Traipsing Through The Arts-All Serious 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Search For The Sublime- Colorist Grady Lamont’s 117^th Dream (Sex Dream, Oops, Erotic Dream) With His “Pinetops” (1982) In Mind

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes these assignments drive me crazy, not the art part or whatever Greg Green the site manager, the guy who gives out the assignments gives me but the necessity for disclaimers, the incessant replies to weirdoes who have plenty of time on their hands and need some lonely hearts club partners and occasionally as here a confession that I screwed up. I have just finished up what I thought was a very nice assignment reviewing three books on art by the late novelist and essayist John Updike (all with various aspects of “looking” in their titles which is what Updike loved about viewing art over his long career). Most of the essays originally breathed life in the pages of The New York Review Of Books which I read on occasion (and my “ghost” advisor here Sam Lowell reads religiously and has for years thus having some of his critics in the old days before the twelve-step program sobered him up a bit from those three to five day drunks claiming he “copied” half his sketches from that source) or in some other art-friendly journal. It was a pleasant to read them and to comment on them with my take on this whole series of mine about the centrality of sex and eroticism of serious 20^th century art in the back of my mind when I compared his views to mine. No question whatever sexual urges Updike charted among his suburban-angst driven mainly male characters in his novels his approach to art, something he has been interested in since he was a kid and may reflect that wide-eyed wonder that kids’ views bring to this jaded old world, his view is probably from the well-worn school of the search for the sublime that started maybe with Vasari, and his narrow-minded little book come Renaissance visions and carried on up to the current day by the likes of Bill Hazlitt and that holy goof and doped up junkie Johnny Raskin.    

Frankly and here is where the “confession” part comes in I overreached when I attempted to override Updike’s views to fit my own theory. Tried to full-court press his small observations on the sexual nature of modern art into a major theme. I knew I was in troubled waters on this score when I, rightly, suggested that Edward Hooper was a sexual pervert dressed in American realist clothing and tried to buttonhole Updike into that belief which was forced, although an unforced error on my part. That is the major error I will admit too. The other “sin” is that I attempted to rush my whole theory over many works of art rather than as before the Updike book series taking on one work of art at a time and see where that fit in to my general scheme. Not every work of every serious 20^th century artist is driven by sex and sensuality (although I would suggest the best work does but I refuse to overreach, again) For example, a most recent example before I got caught up in the book review assignment Jackson Pollock’s drip painting Number 31 from 1949 which is a classic case of sex-drive, no, sex-obsessed painting  which not only buttressed my argument but had the added virtue of bringing to public attention a little- known fact about the circumstances surrounding the production of that masterpiece and others like it by Pollack if we can’t tar his comrades with the same brush so to speak.

Not only did Jackson Pollock have some kind of sex out in the shed in Long Island with who knows who while he was doing that painting but some of his “love” drippings wound up on the canvass giving me a double hit on my sex theories. I read somewhere, yes, that drivel put out by Clement Greenberg when he was king of the hill of the art world when it was centered by default in New York after World War II that Pollack’s drips were his search for the divine, just another loose-leaf word for, ah, sublime. Hell even Updike upchucked that drivel and showed that old Jack was driven by Freudian-Jungian dreams, in short subconscious sex stuff.          

It is possible to learn something both ways. Clearly I overreached in trying to bring every possible artist Updike took aim at brushing the whole operation with my own theory (although the charges of child sexual molestation against Degas for his actions with those innocent ballerinas and other underage girls and pandering for who knows what reason his lovely wife Camille against Monet have held up very well as have Renoir’s latent homosexuality with his womanly baby-faced bathing nudes). From here on in I will take one work of art at a time and place it in context and if I get another book assignment will handle it as a traditional review. That policy was easy to follow for an upcoming Marsden Hartley look see with his rough trade homoerotic late sex paintings and Pollack as it will be with my first new regime task whipping up a storm over Grady Lamont who has made no bones that sex is what has driven his work and if not that then sensuality. Grady has been quoted as saying that even painters like Mark Rothko who one does not associate with being driven by sex as he has reeks, his term not mine, of sex. Let see how things work out. Just don’t shoot the messenger like a number of people have tried to do since I started this series which I hope to continue for a while.

Now to the inevitable disclaimers:

Apparently, as fellow writer here Sam Lowell had warned me, doing the chores in the art world, especially without the official imprimatur of the wicked art cabal, and especially not bowing down to their totem artists and art works is as tough a racket as doing film reviews. The few film reviews that I have done, as Sam or Seth Garth the senior film reviewers here can witness, have created plenty of blow-back in what I have now come to recognize is a dirty cutthroat business with everyone in the profession living out some Hobbesian version of how to survive. The evil eyes are always upon you in that not for the faint-hearted profession for one little slip, one little too quirky remark and even more venom will be thrown at you if you branch out like here to do other kinds of cultural reviews. I know I received plenty of crazed messages from younger film reviewers trying to make their mark in the world by leaving a bloody trail as they move up what is called “the food chain” calling me a dilettante and worse when I took on this series.

That abuse from the cinematic crowd who after all are only as good as their subjective opinions and can be construed as no better that your average thoughtful movie-goer though is child’s play, kids’ stuff compared to the vicious responses that I have received from so-called art critics in the short time I have been running this project. (I won’t even mention the initial blow-back from the troll religious evangelicals, the Brethren of the Common Life from which I come, the religion of my youth the worst, who care nothing for art, wouldn’t know an art work if they tripped over it but, quoting chapter and verse from the Bible know that what I had to say about in my quirky remarks about the relationship between sex and art were degenerate. Were and it still perplexes me willing to call down fire and brimstone on me as Keil, the devil’s servant.) Among the professional art critics and their press agents, flak-catchers and strong arm hit men I have taken more than my share of abuse for not being a member or the club, never claiming to be, and what amounts to my being Nelly Telly the secular version of Keil, the devil’s servant that the evangelicals kept accusing me of being as I moved along.

Those barbs thrown at me not as an attack on my major theory that all serious 20^th century art is intimately tied to sex, sexuality and erotism but for what amount to side observations about earlier works. I drew venomous hatred for pointing out that John Singer Sargent’s infamous Madame X not only was a woman of easy virtue to use a quaint old term but had a horrible bird-like nose that only a mother could love causing her to refuse to do frontal portraits. Apparently if that truth were known the price of her portrait would plummet in value causing horrible shockwaves at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and maybe the greater art world.  (Since then known leftist art critic Kenneth Rexford has come to my defense noting that what I had said about Madame X’s motherless nose was absolutely correct and even Singer Sargent’s earnest attempts to powder the beak cannot salvage that even though the idea of beauty, professional beauty did not dwell on monstrous noses.) I gained more crazed responses when I called things by their right name when I declared the famous Isabella by John White Alexander a stone-cold junkie (opium-crazed) growing the stuff out of a pot where her dead lover’s severed head was being kept as part of the ritual of a kinky cult started in ancient times and still around in secret hideouts today. (Rexford left me high and dry on that one not “buying,” his term, my idea the fair maiden was a junkie although conceding my point that she was a member of the still growing cultists whose religion depended on severed heads.)         

Almost naturally the beast art critics went into crazed spasms when I mentioned the simple fact that James Abbott McNeil Whistler, dear “Jimmy” who they tried to pawn off as a devoted son on that so-called Mother painting was really a pimp, a procurer I guess they called them in the 19^th century. Why? For simply pointing out that in his infamous The White Girl now at the National Gallery which the collective cabal has deemed to be the epitome of the struggle between innocence and the wicked world he was very cleverly “advertising” his wares by putting a wolf’s head and fur beneath her feet. That the classic “come hither” symbol in use since the times of the courtesan Whole of Babylon and effectively used ever since then by the up-scale crowd doing their nasty business on the sly with coded references unlike the poor street whores and brothel damsels. They give dear “Jimmy” a pass since his was hustling his mistress to make the rent money or to keep those repo wolves from the door, the unfriendly door.    

On “advice of counsel” I stopped making reference to 19^th century sex ploys and headed to the 20^th century which has proven no better except that the evangelicals have dropped away since they “know” all 20^th century art, sexual or not, is degenerate apparently taking  their cue from the SS boys around Hitler and Goebbels and would not let their kids near a modern art museum. I won no friends when I pointed out that lustful dirty old man Edward Hopper painting every young woman he could find without her knowing it while going about in full awareness of her sex had flunked facial drawing in art school or wherever he learned to draw. I speculated that he had actually drawn one mopey male and one mopey female, poorly, made many copies and when he had to paint people would attach, maybe by glue or some other substance, those faces on his finished drawings. That one rocked the whole Hopper merchandise empire and it was a close call whether I would survive the onslaught once the cabal decided to send a strong man hit man team out to try to intimidate me. Fortunately, the powers that be here intervened and we settled the matter once they were assured I would not write about Hopper again in that vein. Would only write that he did not glue each mopey figure on by actually did each on the canvas even though to an untrained non-art critic eye they all looked alike. More than that I cannot say.       

Digging deeper into 20^th century art, the time of the big deal abstract impressionist uprising led by guys like Jackson Pollock and Barney Newell proved no better although I won’t bore the reader with the scandalous recent findings of human fluids on many of his famous dripping works. That brings us to the recent barrage over my remarks about Georgia O’Keeffe’s works. How not only her vaginal flowers reeked of sex but that her New York sky-scrapers, Lake George farm houses and Southwest mountains did as well. Yes, I know I am lucky to be around to tell the tale taking on this super-iconic art figure.  

    

I am glad that I let Sam Lowell unwind, tell his take as far as it goes on what I have been up to in this on-going hopefully quirky and what I think is a better word irreverent series on self-selected art works that have grabbed my interest. That way my attack on Art Today art critic Clarence Dewar will make more sense. Mr. Dewar had taken me to task for not being a professional art critic or having any entanglement with the cabal that runs the art establishment, the official art academy in this country like they used to have in Europe to run newcomer artists through the rules-driven gauntlet, the mega-project driven art museum directors, the hungry to be monogram published or mega-show essay writing art curators, the greedy little art collectors who collect art like stock options, the hired gun press agents and flak-catchers who protect every mega-show like it was the Oscars or something and worse, the flitty hard as nails gallery owners trying to unload unsaleable inventory on a naïve clientele.

More bothersome of late Mr. Dewar has taken umbrage, his term, that my sense that all serious art, modern art has sex or eroticism, sensuality if you prefer at its core. (That theory shared by agreement with Sam who went after it hammer and tong in that long-winded essay he wrote. (For Sam’s spiel see Archives dated February 20, 2019 Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Sublime-Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Number 31” (1949) Without Wings-Sam Lowell Unchained)  

Mr Dewar’s main contention is rather than down and dirty sex and getting turned on something greater, something more terrible and beyond compare is at stake. The search for the sublime. Don’t laugh, please he is serious. All art and here we agree for once that this is about modern art, post-Impressionist art when those bastards went mano a mano with the camera view and decided to worry (fret according to Degas) about giving impressions rather than exact detail which the camera would win hands down is the search by humankind through its painter for something greater than they could achieve. In the old days God but now art, art though as a far remove from what you see in reality. In other words what is fake, what is beyond expression.

Well I suppose to earn your daily bread and to keep those gallery cocktail hour invitations arriving in the mails that might be a tenable position in, maybe, 1750 but is far removed from the more plebian concerns of the now diminishing number of artists who as we entry into deep space Internet world consider what they do modern art, or even post-modern art. Mr. Dewar made the fatal mistake though of selecting one Grady Lamont as his candidate for the sublime, adding in that Lamont had reached something like the epitome in his of disassociating line from form which had he claimed preoccupied the modern artist at least since Cezanne (and I, we agree that Cezanne is key to this concern although as an end not as a beginning since he, Cezanne, was the last guy who gave a damn about capturing fruits and wine on misshapen tables and wooden clapboards. Meaning he is last guy who you can claim is a modern who did not care one way or the other about sex, about sensuality, about eroticism (unless of course and I have never heard, and I have asked Sam as well, that he was into some cult of erotic, exotic fruits and such but one never knows.)

Even better that that sublime gag, that sublime grift that has kept more art critics and curators working that one would think humanly possible Mr. Dewar yawned at us is the old chestnut about art for art’s sake that he claims Lamont is the first artist since Whistler to proclaim as the real role of the artist. Lame gibberish. First of all Whistler was much more interested in hustling his what did he call them, oh yes, muses, the models he worked to death in the studio, in his bed and when dough got short, chronically short as was the usual case out on the misty foggy London streets. The art for art sake gag was an idea his press agent Walter Middleton or maybe Bill Hazlitt though up to justify putting the somber sullen symphonic works in the gallery windows. Why else would anybody except his mother buy any of that downer painting when you could just go out the door and get depressed for free. Even his mother thought he was being his usual boorish self when he labeled her portrait a study in black and white or gray. Jesus his poor bedazzled mother sat for him for hours and he “disrespected” her that way.    

But now on to Grady and the real meaning of his work. Apparently Mr. Dewar did not bother to read the very long article by the late art critic Tim Lewis in Mr. Dewar’s own publication Art Today in 1983 when the whole art world was in awe of Grady’s breakthrough painting Pinetops (1982) which made his nut (and was recently sold in a private sale for eleven million dollars, the top price for a real Lamont). In that article (strange Mr. Dewar didn’t see the article since it preceded just in front of his then latest outpouring of the “search for the sublime” in Chinese art of the 19^th century) Lamont when asked point blank by Tim Lewis what the painting had been about, what drove him to express himself like that he answered candidly and I quote so there is no misunderstanding “I wanted to pay homage to Georgia O’Keeffe’s pioneer work in drawing the viewer to the similarities between certain opened flowers and the vagina except I wanted to concentrate on the sexual act itself. The deep what we could call holes in which the elongated poles sit are the consummate acts of copulation. I think that is what draws the viewer to the painting, why it has made an impression not seen since her times when she did true work and not that crap out the desert or wherever she was hiding out.” Bingo.

As for Mr. Dewar’s idea that Lamont had made a final breakthrough in what he asserted was high symbolism over form he laughed (or at least that is how the transcript read) and said it was more a question of his having a lot of silver paint, not a big seller in the art supply stores left when he was short of money. On the art for art’s sake argument he laughed and said essentially “what are you kidding, he did the painting to earn his daily bread and maybe buy some other paints now that the silver was getting low after he used so much for the Pinetop project. Case closed as Sam says in his lawyer-like moments.