He did these constantly, and the results are hysterical, as you can see from these examples. Sulton's work station at Allied was full of these carvings, and they were popular with coworkers.

Too popular, in fact. After people kept stealing them, Sulton had an idea. He started carving his figures in coffins. Nobody touched those. In fact, he even had the bright idea to leave the legs off the figure so that he could put valuables or money in the empty space in the coffin.

We have several of Sulton's figures, including one in a coffin, in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. And you know, as I write this, it occurs to me that I have never checked the empty space to see if Sulton left anything inside. I'm not sure I ever will.

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Electra Havemeyer Webb on Paul's Shelburne-Fenimore Scorecard

2011-08-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

Two years ago today I blogged about a visit to the Shelburne Museum, which has one of the great folk art collections in America, assembled by Electra Havemeyer Webb. You can read my take on the collection in my post from August 24, 2009. At the time I compiled a personal scorecard comparing our collection with theirs from my point of view. Here are the results as I saw it:

Folk Art Scorecard: Fenimore vs. Shelburne

Portraits: Fenimore
Landscapes/townscapes: Fenimore
Schoolgirl art: Shelburne
Quilts: Shelburne
Sculpture: Shelburne
Ceramics (stoneware): Fenimore
Ceramics (redware): Shelburne
20th century: Fenimore

The gist of it is: we are better in paintings; they are better in sculpture.

Well, now I have a "response" from Mrs. Webb herself. Posthumously, of course, since she passed away in late 1960 (just a couple of months after our benefactor, Stephen C. Clark, died). In a letter written to Edith Gregor Halpert, who ran the Downtown Gallery in New York and sold American folk art since the 1920s, Electra reveals her reaction to our collection from a visit to Cooperstown. The letter, which came to my attention from my colleague at Shelburne, Jackie Oak, is dated October 8, 1954 and reads as follows:

"….I have just returned from Cooperstown and, except for maybe one or two pieces of sculpture, I am very satisfied with our collection…but I do think they excel in the paintings in variety and class…."

Great minds think alike. Thank you, Mrs. Webb.

(Folk) Art in Bloom

2011-08-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

Today is the Fenimore Art Museum's Art in Bloom event, and the galleries look so good I had to share a few samples from the folk art gallery. Art in Bloom is all about using floral arrangements to interpret art. We are very lucky to have the local Lake and Valley Garden Club to undertake this effort for us. They got together 20 different arrangements that are all on view today and tomorrow. The one above is an interpretation of our great Grandma Moses painting, "Sugaring Off." You can see a variety of ways that the floral artists use color and composition to make their own versions of the paintings.

This is a bouquet in honor of our Washington and Liberty window shade, the subject of one of my previous posts.

This one interprets a terrific crazy quilt in the gallery.

And this one is a lively rendition of our folk portrait, "Picking Flowers," by Samuel Miller.

Enjoy the flowers on this beautiful weekend!

Hidden Patterns

2011-08-17T06:51:00.001-07:00

I swear that none of these weird coincidences happened until I started blogging. A few months ago I took a call from a gentleman who was a descendant of J. W. Fiske, the famous 19th-century weathervane maker from New York. He had some old weathervane patterns from the shop and wanted to know if we wanted them. We did, of course, but he was moving and needed to get rid of them quickly. So there was no way we could take them in time. It was a big disappointment.

This past week I was on vacation on Martha's Vineyard and remembered a recommendation from a former folk art student of mine to stop in to the weathervane shop of Tuck and Holland in Vineyard Haven. I had tried to stop in last year but the shop was closed. Hoping for better luck, I went to the shop to see a weathervane craftsman at work.

I was greeted by Anthony Holland, who I learned was one of the few craftspeople making weathervanes in a traditional manner in the United States. He showed me around thes shop, and his work was fantastic. I began taking pictures of the crowded workspace and a pile of metal underneath a shelf caught my eye. I asked what it was. "Oh," Anthony said, "those are really great. They're some old J. W. Fiske patterns I got from the original maker's grandson." I had found the patterns, or they had found me.

He showed me the patterns. There was an eagle, a cow, and Fiske's famous horse, Ethan Allen. Anthony told me of his plans to recreate some vanes using the Fiske patterns. He's good enough to do them justice. It actually nice to know that these artifacts had found a good home, and that they were in the hands of a craftsman who had the skills to bring them back to life. I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

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Ralph's Take on Rembrandt

2011-08-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

Ralph Fasanella had trouble painting hands. A lot of trained artists do too, so it is not surprising that a union organizer who turned to drawing suddenly at the age of 40 would struggle with hands early in his career. But he did have something that proved better than years of formal training: he believed that he was an artist and that what he was doing - painting the lives of working people - was a calling that deserved his complete attention and all-consuming passion.

And that made him react when anyone suggested that his paintings weren't up to snuff. He said that he was painting "felt space," not real space. His people and the urban settings he placed them in were not realistic in the purest sense of the word, but they sang with spirit and emotion. As Ralph said, "I may paint flat, but I don't think flat."

His most memorable quote, and the one that says the most about him, occurred very early in his artistic career, when someone told him that his hands looked like sticks. He ought to study Rembrandt's hands, they said, in order to get it right.

His response is priceless: "Fuck you and Rembrandt! My name is Ralph!"

A Family Visit

2011-08-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

It was my great pleasure this week to see the family of Joseph Schoell (visiting from Georgia) and (with my colleague Erin Richardson) show them the sculptures we have in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. I wrote about my experiences with Joseph in my previous post, "An American Dream in Sheet Metal and Paint." The family group included Agnes Schoell Freas, the artist's daughter (in light blue, above; she is named for her mother, the artist's wife), her son David and daughter-in-law Theresa, and their children Alex and Adam.

I don't write enough about folk artists' families. They are really the unsung heroes of this body of work, and their devotion to the visions and labor of the artists among them is what carries on much of the legacies we enjoy. They are as important as any museum staff. As a case in point, I discovered that the Schoell family home is still preserved, with many of Joseph's original sculptures still in place on the front lawn.

As we looked at Joseph's Statue of Liberty, it was particularly heartwarming to hear Agnes explain to her grandchildren the hardships of Joseph's life in Europe and his gratitude for everything this country had to offer. The sculpture was, to them, much more than a visual delight; it was part of who they are. You can see from the photo that we asked Alex and Adam to hold the plaque Joseph made commemorating the anniversaries of the Statue of Liberty and of his coming to America. It seemed like an appropriate way to honor the hopes and dreams the artist undoubtedly carried with him across the ocean. I like to think that Joseph would have been pleased and proud.

Keeping the Faith

2011-08-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

I've seen cathedrals and temples large and small over the years, but the Faith Mission is the one of the most memorable churches I've ever been in. It wasn't hard to find; in a non-descript neighborhood in Newport News, Virginia, the small domestic structure that held the church stood out by virtue of the large painted images of Jesus and assorted angels surrounded by quotes from scripture all over the exterior facing the street.

Not even the jubilant facade, howver, could prepare you for what was inside.

Anderson Johnson was born in Virigina in 1915, the son of a sharecropper. One day, when he was eight years old, he was hoeing a field when he had a vision of God holding out a large, leather-bound book to him. He took that as a sign that he had been called to preach. And preach he did for much of his adult life, using his spiritual fervor and musical talent (specifically his steel guitar) to bring people to Jesus.

Johnson moved back to Newport News in the 1970s to live with his mother, and after her death in 1984 he finally had the chance to create his own church. And so, in that same house, the Faith Mission was born. It was at this time that Johnson put another of his talents into service to Jesus by creating visionary works of art.

It wasn't hard to decipher Johnson's vision. When I visited him in the early 1990s I was initially astonished by the painted facade of the Mission. When I went inside, however, I was completely bowled over. The whole first floor of the house had been gutted to make one large space, with makeshift pews on the front side and an altar and lectern on the back. But that wasn't all. Not by a longshot.

The makeshift church was full of people; bright-eyed, well-dressed, and eager for the Bishop Anderson Johnson's sermon. But they weren't actual people. They were painted portraits by Johnson, smiling, attentive visages on cardboard or plywood, lining each and every pew and even hanging from the rafters. An audience of every speaker's dreams. And a congregation worthy of Johnson's abilities.

Reverend Johnson himself was a delight to meet and converse with. He was not a fundamentalist nutcase. He was friendly and soft-spoken and humbled by his calling. I asked how many parishioners he had. "I've got five that I can count on." That didn't keep him from his committment to preach. We ended up buying several pieces for the Fenimore Art Museum, including a lectern (above) and a painting of an angel (below).

The only time that I saw him upset was on another visit a year or two later. Reverend Johnson had been having some problems with his neighbors. Since he had become well-known as a folk artist, scores of people - strangers to the neighborhood - were coming to see the Faith Mission and buy art. The neighbors accused him of drug dealing. As he explained the situation to me, he got angry, ripped open a decorative container he had made to show me there was nothing inside, and yelled "I don't know nothing about no dope dealer!" It was extremely upsetting to see this good man have to defend himself.

But the memory reminds me, as I think of Reverend Johnson's beautiful people, how wide is the gulf between the world as it is and as it ought to be. Anderson Johnson did what he could to narrow that divide, in a small corner of the world that desparately needed his presence.

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Loaded for Bear

2011-07-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

It's very hard to paint ferocity, especially on a small scale. But this doesn't keep self-taught artists from trying and, as usual, we are the beneficiaries of their efforts. Here is another example.

This small watercolor, about 8 x 10 inches, was found in Binghamton, New York, a small city along the Pennsylvania border. It is called, for obvious reasons, "The Bear Hunters." Actually, I'm not overly fond of that title; this doesn't look like a bear hunt to me. Rather it appears that the two gentlemen and their dog have encountered a bear unexpectedly. The man in orange seems to be raising his axe in self defense. I'm not a hunter, but I'm pretty sure you don't consciously hunt bears with an axe. The other man, in blue, also seems to be in a defensive posture, holding his rifle sideways as if to deflect a blow.

The charm in this piece lies in the bared teeth of the dog and the bear, and in particular the problems in scale that the artist had with the latter. This particular diminutive bear does not seem to pose much of a threat to two armed men and a dog.

Unless there's a mama nearby. Enjoy the watercolor and have a great weekend.

The Mysterious Miniature Altar

2011-07-26T14:18:00.001-07:00

Quite a number of years ago I was walking through the exhibition "Expressions of Trust" at the America Folk Art Museum in New York when an unusual piece caught my eye. It was a sculpture in the form of a carved box with a wood frame and plexiglas sides that allowed you to see inside. In the center of the box was a carved altar with a crucifix surrounded by colorful plastic flowers. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it intrigued me in that it seemed like the kind of folk art you might find at a local flea market or consignment shop. It was strong in its simplicity and in the depth of the devotion expressed by the obviously Catholic, working class artist.

When I read the label I was stunned. It was made by a priest from Uitca, where I live. And judging from the artist's dates, he was still alive. I took down all of the information on the label and resolved to look into it further upon returning home. With any luck, there would be an opportunity to meet an interesting local folk artist and perhaps see more pieces.

When I got back home I took out the phone book and looked up the name of the priest. He was right there in the white pages. Delighted at my luck, I picked up the phone and dialed. A male voice answered. I said, "Is this Father so-and-so?" "Yes, it is." Introducing myself, I continued, "I saw your piece at the American Folk Art Museum and really liked it." "What piece?" "The sculpture of the miniature altar." "I don't know what you're talking about." We dropped the conversation quickly and got off the phone.

Well, that was awkward. Unsure of what went wrong (some folk artists just don't want any attention, which is understandable) I just dropped the matter and forgot about the sculpture. Some years later, during a busy summer day at the Fenimore Art Museum, the front desk called to tell me that there was a young couple that wanted to see a curator. I went down to meet them, of course. They were from Barneveld, a small town about a half hour north of Utica. They told me that they had a piece of folk art by a relative of the woman. When they showed me a photo my eyes went wide. It was a miniature altar nearly identical to the one I had seen years earlier.

"Wow, is this one of those altars made by that priest from Utica?" The couple looked at each other, confused. "No, this is by a carpenter, Leo Liedtke," the woman said, "my father." So it was father, Leo. Not Father Leo. Delighted to find out the truth, I gladly accepted the piece into the collection and started to do some research on Liedtke, who had passed away years ago.

There wasn't a lot to find. Leo had lived an ordinary life in a house about a mile from where I live now. He was a steady, reliable carpenter and father as well as, I'm sure, a steady and reliable parishioner. And yet, in that ordinary house he quietly turned his manual skills toward the creation of these small altars. To my knowledge they were never meant to be exhibited outside his home. He did do one large piece, of the Forbidden City in China, but it was the smaller religious works that held all the charm and personal meaning.

Leo Liedtke may never be considered a great or important folk artist, but his work - and the memorable way it came to me - stands for something larger. In expressing beliefs and values shared by many in his community, Liedtke affirmed his individual existence. His folk art was an profound expression of self in a world where sameness was the watchword.

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The Little Farmer

2011-07-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a small watercolor, about 4" x 7", that I have always liked. It was purchased from a landlady in New Bedford, Massachusetts by Jean Lipman in the 1940s, with little or no history as to who painted it and where it was from. It has been in the Fenimore Art Museum collection since 1950.

It depicts a small farmstead with a nice house (possibly stone with tile shingles), a well, and a farmer holding a two-pronged pitchfork and walking a dog on a leash. That's about all we know, believe it or not. The painting has always been called "The Amish Farmer" owing to the distinctive beard and hat of the man, but that is a tenuous identification at best.

All that aside, the little watercolor has out-sized charm, doesn't it? We displayed it in our folk art gallery last year and it received considerable attention. I was hoping that someone would provide some clue to its origin, but, alas, it remains one of our anonymous treasures.

A Stolen Kiss on the Mohawk River

2011-07-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

Every time I travel north on Interstate 87 from Albany, New York, to the Adirondacks, I pass over the well-known "Twin Bridges," technically the Thaddeus Kosciusko Bridge which spans the Mohawk River just a few miles north of the city. The bridge offers a nice view of an idyllic riverside with cottages nestled along the shore and people swimming and boating. It never occurred to me until recently that just underneath the bridge is the site of a old ferry that figures prominently in one of my favorite paintings here in the Fenimore Art Museum.

Dunsbach's Ferry Across the Mohawk is a painting done in the 1890s by an O. B. Scouten that depicts the ferry operation in astonishing detail. The artist shows the landmark buildings on the near shore, including a house on the left built by Killian Van De Burg in 1718, and a tavern on the right operated at the time by John Sheffer, known as "Dutch John." The train in the background hints at the importance of the Ferry, as it connected travelers to and from Albany to the Troy and Schenectady line of the New York Central Railroad.

But it is the figures and their activities in this painting that has always intrigued me. In the foreground you see farmers with a hay wagon alongside city folk waiting for the ferry, and at the right there is a woman feeding chickens and boys swimming in the river. On the ferry itself (detail below) the artist has depicted two ferry workers, one manning the rope and the other pulling the ferry along the guidelines. There is also a two-horse wagon with a well-dressed couple.

Take a good look at the couple. The man's attention is not focused on his companion, but rather on the seated couple on the edge of the ferry behind the wagon, who appear to be in full embrace and in mid-kiss. Here is the value of a folk artist: no detail goes unnoticed or is thought to be too trivial. As much as I like historic photography (see the image of Dunsbach's Ferry in the collection of the Capital District Library Council above), there is no substitute the artist-voyeur.

Lightning Strikes in Cooperstown

2011-07-12T06:35:00.000-07:00

We've had some turbulent weather lately here in upstate New York, and every once in a while, when it thunders and lightnings, I think of Jimmy Litz.

James C. Litz was born in Buffalo, New York in 1948. He graduated from high school in the late 1960s, but never had a chance to enter a trade or begin a career. At the age of eighteen he was drafted into the Army to serve in Vietnam. Jimmy served with Company D of the 7th Air Cavalry, the same unit, he noted, that General George Armstrong Custer lost at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Jimmy left Oakland on his nineteenth birthday and arrived in Vietnam at 1 am the next day. He spent his tour of duty with a machine gun unit in the jungles along the South China Sea coast. Here's a photo Jimmy later sent me of himself (on the right) with a buddy, Leo Parker of Dallas, Texas.

Returning to civilian life was extremely difficult. Jimmy recalled that it was impossible for him to take orders from anyone in authority, and so he moved from job to job and turned to alcohol to escape what he saw as a ruined life. His family helped whenever they could, asking Jimmy to do odd jobs that even included entertaining his nephews. At one such babysitting gig, in the early 1980s, he decided to draw some pictures in pencil and have the boys color them. Jimmy enjoyed drawing so much that he bought paints and began to create lively, colorful versions of his sketches.

Jimmy became well known as a folk artist in Buffalo thanks to a local gallery owner and artist, Tony Sisti, and even got some words of encouragement from Will Moses, the grandson of Grandma Moses. But it was a fateful day in 1986 that will forever remain in my mind when I think of Jimmy.

It was mid-afternoon on August 2, and Jimmy and his wife Beverly were enjoying a trip to Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame. All of a sudden a violent storm kicked up, with torrential rain, high winds, and frightful lightning. Several blocks away from their car, Jimmy and Beverly ran for their lives to the nearest house and frantically knocked on the door to be let in.

The house they entered happened to be the home of Louis C. and Agnes Halsey Jones, pioneering scholars in the field of American folk art. Lou, of course, was the retired Director of our museum, and had formed our great folk art collection in the 1940s and 1950s. Jimmy thoroughly charmed the Joneses, and neither party could believe their luck. Before long, Jimmy was at the Fenimore Art Museum with a portfolio of paintings and we had his work in the permanent collection. I show two of his works here: The Buffalo Bisons War Memorial Stadium from 1987 and Birds, Butterflies, and Survival from 1990. I got to know Jimmy well over the ensuing years, and even visited him in Buffalo. His health began to fail in 2000, when he had to stop painting, and he died of complications from diabetes in 2009.

Jimmy was one of the nicest, most upbeat people I've ever met. He reveled in his life as an artist, saying that painting was "the only real time I am able to communicate what's going on inside my head." Judging from his beautiful paintings, he had negotiated a peace with the world that served everyone well. And judging from the lightning storm, he may well have had someone else looking out for him.

The Horse with the Longest Hair in the World

2011-07-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

Here is a beautiful and intriguing painting (roughly 18" x 24") we purchased from a woman in North Chatham, New York in 1958, depicting a horse. Not just any horse. But the horse with the longest hair in the world. Supposedly.

I'm pretty sure that title was bestowed on the animal by our then-Director Lou Jones, who was a folklorist by trade and loved tall tales. Looking at this painting, it's easy to see it as a product of an artist's imagination or some flight of fancy on the part of the person who commissioned the painting. Over the years, scores of visitors to the Fenimore Art Museum have thought otherwise, and have filled our research files with candidates for the identity of this horse.

The most compelling case is that of Linus, a Percheron stallion who was featured in Scientific American in 1891. In fact, the engraving of Linus that appeared in the journal (above) was possibly the source for the painting's composition, as opposed to the artist painting the picture from life by viewing the real horse.

Here is what Scientific American had to say about Linus: He is 16 hands in height, weighs 1,435 pounds and is of chestnut color. The mane is fourteen feet, the foretop nine feet, and tail twelve feet long. When spread and drawn out to their full extent, the display of the beautiful locks of bright hair is quite impressive. The greatest care is taken of the hair. It is washed out with cold water, no tonics being applied to it. Before the horse is placed in his stall the hair is drawn out and divided into several thick strands. From his mane four such strands are made. Each strand is then tied around once every six inches about to the end. It is then rolled up and put into a bag. For his mane and foretop alone five bags are required....During the last two years his mane and tail have grown about two feet.

Some years ago someone sent this photograph of Linus, an even better image of him to compare with the painting.

Is this enough to re-title the painting? Perhaps. We haven't done that yet; the title "Horse with the Longest Hair in the World" is hard to let go of.

Gregorio Marzan and the Lady of 104th Street

2011-07-05T06:46:00.000-07:00

I have had many pleasant encounters with folk artists over the years, most of them on dusty back roads many miles from the nearest population center. As you know from previous posts on Malcah Zeldis and Ralph Fasanella, some of my favorites were right in Manhattan. Gregorio Marzan is another urban folk artist that I recall with great fondness.

He may as well have lived in the middle of nowhere, at least as far as my experience of New York is concerned. Gregorio was an immigrant from Puerto Rico and lived in a housing project on 104th Street in Manhattan in the neighborhood of East Harlem.

I knew from reading books on contemporary folk art that he was born in Vega Baja, west of San Juan in North Central Puerto Rico in 1906. He came to New York in 1937, a refugee of hard times during the Depression and years ahead of the great Puerto Rican migration that followed World War II. The only work he could find was through the Works Progress Administration, first as a sewer worker and later, thankfully, as a maker of toys and dolls in a factory. He remained in this line of work until his retirement in 1971.

Like many folk artists, he did not become idle upon retiring. Gregorio instead used his talents and his penchant for finding objects to work with to create fantastic sculptures. He made portrait busts, colorful animals, and one of the best renditions of the Statue of Liberty ever made (the ones shown just below are from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a private collection). He began to show his work at El Museo del Barrio nearby and became well known, at least in folk art circles.

It was Lady Liberty I was after when I visited Gregorio with my friend Lee Kogan (seen with me and Gregorio in the photo above) in the winter of 1991/92. His neighborhood was quiet if not posh, but his building was quite run down. Wallpaper peeling in the halls. Garbage here and there that we had to step around. Smells I can't describe. And yet Gregorio's apartment was immaculate and he appeared to maintain a steadfast dignity in his old age despite the decline of the world around him. We talked for a while, with his daughter helping to translate. Gregorio didn't flinch when he told me that a Statue of Liberty would cost $800.

Neither did I. We agreed on the price and I left there not entirely sure he had the energy left in him to do another large piece. A few weeks later I received a call from his daughter. The piece was ready. I went back down to New York and back to 104th Street, where I went back into that building and up the elevator to his apartment door. I knocked, and there was no answer. I heard muffled noises coming from inside, but couldn't tell what was going on.

Gregorio finally came to the door and let me in. To my utter astonishment, he had created an elaborate setting in one whole room to showcase his new Statue of Liberty for me. On a pedestal. With special lighting from a single bare lightbulb. The wall behind it cleared to eliminate any distractions. And the Lady - made from plaster, fabric, glue, and even the Elmer's Glue caps - was gorgeous.

I'll never forget the pride on his face; the pride of creation, of course, but also the pride in being American. I told him it was perfect, paid him his money, and gently carried the piece out to my car.

When I first heard about Gregorio's Statues of Liberty I was surprised to find out that he had never actually visited the Lady in person. After that afternoon I realized that it didn't matter, for it was obvious that he carried her with him every day.

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Folk Sculpture: The View from Below

2011-07-01T04:24:00.000-07:00

Friday is a great day for less serious blogging, so I decided to just have a little fun with my iPhone camera in the gallery. The results actually surprised me.

It's amazing how much difference perspective can make. When viewed from below, these folk sculptures in the Fenimore Art Museum's galleries take on characteristics that are far grander than we typically show. Our little George Washington figure, above, looks like it belongs in a park with scores of pigeons all over it and people lounging at its base.

The cigar store figure seen here may well have been viewed this way in the 1890s. We found an advertisement from the tobacconist who owned it showing the figure displayed on a second story balcony overlooking the street.

I always thought our little mermaid garden sculpture looked like a full sized figurehead on the prow of a ship. If she was several times larger than she is, this is what she would look like from the wharf below.

And lastly, we used to think that this figure of Columbia was first thought to have been a pilot house figure for a Great Lakes steamship. One scholar, however, thought that it might have been made for a courthouse, although others have felt that to be unlikely as the more common courthouse figure was Justice, of course. At any rate, here is what she would have looked like to a passenger, perhaps, standing on the deck of the steamship.

I will only add that an exercise such as this should only be undertaken when the gallery is empty. Even when you are the President. Especially when you are the President.

Lavern Kelley, The Farmer Who Knew

2011-06-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

Lavern Kelley was a dairy farmer who lived just a few miles south of Cooperstown on a small family farm kept up by him and his brother. He had taken up whittling as a young boy after an appendectomy, and continued to carve his whole life. His subject matter was all around him, and included not only farm vehicles like trucks, tractors, and plows, but also people, which he began to carve in response to the requests of his patrons.

I knew Lavern for many years prior to his death in 1995. He was the nicest, most soft-spoken gentleman you would ever have the pleasure of meeting. Despite his fame, he was always humble about his abilities and was always willing to take the time to talk with people about his artwork. We used to have him appear at The Farmers' Museum's annual Harvest Festival to demonstrate his carving, and our visitors - particularly the children - were just entranced by the casual manner in which he sculpted basswood while carrying on a conversation.

He could also write. We have in our files several lengthy and remarkably well-written letters describing his work and his approach to particular pieces. They are worth sharing.

In 1988, the Fenimore Art Museum commissioned two pieces from Kelley. We did not specify what they were to be, only that we wanted two people about three feet tall each. The rest was up to him. Here is how he described his thought process:

When I was first approached concerning the commissioned two figures for the Fenimore Art Museum, I felt both elation and surprise. I had never had a commission of this size before. Since The Farmers' Museum, located across the road, and also a part of the museum campus with the Fenimore, keeps mainly to before the turn of the century in their displays, I thought it would be fitting to make the new pieces from that period.

Usually, a blacksmith was one of the most important people in town, so I settled on a blacksmith for the male figure. I felt this was fitting, too, because there is an active blacksmith shop at The Farmers' Museum. The female figure, however, posed a little bigger problem, since women were not as highly visible in that period. The two most obvious walks of life for a woman at that time would have been the housewife or the schoolmarm, at least that was all I could think of. I settled on the schoolmarm, and this also fitted in nicely, because there is a schoolhouse across the road at the museum.

Lavern worked on the blacksmith for about five months, in between his seasonal farm chores. The schoolmarm, completed in the winter, went faster. The finished pair have graced our galleries off and on for many years now, and every time I see them I think of the two museums on our campus - the Fenimore Art Museum and The Farmers' Museum - and the cultural ties between them that too few people grasp. I also think of the unassuming local farmer who saw it all so clearly and expressed it so beautifully in wood.

Supporting Cast

2011-06-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

I was walking through the folk art gallery of the museum today and a little-noticed figure caught my eye. An unknown sailor in a painting celebrating Commodore Perry's victory on Lake Erie during the War of 1812. It ocurred to me that we pay so little attention to the supporting cast in these paintings. Here is a couple of noteworthy cast members in our gallery, beginning with the aforementioned sailor.

Perry is considered a hero for his naval brilliance and bravery in the midst of battle. His crew may have been more concerned with survival, judging from the terrified look on the face of the sailor in the peephole. His look stands in stark contrast to the stoic determnation of the lead actor in this historical drama.

We've seen this large, round banner meant to be carried in political parades on behalf of the Whig Party in the 1840s. In the scene, the artist included the Erie Canal as an example of the Whig program of internal improvements meant to ensure trade and commerce.

Standing in as the only person in this banner is a tiny figure at the edge of the canal, holding a long pole meant to (I presume) gauge the depth of the water in the lock. His role is tiny in the grander scheme of the banner and what it represents, but he is an effective stand-in for the legions of working Americans playing a vital role in the nation's economic life.

Two small, barely noticable figures at the edges of the action. Both hold keys to the meaning of the works, and like any supprting cast, draw attention to the main point or purpose of the paintng. The stories wouldn't be complete without them.

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Painting the Poorhouse

2011-06-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

Studying American folk art has shown me time and time again how the creative products of an artist can mask the turbulent life from which they had sprung. This is particularly true of a group of painters who were active in Southeastern Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century. These folk artists were prone to heavy drinking, which resulted in poverty and homelessness. But they had two things going for them; they knew where they could go to get back on their feet, and they could paint breathtakingly beautiful scenery of their favorite havens.

The artists were Charles C. Hoffmann, John Rasmussen, and Louis Mader, and their principal refuge was the Berks County Almshouse in Reading, Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1870s with Hoffmann, they painted stunning birds-eye views of the Almshouse during their residencies. These large works of art documented the buildings, grounds, and activities of the institution in painstaking detail and bright colors, and were the perfect keepsake for the Almshouse Stewards or Board members who commissioned them.

We are fortunate to have an exceptional Rasmussen in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. The work is painted on tin, dated 1881, and is quite large at roughly 39" x 46". Rasmussen came along a few years later than Hoffmann, and may have seen some of his work in the Almshouse when he was there. He obviously admired Hoffmann's style, as he emulated it in his own works. Here we can see the main campus of the Almshouse strikingly rendered in a large oval at the center, with vignettes of singular structures in each corner and a large decorative patriotic flourish at the top. A tour-de-force of topographical folk painting.

I should note that the main building at the center was where most of the residents stayed; one wing was for the men, the other for women. Other areas of the grounds show a pump house, a schoolhouse, a church, and quite a few fields where a variety of crops are cultivated. All in all, it is a vision of a self-sustaining community. It wasn't all utopian harmony, of course. The building at the lower right (seen in the detail below), with the high enclosure just outside, was for the housing of mentally ill residents who were prone to violence.

The general feeling, however, is one of happiness, plentitude, and safety from the vicissitudes of life. This refuge was only temporary for some, like Hoffmann, who used his skill as an artist to earn his way out. Repeatedly. It was his great misfortune that his alcoholism would not allow him to keep company with money for very long, and he found himself back in the Almshouse in short order. He would then repeat the vicious cycle by painting more of these views to get back out.

We do not know enough about Rasmussen to make the same conclusion, but Hoffmann's experience makes it hard to look at these outwardly joyous paintings without seeing the tragic combination of artistic talent and human frailty that gave them life.

A Horseshoe Sign

2011-06-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

One of our curators recently found this piece behind some large farming equipment in a wing of our storage facility and brought it out to get a better look. When I happened upon it on a walk-through of storage I was startled for two reasons: one, it was something I had never seen before; and two, it is a really cool piece of (probably local) folk art.

It is a sign probably dating to the early 20th century advertising the horseshoeing busines of C.V. Olmsted. The sign measures about 16 x 50 inches and the letters are made of cast-off and broken horseshoes. Very clever.

The problem is that we have no idea where it came from or when. It was found in the collection of The Farmers' Museum in 1973 without any record of its history or date of acquisition. This is a thankfully rare occurance today, but in the early days of the museum it was common for people to drop things off for the collection without leaving much in the way of documentation.

I imagine that, back then, perhaps it was felt that everyone knew who C.V. Olmsted was.

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Baker's Dozen

2011-06-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

While small, paperback-size butter molds are very common, and largely anonymous, large cake boards that can be linked to a specific owner or maker are extremely rare. Only about a dozen documented cake boards are known. We are fortunate to have two of these magnificent examples of folk sculpture in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. And how the original owners (New York City bakers, for the most part) would chuckle at the thought of their cake board being exhibited in an art museum.

This cake board measures about 18" x 30" and features a memorial to George Washington. Our other board is a tribute to Lafayette. It, like the others, was meant to create a design in a large sheet of gingerbread. The method was simple; the stiff dough of the gingerbread was pressed or rolled onto the mold And then allowed to dry before being baked. The carvers of these boards deliberately made their designs in large gouges rather than delicate tracery so that the image would hold its resolution during the baking.

The result must have been specatacular, which was why these cake boards would most often be found in large bakeries or in the homes of the well-to-do. Most of them were commissioned by the bakers who worked in New York's Bowery in the first half of the 19th century.

If you look closely at our board, you will notice, admist all of the standard iconography of a memorial to Washington, the word "Tasten" along the bottom. It stamds for Thomas Asten, a baker who worked on Greenwich Street in New York from 1824 to 1827. He later became a partner with another baker and, eventually, a street inspecter and auctioneer.

When Asten went out of business as a baker, he must have sold the tools of his trade to other bakeries. If you look at the lower corners of our piece, you will see the letters "J" and "C" in script. The experts in the history of these cake boards (yes, there are a few) believe that these initials are in a different style than the rest of the cake board and thus were added later.

But not much later. One scholar thinks that they stand for John or Jameson Cox, who ran a bakery on Pike Street in New York up until 1834.

Who carved these boards? It's not easy to say, although we do know the names of two carvers, John Conger and Henry Fox, who signed boards. Conger's background is not known; Cox was a carpenter. Conger may have carved wood blocks for prints, which would help explain why the imagery in many of these boards is based on published print sources. And like the blocks carved for prints, these images had to be carved in reverse.

It was one of the 20th century's great sculptors, Elie Nadelman, who found this cake board and added it to his growing collection of American folk art sometime during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It took just over a century for our cake board to make the trek uptown from Lower Manhattan to Nadelman's home in Riverdale-on-Hudson.

About a decade later it was in our folk art gallery in Cooperstown, where today it hangs in a converted ballroom reminiscent of those formal dining areas it may have served shortly after being carved.

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Elegy for a Museum Director

2011-06-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

How many of us get to (or think to) write our own obituary? Daniel R. Porter, who was the Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program when I first came to Cooperstown in 1981, and later became Director of the Fenimore Art Museum's parent organization, made sure he had the final word. The result is pure folk literature, witty and self-deprecating and a joy to read.

Dan Porter was a real piece of work, but he supported my career when I was just starting out and I owe him the honor of having his last words read by my readers here. Please take the time to read the obit he wrote for himself and left in the care of his younger brother, with instructions to simply fill in the date of death when the time came. We should all be so organized.

Daniel R. Porter III

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - With trumpets blaring, Zeus, god of gods, called Daniel Reed Porter III to His Heavenly Pantheon on Nov. 21, 2006.

He (Porter, not Zeus) was the second White child born in the new maternity ward of Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton (Mass) on his father's birthday July 2, 1930. His mother Eleanor (Parsons) needed all the help she could get.

Porter was reared on a small farm with his siblings in Worthington. Sickly as a child, his parents often contemplated drowning him in Watt's Brook that flowed (trickled in summer) behind the house into which (the brook, not the house) they deposited other trash, sewage and cow manure.

After being partially educated in local schools, Porter matriculated in the class of 1952 at UMass, formerly Mass Aggie. Here he failed to distinguish himself in any meaningful way, and managed to alienate a number of his classmates and professors. Upon graduation without honors, Porter was drafted into the Army and served in Korea before and after the armistice. There he learned more than at college - never volunteer, be cowardly to survive, don't circulate petitions and keep away from indigenous females.

Returning home ill-prepared for an occupation, he was strangely accepted by the University of Michigan Graduate School where he tried to prepare for an acceptable if not respectable occupation.

A 35-year career as a museum and historical agency administrator and museum director followed. He moved from state to state five times to keep ahead of his reputation. He completed his career ignominiously in Cooperstown in 1992. On his demise, he was a member of no organization, club or charity.

Porter was not survived by his parents and sister, Janice Leroux. But surviving him are his relict, Joan (Dornfeld); a daughter, Leslie, her husband, Edward Easton III, and their daughters, Erika, Caitlin, and Allison, of Coudersport (God's Country), Pa.; his son, Andrew, and his wife, Amy (Pens), and their heir, Reed; a brother, Edward, and his wife, Shirley (Smith), on Watt's Brook; a brother-in-law, Al Leroux, and his Buick sedan of Northampton; and numbers of nieces and nephews.

There will be no final rites or any mumbo-jumbo. He will not lie in state at the The Farmers' Museum. His cremated remains will be scattered on Watt's Brook. Memorial gifts will not be accepted and cards are a waste of money.

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A Fireplace Fantasy

2011-06-01T16:54:00.001-07:00

Okay, so blogging while also being President is harder than I thought. I can't believe it's been nearly a month since my last post. What's even harder to believe is that, if my Followers gadget is correct, I have actually gained followers during that time. Thank you to everyone who has signed on and held on. Here's another little tidbit from the storage racks for you.

This fireboard has been in the collection since 1950, when we acquired it from Jean Lipman. That's sixty-one years, and I cannot recall it ever being on view. It's relegation to storage is probably owing to the lack of information about it, but it is intriguing onetheless and beautiful to behold.

A fireboard, in case you don't know, is an portable enclosure usually made of wood or canvas and used to cover the unsightly fireplace in the summer months. We have a number of these, the most famous of which is our great "Bear and Pears," also from Lipman.

This piece is more enigmatic, as the scene it depicts is exotic and mysterious, possibly based on a print or number of prints of foreign lands that so intrigued New Englanders in the nineteenth century.

It belonged to a Connecticut collector named Titus Geesey, who felt strongly that it was of Connecticut origin, mainly because the painted decoration along the borders resembled the painted tin designs of local decorators. Other than this theory, we have no information as to its history.

But that never stops us from speculating. As I was researching the piece for this post I came across a gem of an interpretation in an old graduate student report. Back in 1968 a student in the folkore program at Cooperstown, clearly exasperated at being unable to find any solid information on this painting and needed something to say, offered this statement for posterity:

"An attempt to interpret this particular pastiche in terms of the life of the time leads me to conclude that limners ate opium on the job; that there were lions large and relaxed roaming (or at least posing) with Amazon women near castles with Mansard roofs; that somewhere in New England there existed a culture in which people came in a variety of sizes."

I just love this interpretation. It captures the whimsey of the piece like no academic study could do. And it is a reminder that a fireboard was one of the few art forms that was always displayed at child height. What flights of fancy would have been taken in this parlor.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Counting Sheep

2011-05-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

In my new position as President I never know where the day will take me. This morning I was working on an exhibition for the summer of 2012 on the subject of American Impressionism when I was called away to The Farmers' Museum (our sister institution of which I am also President) to watch young oxen being trained. On my way to the farmyard I noticed a co-worker hovering near the sheep's pen.

When I walked over to see what she was looking at, I saw a sheep with her brand new baby lamb. Naturally, I took out my iPhone and snapped the first picture of this new addition to the museum staff. Within the hour a second lamb was born, much to the delight of the families that happened to be nearby.

Any time something like this happens I am reminded of the original vision of the two museums here in Cooperstown -- The Farmers' Museum and the Fenimore Art Museum -- and how much they were always meant to complement each other. Folk art and paintings of everyday life at the Fenimore, living history and real animals at the Farm. This time was no exception.

When I saw the new-born lamb I thought immediately of the painting we have tucked away in storage, depicting a Cotswold ram at the Van Wagenen farm in Lawyersville, New York in the 1860s. It was painted by Thomas Kirby Van Zandt, and the note in our files indicate that the original owner thought it was a remarkable likeness of an animal known for its personality. Now we have another living example of an ongoing livestock tradition in upstate New York to give this artwork meaning and immediacy.

There's even another connection: Jared Van Wagenen, Jr., whose father owned the ram in the painting, wrote the classic book 'The Golden Age of Homespun" for us back in the 1950s. His descriptions of the era depicted in the painting, and recreated at The Farmers' Museum, have enthralled generations of readers. But even he would admit that you can't beat the real thing.

The Eyes Have It

2011-05-04T07:21:00.000-07:00

On my recent trip to Dallas to attend the opening of the Fenimore Art Museum's Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, I came across this curious painting at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. It struck me as another fine example of an itinerant folk artist's penchant for depicting sitters as they were, rather than as an idealized version of themselves.

Ammi Phillips was a prolific painter in the valleys and towns of eastern New York State and western New England in the first half of the nineteenth century. He is well known for employing stock poses in order to speed up production of his portraits. But he did so with such fluid and graceful brushwork that the paintings are elegant and refined even in their sameness. And his sitters didn't seem to mind that they looked like so many others' portraits that they must have seen in their villages.

Yet despite this sameness, Phillips often captured something unique to each sitter. In this case, it was an obvious crossed eye. This young girl and her parents must not have seen this condition as a major flaw, for by all indications they accepted this finished portrait and it descended in the girl's family.

It's entirely possible that some might look at this painting, not having seen Phillips' work before, and attribute the crossed eye to a lack of painting skill. That view is problematic for many reasons, chief among them is this: the cat's eyes are perfect.

Dallas Museum of Art

2011-04-27T05:37:00.001-07:00

In a recent visit to the Dallas Museum of Art, where our American Indian Art collection opened the third leg of its national tour last week, I had the pleasure of viewing a couple of grand " canvases." it's nice to see a quilt get equal billing to a major American landscape. This Barn Raising quilt is almost the same size as Frederic Church's famous 1861 painting "The Icebergs".

The latter is a dascinating story of discovery. The great painting, which enthralled thousands when it was exhibited in 1861, was lost for more than a century. It was found, after an exhaustive search, on a liitle-used third floor landing of a large manaion in England that was being used as a home for delinquent boys.

The quilt was made in the 1890s and, as far as I could tell, has a less dramatic history. It was probably a treasured heirloom in a middle-class home until it was given to the museum in 1998.

This disparity in provenance fascinated me. Ordinarily it is folk art that is more vulnerable to the ravages of time. In this case, the folk art textile had far more careful stewardship, while one of the most famous landscapes of its time lanquished for decades in a hostile environment. Delinquent boys are usually not kind to paintings. I guess we owe these boys a debt of gratitude for the survival of "The Icebergs".

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Changes

2011-04-22T07:13:00.001-07:00

It's not like me to go eleven days without posting. Since I launched this blog in August of 2009 I have managed, somehow, to post about twice a week. Lately, however, something has happened that will make it difficult to continue at that pace.

In late March, I was appointed President and CEO of the Fenimore Art Museum and The Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown. It was a bit of a surprise, but also quite an honor. And my calendar exploded.

As I worked my way through meetings, openings, and conference calls these past few weeks, I have thought often of this blog and how I would keep it going. It is just too much fun to let go.

But to keep it going, There have to be some changes. More photo blogging. More mobile blogging, using my iPhone like I'm doing today. Perhaps posting once a week instead of twice.

There is stiil a lot to share on the topic of American folk art. I hope you all continue to enjoy this blog; maybe even more than before. It will continue to celebrate the lost and forgotten, the quirky and offbeat, the extraordinary found in ordinary people.

There's no way I'm going to let that go.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Ray's Ornamental Gardens

2011-04-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting and compelling areas of study in the field of American folk art is the folk environments that were once great attractions but, owing to time and the elements, are now considered defunct. Often these works exist only in the photographs that visitors had the foresight to take when they could still be taken. I recently purchased two old black and white photographs of a folk environment on eBay and as a result had a whole new wold open up to me.

The photos I purchased are the ones at the top and bottom of this post. The dealer who sold them knew only that the bottom one was from Stephenville, Texas. He did not know where the top one came from. At first glance, they looked similar to me. Something about the style of the concrete, glass, and ceramic pieces that made up the environment.

After some digging online, I found out that these photos were taken at the once-famous Ray's Ornamental Gardens in Stephenville sometime in the 1940s. George Ellis Ray was born in Tennessee in 1881 and married Melissa Gallaher there in 1900. She died in Stephenville in 1932 and that, I believe, is when George began his environment (the dealer mentioned something about the maker doing this project out of grief for his wife).

It was such a local attraction that several postcards were made at the time, two of which I illustrate here. One book on Stephenville even described the popularity and nature of the site, which was a real find:

"A unique and interesting Stephenville novelty was the inimitable Ray's Gardens, which brought people from near and far. There, guests could view the often bizarre and unusual folk art of George Ellis Ray (1881-1957). He made sculptures of concrete, tile, colored glass, shells, and petrified rock. While visiting, guests could read George's homespun, thought-provoking, philosophical aphorisms, listening all the while to gospel music played trough a loudspeaker system."

George died in 1957 and, as is often the case, the environment fell into disrepair. Supposedly nothing of it can be seen today. We can. however, enjoy George Ray's work through these images, and admire his ability and desire to express himself visually and share that vision broadly. That is, for me, the hallmark of great folk art.

Portrait of a Dullard as a Long-Winded Preacher

2011-04-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

Most museum labels don't provide a lot of insight. It seems that many curators are content with sharing only the basic data on a piece, like the title, artist, date, and medium. Oh, and the donor. It's rare to read any thoughts or opinions on the part of the people who know these works best.

This painting, which I saw in my trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts back in February, was an exception. The label struck me as a clever bit of insight into this guy, who was painted by the itinerant folk artist Ammi Phillips in Troy,New York, in about 1820.

His name was Jonas Coe, and he was a Presbyterian minister. According tot he label, a writer from the time period left us with our only verbal picture of Reverend Coe: "Great in character rather than in intellect, wit, or eloquence." Translation: boring and long-winded.

The curators who wrote the label astutely point out the visual clues to this man's lack of ability to engage his parishioners. His right hand is open and arm extended as if lamely making a point, and the fingers of his left hand mark the page in his Bible that is no doubt the source of his sermon. As the label points out, a "pedantic" style rather than an inspired one.

The last line of the label, which addresses the Rev. Coe's face, is priceless. "His dour expression augurs sterns and lengthy sermons." I wonder how many of these Ammi Phillips had to sit through in order to be able to express so beautifully the dullard's countenance and gestures.

A Lady in Winter

2011-03-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

I almost missed this great carving of Lady Liberty at the MFA in Boston last month. She was tucked away in a corner of one of the large galleries, literally swallowed up by the huge painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware by Thomas Sully. And she's one of the best sculptures in the museum.

According to the label, this figure of Liberty was carved probably for a Massachusetts courthouse in the 1790s. This symbol of Liberty was very popular in the early years of the American Republic. She is often dressed in classical garb -- an homage to the great republics of ancient Greece and Rome -- and also holds or wears a Phrygian cap, or Liberty cap. The Liberty cap, which you can see on the end of the staff in Liberty's hand, became a symbol of freedom in the 18th century. It also comes from ancient times; the Romans gave these caps to freed slaves.

It's a great carving, probably done by someone with experience in the shipcarving trade. I was amazed at the delicate realism of the sculpture, especially considering that it was meant to be exposed to the elements -- New England winters included.

In fact, I would venture to say that this frail Lady Liberty saw worse winters than the national hero occupying acres of canvas to her right, Valley Forge notwithstanding.

Encountering God at the MFA

2011-03-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

It is perhaps the most famous quilt in America; certainly one of the best ever produced. During a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's new Art of the Americas wing I encountered for the first time in many years. It is Harriet Powers' great Pictorial Quilt (done between 1895 1n3 1898), recently conserved and just put on view in a special folk art gallery at the MFA.

Recognition of Powers' work came very early. In 1886, a young artist of Athens, Georgia, Jennie Smith, went to the Athens Cotton Fair. There she saw Powers' other great quilt, the Bible Quilt (now in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, below). She wrote: "I have spent my whole life in the South, and am perfectly familiar with thirty patterns of quilts, but I had never seen an original design, and never a living creature portrayed in patchwork, until the year 1886....in one corner there hung a quilt which 'captured my eye' and after much difficulty I found the owner, a negro woman, who lives in the country on a little farm whereon she and husband make a respectable living....The scenes on the quilt were Biblical and I was fascinated. I offered to buy it but it was not for sale at any price."

Harriet later sold the quilt to Ms. Smith, and hard times compelled the latter to only offer five dollars. Harriet and her husband, facing financial trouble themselves, readily accepted the money. But before leaving Ms. Smith's she explained all of the panels in the quilt.

In recent years another great quilter, Kyra Hicks, has done extensive research on this extraordinary artist who was born a slave in 1837 and became a landowner after the Civil War. Kyra's book, "This I Accomplish," broke new ground in the study of Powers and her work. The most startling find for many was that Harriet was actually a literate woman and a quilter of some local renown prior to her "discovery." Other surprises await in Ms. Hicks' volume, but I would rather have her tell you what they are.

For now, you can view another national treasure of textile art at the MFA. As you look at the fifteen squares, each a different story (mostly Biblical), pay particular attention to the brilliance of Powers' improvisational style. There is very little like it anywhere, except in her other quilt at the Smithsonian.

And look closely at the blue square in the center. It depicts the Leonid Meteor Shower that took place in 1833, a few years before Powers was born. The stories told by the slaves of this phenomenon must have left a deep impression on the young Harriet. By placing this image at the heart of her quilt, I think Harriet was connecting the spiritual with the physical. Her lively and profound affirmation of the presence of God on Earth is now on view in a spectacular new venue every bit the equal of the Athens Cotton Fair.

Fasanella Found and Reinstalled

2011-03-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

If you've been following my previous posts (along with my friend Laura Ruberto's) on the case of the missing Ralph Fasanella painting, "Welcome Home, Boys," owned by the City of Oakland, you'll be pleased to know that the Cultural Arts Office has overseen a reinstallation of the painting to a more public area within the African American Museum and Library of Oakland (AAMLO). The manager of the Cultural Arts Office, Steve Huss, sent me the photos you see on this page.

It looks as if the painting is now in a public reading room that houses other exhibits, which is good. And it's over a mantel, which protects it from any incidental bumping that could cause damage. So I have to admit that the City is taking this matter seriously and is doing what they can to protect and present this great work to the public.

What remains is context. I'm going to write a piece about "Welcome Home, Boys" for the City and Library staff to consider taking into account in their presentation. If there are connections that can be made to the painting's surroundings in AAMLO that would obviously strengthen the experience of seeing the work and would make it a more compelling destination than it was in the Public Library.

One other matter of interest. Mr. Huss noticed that there are two signatures. Both are dated 1953, but in one the artist's name is misspelled "Fasanlla." It was not unusual for Ralph to sign a work more than once, and it was also not unheard of for him, when signing in a hurry (his norm) to drop a letter or two. At first glance, both of these signatures look authentic. I guess we can take this as an emphatic statement of creative ownership that, by all appearances, is once again before the people of Oakland.

The Dentist and the Mole

2011-03-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

Joseph Moore was a dentist in rural Massachusetts. He couldn't have made a lot of money practicing in the small town of Ware in the late 1830s; in fact, he had to travel in order to find enough patients to keep his practice going. During the long New England winters, when travel was difficult, he had a second job as a hatter.

How is it, then, that when Moore commissioned his neighbor in Ware, Erastus Salisbury Field, to paint a portrait of himself and his family, that he chose to have them depicted on a canvas fully 84 x 93 inches? When you encounter this picture in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, it is as overwhelming as any of the huge history paintings by Copley or Stuart or Sully. And yet it depicts not a national hero, but an average country dentist.

What an incredible monument to the talents of the folk artist this painting is. It has everything: bright color, lots of detail in the faces, costumes, furniture, and carpet; incredible sense of pattern in the way that the figures float against the vertical perspective of the floor; homespun charm in the depictions of the children standing erect as forthright young adults or clinging to their parents.

And in the midst of all this artistic virtuosity, one small telling detail that really says it all. Look closely at Joseph Moore's face. No, that is not a flaw in the photograph. It is a large mole on his left cheek. Why would you allow that to be included in your portrait if you were paying enough to have a mural size image created?

Because it was there. A distinguishing feature that was not seen as a blemish, at least not by Joseph Moore. In folk art studies we acknowledge the tendency of the artist to present subjects as they are, with all there "flaws," as an honest, direct approach to art-making. It's what makes folk art such an important historical document, and a counterpoint to the tendency among academic artists to gloss over the odd features of a subject to approach a more conventional notion of physical beauty.

In the typically witty shorthand of the folk art field, this approach has a nickname: it is known as the "warts-and-all" approach. It's just one more way that the untrained artist, in doing everything wrong, somehow got it all right.

Back in the Public Domain

2011-03-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

I had a nice phone conversation yesterday with Mr. Steven Huss, Cultural Arts Manager for the City of Oakland. He called to reassure me that the Fasanella painting "Welcome home, Boys" was in good hands at the African american Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO, above), and that the city would redouble their efforts to care for the work as well as ensure public access to it.

Mr. Huss made a couple of points that bear repeating here. First, that the painting was never "lost," but that it had been moved without the Cultural Arts office knowing where it went. He went on to explain that this painting is an anomaly in the City's art collection in that it is the only moveable object they have. (This page will give you some idea of what he means). I can certainly sympathize in that city offices generally do not have the staff, infrastructure, or procedures in place to track objects the way museums do. And museums do lose things from time to time too.

At any rate, the painting is now on everyone's radar screen for the foreseeable future. Mr. Huss promised to move it from the office area it now occupies to a public gallery at AAMLO. He even promised to send me a photograph of the work in its new location for me to post here on the blog. In return, I have donated a copy of my 2001 book "Ralph Fasanella's America" to AAMLO for them to have as a resource for people who come see the painting.

The only question that remains for me is whether "Welcome Home, Boys" fits into the mission and activities of AAMLO, whose stated purpose is to "discover, preserve, interpret and share the historical and cultural experiences of African Americans in California and the West for future generations." AAMLO has a lot of archival material relating to progressive movements and people; perhaps that is a tie-in; "Welcome Home, Boys" includes a diverse group of labor activists and strongly reflects the artist's experience in the more progressive unions to advocate for racial and gender equality. AAMLO also appears to have high-quality exhibition spaces and design. So I'm looking forward to seeing where the Fasanella fits in.

For now, however, I feel satisfied that the painting is safe, the city values it again, and the public will shortly be able to see it. That is, after all, what the public domain is all about.

Hiding in "Plain Sight"

2011-03-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

That's how the City of Oakland described the resolution to the case of the missing Fasanella painting outlined in my last post. It was never lost, they said (after dispatching no less than a dozen employees to find out where it was). The painting had, since 2003, been on display at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, in a climate-controlled environment to protect the newly restored work from any further deterioration. The story of the city's reaction to the breaking news of the missing painting appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Bay Citizen (the latter being the Bay area's New York Times bureau). My phone interviews with the various reporters took place in a crowded NYS Thruway rest area while on my way to New York last week, so pardon me if I don't sound coherent :-)

The question of why the Fasanella is in an African American museum is beyond me at the moment, but suffice it to say that when Laura Ruberto went to the museum to see it, it was there just as the city said. Well, almost. The photo Laura took clearly shows the painting is in good shape and even has its informational plaque on the wall next to it for visitors to read. But wait. In the lower right corner there is a stereo player of some sort, and in the lower left a chair. That's because the Fasanella is hanging in a private office rather than a public space.

At least the city did the right thing in protecting the painting and placing it in a safe, climate-controlled area, but that's not the same as having it accessible to the people of the city, which was the spirit of the gift in the early 1990s. Obviously, more discussions with the city will follow, which I will share on these pages.

The Missing Masterpiece

2011-03-02T12:19:00.000-08:00

It's not often that there is breaking news in the field of American folk art, but this is huge: a large and important folk painting by Ralph Fasanella given to the people of Oakland twenty years ago cannot be found anywhere.

A week or two ago I casually asked Laura Ruberto, a Facebook friend and colleague who lives in Oakland, if she had ever seen the Fasanella painting "Welcome Home, Boys" at the Oakland Public Library. The work, painted in 1953 and measuring a full six feet in width, had been purchased from a private collection with money from a local union and the public art fund of the city of Oakland in the early 1990s through an initiative called Public Domain. It was originally going to hang in the Oakland Airport, but the Public Library seemed a safer and better location. It was intended to honor the working class citizens of Oakland and the Bay area who fought for a piece of post-World War II prosperity after working for years under a no-strike pledge to help the war effort.

And there (on the blank wall above) it was when I went though Oakland in 1997 and stopped by just to see it. But when Laura went to the library, well, that's when things got fuzzy. The Library recalled sending the work to the Oakland Museum for restoration in 1997. The Museum staff told Laura that it left their premises in 2003, but could not tell her where it went. The Public Arts office did not know its whereabouts, but promised to investigate. Her story of her continued attempts to locate this work through the Library, the Oakland Museum, and the Public Arts office are detailed in her recent blog post, "The Case of the Missing Fasanella Painting." The whole episode is very disturbing.

Hopefully the work is simply tucked away somewhere in storage or hanging in a union hall somewhere in the city. Hopefully. I'll post an update when we know anything further.

Meditation by the Sea

2011-02-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

I just got back from a trip to Boston to see the new American wing at the Museum of Fine Arts. The museum is a far cry from my graduate school days of the early 1990s. The new wing is huge, inviting, and loaded with the museum's formidable collection of American art from prehistory through the present.

Of course, I took particular note of the folk art collection, which was always a strong component of the museum's offerings since their main benefactor, the collector Maxim Karolik (a Russian immigrant who married into the wealthy Codman family of Boston) was a major enthusiast of the works of American self-taught artists. I was delighted to find out that the folk art pieces appear in a number of galleries throughout the new wing, and are also featured in one large gallery on the second floor. While perusing that space, I reacquainted myself with a singular, enigmatic piece that has captivated critics and the public for decades: the unassuming little painting called "Meditation by the Sea."

It'a a wonderful little painting, with all of the bold patterning of forms that make folk art so much fun. But it has more than that. It has an air of mystery and tension that is inescapable. Who is the figure in the foreground? Why is he at this beach? Most important, what is he thinking as he contemplates the sea before him?

The accompanying label offered two tidbits. One, that this painting was based on a print of the beach at Gay Head, Martha's Vineyard, that appeared in Harper's Magazine in the early 1860s. And two, that perhaps the tension and anxiety some see in the picture has something to do with the Civil War going on at the time.

Both ideas are tenuous. I'm reproducing the print here to make my point that there is no conclusive way to say it is the inspiration for the painting. At least not to my eye. This lack of visual connection throws into question, obviously, the latter contention that the mood is related to the Civil War. I'm not sure we know when this picture was painted.

None of this matters, of course, when considering this work as an American masterpiece. It is, unquestionably. It's just a pity we don't know what that little guy is thinking. In the meantime, we can fill in the blanks with our own imaginations, and admire the liveliness of the unidentified artist's brush strokes, which delight the eye, and the composition, which invites us to take a walk on that beach and lose ourselves for a moment or two.

Cat in a Box

2011-02-24T09:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you get tired of all the folk paintings of kids and their pets. This piece is a welcome relief from that monotony, at least for me. We've had it in the Fenimore Art Museum collection since 1992, when it was bequeathed to us from a donor in California. It's an 11" square painted "box," actually stretched canvas, painted to look like an actual cat in a carrying case. The artist painted leather straps along the front side to allow the feline to look out and, presumably, to breathe. This artist obviously had a love of animals had a sense of humor.

We think the painter was Florence Elizabeth Atkins, who was born in Louisiana in 1876 and spent most of her working years in San Francisco, where she moved just a few years after the great earthquake of 1906. Atkins never married, and died in San Francisco in 1946. Aside from working as a clerk for Western-Union Telegraph Company, she was known for her painted and sculpted animals, particularly her bird studies, and her work was included in prestigious venues such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Atkins did study art formally in California and in Europe, so strictly speaking she is not really a folk artist. But there is something about pieces like this that have a homespun and offbeat quality about them that appeals to me. This is a piece meant more for a middle-class parlor than a formal art gallery in a mansion.

What also appeals to me is that Ms. Atkins is truly a lost and under-appreciated artist. It is very difficult to find information about her on the internet, and their are no images of her work to be readily found anywhere. Maybe this post will help get the ball rolling. In the meantime, it is hard to look at this painting without smiling. Especially when you think of this kitty sitting in Florence's studio looking out longingly at all those bird studies.

Noseprints

2011-02-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

Here's another one of those folk artists whose work is so recognizable that there is no debate over attribution when an unsigned piece shows up on the market. Zedekiah Belknap is well known in folk art circles but not so much among the general art-viewing public. He worked mainly in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont between 1807 and the late 1840s as an itinerant portrait painter.

Belknap may not have originally intend to paint portraits for a living. In his youth, he actually entered divinity school at Dartmouth College in the hopes of becoming a minister. He graduated in 1807, and did preach for a few years, although he was never ordained. He began to paint portraits the same year he graduated from Dartmouth.

He didn't have much luck in his married life. Belknap married Sophia Sherman in Waterville, Maine in 1812, but she terminated the marriage shortly after. It seems that Belknap's relatives frightened her. Many of them were afflicted with a hereditary hip disease that left them limping.

Over the course of his forty-one year painting career, Belknap is known to have painted at least 170 portraits. They all have one thing in common, at least to my eye. Yes, it's the noses. All of Belknap's sitters, male and female, young and old, have the same bulbous nose outlined in a thick, reddish line of paint. The Fenimore Art Museum's "Two Children with a basket of Fruit," painted about 1830, is a great example of his work. I particularly like how the rounded forms of the fruit in the basket echo the two very prominent noses in this portrait. Those noses are better than any signature.

Belknap's bad luck continued throughout his lifetime. In 1857 he entered a Poor Farm near Weathersfield, Vermont and died there the following year. His delightful paintings form a legacy that belies the difficulties he endured in his 76-year life. It's both a pleasure and a relief that we never have to argue over whether any of them are really his.

Watts Towers - A New Partnership

2011-02-17T12:31:00.000-08:00

The year I was born, the now-world-famous Watts Towers in Los Angeles nearly died. It was 1959, and the city of Los Angeles was worried, or at least claimed to be. The Towers, built over the course of many years by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia in the Watts section of LA, were neglected and in disrepair after Rodia left town. The complex of seventeen major structures built of concrete, rebar, ceramic, shells, and glass -- the tallest of which stretched 100 feet into the sky -- appeared vulnerable to collapse, especially in the event of a tremor or earthquake.

So in 1959, the city of Los Angeles ordered the Towers demolished.

Fortunately, a group of concerned citizens formed a committee to save the Towers. One of their members was N. J. (Bud) Goldstone, and aerospace engineer (below). He devised a stress test to prove the Towers were safe. After being subjected to tremendous pressure, the Towers did not budge. So they were spared.

But they still needed work, and have continually required care and restoration ever since. In recent times this has proven difficult, as the city's budget became stretched by the severe recession. In 2011 the city had only $150,000 to offer, down from its annual allocation of $300,000.

The time was ripe for another champion of this folk art masterpiece to step forward. Michael Govan had admired the Towers ever since his grad school days at the University of California at San Diego. In his current role as Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) he approached the city about a partnership to help preserve the Towers. Since most private foundations do not grant money to governments, LACMA became the agent for the city, and recently obtained a $500,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation to do the conservation work along with programming for the Watts Towers Art Center and Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center.

So now a major urban fine art museum will become the primary caretaker of a folk art wonder that it doesn't even own. That's a long way from the wrecking ball prospects of a half century ago.

An Old Friend Reintroduced

2011-02-11T10:36:00.000-08:00

This is one of my favorite folk art paintings of all time, and one that I thought would forever remain a mystery. Back in my grad school days, when i took the American Folk Art course offered by Lou and Aggie Jones here at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, this painting was one that the Joneses love to dwell upon. It's called "The Old Plantation," and it depicts a group of slaves playing music and dancing at an unidentified plantation on a riverbank. It is in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Physical evidence gave some clues to the painting's origins; a watermark on the paper indicated a date of around 1790. The piece was found in an antique shop in South Carolina in the early part of the 20th century. The key question was whether the work was done by a white or a black artist. It certainly looked like a piece done by someone skilled and experienced in watercolor, but there were trained African American artists prior to the American Revolution. The details of the painting, particularly the instruments (which are African or African-inspired) and the nature of the dance itself, seemed to indicate an artist who was intimately familiar with slave culture. To many scholars that seemed enough to lean toward the notion of this having been painted by an artist who was also a slave on this plantation.

Now, owing to careful research, we know that this is not the case at all. Susan P. Shames, a librarian at Colonial Williamsburg, conducted extensive research into period documents, gravestones, and newspapers to identify the artist as John Rose, a plantation owner (and watercolorist) who kept slaves at his riverfront plantation in South Carolina in the 1790s. One key breakthrough had come years ago, in 1976, when a pair of elderly sisters came to Colonial Williamsburg to see the painting and informed staff that the piece had descended in their family and that it was painted by an ancestor of theirs depicting his own plantation. It was Ms. Shames who discovered that one of the ladies' forebears was John Rose.

When I traveled to Williamsburg in the mid-1980s to conduct research on our own folk art collection, I recall vividly my reaction to seeing this piece for the first time. My first thought was "I can't believe it's that small." The iconic painting is only about 11" x 18". It occupied a small section of wall just to the right as you entered the folk art museum's "Carolina Room," and I remember thinking how unfortunate it is that we will never know who painted it.

Now that we do know, this painting rises, in my estimation, from a larger-than-life folk art icon to an unequivocal national treasure. But it's going to be hard to adjust my thinking (and my lecture notes) after speaking about this piece to my own grad students for the past 25 years.

My Second Acquisition - 1983

2011-02-08T06:57:00.000-08:00

In retrospect, the museum should not have allowed me to get a taste of what it feels like to acquire artwork so early in my career. As I recounted in my last post, my first piece of art acquired for the museum occurred before I was even a staff member. So did the second. Only that one was mural sized and cost a lot of money.

Those of you who know my work as it relates to the great 20th-century folk painter Ralph Fasanella will not be surprised that his work was at the top of my list of must-haves for the Fenimore Art Museum folk art collection right from the start (see my previous posts on him). I met Ralph in the fall of 1981, my first semester in graduate school, and saw all of the incredible paintings that he had in his studio.

As I planned my first folk art exhibition here in the summer of 1982, I pressed the issue of a major acquisition. Our Director at the time had just come on board and, I think, was eager to make a statement, so he encouraged me. It didn't hurt that he had been Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program when I started my studies, and so he knew me quite well.

At any rate, imagine that same 23-year old summer intern again, only this time with money to spend. I went back down to Ralph's studio in Westchester County with a different eye. In the end, the work I chose had it all: it was one of Ralph's best urban scenes; it was autobiographical; it was large and colorful; it was New York; and it included his trademark political viewpoints without being overbearing. It was "Dress Shop," oil on canvas, 1972, 45" x 90". After a few months of getting the necessary approvals, we purchased the painting as our first accession of the year 1983.

The painting depicts the garment factory where Ralph's mother worked in the 1920s and 1930s, but it is more conceptual than that. On the right is a neighborhood from the early 1920s, when Ralph was a youth getting up at the crack of dawn to help his father deliver ice. On the right is the Bronx as Ralph knew it from the 1960s. As he put it: "This painting took fifty years to create."

The price? Hefty for that time, a grand total of $23,500. Our Director got a kick out of saying that the price had him hyperventilating but he did not hesitate to support the purchase. And I felt like a conquering hero. It was only much later that I understood the full complexity of this painting, and the deep personal meaning it held for its maker.

At the lower right Ralph included a plaque dedicating the painting to the memory of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. Just above the sign he has placed his mother and sister working away in the dress shop. The proximity is not coincidental; for Ralph, the union organizer and antifascist, the notion of family was a universal expression of love for a whole people. I think I really got it when Ralph was talking about the painting over the phone with one of our upper-level administrators and said "that one is right from the belly."

My First Acquisition: 1982

2011-02-04T06:24:00.000-08:00

This is where it all started. I was a summer intern at the Fenimore Art Museum in between semesters at the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies, working on my Master's degree and searching for a niche in the museum world. I was tasked with the research and installation of a major exhibition of the American folk art collection. Heady stuff for a 23-year-old. I think I got the internship because I was the only applicant who had taken the folk art graduate course offered by our former director Louis C. Jones and his wife Aggie. Lucky for me, as it turned out to be the defining moment in my career.

One of my first assignments as an intern was to seek out and acquire an Otsego County folk painting that the director had heard existed. It was owned by a local woman whose mother had found it in an antiques shop along Route 20, just a few miles north of Cooperstown, sometime in the mid-20th century. According to the information our director had, it was an oil on board, about 20" x 30" and depicted a local building.

When the museum's then-curator and I first got a look at the piece we were more than pleasantly surprised. For a simple painting on board, this work offers a lot. The late 18th-century saltbox clapboard structure with a log addition. Figures rowing, washing clothes in the lake or stream, walking across the lawn toward a horse, fishing. And the variety of animals: a cow, geese, a sheep, and a large pig.

My favorite detail is the tavern sign high up on the pole to the left of the building. I only wish it was legible. It seems likely that this piece depicts a local scene, although it would be difficult if not impossible to identify conclusively. It is also worth remembering that Route 20, where this was found, was once called the Great Western Turnpike, so this painting may have originated in New England and migrated westward as so many people and objects did in the early 19th century. We acquired the piece, of course (the mother had made her daughter promise to give it to us eventually) and gave it a place of honor in the new exhibition.

The tavern in the painting looks like a friendly and welcoming spot for any weary traveler making their way along that hilly route. But to me it represents the start of a nearly 30-year journey exploring the variegated world of American folk art, with each new valley more exciting than the last.

The Enigmatic Foursome

2011-02-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

Group portraits are usually pretty straightforward. You know how the father is, along with the mother and the children. If they do not depict obvious family members, as in my previous post about the strange group of ironers, these works can be very puzzling. This is one of our oddest examples of this phenomenon.

The "Enigmatic Foursome" came out of the barn of Mr. and Mrs. William J. Gunn in the late 1950s, found there by Mary Allis and sold to Stephen C. Clark for the Fenimore Art Museum. It has never been considered one of our masterpieces, but it is interesting enough that we have included it regularly in our exhibitions and catalogues.

But what an odd assortment of individuals. Who are they and why would they have a picture taken together? The inclusion of the Black man, ostensibly on an equal standing as the others, is highly unusual for portraiture of the early 19th century (ca. 1835-50 seems a good guess for this painting). That aside, no two members of this group look related, and the laughing red-haired man in front seems particularly out of place.

Our former director, Lou Jones, always had a ready answer for conundrums like this. And his "answer" was usually delivered tongue-in-cheek. When he wrote about this painting in 1960 -- the title "Enigmatic Foursome" is his -- he thought that this was a traveling theatrical troupe of the type that performed in small town taverns and country fairs across rural America in the early decades of the 19th century.

It's not a bad guess. Look at the cast of characters: The Straight Man, at the top; the Ingenue, at the left; the Clown, at the bottom; and the Black character who would have danced and performed between sets. If Jones was right, this is really a very rare piece, documenting a form of early American entertainment in a manner that we just don't see in surviving examples. Even if this portrait depicts something other than a theatrical troupe, it is a remarkable survival of a group of people who by conventional standards have no right to occupy the same canvas. That is the enigma that this picture presents to this day.

It's a Small World

2011-01-28T09:49:00.000-08:00

Here's the second in my series of posts relating to finds I made at this year's Winter Antiques Show in New York City. This one was a sweet little piece, and a rare one too. As I discussed in my post from last March regarding a large watercolor and ink map sampler that I bought for the museum, these particular forms of schoolgirl work are much more difficult to find than the more common Biblical scene or print-derived landscape. That's why this small map sampler caught my eye.

This piece is only about 10" wide, much smaller than our large piece from last year. The workmanship is quite good for the scale, as you can tell from the detail photos. And it's signed, by an Anna Gill, and dated 1804. This is important because, like to many pieces that I have blogged about in these pages, there is a good story behind this piece that we would not know if it wasn't signed.

According to the dealer offering this sampler, Anna Gill lived in Pleasant Valley, New York and was eleven years old when she did this piece. Her mother, Wilhemina Anthony Gill, had a private nurse from childhood, a slave purchased in 1761 and named Dina. During the American Revolution, when the British troops invaded the Hudson Valley and destroyed numerous homes (including nearly all of Kingston, NY), Dina stayed behind after the family fled into the woods, as she was determined to protect the family home. The story goes that when she encountered the British troops she offered them a meal in return for sparing the house. Surprisingly, they agreed, but burned the mill.

Records indicate that when Dina died in 1823 she was a free person. The Gill family had such respect and gratitude for her that they arranged to have her buried in the family plot in Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery. Anna, the maker of this sampler, died unmarried in 1844 and is buried in the same plot.

These map samplers were meant to demonstrate a schoolgirl's knowledge of world geography. It just seemed fascinating to me that behind this small demonstration of one's awareness of the world there was a family history that stood squarely at the intersection of Africa, Europe, and North America. Some things can't be taught in school.

Crossing the Atlantic at the Winter Antiques Show

2011-01-25T07:45:00.000-08:00

I just returned from my annual January visit to New York City and the Winter Antiques Show, and have several interesting discoveries to share. This is a show not to be missed; there are dozens of dealers representing a wide range of interests from fine art to ancient art to tribal art and, of course, American folk art. You may or may not go there to buy, as the prices are consistent with what you might expect from an antiques show on Park Avenue, but the looking is its own reward. You can educate your eye more fully in an hour here than in weeks of seeking out individual shops in the many regions from which these dealers come. And the setting is glamorous, as you can see by the entrance to the show below.

While wandering through the show, I kept an eye out for pieces that had certain similaities with ones in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. Here's a good one.

This life-size carved wooden figure depicted a mariner holding a sextant. It is beautifully carved, probably in a large ship carver's shop. At first glance i would have thought it to be American, but according to the label it is English. The piece is attributed to a carver named Thomas Hall Tweedy, who reportedly carved it for a natical instrument maker's shop (the dealer even gave the name of the shop: John Cail!) in Newcastle on Tyne.

This figure undoubtedly sat outside the shop on the sidewalk, like a cigar store figure. But it reminded me so much of a little figure in our collection I just had to photograph it and share it here. Our figure is even mentioned in the dealer's label for the large piece.

Our little mariner is only about 25 inches tall, but it depicts the mariner holding the sextant in the same manner as the large figure. Our is, of course, much more primitive than the large one. But very appealing for those who have an eye for folk art. Our piece was found in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and is thought to have come from a nautical instrument maker's shop in that important coastal city. The small figures would generally be displayed either on countertops or, as I have seen in one period photo, outdoors on a cantilevered mount above the shop doorway.

However separated by thousands of miles of ocean, these two pieces remind us of the seafaring culture that binds the hemispheres. This notion has gained such credibility in recent years that historians speak less and less of American or European history and instead study Atlantic history. Or, as the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, is fond of saying: the sea connects us all.

The Castles of Montgomery

2011-01-21T06:05:00.000-08:00

This is really one of the most spectacular pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum folk art collection. It’s a large painting on canvas, about 41” x 55”, depicting an imaginary scene of two castles on a river. The castles have different banners flying overhead, with the one on the left looking decidedly Moorish, perhaps evoking the medieval tradition of battle scenes between Christian and Moorish knights. The title of the work comes from the prominent inscription along the top: “View of the Castle of Montgomery.”

We don’t know the source of this image (there is a Montgomery Castle in Wales but we have not found a print view of it that would be the source of this painting; besides, you would more likely find Moorish castles in Spain and Portugal), but the manner in which it was painted is the reason for its appeal. The colors are bright, bold, and solid. The castles are flattened against the picture plane in delightful patterns, and the repetition of forms such as the boats on the river, the trees on the horizon, and the birds in the sky creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. The lone fisherman on the shore adds an almost quaint, everyday mood to the piece.

Oral tradition holds that this painting was created as a fireboard, or fireplace enclosure, by the architect of the Wofford House in Woodruff, South Carolina. It was probably painted in the mid-19^th century, around 1830-35. Interestingly, a nearly identical piece exists in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Virginia (shown here at the bottom). That piece was painted for the Moore family home in Fredonia, just seven miles from the Wofford House. That painting bears the exact same inscription as this one, referring to the enigmatic “Castle of Montgomery.”

The existence of two identical fireboards of this size and quality within seven miles of each other provides us with a tantalizing clue to the artist, who was undoubtedly local. We don’t know for sure what Montgomery refers to, but research at Colonial Williamsburg suggests that it might be local too. According to the research, the probable reason for the commission of their work occurred in 1833 when the owner of the Moore home, Dr. Andrew Barry Moore, brought his new bride home for the first time.

Her maiden name? Nancy Montgomery.

Folk or Fake?

2011-01-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

This may be one of the most interesting and instructive pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum’s folk art collection. As such, it has a special status in relation to all of the other paintings in the collection.

That’s because it is a fake. A rare fake by a famous forger.

In 1990 Robert Lawrence Trotter was sentenced to 10 months in Federal prison for the forgery and sale of American folk paintings. Trotter was a talented artist in his own right, but was unable to sell his works. So he started forging the works of other historical painters whose works did have a ready market. One FBI agent explained: “He’d go into antiques shops, buy old frames, use square nails and ultraviolet light to cause certain cracks to occur. He wouldn’t copy, but he’d paint in the famous artist’s style. Sometimes he would sign their name, sometimes he wouldn’t.”

When Trotter was sentence to federal prison, he was ordered to give four of his fake paintings to Yale University so that they could be studied for future use in identifying forgeries.

There are 55 known Trotter fakes, only 16 of which have ever been recovered. That’s what makes our example so rare.

Looking at the piece, you can see right away why Trotter was successful, at least for a while. It is beautifully painted in a style consistent with what one might expect for 19th-century New England portraiture.

To my eye, however, there are some red flags. The baby here is too stylized and awkwardly proportioned in relation to the mother. The mother herself bears too much resemblance to the works of known folk artists like Noah North and Milton Hopkins. Overall, the work strikes me as a pastiche of different styles rather than one uniform manner of painting. I'm sure there are other technical ways in which a conservator could determine that this work is not authentic as well, but in the field one has to rely on a practiced eye.

The real clue, for me, is the reverse, which most people don’t inspect when they buy a painting. You can see quite clearly here that although the stretcher is clearly old, the canvas is not. Dead giveaway, in my opinion.

There are 55 known Trotter fakes, only 16 of which have ever been recovered. Ours and the four at Yale are the only ones I know of in public collections. Ours was donated by a private individual who wanted a public record of Trotter's fakes so that others would not be fooled. So like those at Yale, our Trotter is available for study by any qualified individual interested in learning more about the technical process of creating a work of art that isn’t what it appears to be.

Ugliest. Baby. Ever.

2011-01-13T15:45:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across this painting just today while attending a meeting in collections storage. It's a piece I know well from the 1980s, but haven't seen in a while. It was thrilling to see it again for a couple of reasons. One, it IS the ugliest folk art baby I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. Second, and more important, it is one of the great study pieces in the field.

Looking at the painting, one would feel pretty confident that it was cut down from a larger painting. It seems so spontaneous and open-form for a 19th-century folk portrait. But studying more closely reveals two insights that work against such a conclusion. The arms are positioned in a way that would make for a very awkward pose on the part of the mother if she were once included. And if you look closely at the edges of the paint surface you can see the original canvas pattern (visible in the paint) scallops along the left side. This indicates that this was the original tacking edge, which would have pulled the canvas where the nails were placed at intervals.

But looking at the exposed canvas along the unpainted edges reveals more strangeness. The weave of this canvas is much finer than the pattern in the painted surface. Was the original canvas simply mounted on a new one? There is no evidence of a second layer of canvas anywhere.

So what happened? Well, this painting is a rare survival of a canvas transfer done many years ago by an known restorer (probably not a professional conservator). The paint surface was literally peeled off the original canvas (keeping the canvas pattern as a "fossil") and laid onto a new one to stabilize the painting. And as far as we know, it is an original composition showcasing the obvious pride in one's newborn, however misplaced that pride might be.

I've never considered exhibiting this portrait. It's a aesthetic horror. Don't even try to convince me otherwise. But I have never considered getting rid of it either. It's the only example of this kind of physical evidence that I know of, and is a great piece to sue for getting my graduate students to look closely at a painting. I also like having this picture around when I'm in need of a good laugh.

Man of Mystery

2011-01-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

This fantastic little carving came to us by bequest from Mary Allis, the legendary Connecticut dealer who was instrumental in arranging for so much of our folk art collection to reside in the Fenimore Art Museum. It was Mary Allis who put Jean and Howard Lipman in touch with our benefactor, Stephen Clark, in 1950. And it was Allis who found the treasure trove of folk paintings in an old barn on the property of Mr. and Mrs. William J. Gunn and brought them to Mr. Clark's attention. Our collection would not be anywhere near as important as it is without her.

As for this piece, very little is known about it, but it shows the kind of careful, bold patterning and forthright expressiveness that Allis always sought in great folk art. It stands about 15" high, and depicts a gentleman in colonial costume leaning on his cane and holding a tri-corner hat. It is difficult to date the piece, although of course the clothing is 18th century. We just don't know if the artist was working at a later date.

Regardless of the date, it is certainly something made by a professional (though not classically trained) carver, possibly for commercial purposes. Figures like this one adorned the countertops of American shops from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. A similar figure in our collection may have advertised a gentleman's sporting goods store. Whether this figure advertised a clothing shop or had an entirely different purpose is still to be determined. Mary Allis did not, unfortunately, indicate where she acquired this sculpture.

I particularly like this man's face, with his upraised eyebrows and rosy cheeks. His hair is also quite nicely carved in long, flowing lines. All of which contrasts with the blocky feet that the artist did not do anything to even approximate a naturalistic appearance.

Someday we may find out where this gentleman lived and what he did for a living, but for now he is an enigmatic wonder of the folk art collection, unwilling or unable to reveal any clues to his past.

Washington Crossing the Delaware

2011-01-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

It was, of course, the greatest comeback in American history. Had it not succeeded, there might not be much if any American history to study. On Christmas night in 1776, after a string of losses and with much of his army demoralized and ready to opt out as their terms of service expired, George Washington mounted a bold offensive by crossing the Delaware River at night and surprising the Hessian mercenaries fighting for England at dawn.

It took nearly 75 years for an artist to adequately capture this historical moment. Emmanuel Leutze, a German immigrant who grew up in Philadelphia but was working in Dusseldorf, Germany in the late 1840s, wanted to create an image that would inspire democratic revolutionaries throughout Europe. He thought the example of American independence would do the trick, and chose Washington’s surprise victory as the subject.

No one can dispute the magnificence and power of the massive painting he created (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and measuring a full 149” x 255”!!!), and it was a huge success, at least in the United States. The painting was copied by a number of engravers and made widely available through print media.

Where it somehow found its way into the hands of an unknown folk artist from New England in the 1880s. The result was an inspired embroidery in the Fenimore Art Museum collection based on the Leutze painting. Though much smaller than the original (our work is about 32” x 42”, it captures the gravity of the moment in needlework and silk, and brings the pride in America’s past (and this young woman’s dexterity with the needle) into the parlor of an average American home. The “life” of an image like Leutze’s may be fascinating, but it is considerably enriched when it merges with the artistic expressions of the people it celebrates.

Weathervanes: More Tools of the Trade

2011-01-03T04:00:00.000-08:00

I've done quite a few posts about weathervanes, and have even shown a great carved weathervane pattern of a bull that gives some insight into how these iconic piece of folk art were made. Recently, while browsing through our collections facility, I came across two other objects that add more to the story.

Many weathervanes began with a hand carving, like the bull. From this carving the maker would create a plaster or ceramic mold, which would in turn be used to make a castiron figure resembling the original carving. Copper sheets would be hammered over the iron and soldered together to make the final, hollow-bodied and lightweight weathervane. Weathervane manufacturers held onto their molds as long as they were producing the vanes, but all too often these pieces of their history would be discarded when the company went out of business. Most weathervane manufactories did not survive the great Depression of the 1930s, and so the tools of the trade are rare.

We are lucky to have the carved bull, of course, but the other pieces I found represent the second step in the process. These are two sides of a ceramic mold for a small cow weathervane, sold to the Fenimore Art Museum in 1956 by Adele Earnest and Cordelia Hamilton of the Stony Point Antiques Gallery in Stony Point New York. Earnest and Hamilton also sold us the bull, showing how adept they were at finding the exceptional pieces of folk art that were still floating around in estates and shops at that time.

We don't know where these molds came from, unfortunately, but they are remarkable survivals nonetheless. They are about 17" wide and 10" tall, and one of them is marked "14 COW," which indicates the number and subject of the pattern that this company offered. I would guess that they date to the late 19th century.

Finding these pieces was another reminder that a really good weathervane exhibition, including contextual material like these, would be an eye-opener for many people. That is something that is increasingly on my radar screen for the coming years.

Big Church Little Church

2010-12-30T06:29:00.000-08:00

Here is a small piece from the top shelf. In museum lingo, that means an object that is stored in an out-of-the-way location, in this case literally the top shelf of a tall shelving unit. Items way up there are difficult to see and examine, as it requires the use of a ladder to get close enough to see them. Like the Salon exhibitions of old, those things that are at eye level tend to get the most attention, while those that are closer to the floor or “skied” (placed high) tend to get only fleeting glances.

I have glanced at this little church a number of times, and finally decided to brave the climb up the ladder to check it out more closely. As usual, I was surprised at what I found out.

It’s a delightful piece of homemade folk art. Someone, probably a local carpenter, made this realistic little building around the turn of the twentieth century with simple but clever joinery, incising, and planing. It stands about 14 inches high, and has a hinge at the back to allow it to be opened. You can see from the slot at the apex of the roof that this was made as a donation box. It is badly painted, perhaps later than when it was made, but it is beautiful nonetheless.

The story behind is a nice one too, and quite relevant to our museum. According to the donor, Donald Molloy of Fort Myers, Florida, it was given to him by his grandmother, Viola E. Smith Lance, in about the late 1970s. She had received it from the Matthews family of Cornwallville, New York in the early years of the twentieth century. According to her recollections, Mrs. Matthews was a wealthy woman from New York City who spent her summers in the Catskill Mountains. She was very devoted to the church in Cornwallville, and made it a habit to keep this homemade donation box on her porch during the week so her well-off friends could contribute to the church’s collection any time they visited her.

The church Mrs. Matthews used this box to collect donations for? It is the very one now located at the end of the village green at The Farmers’ Museum. This building originally served a congregation in East Durham, and was moved to Cornwallville to serve the Methodist Episcopal congregation there, and was purchased by the museum and moved to Cooperstown in 1964.

Along the way, the church collected more than money. It acquired a history, both tangible and intangible, that is still catching up with it today. This little piece of folk art way up on the shelf rightly belongs with our Cornwallville Church. Despite its size, the little donation box adds great depth and meaning to the church, and reminds us how every great historical survival is the result of many small acts of devotion.

James Lombard: Maine Weathervanes

2010-12-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

Not all late 19^th-century weathervanes are extravagant, mass-produced ornaments for prosperous farmsteads. Although the norm at the time was for these elaborate vanes to be produced and marketed by large firms in Boston or New York, there is one humble maker who has become a famous counterpart to our understanding of this art form.

He is James Lombard, a farmer from central Maine who was born in 1865 and at some point in his young life produced weathervanes for his community of Bridgton and as far away as Wells, Maine. Lombard worked with simple planks of pine, which he sawed and chiseled into fantastic shapes for his vanes. We have three in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, each about eighteen inches tall, and they all show Lombard’s talent in creating the lively silhouettes of the chickens that were the subjects of the pieces. Look how he made the cutout areas form their own designs, and how proudly these birds show off their plumage.

We’re very lucky to have the Lombard vanes we have. The one painted white (just above) was found on a hen house in Wells, Maine, fully sixty miles to the south of Lombard’s home in Bridgton. This distance may indicate that he traveled to peddle these vanes in his youth.

The weathervane at the top of this post, however, is really special. You can tell that it was made with more care than the other one, and is a more successful composition. It’s coat of white paint is much older, suggesting that it was treasured as a relic rather than “restored.” Where was this one found? The barn of the Lombard Homestead itself in Bridgton. This was the vane that Lombard himself saw every day as he worked his farm until he passed away in 1920.

Midwestern Master: Paul Seifert

2010-12-21T05:14:00.000-08:00

When one looks at idyllic farm scenes like this piece, one almost always thinks of an artist peacefully whiling away his time in the countryside making these images for interested people found along the way. That’s only partly true. Paul Seifert, the artist of this beautiful watercolor of the farm of Mr. E. R. Jones, had a fascinating life that led him from the chaos of mid-19^th-century Germany to the American frontier.

According to his granddaughter, Seifert was born in Germany in 1846, and probably saw a lot of upheaval in his early years, including the revolutions of 1848. He studied engineering at the University of Leipzig but fled Germany in 1866 to avoid being conscripted into military service during the Austro-Prussian war. He came to New York and took the Erie Canal westward, arriving in Milwaukee in 1867. From there the journey got really interesting.

Seifert wanted to continue westward, so he jumped on a lumber raft (see my previous post on Linton Park and the lumber rafts of Pennsylvania) for a 100-mile ride down the Wisconsin River. No pleasure cruise, I’m sure. As the raft approached Richland City (later named Portage), near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Pine Rivers, he must have seen something he liked. He dove off the raft into the river and swam ashore. Sitting on the shore was a group of young girls (maybe the reason for the dive?) that included a 16-year-old Elizabeth Craft. She later recalled Seifert struggling onto the bank looking like “a drowned rat.” They were married the following year.

Paul and Elizabeth built a log cabin on the banks of the river and worked very hard to create an 80-acre truck garden, from which they sold vegetables to people in Gotham, two miles away. Seifert “trucked” the produce there by wheelbarrow. He earned extra money as a taxidermist and craftsman to help support their growing family of four daughters.

In 1875, Seifert decided to try his hand at painting. He packed his bags with paper and paints and went on the road in search of farmers who would be willing to pay $2.50 for a view of their farm. The paper was large, often 21 x 27 inches, so the resulting image made quite an impression. Over the course of the next decade he made about 100 of these drawings, mostly in Richland, Grant, Sauk, and Iowa Counties in southwestern Wisconsin. Seifert died at the age of 80 in 1925, and his artwork didn’t receive any accolades until it was discovered by Jean Lipman in the 1940s. It was from Lipman that the Fenimore Art Museum acquired this piece.

Seifert painted the farm of E. R. Jones of Dodgeville (seen today in the photo above) in 1881. It is different from many of his works in that it shows the farm in late autumn or early winter, just after a snowfall. The blanket of freshly fallen snow contrasts nicely with the autumn colors still visible of the trees. The beauty of the work lies not only in the palette, but also in the impeccably clean, smooth lines of paint used to distinguish the buildings, figures, and landscape.

One tidbit of information makes me wonder whether Seifert’s painting was meant to be represented in the Fenimore Art museum. Just over twenty miles to the west of Dodgeville is a town the artist must have known in his travels: Fennimore, Wisconsin.

A Man and His Dog

2010-12-17T07:19:00.000-08:00

Man with Gun and Dog.

That's pretty much all we know about this 22-inch tall figure in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. It looks to me like a well-dressed gentleman with his Dalmatian and long rifle out for a day of sport hunting in the countryside. He wears a nice suit and necktie along with a cap, all of which seem to indicate an early twentieth-century date for the piece. But we don't really know who made him and for what reason.

The figure is nicely carved, and there is a lot of personality and individual style in the carving of the facial features and the body of the figure. The dog is delightful and charmingly undersized in relation to the man, perhaps because the carver chose a smaller base than would accommodate a more realistically size canine. The carver also went to a great deal of time and effort to create the gun that the man holds at his side. It has a fair amount of detail and is even hollowed out.

The only suggestion that has occurred to us over the years is that this figure might have been a counter-top trade sign for a sporting goods store. I suppose that's a possibility, although these types of signs were not so much in vogue in the twentieth century. But it is not a commercially produced figure anyway, so it might have been commissioned by a store owner who approached a local carver to provide a nice and practical ornament for his shop.

It's also my guess that this man was hunting fowl, but I couldn't tell you for sure. The dog looks like a Dalmatian to me, and they were known to be good bird-dogs. He even looks as if he is pointing with his tail, working while his master poses.

The Magic of Marbledust

2010-12-14T10:45:00.000-08:00

Some folk paintings have subtle qualities that only grow on you over time. For years, when I pulled painting storage racks, I would get to one that was very different from all the others. Instead of the expected splash of colors from the various paintings hung on each rack, this one offered only a dull vista of black and white images. I didn’t give these works much thought or time (let alone gallery space) until the late 1990s when I learned more about them. Now, after looking more closely at them, I think they are some of the most interesting pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum folk art collection.

They are commonly called Marbledust paintings, but in the nineteenth century they were known as Grecian Panitings and, later, Monochromatic Paintings. The method of creating these works was simple: the drawing surface consisted of paper or an artist’s board, first painted white and coated with marbledust sifted through fine muslin. When dry, this created a rough surface on which charcoal and pastels could be worked to create soft-edged forms and modeled areas of light and shadow. The medium could be worked with a piece of leather or a knife to create strongly contrasting light and dark areas.

It was an art form designed for young ladies, and included in B. F. Gandee’s 1835 publication, The Artist, or Young Ladies’ Instructor. Gandee referred to the technique as Grecian Painting. It was Silas Wood who commercialized the process and called it Monochromatic Painting in the 1850s. By that time, female academies were offering this art form as part of their curriculums, using published prints for subjects and composition.

These works glisten and shimmer in the right light, and are stunning in their execution. Our Marbledust painting of Mount Vernon by a Connecticut woman named Lucia Jencks in 1861 is one of the best examples. It is large (21 ½” x 27 ½”) and has an incredible amount of detail in every square inch. The result is an impressive tribute to George Washington, depicting his home and final resting place. A perfect complement to any American home.

If you like early engravings or mezzotints, these Marbledust paintings will really appeal to you. They are essentially hand-drawn versions of the prints. Only sprinkled with fairy dust.

Deciphering Inscriptions

2010-12-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a great lesson in what not to believe when looking at the reverse of a painting and trying to decipher an inscription. We have this portrait of Cynthia Pierce by a folk artist named Noah Alden in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. The inscription on the back looks very clear: "Miss Cintha J. Pierce 1793/Pinxt June 1800/by Noah Alden."

But there are problems that might not be obvious to the novice. Is 1793 a birthdate? If so, Miss Pierce was painted at the age of seven, which she clearly is not in this picture ("Pinxt" is a Latinized way of saying "painted"). It should also bother you that "Cintha" is so clumsily spelled.

Fortunately we have the mate to this portrait, Cynthia's husband Silas. On the reverse of his portrait ithere is another inscription, but before reading it you should note the look of the canvas. It is much more patinated than hers. This is what an original canvas back looks like. The inscription looks period too, with the appropriate flourishes of the brush. Here is what his reads: "Silas Pierce/born June 26rh 1772/Painted June 1830/by/Noah Alden." So the 1772 and 1793 dates are their birthdates, and the paintings were done in 1830, not 1800.

This is what probably happened. Mrs. Pierce (not "Miss" as the inscription says) was relined at some point. In this process, a restorer will trim the egdes of the canvas and use non-acidic adhesives and heat to attach the old canvas to a new one. This is often done to stabilize a painting that is torn or flaking. In the process, however, you lose the original reverse. In this case, I think the restorer or owner tried to replicate the original inscription on the new canvas. And made several mistakes in the process.

There's one more little tidbit on the back of Silas' portrait that is worth noting. Way down in the lower right hand corner, the artist has included the price: $13.00. That's a detail worth preserving.

The Eyes Have It

2010-12-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

This is one of the oddest oddball images in the history of American folk art, but it is an offshoot of a portrait tradition that is very common. Ammi Phillips, the artist, was one of the most prolific painters of his generation. He was born in Connecticut in 1788, and by 1811 he was establishing himself as a portrait painter in eastern New York State. Phillips had a penchant for finding newly prosperous middle-class entrepreneurs, those who came to the then-wilds of New York after the Revolutionary War to start settlements and take advantage of the plentitude of timber and water power. Over the course of his fifty-year painting career, Phillips would create likenesses of this generation as well as that of their children and grandchildren who had more genteel pursuits. He died in 1865.

Here is a Phillips portrait of a mother and child that we have in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. You can see why he was so popular. These paintings are simple and elegant, with solid colors and graceful lines. We think this portrait was painted sometime in the 1820s.

The portrait of the physician (in a private collection) is also from this period, but it is in a class by itself for what it shows. Of course, Phillips' patrons were justly proud of their accomplishments, and often had him include references to the source of their prosperity in their portraits. In this case, a simple book just wouldn't do. The good doctor here had to have his portrait painted in the act of a surgical procedure, in this case a surgery to repair a cataract. Honestly, I didn't even know that this type of surgery was performed in the 1820s, but here it is.

If you want to know more, you should be aware of the article "Folk Art Portraiture of Early American Surgeons," by Ira M. Rutkow, MD, published in Archives of Surgery in July 1999, available here by subscription to the journal. Otherwise, just enjoy this unusual painted document of 19th-century medicine and be glad you were born much later.

The Knickerbocker Mystery

2010-12-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

The landlord of the Columbian Hotel in New York, a Mr. Seth Handaside, made a startling announcement one day in 1809. One of his tenants had disappeared and left behind a large debt of unpaid rent. But that was not all he left behind. In the abandoned room, Handaside found a manuscript entitled:

A history of New York, from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch dynasty, Containing among many surprising and curious matters, the unutterable ponderings of Walter the Doubter, the diasastrous projects of William the Testy, and the chivalric achievments (sic) of Peter the Headstrong, the three Dutch governors of New Amsterdam; being the only authentic history of the times that ever hath been, or ever will be published.

The manuscript was signed by a Diedrich Knickerbocker, the tenant who ran off to parts unknown. The landlord, in an attempt to recoup his losses, handed the manuscript over to a printer, who published it that same year. The book and its mysterious author were the talk of the town for months. A History of New York was a rollicking tale of the colorful personalities and foibles of the old Dutch families that still dominated New York society. Knickerbocker had produced a big literary hit.

Only, as you probably know, there was no Diedrich Knickerbocker. When word got out that the tenant story was a ruse, and the real author was a little known and unsuccessful lawyer, people were shocked. As the author was not of Dutch descent, his book took the older families aback for poking fun at their ancestors. But the young writer went on to achieve lasting fame, and his creation, Diedrich "Father" Knickerbocker, went on to become a character that represented New York much the way uncle Sam represents the United States.

I'm speaking, of course, about Washington Irving. His creation, Father Knickerbocker, was seen everywhere in the 19th century, in cartoons and editorials, magazines and advertisements. Even a weathervane that has a long history right here in James Fenimore Cooper country.

We have a large weathervane of him, and it is one of the best in The Farmers' Museum collection. Everything about it -- the detail of the scowling face, the plump body overwhelming the poor, small chair, the tall hat, the pint he is drinking, and especially the surface patina (and bullet holes!) -- speaks to its quality as an artwork and artifact. But there is something even better.

I've said on previous occasions here how rare it is for a 19th-century weathervane to have any history, let alone a photograph of it in its original location. Our angel weathervane from Nantucket is one example. The great thing about Father Knickerbocker is that we have photos of him sitting atop the barn of Edward Severin Clark's Fenimore Farm, the property that became The Farmers' Museum (the sister institution to the Fenimore Art Museum) in the 1940s. The pictures are probably from the later 19th century, prior to the construction of the massive stone barn that is the main entrance to the Museum today.

It's great to have such a magnificent part of our history in our collection, especially one that is tied to such a long tradition of history and literature in New York State. But even though it is common for weathervanes to have bullet holes in them, I can't for the life of me imagine what kind of person would shoot at our Father Knickerbocker. A Cooper fan perhaps?

Joshua Johnson

2010-11-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

Quite a few of the blog posts I have written in the past year and a half have dealt with folk portraiture. We've seen folk portrait painters from the Colonial era, the heyday of the portrait in the early and mid-19th century, and from the photographic era after 1840-50. We've seen famous portraitists as well as anonymous ones. In fact, there has been such a range and variety of portrait painters in these pages that it would be difficult to find a common denominator other than the lack of artistic training.

Difficult, but not impossible. You see, all of the folk portraitists that have appeared here so far have one thing in common: have were white.

There were probably scores of African American portrait painters in the 19th century; some slaves were specifically taught to paint. The problem is that so few are documented or known by name. There is one notable exception.

Joshua Johnson spent 30 years painting portraits in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1795 to about 1825. Thirty years in the same place, plying the same trade among the same community. And yet so little is known about him, other than the paintings which are ascribed to his hand. We do know that Johnson was a free man, which was not unusual for a city where the freed Blacks outnumbered slaves by more than two to one. A 1782 document cites a Joshua Johnson who was a blacksmith, aged 20, who was finishing up an apprenticeship and soon to be freed. It is not certain whether this is the same Joshua Johnson as the portrait painter. City directories list Johnson as a painter beginning in 1796, and trace his movements around the Baltimore area over the next several decades.

Other than that, very little is known about his life. But the paintings speak volumes.

The nineteen works known to have been painted by Johnson display a keen sense of design and color, and a subtle delicacy that is rarely equalled in Anerican art. The subjects, overwhelming white, are all rendered with great sensitivity despite the obvious challenges in the naturalism of the figures. This is a common problem in folk art but in the best works can be turned to advantage by emphasizing pattern rather than three-dimensional form and perspective.

It's a pity that we don't know more about Johnson, and that there is no known self-portrait of the artist. He remains a figure who devoted his working life to preserving the appearance of people in his city, and yet no one knows what he looked like.

I first encountered Johnson's work in 1992 at the Maryland Historical Society in an exhibit of their collection as interpreted by an African American artist, Fred Wilson, and entitled "Mining the Museum." It was provacative in many ways; Wilson applied his own labels to the pieces, inlcuding the slave shackles that bore the ironic identifying heading "Maryland Metalwork, 1750-1800."

But the Johnson portrait stands out as a distinct memory. As you walked up to the painting, your movement triggered an audiotape which said, simply and plaintively, "who will paint my portrait?"

From top:

Westwood Children, ca. 1807, National Gallery of Art

Grace Allison McCurdy and Her Daughters, ca. 1806, Corcoran Gallery of Art

Edward and Sarah Rutter, ca. 1805, Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Jacob Anderson and His Sons, ca. 1812-15, Brooklyn Museum

A Folk Art Feast

2010-11-25T10:19:00.000-08:00

The other day I scoured our folk art galleries and storage areas to find a piece that would make a great Thanksgiving post. To my surprise, there are few folk paintings that depict a family at mealtime. Perhaps this was too mundane a subject even for the folk genre painter; more likely, it required a range of skills that was difficult to acquire. Think about it: in order to paint such a scene you would have needed to do portraiture, interior space (and perspective), and still life (for the plates and platters of food).

But I happened to receive an email from a colleague who sent along an image of just such a feast as a thank you for a recent research visit to Cooperstown. And I knew the image immediately. It is from a private collection that I have known for several years.

It is a family record by the itinerant artist James Osborne, depicting the family of Hatch family of Maine in 1831. Beneath a large panel listing the family members and their birth dates, Osborne has depicted the family seated at a large table about to partake in a sumptuous feast. Notice that the father, at the end of the table at the right, is reading to the family prior to the meal. Perhaps a short Biblical passage offered as grace? If you look closely (which might be difficult since I could not obtain a high resolution image), you can also see one small child sneaking a morsel of food while the others wait patiently for the dad to finish. A little humor goes a long way at the Holidays.

Enjoy this image while you enjoy your holiday weekend, hopefully with family and friends. Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Serving Up Sullivan's Diner

2010-11-23T08:59:00.000-08:00

Working artists are frequently drawn to working people. I think this is particularly true of self-taught artists, who seem to have an affinity for those who make their way in the world by virtue of initiative and ingenuity. We happen to have in the Fenimore Art Museum, many examples of this empathetic relationship. One of these works hits pretty close to home for me: Mary Shelley's 21" x 27 1/2" bas-relief carving, "Sullivan's Diner, Horseheads, N.Y."

I've known Mary for quite a number of years, and have always admired her work. She began carving in 1973, inspired by the relief carvings of the famed Key West folk artist Mario Sanchez, about whom I have blogged before. Mary's pieces are carved panels, like those of Sanchez, but executed in a very different style. Her figures are exaggerated and expressionistic, often humorous in her manipulations of scale as well as form.

And Mary has always loved diners. She did a whole series of them in the 1980s. We ar elucky to have one of the best of these. Here is what Mary wrote in a letter to us at the time of her donation of "Sullivan's Diner" to the museum:

The Sullivan's Diner piece you have is the fourth (and currently last) in a series of pictures carved of Sullivan's Diner located in Horesheads, New York. (Another piece in the series I donated to the National Museum of Women and the Arts.) I originally started doing pictures of diners and restaurants because I was fascinated with them as places where people, isolated during the rest of their day, could come together just to "be" and feel a sense of instant belonging. After all, I also found myself (the isolated artist) going to them for the same reasons.

Sullivans Diner has a storied history in the Southern Tier of New York State.It was built in the 1940s Patterson, New Jersey, as a Silk City diner car, and was brought to downtown Elmira, New York (my hometown) where it became well known as Vic's Diner. In 1974 the diner was purchased by Arthur and Fran Sullivan and relocated to Old Ithaca Road in Horseheads, just north of Elmira. The Sullivans sold the business in 2005, but it continues today under new ownership.

At the time of her retirement in 2005, Fran Sullivan estimated that she had cracked 12 million eggs in that diner. She actually sat down one day and figured this out. When I used to look at Mary's carving, I associated the plate of eggs and toast held by the waitress in the foreground as an iconic diner serving. Now, I can only think of a hard-working and hardy soul who held forth in that building for more than thirty years, serving up 12 million of those eggs to the people she knew and loved. I'm very glad that one of them was a hungry folk artist looking for inspiration and a good meal.

An Uneasy Silence

2010-11-19T04:55:00.000-08:00

Here is a piece that always made me laugh. Sometime around 1815, the Connecticut watercolorist Eunice Pinney created this odd interior scene of two women sitting opposite each other in a formal parlor and seemingly staring at each other in awkward silence. It is small, about 10" x 15". The only animated character here is the baby held in the arms of the woman at the left. And even the baby is strangely rendered as a miniature adult.

And yet, this is one of the greatest folk art interiors ever made. The design sensibility that Pinney demonstrates is remarkable, even at first glance where one is drawn to the piece by its color and symmetry. Beyond that, it only gets better. The two women are drawn with organic s-curves that mirror each other. The flattened, vertical perspective of the Queen Anne table and the floor make the patterns and shapes of each leap off the paper. The draperies likewise hang symmetrically, and have a texture that makes them appear like the hanging branches of a weeping willow. The chairs in which the women are sitting are so ephemeral that they almost disappear. Of all the elements in this watercolor they are perhaps the most pure in form.

The question that has always nagged me about "Two Women" is the meaning of the painting. Who were these women? What are they doing and why did Pinney paint them? Is this a portrait of family members? Pinney was well known for her watercolor memorial paintings; we have three of those in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. Is this a tribute to a lost loved one? Or is it based on a print, as some other of Pinneys works were known to have been.

We may never know. But staring at this piece and trying to unlock its secrets is not an unpleasant pastime.

The Glorious Twilight of Folk Portraiture

2010-11-14T06:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve always thought it ironic that just as folk portraiture was dying out, rapidly replaced by the new contraption called the daguerreotype, it became more dynamic. It almost seems as if folk painters knew that their days were numbered and that the cheaper price and more accurate images of the photograph would soon be the method of choice for capturing a likeness. At any rate, the years after the introduction of the daguerreotype to America in 1839 were marked by some of the best folk portraits ever, and few were better than the little-known Samuel Miller.

Miller painted in and around Boston in the late 1840s and early 1850s, more than a decade after the photograph had been introduced. Looking at his paintings, it really is no wonder that, for a time, some people still preferred the old-fashioned custom of commissioning a painted portrait. His likenesses, especially of children, are colorful and boldly patterned. They exude the forthright charm that we have come to associate with folk art.

He also debunks some of the myths. It would be easy to picture Miller traveling the highways and byways of New England,plying his trade in small towns and villages and moving on when business dried up. The facts are that he was born in Boston in about 1806 and died in Charlestown in 1853, having lived in the same community his whole life.

We are fortunate to have five Millers in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. The best of these is our classic Picking Flowers seen at the top of this post. This work shows a young girl in a striking red dress in a well-tended flower garden, standing before a landscape that resembles the south shore of Massachusetts. There is even a small cape style house situated in a snug little inlet at the left. A yellow bird is perched on a tree branch at the upper right, and a cat toys with one of the picked flowers at the lower left. The second illustration here is also from our collection, and shows another girl in an interior setting, teasing her cat with a tassel.

One of the best Millers is the portrait of Emily Moulton at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, seen above. Emily’s portrait includes patterned stockings and a lovely vase of flowers on the windowsill at the right. This portrait bears the inscription on the reverse, "Painted in 1852 by Mr. Miller who lived on the south corner of Pearl and Bartlett Streets, Charlestown, Mass., USA.”

Whoever Miller was, he no doubt loved ornamentation; bright, beautiful colors and shapes abound in these works. He must have felt that the youngsters in these pictures were literally the flower of youth, with all the beauty and promise of a bright spring morning. I suspect that he dreaded the rising popularity of the daguerreotype, and not just for economic reasons. The small, drab images it produced do not do justice to subjects such as these.

But America in 1850 was a practical culture that prized innovation, and photographs could capture many things that paintings could not. But the loss of the aesthetics of form and pattern and color was profound, at least from our perspective today. It would not reappear until the early Modernists of the 1920s would attempt to reassert it in their paintings. These trained artists, it should be noted, revered the lost folk artists of the mid-19th century.

I guess it IS better to burn out than to fade away....

Two Connecticut Lives

2010-11-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

When I first saw these small watercolors many years ago in the folk art galleries of the Fenimore Art Museum, I thought for sure that they were some kind of joke. A cartoon or caricature of an old woman smoking a pipe. Billows of smoke forming in front of her feisty face. Very hard to take seriously, until (as always) you learn more.

They depict the venerable Martha Barnes of Middletown, Connecticut, who was, as the inscription on one of the paintings indicates, 96 years old when they were done. Martha was blessed with a long life but not an easy one. She was born in 1738 and was married at the age of twenty to Jabez Barnes, a sailor. He was lost at sea in the West Indies in 1780, leaving Martha to raise the couple’s eight children. She did so, spending her entire life in Middletown. Martha died at the age of 96 in 1834, and was remembered as a strong-willed and devoutly religious woman who was absent from church only two half-days during the last twenty years of her life.

She had a grandson with a gift for painting but some challenges of his own. Lucius Barnes was born in 1819 to Martha’s son Elizur, and at the age of four contracted a spinal disease that left him with only the use of his hands and toes. He spent his childhood and young adulthood confined to a wheelchair.

At about the time of his grandmother’s death in 1834, Lucius painted about six watercolors of her in a couple of different poses: sitting and reading the Bible or standing with a cane and smoking what must have been a trademark pipe. Lucius died two years later, in 1836, at just seventeen.

It’s not entirely clear why Lucius painted these portraits, but one of them was discovered bound within a copy of John Cookson's book on Martha entitled "The Memoir of Martha Barnes, Late of Middletown, Connecticut" (1834) It is possible that some of these nearly identical drawings may have served originally as frontispiece illustrations to this text.

In any case, what we should really see in these amusing little watercolors is not so much the humor inherent in the subject, although that is inescapable and harmless. Knowing the story behind the pictures, I now can’t help but see the intersection of two difficult lives, one long and one short, expressed with immutable affection, clarity and charm.

Malcah Zeldis

2010-11-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write a post about one of my favorite folk artists, Malcah Zeldis, for quite some time. Yesterday I came across this video posted on the American Folk Art Museum's Facebook page and it reminded me of this intention. It appeared in a blog about older people and their contributions and talents; a wonderful way to see any number of folk artists. But for me, having known Malcah for many years, it was a shock to think of her as older. It was also a reminder that I need to get back in touch with her the next time I am in New York.

Advanced Style Presents: Malcah Zeldis from teenage peanut video productions on Vimeo.

Malcah's story is unusual and inspiring. She was born Mildred Brightman in the Bornx in 1931, and grew up in Detroit. Her father was a jack of all trades, a fruit peddler and window washer as well as a Sunday painter. He appears often in her paintings with his T-shaped squeegies ready to brighten the city with clean, clear windows.

Malcah became an ardent Zionist, and traveled to Isreal in her youth to live in a Kibbutz. The experience affected her deeply. She still recalls the brilliant colors and exotic ways of the Arab peoples she encountered. And, on one occasion, the Isreali artist Aaron Giladi saw some early paintings of hers on a visit to the community and pronounced "There is a great artist living in this Kibbutz."

Upon her return to America, Malcah (the name is Hebrew for Queen) married and had two children and settled in Brooklyn. It was only after her divorce in the 1970s that she finally had the time to devote herself to painting. When she did, the results were astonishing.

Her work is bold and colorful, like the bedouin people she so admired. It is unabashedly autobiographical, and includes many images of herself and her loved ones. Malcah also memorializes her heroes, everyone from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to Anne Frank to the women of the Old Testament. Peace and harmony rein supreme in the world of Malcah Zeldis. We are fortunate to have, in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, one of Malcah's great autobiographical works, a homage to the Jewish baseball star Hank Greenberg (above), set in the Detroit of her youth. She appears in this work as the young girl sitting on the front step with her doll while her family listens to the ballgame on the radio. Greenberg towers over the scene at the top, larger than life.

I visited her often in her New York City apartment, and she is an incredibly gracious hostess. Once, while visiting her during Hannukah, she let my daughter light the Mennorah. The apartment is, as you can see from the video, loaded with beautiful paintings that Malcah loves to explain as you walk through the rooms with her. It is a world of brilliant color and dynamic people -- both famous and obscure -- who have made the world a better place.

Off in one room, at the back of the apartment, the keen eye might notice something small and plain in one corner. It is a T-shaped squeegie, the very one used by Malcah's father so many years ago. I believe it is a reminder to the artist that so many people, in the course of their daily work, create beauty in their own way.

Angels and Roosters

2010-11-01T03:42:00.000-07:00

On my recent visit to Minneapolis to attend the opening of our own Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, I had the pleasure of spending several hours in the Institute enjoying their many galleries of artworks from around the world. As you read in my last post, the folk art of Japan was a pleasant surprise, but I also encountered an unexpected treasure trove of American folk art.

The MIA is Byzantine; not in its organization but in the layout of its galleries. i loved wandering through the many nooks and crannies of the place, turning corners and finding things that were not mentioned on the visitor guide. As I walked down one long corridor, looking for the cafe, I came across a multi-story atrium (above) that yielded a pleasant and familiar sight. On the top floor, just above the mezzanine level with the cafe, was a hallway gallery of 19th-century American weathervanes.

I of course took a closer look. The nearly two dozen vanes were all the gift of a single couple, John and Elizabeth Driscoll of Minneapolis. Their taste was exquisite and far-reaching. The collection included a terrific cast iron vane of a rooster (above) made by the Rochester Iron Works of Rochester, New York, very similar to one in the Fenimore Art Museum collection.

In fact, the Driscolls seem to have had a thing for roosters; there were a variety of them in every style and medium possible. My favorite was one (above) that was found on a barn in Red Hook, New York in the 1970s and dates to about 1890. It’s fantastic; not realistic at all but a fun, patterned version of the barnyard fowl. And the paint surface is as good as any weathervane I’ve seen. The vane is boldly striped in red and yellow, which accentuates the curved pattern of the tail feathers.

I also noticed a large Angel Gabriel, which reminded me of our little angel from Nantucket. This one is about five times larger than ours, and it seemed very different in form than the Gabriel vanes I’ve seen over the years. According to the label, it was made for cupola of the Winslow House Hotel in Minneapolis in about 1857. The hotel was a favorite resort for tourists coming to see St. Anthony Falls. Recent scholarship on this vane has apparently yielded some exciting new information about its history, and may explain its appearance.

According to the label, the Gabriel weathervane may have been made in France and displayed at the 1853 World’s Exposition in New York, popularly known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition. It was housed in a grand structure made of glass and resembling a huge greenhouse (above). The label did not indicate where the curators came upon this information, but if it is true this is the documented weathervane I am aware of with such a provenance. And it isn’t common to have French vanes in American collections.

But if you can discover Japanese folk art in Minnesota, why not an Angel from France?

Finding Japan in Minnesota

2010-10-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

Folk artists have a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and creating images that appeal to the audience of the moment. Time and time again in these pages I have written about folk artists who find and meet the market demand for inexpensive, bold, colorful, and meaningful images. You could say that folk artists are opportunistic in the manner in which they pursue their trade. And although their products may be lightly regarded in their own time, they acquire great value over time as we come to see how resourceful and beautiful these works really are, and how well they shed light on historical periods long past.

This isn’t only true of American folk art, but also of folk art around the world. I was reminded of this on a recent visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. This encyclopedic art museum, with holdings from antiquity to the present and from all parts of the globe, had two modest sized galleries that intrigued me. One was a gallery of American folk art: more on that in a future post. The other was a complete surprise.

As I was wandering through the byzantine galleries of the museum, I happened to stroll through the Asian wing, admiring the many large and intricate hanging scroll paintings and huge folding screens with scenes painted on them. I don’t know much about Asian art (the collection was primarily Chinese and Japanese) but I do enjoy the aesthetic of form and pattern, so it was a pleasant walk-through.

Then I took a detour into a gallery that was a bit off the beaten path. The room was full of Japanese folk paintings from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and the similarities of circumstance with American folk art were striking. Apparently there was a major roadway (called the Tokaido roadway) that linked Kyoto with the military stronghold of Edo (now Tokyo) as early as the 1600s. On this highway was a town called Otsu, where travelers often stopped for a respite on their journey.

Sometime in the early part of the century, enterprising artists started creating inexpensive and small hanging scroll paintings to sell to these wayfarers. None of these artists are known by name, but the works they made and sold are vintage folk art: simple, direct, bold, colorful, sometimes humorous, and memorable. Some of the works feature pagodas, other tell funny stories about everything from Gods and Demons to daily life at the time. It was a tradition, and a market, that lasted for three centuries.

These works are called Otsu-e, or pictures of Otsu (e means “picture” in Japanese). As the demand for these works grew, artists started innovating in production, just like their American counterparts. They used stencils to speed the imaging of particular forms, much the way the American mural painter Rufus Porter advised Americans to do the same in New England the 1840s. And they sought out well-traveled byways like the Florida Highwaymen on the 20th century.

The works on display at the Minneapolis Institute included (in order of their appearance here) one of the Pagoda paintings (from the late 19th century), and several others that depicted the God of Thunder trying to retrieve the drum he accidentally dropped into the ocean (from the late 18th-mid 19th century), the God of Agriculture humorously trying to shave the elongated forehead of the God of Longevity and Wisdom (early 18th century), a cat offering a mouse a hot pepper to make him drink sake and become inebriated, and a falconer (both early 18th century).

I’m a firm believer that any museum that claims to be encyclopedic must have folk art represented in its galleries. These humble works of Otsu-e were the only glimpse into the daily life of ordinary people in the entire Asian wing, as far as I could tell. The folk art of any culture has a collective power that speaks for the vast masses for whom art was a welcome respite on a long and dusty highway.

The Squirrel Cage

2010-10-24T05:19:00.000-07:00

There is a large body of folk art painted on tin utilitarian wares, chiefly the document boxes and platters that were brightly decorated by painters employed by tinshops in the id-19th century. We have these aplenty in the Fenimore Art Museum collection (currently on view at The Farmers' Museum), but it is another piece that caught my eye the other day that I wanted to write about. It is a piece that is ornamental not only in its painted decoration but also in the working and shaping of the tin itself. Our squirrel cage, from about 1885, is one of the most outstanding examples of its kind known. It speaks to the Victorian fascination with unusual household pets and highly ornate interior furnishings.

Squirrels were not completely unknown as pets in the 19 century, or even the 18th. Perhaps owing to my teaching a graduate course in American painting, our squirrel cage always reminds me of the famous John Singleton Copley portrait of the half-brother Henry Pelham, better known as “Boy with a Squirrel.” This painting was done in 1765 and shows the young Henry at a table with his pet squirrel on a “leash” that is actually a gold chain. This always seemed risky to me -- squirrels bite, don’t they? -- but it must have been commonplace for the time. Other Copley portraits from this time also show squirrels on leashes.

The cage seems like a better idea, at least from the owner’s perspective. These contraptions follow the popular literature of the late 19th century extolling the virtues of pet ownership, particularly for teaching responsibility to children, and go so far as to specify the type of segmented cage,with separate areas for eating, sleeping, and exercise, that was preferred.

Our cage fits this latter standard, but also goes much further in design. It is actually a miniature rendition of a steepled church, with a wheel attached at one end for the exercise area. The windows, which in other cages are merely small openings punched through the tin in some decorative design, are here realized as Gothic windows!

While the shape of the cage is fascinating the paint decoration really makes it special. The tinsmith must have had an experienced decorator in his employ, since the landscapes that grace the sides of the roof are done in a style closely associated with ornamented furniture. I take particular note of the Japanese style bridge in one of these landscapes, perhaps reflecting the influence of japanese design brought to America in the Centennial exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Other painted flourishes like the swirls in the steeple contribute to the overall effect.

This piece was obviously made for a wealthy family, and so one could question the extent to which it reflects the lives of the folk. But it does showcase artisanship of the kind that furnished America with a rich and vibrant ornamental tradition with which to enhance our daily lives.