"A simple line painted with a brush can lead to freedom and happiness," the painter Joan Miro said.
He got that right.
How about you?
What's your rabbit hole?
Above:Baron von Hoppin' by Jan Weir. Oil on linen. 6 x 8 inches. The Rabbit King by Joan Miro. Etching, aquatint and carborundum on paper. 38 x 28 inches.
In 1919, St. Louis adman Charlie Grigg saw big money in soda pop.
So he quit advertising for sales and joined a beverage company.
An innovative guy, before long he invented two successful soft drinks for the company, "Whistle" and "Howdy."
But it was his third invention that made Grigg's name.
In 1929, Grigg—now heading his own beverage company—introduced "Bib," a name he would change seven years later to "7 Up."
The "up" in 7 Up came from lithium, a mood-enhancing substance used to treat depression in the early 20th century.
Grigg added tons of it to 7 Up, to distinguish it from other lemon and lime pops.
A well-known picker-upper, lithium was a popular ingredient in patent medicines at the time; and doctors would advise depression-sufferers who could afford it to vacation at spas near lithium-rich springs, where they could drink and bathe in the mind-altering waters.
Grigg’s formula was perfect.
His timing was also perfect: 7 Up appeared just two weeks before Black Tuesday, the event that triggered—no pun intended—the Great Depression.
Sales of 7 Up soared.
Consumers believed Grigg's claim that the pop buoyed flagging spirits (7 Up is a "savory, flavory drink with a real wallop," his ads said).
They also liked to use 7 Up as a hangover cure (it "takes the ouch out of grouch," the ads insisted).
Grigg's invention became the third best-selling pop in the world—until the federal government intervened.
In 1948, the feds banned lithium in all foods and beverages, determining it to be a cause of birth defects, kidney failure, and death.
Without lithium, 7 Up's sales tanked.
But in 1968, with the help of ad agency J. Walter Thompson, 7 Up staged a comeback.
The agency hired designer Milton Glaser—famous for his Bob Dylan poster—to create campaign graphics and rented thousands of billboards alongside America's busiest highways, where college kids would be sure to see them.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes
A fellow artist expressed to me yesterday her disappointment that realist painters—even of the caliber of Monet and Van Gogh—never add anything original to our culture.
Photographers have a word for that wistful feeling: vemödalen.
Vemödalen—the feeling everything has already been done—was coined by the Swiss blogger John Koening, whose Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines "emotions we feel, but don't have words to express."
According to Koening, vemödalen is "the frustration of photographing something amazing, when thousands of identical photos already exist."
Those thousands of precedent photos turn mine into "something hollow, pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself."
By this definition, vemödalen (a word doubtless derived from the Swedish vemod, meaning "melancholy") is a kind of weltschmerzthat mistakes every work of art as another flat-pack item from Ikea.
It's easy to understand where vemödalen comes from.
Unoriginality is baked into human existence, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger proved in Being and Time.
Heidegger calls the self of our everyday being the "they-self" (Man-selbst).
The they-self is a conformist and unoriginal way of engaging with the world.
Heidegger claims that I am not myself as I go about the tasks that preoccupy me every day.
The they-self, he says, represents "concerned absorption in the world we encounter.
"The 'they' prescribes our way of interpreting the world."
In other words, I don't encounter the world: they do.
"It is not 'I', in the sense of my own self, that 'am,' but others, whose way is that of the 'they,'" Heidegger says.
While being a they-self feels comfortable, Heidegger insists, remaining one is a choice: a choice to surrender your soul to the "dictatorship of the they;" to surrender, sheepishly, to conformity, mediocrity, practicality, and ingenuousness.
In a real sense, Heidegger says, we wear a disguise our whole lives: the disguise of the they. And that disguise—that inauthentic self—tricks us into believing "there's nothing new under the sun" when, in fact, everything under the sun is new every moment of every day, if only we open our eyes to it.
. "It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die," Oscar Wilde once wrote.
"Most people are other people. Their life is a mimicry."
The average American artist, according to the Labor Department, earns $50,300 a year. That's $10,000 less than a clerk at the post office (a job Faulkner held as a young man, until he was fired for throwing away mail).
Of course remorse isn't good for the soul; and calling America materialistic is trite.
But as Wassily Kandinsky observed, "The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip."
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
— Somerset Maugham
I don't care for many aspects of aging.
The mysterious sore knees and feet and back muscles.
Pretty women calling me "Sir."
Automatically getting the senior discount.
Those things suck.
But one noticeable aspect of aging pleases me immensely: discovering the power of patience.
Without patience, I could never have made painting my second career.
Because painting consumes time—tons of it. (I just spent 30 hours painting a single eye and am not finished with it yet.)
"Patience is bitter," Rousseau said, "but its fruit is sweet."
Why I had to grow old to at long last discover patience puzzles me.
Maybe I lacked the patience to look for it.
Maybe I had no time for patience.
What eluded me, I think, was knowing that patience wields power impatience lacks.
Patience is a weapon.
"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait," Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace. "But believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all."
I guess all this is a roundabout way of saying that age, if you're lucky, brings with it a sobriety that's missing in youth and middle age. (No surprise, some AA groups recite an "extended" Serenity Prayer that adds, "Grant me patience for the changes that take time.")
English borrowed the word sobriety seven centuries ago from the Latin sobrius.
Sobrius meant not only abstemious, but calm, steady, unhurried, still.
Rarely do I remember my dreams. Last night's is an exception.
I dreamed that my wife and I had planned to stay at a B&B during an antique show that was being held inside the Brandywine River Museum. (That's an actual annual event which I ran between 2006 and 2010.)
The B&B in my dream was owned and operated by the museum (that's purely imaginary).
For some undisclosed reason, we had to scrap our plans to attend the show a day or two out.
Given our late cancellation, the B&B refused to refund us the lavish deposit on our room.
Oh, well, I said to no one in particular, you win some, you lose some.
I swallowed the $800 loss.
About a month later, a second $800 charge by the B&B appeared on my credit card statement.
I called the front desk immediately.
"What's this other $800 charge for?" I asked. "We didn't even stayed at the inn."
Lloyd Bridges and sons
The concierge was blasé.
"After you cancelled your prepaid room, we gave it for free to a VIP guest, the movie actor Lloyd Bridges," he said. "Unfortunately, Mr. Bridges died in the room."
"That's terrible," I said. "But what's the $800 charge on my card for?"
"The $800 covers the cost to the inn of removing his body."
I asked why Lloyd Bridges' famous sons, Jeff and Beau, weren't asked to pay for the removal of their father's body.
"They're rich," I said. "They can certainly afford it."
"We asked them and they both refused to pay," the concierge said. "So our only choice was to charge you."
I grew instantly riled, but knew I couldn't say a word.
Maintaining goodwill with the museum was crucial to my career—as what, I was unsure.
Bridges symbolize the sex act—naturally. (Hey, it's Freud.)
But bridges also symbolize crossings: the crossing from birth to life; the crossing from life to death; and, for that matter, the crossing from any of life's stages to the next one.
As such, bridges symbolize changes: transitions, passages, returns, and departures.
Changes—whether for good or ill.
You don't want to burn those bridges, unless it's absolutely necessary. And maybe not even then.
You want to take the bridges as they come.
As The Dude said, “Strikes and gutters, ups and downs.”
Hold onto your taste, even when you're embarrassed by it.
— Jerry Saltz
Connoisseurs and critics often look down on art that's driven by pop culture (the source of the "pop" in the term "pop art").
Not me.
I guess I'm a child of the '60s, because I love pop paintings and subjects.
New York critic Jerry Saltz nails it when he says of pop subjects, "Never renounce them for the sake of others' pieties.
"Own your guilty pleasures."
My latest stab at depicting what I term a "nostalgic goodie" is Ding Dongs.
I could just have well titled the painting Ring Dings.
Ding Dong aficionados know that in 1967 their maker, Hostess, engaged in an all-out, take-no-prisoners brand war with Drake's Cakes, the maker of Ring Dings, by copying the latter's immensely successful product.
The bloody war, known to history as the "Ding Dong-Ring Ding Conflict," lasted for nearly 20 years. Hostess only won by buying its rival and discontinuing the Ring Ding.
That takes the cake, you might say.
If you're anywhere near Delaware in the next 10 days, be sure to drop into my solo show, Cold Comforts. It features 30 paintings of food.
And if you're not near Delaware, pop onto my website.
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
— William Faulkner
Above:Ding Dongs by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.
Gouzer paid $12.9 million for the painting; he'll sell the 10,000 particles next month for $1,500 each, yielding an immediate 16% profit.
If the particles are later resold by their new owners, Gouzer will receive an automatic cut of the resale price. He'll pay no income tax on those profits—and he gets to keep the original painting.
Artful deal!
Gouzer claims he is "collectivizing" art, "because pure enjoyment of art is not complete until you feel you own it."
The entrepreneur in me agrees completely.
And so, in honor of Banksy, I'm making you the following offer:
Buy my original painting Judging Amy (above) and enjoy owning it; fractionalize it, if you want; or resell the whole piece. Whatever you do, I will donate 100% of my profit to the Repro Legal Defense Fund.
The Repro Fund covers bail and attorneys' fees for women targeted by police for ending their own pregnancies.
Above: Judging Amy. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches.
I'm tagging along with my wife in Maine this week while she studies landscape photography under the Wyeth family's official photographer, Peter Ralston.
Dogshead Island
Coastal Maine deserves its reputation as an über-romantic spot, and in mid-September teeters on Indian Summer, one of my favorite times of year.
Yesterday, we island-hopped for 14 straight hours in Peter's 37-foot lobster boat, The Raven, as he directed my wife in shooting hundreds of photos of skiffs, schooners, sailboats, shorelines, shacks, shanties, and seals.
And lobstermen. Hundreds of lobstermen.
Our two-hour stop on Vinalhaven Island reminded me we were only miles—31, to be exact—from Monhegan Island, where artist Jamie Wyeth spends his summers.
Monhegan Island, known as the "Artists' Island," holds an esteemed place in American art history, having, before Wyeth summered there, been the summer home of Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Rockwell Kent. Jamie Wyeth in fact now owns and has lived in Kent's former island home.
Vinalhaven Island
Kent was drawn to Monhegan Island in 1905, and summered there off and on until 1953. Wyeth bought his home in 1968, but later moved to neighboring Southern Island, to escape the summer tourists.
In his lifetime, Kent was one of America's most revered artists; but Joe McCarthy put an end to his career. The witch-hunting senator accused (falsely) Kent of being a Communist. As a consequence, every museum in the country took down his paintings.
Jamie Wyeth, on the other hand, is the darling of American museums—and rightfully so.
I love Wyeth's work.
Serendipitously, Jamie Wyeth loves Rockwell Kent's work (most of which today is in Russia, gifted to that country out of spite by the beleaguered Kent) and collects it. He keeps his collection in his Southern Island home.
I love Rockwell Kent's work, too; maybe more.
Maine may be über-romantic, but it wouldn't be Maine after all without some weirdness. (It's the home of Stephen King.)
Jamie Wyeth's homage to Kent, Portrait of Rockwell Kent, hints at that weirdness by including the contour ofa woman falling from the rocks to her death in the background.
That's Kent's mistress, the New York socialite Sally Maynard Moran, who either committed suicide or was murdered in 1953.
Her body was found in the ocean off Monhegan Island three weeks after her mysterious disappearance one night.
Nobody knows, to this date, what happened to her.
Above:Island Library by Jamie Wyeth. Watercolor, 28 x 20 inches. Wreck, Monhegan by Rockwell Kent. Oil on canvas panel. 7 x 13 inches. Portrait of Rockwell Kent by Jamie Wyeth. Oil on fiberboard. 34 x 26 inches. Maine photos by Robert Francis James.
Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free, sleaze goes right out the window.
— Cintra Wilson
Cover by Al Rossi
My first exposure to sleaze—I was age eight—was the paperback tower at the front of our corner drug store.
It was six or seven feet tall—dwarfing me—and pentagonal and would rotate unsteadily on a hidden axle when you gave it a whirl.
Top heavy from its burden of potboilers, the tower always threatened to fall on me when I spun it. At the very first squeak, my inattentive mother would glance up from her shopping and siss at me, "Robert, leave that alone."
The book tower's presence in the drug store suggested to my eight-year-old mind that its weird offerings must somehow relate to grownups' healthcare (although I would soon discover a comparable rack of sulfurous paperbacks in the confectioner's store down the street—where absolutely nothing healthy was sold).
Although I had no clue at the time, three of the artists who created the covers for many of the books on display were among the finest illustrators of the day, rivals of the famous Norman Rockwell.
They were Norman Rockwell's lurid twins.
Al Rossi was a prolific magazine illustrator and a masterful merchant of paperback sleaze. He was the original cover artist for Junkie, a 1953 novel by beat writer William Burroughs (published under the pen name William Lee). The Bronx-born Rossi was a prominent supplier to Balcourt, a New York-based stock house that provided cover art to paperback publishers in the 1950s and '60s. A professional jazz musician until World War II, when he served with the Army in Europe, Rossi was compelled after the war to try his hand at illustration to make ends meet, attending Pratt and the Arts Student League to learn the craft. Before associating with Balcourt, he worked for several publishers of pulp magazines, the forerunners to paperback books. Rossi liked to use his male neighbors and their wives as his models.
Cover by Ben Stahl
Ben Stahl was exposed to fine art in the seventh grade, thanks to a scholarship he received to attend Saturday morning lectures at the Chicago Art Institute. After high school, he landed a job at a commercial art studio in Chicago that provided illustrations almost exclusively to The Saturday Evening Post. His success as a studio artist prompted Stahl to move to New York and go freelance. There, he began illustrating paperback book covers, as well as continuing to supply artwork to The Post (he illustrated more than 750 stories for the magazine during his career). Stahl soon earned a reputation as a serious fine artist and, along with Norman Rockwell and Connecticut illustrator Albert Dorne, co-founded the Famous Artists School, a mail-order course whose graduates include Pat Boone, Tony Curtis and Charlton Heston. In 1965, as his career was reaching its zenith, Stahl painted 15 life-size pictures of the stations of the cross and opened his own museum in Sarasota, Florida, to house them. But the paintings were stolen four years later and never recovered. Stahl was left nearly penniless due to the theft.
Cover by Paul Rader
Paul Rader, at age 16, was one of the youngest artists ever to have an art museum exhibit his paintings. His early mastery of portrait painting earned him awards throughout the '20s and '30s and brought him commissions to paint wealthy judges, lawyers, and businessmen in his hometown of Detroit. Rader switched to illustrating pulp magazines after World War II, finding the work more lucrative, and moved to New York, where he became another leading supplier to Balfour. When painting paperback book covers, Rader liked using professional models and actors, supplied to him by talent agencies. One of his favorite male models, Guy Williams, went on in the mid-1960s to play Dr. John Robinson in the TV show Lost in Space.
Whether Rossi, Stahl and Rader set the floor of our society's sleaze index, I don't know; but I do know their art depicted truths—truths most Americans, Puritans at heart, wished to deny in the 1950s.
The risks they took in defying mores and good taste and giving free reign to sleaze may not have contributed to the world's trove of art, but these three artists helped millions of Americans remain literate members of the book-buying public, which is a lot more than you can say about today's media consumers.
Above: Cover illustration for The Bump and Grind Murders by Al Rossi. Cover illustration for The Creepers also by Al Rossi.
The show takes place Saturday and Sunday, November 21-22, 2020, 10 am-5 pm and 11 am-4 pm. Admission is $5 (kids 10 & under free). Proceeds go to help the Center.
Fin-de-siècle composer Erik Satie, best known for his "Gymnopédies Suite of 1888," was, to be blunt, a wierdo. To wit:
Satie carried a hammer with him wherever he went, a lifetime habit he acquired while living in Montmartre as a young bohemian. He also slept with one eye open.
He wore only a grey velvet suit and kept over 100 umbrellas in his apartment.
He detested the sun and only ventured outside on cloudy days.
He washed only with a pumice stone, never using soap.
He ate only white food: eggs, sugar, salt, rice, cheese (white varieties only), fish, chicken, veal, animal fat and ground bones, turnips, pastries, and coconut.
He regulated his daily life to the minute. Every day, Satie awoke at 7:18 am; composed from 10:23 to 11:47 am; ate lunch at 12:11 pm; rode a horse from 1:19 to 2:53 pm; composed again from 3:12 to 4:07 pm; relaxed from 4:27 to 6:47 pm; ate dinner at 7:16 pm; read aloud from 8:09 to 9:59 pm; and went to bed at 10:37 pm.
He composed a surreal ballet that caused riots outside the concert hall during the premiere. The ballet landed Satie in a Parisian jail cell for eight days. The charge: "cultural anarchy."
He had only one girlfriend his entire life, Suzanne Valadon, a beautiful painter of portraits who lived in the apartment next door to his for six months. Satie's penury and compulsive nature drove her nuts and she left him and married a stockbroker.
Satie barely graduated music school and throughout his life suffered rebuke from critics, who labelled him a "clown" and called his music "worthless."
Satie called his compositions "furniture music"—what today we'd call "Muzak"—and would scatter his ensemble throughout the room during performances, commingled with the listening audience.
An artist is making something exist by observing it.
― William S. Burroughs
The Independent on Sunday once asked John Updike to describe a writer that affected him.
He responded by naming Proust, the writer who opened Updike's eyes to style―to "prose not as the colorless tool of mimesis but as a gaudy agent dynamic in itself, peeling back dead skins of lazy surface notation, going deeper into reality much as science does with its accumulating formulations."
[Note to English teachers: point out how Updike's use of mathematicians' terms ("agent dynamic," "surface notation") bolsters his comparison between observant writing and science.]
Learning to paint has revealed how irresistible "lazy surface notation" can be.
I'm in a continual―losing―battle with my painting teachers, God Bless 'Em, over surrendering to the temptation to describe only the surfaces of objects, and never the atmosphere in which they dwell; what you might call the deeper reality of their "dance in space."
It's a temptation worse than sugary snacks.
The good news?
Everyone struggles with lazy surface notation.
Paul Gaugin once wrote in his journal, "I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer."
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
― Gustave Flaubert
While local governments assist, privileged Whites around the country are helping angry Blacks destroy and deface public sculptures.
A kid endorsing the desecration commented on my Facebook stream, "Time to write our own history."
The youth in me agrees; the codger cringes.
"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance," Camus said. "Good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." I'm noticing a lot of ignorance. For example, in San Francisco this week, protesters toppled statues of Francis Scott Key and Ulysses Grant.
History tells us Key held slaves; Grant did not. In fact, Grant played a part in slaves' emancipation; a bit part, anyway. At this rate, the next statues in San Francisco to come down will be those of Lincoln, Gandhi, Cervantes, Beethoven, Tony Bennett and Harvey Milk. And, oh―lest we forget―Yoda. It seems Yoda wasn't woke.
Pike―although an advocate for Native American rights―was a racist Know-Nothing and unreconstructed Confederate. Jackson was a slaveholder and advocate for the expulsion of Native Americans.
The statue depicts Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by two guides, one Native American, the other Black. Although he advocated for Native American rights and owned no slaves―he was four the year the Emancipation Proclamation was issued―Roosevelt indeed was a racist.
As great-grandson Teddy Roosevelt IV eloquently said, “The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice."
But, sorry, I prize many "relics of another age"―even many that trigger.
I'd no sooner topple Francis, Ulysses, Albert, Andrew or Teddy than I'd topple Lady Liberty―even though she stands for sexism, industrialism, imperialism, anthropocentrism, colonialism and capitalism. Call me an antiquarian, but I like civilization.
