Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Sublime-

A Kick In The Back To Art Critic Clarence Dewar-Sex And The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859)

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes despite your best intentions or at least the direction of your initial intentions you get waylaid by something that you had not expected, something that came out of left field, some undead thing, what do the kids call it some zombie beast thing, let’s call it some undead thing and that will suffice, in middle of the night. I had originally intended this piece to be a homage to the sensuality of the art of Arthur Garfield Dove, a key pioneer in bringing serious sexuality to serious art. (I will only do this three-name moniker thing once which drives my plebian blood pressure through the roof making an exception to Dove because maybe he was living on that boat in the Hudson River with his mistress, fellow artist Helen Torr, or was tied up with farm chores once he broke from his upper middle-class existence and got the heave-ho from dear old Dad but only once nevertheless). Then one Clarence Dewar, you have heard that name before in this space, as a so-called art critic for Art Today mentioned by me as a foil for those rubes who think that all 20^th century was the search for the sublime. (Nobody not even Mr. Dewar could believe that 21^st century art as it evolves in the age of the Internet has anything to do with sex or eroticism except a few crazed curators trying to move up the food chain at the MoMA.)

I first took Mr. Dewar over the coals, no, rapped his knuckles like some wayward schoolboy when he argued that Jackson Pollack’s Number 31 from 1949 was the epitome of the sublime in the last half century of the 20^th century. I had assumed he was just clueless about the real import of the painting as the clarion call to sexual liberation before that was fashionable in staid post-World War II America as the Cold War heated up. I thought that maybe he had attended too many classes and dinner parties with his acknowledged mentor Clement Greenberg whose rants over the search for sublime whatever that is or was and removing the fight for line from form were some stone tablets from the hills (maybe Joseph Smith’s upstate New York tablets hills although Smith could be excused having been born during the Second Great Awakening when art was about Jesus and the brethren which disoriented lots of country folk).

(It bears repeating every chance I get to note that sycophant Dewar got his ass kicked out of a publication Sam Lowell was acting as art and cinema editor for out in alternative newspaper universe San Francisco back in the 1970s for retailing (read plagiarizing) the latest words from the mountain by Clement Greenberg as his own. Acting essentially as a shill and flak-catcher for the well-known wily Greenberg who used up a whole generation of boys that way and never got a scratch on him although today at least his opinions, his words from the mountains are used to wrap fish remains in.)       

Then I talked to Sam Lowell about this latest troll. (We have already had enough, more than enough about the high-brow ones like one Arthur Doyle (middle name Gilmore omitted on purpose) and the swarm of born-again evangelicals who inundated this space, this sacred space with about twelve million quotes from the Bible basically in order to justify calling me Keil, the devil’s servant. I am worried about their reemergence since now I have to go back into the 19^th century art scene for fear that this fool Mr. Dewar’s nonsense will have unleashed those dopes again) Sam laughed said not to worry Clarence hadn’t had an original though since he was born, maybe before. This did not make me laugh because in addition to that Sam claimed that Clarence had been nothing but Greenberg’s poodle, his go-fer and flak-catcher. What did make me laugh was when Sam told me he had known Clarence back in the 1970s and had had to fired him for plagiarism. For taking whatever was on Greenberg’s mind on any given day and either just did a thin re-write or cut the title off from a Greenberg piece in some other publication and sent it in as is. Sam said if Clarence wanted to go low we would discredit him with that otherwise we would meet him on our own self-selected ground of sex and eroticism as the driving force for 20^th century art.

First I threw the wrecking ball around that sublime silliness in Mr. Dewar’s interpretation of what Pollock was trying to release and then Sam put the whammy of whammies on him with the evidence that Pollock was according to recent high tech testing either having sex with somebody or himself (okay masturbating I was trying to avoid writing that in case the Primitive Baptists got wind of it and started going crazy again ranting against me using protecting their kids from such usage as cannon fodder for their weak foolishness) and had used a condom which became part of the painting out in that lonely shed on Long Island. Then when Mr. Dewar tried to play lawyer for Edward Hopper and his brilliant Nighthawks talking bullshit, Sam’s term, but I agree, about all the lonely people, about the loneliness of urbanization I had to yank him up again for being not just a poor example of an art critic but maybe having read whatever Hopper’s press agent had to say to prettify the fact that Hopper was a dirty old man who spent more time with some young honey in a well-known house of ill repute (okay whorehouse) than with his wife, Jo, who nevertheless told a candid world Eddie, her Eddie was hot for buxom young things in a fit or righteous anger. (Thereafter she refused to let her Eddie do any nudes-except her- an unwise decision since as Sam noted, and John Updike did too many years ago, that in sweet revenge he portrayed her as some old-time bent whore who had best been put out to pasture years before. Check Hooper’s Girlie Show for his revenge on Jo. Oh yes, and as another prime example of the scandalous fact that he had flunked doing faces classes under either William Merritt Chase, you can hear me grind my teeth writing this, or Bob Henri.)            

The current uprising of this fool, sending us back to the dangerous waters of the 19^th century art scene, is a post-mortem taking issue about Whistler’s The White Girl and our (Sam is included here) contention that Whistler was pimping his girlfriend to get out from under a mountain of debt. Mr. Dewar made the outrageous claim that Whistler was just conforming to the theories of his friends in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood comparing The White Girl to Brotherhood leader Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s Bocca Baciata. Jesus I though Sam was either going to have a stroke, or go to New York to see Mr. Dewar with murder and mayhem in his heart

Whistler may have been friends, may have had a few drinks at the Cock &Bull down by the waterfront in London on the Thames  where the liquor flowed and with the right connections you could feast on the flavor of the month lanadum which fueled more cultural careers than you could shake a stick at, name the artist, poet, in Rosetti’s case artist-poet and drugs were driving half their insights. Did poor crazy Ruskin Turner’s big-time patron in so that in the end he was blathering about all serious 19^th century being the search for the sublime. Drove a guy like art critic Bill Hazlitt straight to the nut house, straight to Bedlam talking about the need to go back to heroic historical paintings like the great David. Are you kidding?  But the drugs then, and now too check Grady Lamont’s admissions to illegal and extensive drug use before he hit the twelve- step road, weren’t for everyone.

Whistler and the brothers may have even shared, ah, what did they call them oh yes muses, wink, wink, models, for sure Fanny Cornforth who was free with her charms as long as they lasted before the drink and some sour DNA genes did her in. What they did no share, could not share was a vision about sexuality. Whistler as Sam and I have made clear in our studies of the predecessors of the 20^th century glut of sex and eroticism in serious art was about hustling his favorite muse of the month covering them in symphonies of colors, white, green, black, Sam, by the way says sym-phonies of color, language but frankly except The White Girl where he used an ancient from the days of the Whole of Babylon hsy symbolic trick with the wolf’s head and fur to draw attention to his wares his stuff is NOT sexual, is some drug-induced hazy mist at dusk or dawn nonsense. (By the way the Whole of Babylon, unlike pimp daddy James advertised her own wares, made her own way and didn’t need some humpty dumpty middleman to promote her cause.)           

Rosetti and the brethren though reeked of sex, reeked of the liberating spirit they found in early Renaissance painters before punks, Sam’s term not mine, like DaVinci and that no good bastard Raphael tried to suppress bringing everybody back to the crazy Mother Mary. Baby Jesus, Holy Family noise that crippled art for centuries except for Popes and the like who could afford the graft for real art, nudes and Grecian urn priapic material in their private apartments. The Brothers’ hero par excellence Botticelli and work like his divine Venus who Sam swears, this long before I knew him and while he was working his way through three marriages and three divorces, he had a “hippie chick” girlfriend who looked exactly like her, including the forever long hair and braids. Including those luscious ruby red lips that even I appreciated when Venus made a stop at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a few years ago (and Sam pissed me off by staring at the painting for about an hour which wasn’t so bad but went on and on about that hippie chick, not a good move, not at all).

That is the rub, that is the clincher as to why a drug-infested pimp like Whistler could never make the cut, could never get into the Brotherhood for love nor money. Look at his so-called muses, look at their skinny pre-Angela Joie sullen sunken pinkish lips, even when he was hustling. Had no sense how important the lips were to sexuality and sensuality back in Botticelli’s golden age time. Then look at Bocca Baciata, or for that matter half a dozen Rosetti paintings using Fanny Cornforth, she with those big full ruby red lips not seen since Botticelli went through his paces. That should take care of one holy goof Clarence Dewar and his craziness, his half-baked theories. As Sam says on occasion though, enough.