Of Brick and Wood: Multicultural Masterpieces

Humans are the dominant species in our age.  We are the most destructive to each other and to our environment.  But the upside is that we are creative and inventive in this environment too, and produce things that are beautiful to us--and often starting with the humblest of materials.  As art historians, we like to study these things, classify, organize and group them according to norms we establish within our lifespans.  Great stone cathedrals come to mind, or Norwegian stave churches, or the formidable structures that are driven by technological advances like those towering skyscrapers of Dubai and Singapore.

Cervera de la Cañada, Santa Tecla: Interior detail

Gwozdziec Synagogue: Portal of the Rabbis by Isidor Kaufman

For me, some of the most remarkable of these structures are those that are very regional and time-restricted, and that make something remarkably beautiful out of very modest materials.  There are many over time and geography, but I just wanted to mention two: 13th-16th century brick churches in the region of Aragon in Spain, and 17th-18th century wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe--now long gone but well-documented by pre-World War II photography.  Both were built by artisans of one religion for another.  Within the last sixty years or so, both groups of buildings have been well studied and analyzed, and I'll give you excellent links to detailed sites below.

Spain: Aragon at Upper Right

Art Historians have given a name, Mudéjar, to the Aragonese churches.  The term Mudéjar generally refers to the Muslim residents of Christian Spain during the Reconquest period.  In Aragon, Mudéjar artisans and builders dominated the construction trade and their principal building material was brick: they made brick and ceramics as well.  Presumably, the Mudéjars also made mosques for themselves and perhaps synagogues for Aragonese Jews,  but none of these survive.  A number of the Christian churches were built on the sites of former mosques in this region as the Christians continued

Ateca: Santa María.  Minaret-Bell Tower

to vanquish Muslims up to 1492.  Some of the towers we call minarets from these conquered mosques were appropriated, extended higher and converted into bell towers when they became churches, though most often the church proper was rebuilt to conform to the shape and orientation of Christian practice: longitudinal nave, polygonal apse.

 

Morata de Jiloca, San Martín

The builders of the churches were these Mudéjar craftspeople, who used local and inexpensive brick, and their own time-tested building methods.  Following their own traditions, they adorned the repurposed or new towers, apses and facades with geometric decorations of raised and angled brick as well as colored ceramic inserts to liven them up.  The interiors were plastered and painted with patterns to imitate stone, or repeated geometric motifs; windows and their supports were filled in with geometric patterns too.  Several of these buildings remained reasonably intact, such as those in Tobed, Cervera de la Cañada, Maluenda and Torralba de Ribota, and in the last few decades meticulously restored.

Cervera de la Cañada: Apse (with later retablo and painting)

What makes these structures so interesting is that this profusion of motifs merged with the interior objects and adornments provided by their Christian users: big brightly colored and gilded multi-paneled altarpieces called retablos were in most side chapels and over the high altar; elaborate stucco pulpits and choir screens use a Mudéjar technique but also Gothic pattern motifs.  The interior effect was a riot of pattern and color, but the long nave, sometimes side-aisles, lateral chapels and the apse with its high altar were undeniably and proudly Christian. So these churches were a design collaboration of Muslims and Christians that resulted in a unique fusion.

This fusion produced a very regional kind of architecture that achieved its opulence through brick, ceramic, stucco and painted and gilded wood: inexpensive materials that combined to produce something unique and rich.  There is a website that serves as a visual and informational treasure trove for this architectural movement illustrated with meticulously photographed details for all of them that are out there, maintained by José Antonio Tolosa.  I give the link below.

Map of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

If brickmaking materials abounded in late medieval Aragon, so did trees in eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Wooden architecture developed in the region and encompassed both housing and places of worship.  It is readily seen in old photographs of small towns in the countryside, in large manor houses, cottages and both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in the region, as well as spectacular Jewish wooden synagogues. The greatest flowering of this multi-cultural renaissance took place during the existence of what was known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795).

Wolpa Synagogue: Bimah (c); Ark (r)

While masonry synagogues were built in larger cities, synagogues in the countryside were constructed of timber, and though the present consensus has it that the builders and carpenters themselves were not Jews, their  methods conformed to those of the general type of all architecture of the period.  As in the case of Mudéjar churches in Aragon, this was modified to meet the needs of Jewish practice. Interior synagogue space was basically a square, and had two liturgical focus points: the Ark, which held the Torah scrolls, generally located on the eastern wall, and the Bimah, here a pavilion-like platform in the middle of the room, where the Torah portions were read each Sabbath and on holidays, with seating around it.

 

Due to less durability and fires, these synagogues were often modified over time, with their roofline raised to accommodate interior cupulas of complex construction.  Exteriors were relatively plain, though as roofs were raised, the exterior profiles became multi-tiered.  Also, extra galleries, porches and other rooms were successively added, resulting in complex exteriors such as at Zabludow.

Zabludow: Synagogue

But much as the altarpieces and stucco screens of the Aragonese churches transformed their appearances to conform to a profound Christianity, the wooden synagogues' interiors were adorned with structures, and often wall and ceiling paintings that expressed their Judaism.  Torah Arks became tall narrow often filigreed affairs, often richly colored and sometimes gilded.  The bimahs rivaled the baldacchinos of Italian Baroque churches, with elaborate wooden carving.  And in some synagogues, the walls were covered with painted Hebrew religious texts, while the ceilings and painted cupolas could offer Zodiac imagery, various animals and painted ornament: human form might not be represented (except for the painted hands offering the Priestly blessing above some arks), but anything and everything else was.  It's not clear who actually executed the interior carvings, but the wall and ceiling painters were Jewish: they signed their work and formed itinerant teams who traveled from town to town, much like the Romanesque church

Khodorow: Ark and wall painting

painters in medieval Catalonia.

There is one irony, though: this superb environment was for men only.  Originally most of these structures had no accommodation for women at all; subsequently a narrow side upper or lower room for women was added on in many of them, but the only visual access was through a heavy grill or a narrow slit.  At least Aragonese Catholic women could sit or stand alongside of the men.

If any of these synagogues survived, they would surely be Unesco World Heritage Sites, but some vanished in the late 19th - early 20th century as small-town populations became very impoverished, and many Jews emigrated.  Those that did make it up to Hitler's invasion of Eastern Europe perished in the Holocaust.  Fortunately, many of them were photographed, analyzed and documented in the 1920's in a project sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute.  A good portion of this archive survived World War II, and was utilized by the architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka in their superb wooden synagogue studies beginning in 1957 (I cite a reference to the later English edition below).  Building on this, the architectural historian Thomas Hubka produced a marvelous monograph on one Synagogue, that of Gwozdziec, and this inspired the new Museum of Polish Jewry and the American Handhouse studio to recreate the Synagogue's ceiling and bimah as the museum's centerpiece, joining an earlier recreation of the painted Chodorov ceiling at the Beit Hatefutsoth Museum in Tel Aviv.

 

The reconstructed bimah and ceiling from Gwozdziec

A more curious reconstruction is of the Wolpa Synagogue in the town of Bilgoraj, integrated into a reproduced Jewish Shetl, --is this a sort of Shtetl theme-park?  Bilgoraj now has no Jews, but it did--and a synagogue too, but not this one!

We often forget about the multicultural artistic collaborations found in so many places in the world at so many different time periods; human beings can coexist and produce masterpieces, but histories and the current news so often accentuate the negative.

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The very best place to see an encyclopediopic collection of images and many details of Aragonese Mudéjar architecture is José Antonio Tolosa's website Aragón Mudéjar:

https://www.aragonmudejar.com

The two superior works on Wooden Synagogues are Books:

1. María and Kazimierz Piechotka, Heaven's Gates.  Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Krupski i S-ka, 2004.

There are earlier versions, Wooden Synagogues, both in Polish and English, going back to 1957. There's a later edition published by Polin, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and a sister volume on masonry synagogues in the same region: pricey, but worth seeking out.

2.Thomas C. Hubka, Resplendent Synagogue. Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth=Century Polish Community, Brandeis University Press, 2004, also pricey--but easier to find.

A short film on reconstructing the Gwozdziec ceiling can be found at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc-s-GfPrFs

For discussions of many and varied aspects of Jewish art, including synagogues of all places and times, I recommend Samuel Gruber's wonderful website:

http://samgrubersjewishartmonuments.blogspot.com

Dastardly Deeds on The Nueces Strip, Art, a Museum, and a Saloon

Michael Ome Untiedt: On the Nueces Strip.  Rangers and Another Heye Saddle.  San Antonio, Briscoe Western Art Museum

A man gallops his horse up a dusty path.  Judging by the starry sky, It’s night, but there must be a full moon because the rider casts a moon-shadow on the trail.  The rider looks back at two pursuing men, also riding full-tilt, trying to catch him.  Way in the background are some darker hills with a few lights of a town at their base.  The brushstrokes are broad, impressionistic.  In spite of the fugitive’s red shirt, moonlight makes the colors cool and ghostly.

The painter of this work is Michael One Untiedt, a contemporary Western artist and this work, entitled On the Nueces Strip: Rangers and Another Heye Saddle, is recent (2014).  A lot of Untiedt’s work falls in the western genre.  Some of them have historical figures such as Charlie Goodnight and Quanah Parker.  Sometimes two almost identical compositions have divergent backstories, for example, On the Nueces Strip is very similar to another of his works, When Faith Takes a Fast Mount, where there is only one pursuer, the weather is stormy rather than nocturnal, and a crucifix is on a low hill to the right.  On his website, the painter comments on many of his works, accompanied by photographs of them.  Quite a number are night scenes; he gives tribute in these to earlier Western painters in the genre, Frederic Remington and Frank Tenney Johnson.  Many are general nostalgic scenes of cowboy life, others are pure but recognizably western landscapes, and all appear to narrate something, identifiable or not.

The title “On the Nueces Strip: Rangers and Another Heye Saddle” certainly implies a specific story being told here, but unless you happen to be a die-hard Texas history buff, you are probably asking “Nueces Strip?  Where is that?”  “Heye Saddle—is it a type of saddle, or does it refer to one owned by somebody named Heye, or made by Heye?,” not to mention exactly what did these rangers do and when did they do it?  Were they Texas Rangers, and if so, this certainly is not the major league ball club, since they’re in Arlington—nowhere near the Nueces river in south Texas.

The particular incident referred to here was a robbery of a general store on the Nueces River, the theft of eighteen valuable saddles among the loot, and the story of their recovery in 1875.  The Nueces River, which flows from Edwards County in central Texas, to Corpus Christi Bay, was considered the boundary between Mexico and Texas, until Texas, the winner of the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 definitively fixed its border southward at the Rio Grande with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  But there were many Mexican citizens who had had land grants in the “Nueces Strip”—the area between the two rivers.  They still considered their lands theirs, even as Anglo-American settlers began to populate the territory and take property for themselves.  Conflict in the region raged for another thirty years or more.  One of the biggest Mexican land-grant leaders, Juan Nepumaceno Cortina, lost a considerable amount of property claimed ancestrally by his family north of the Rio Grande in the vicinity of Brownsville.  He became the leader of disenfranchised Mexicans in the region, and fought two local wars during the period 1859-1861 before he was driven back over the border.  

From the end of the Civil War and later, as Anglo-American ranches were being established, great numbers of feral longhorn cattle were rounded up, claimed by the ranchers, and branded with their brands.  After 1870 Cortina became active again, directing raids into the Nueces strip area, stealing cattle and looting Anglo-American settlements and ranches, taking all of it across the Rio Grande to Mexico.  To Mexicans, he was Robin Hood.  To many Anglo-Americans, he was more like Attila the Hun.

Captain Leander McNelly

This is not the place to talk about the Texas Rangers, a sort of Texan “Special Forces” with a long and checkered history; just to mention one short part of it. A company of Rangers was commissioned by Texas Governor Edmund J. Davis to settle a long-standing feud between the Sutton and Taylor families in south Texas in 1874.  It was commanded by 30-year-old Captain Leander McNelly, a Civil War veteran and former state policeman.  Though they were only partially successful, McNelly was called to action again in 1875 to try and establish some law and order in the Nueces Strip. He recruited forty men, and for the next two years, often using brutal and unorthodox methods (McNelly was a disciple of the “take-no-prisoners-school), they succeeded.  For a detailed account of their activities at this time, I recommend the account of the youngest member of the company, George Durham called Taming the Nueces Strip.”

Untiedt’s painting invokes this campaign.  The San Antonio Daily Express sounded a general alarm about the threatening situation on the Nueces Strip on May, 20, 1875.  Cortina sent out four groups of marauders consisting of Mexicans and some allied American over the border five days later.  Three were soon repulsed, but the fourth group charged north, heading towards Corpus Christi.  On the way, they destroyed ranches and homesteads, raided a store run and owned by George Franks, and took some prisoners of both genders, driving them in front as human shields and/or bargaining chips.

On March 26 (Good Friday), they reached Nuecestown, a small place then, and now absorbed into Corpus Christi.  There, they attacked the general store owned by Thomas J. Noakes, who was also the town’s postmaster.  Noakes, knowing of the local potential for disaster, had dug a tunnel under the house, where he hid after shooting one of the robbers, and then realizing the overwhelming odds against him.  His five children escaped to the river,  but Noakes’s wife Martha took a stand.  As the robbers attempted to set fire to the store, she managed to douse it twice before ducking inside to grab her feather comforter.  One of the Anglo robbers, described by her with a distinctive facial scar, beat her severely with his riding quirt, but she eventually escaped, quilt and all.  T.J. Noakes survived as well, but the store was completely sacked and burned before the banditsrode away.

Among their haul were eighteen luxury saddles, heavily adorned with silver in distinctive pattern and design, manufactured by Dietrich Heye of San Antonio.

This robber band was prevented by traveling further by a posse who came down from Corpus Christi, and other armed locals.  Retribution was evidently very intense and violent, but did nothing to stop the lawless carnage between both Mexicans and Anglos in the region over the next month.

According to George Durham, when NcNelly and his rangers Nuecestown and the site of the burned store, he gave his men very specific instructions.

Captain seemed mighty concerned about those eighteen saddles.  He got Mike Dunn 

[one of the prisoners the posse freed from the gang after the raid] to give him a good 

picture of them—length of the tapideros, if the skirts were cinched.  He wanted all 

details…and ordered: “Describe those saddles to the Rangers.  Make sure they 

understand exactly.  Then order them to empty those saddles on sight.  No palavering 

with the riders.  Empty them.  Leave the men where you drop them and bring the

  saddles to camp.”

The following month, McNelly and his rangers caught up with many of the raiders at the salt marsh of Palo Alto, north of Brownsville. He and his men slaughtered them all—and George himself killed the scarfaced man who beat up Mrs. Noakes.  McNelly had the bodies brought back to Brownsville and stacked them in a public square—shocking friends as well as the unsympathetic.  A tally of the loot recaptured from the battle included twenty-two pistols, twelve rifles and fourteen saddles.  Durham reported that

Nine of the saddles…look to be almost brand new.  they are dandies.  Garnished with 

two-inch silver conchos, foot-long tapaderos.  The first ones I’ve seen.  Came from Dick 

Heye saddlery in    Santone. “Captain  perked up and said, ‘Let’s have a look at them.  

Sounds like they’re part of the plunder taken up in Nuecestown in a raid last 

March.” They were.  No mistaking them.

Befitting their special value, Cortina had given them to his trusted and honored lieutenants. McNelly, in the instructions to his men, practiced what art historians call “connoisseurship:” analyzing the traits of a distinctive style to determine the authenticity of a work of art.  It worked for the art of saddles too.

McNelly died young at 33.  He had been suffering from tuberculosis and had originally migrated to Texas from Louisiana in search of drier air.  He lived long enough to conduct more skirmishes along the Rio Grande, including one over the border in Mexico itself.  The Nueces Strip was pacified, but the Rio Grande is, to this day as we well know, a volatile border.

T.J. Noakes got these saddles back—and eventually all  eighteen—plus seven more!  They were evidently prized targets.  The problem was, according to Durham at least, they had morphed from notable to notorious—no one wanted to buy them, given their history.

So who knows which incident in this border war involving Heye saddles, if any, is the specific pursuit depicted in Untiedt’s painting?  It’s more a poetic narration of pursuit—and for this writer, a lot more moving and impressive than such standard “western issue” paintings depicting Captain McNelly by Joe Grandee or Clyde Heron.

Part of the irony of it all, is that no part of the saddle and its rich adornments is visible in the painting, but visitors to the gallery where the painting is hung can examine a genuine Heye saddle, with all its silver concho trimmings (Durham mentions that these were particularly large), and characteristically long and silver-plated tapaderos (stirrup covers) on display in the same room.

Diedrich Heye and his workers, 110 Commerce St., San Antonio

The Site of the Original Saddlery Today

It would be cool to say that this particular saddle was actually part of the Nuecestown loot, but it isn’t, for the firm of D. Heye and his sons kept the enterprise going well into second third of the 20th century.  Deidrich Heye was part of a wave of German settlers who came to central Texas during the mid 19th century.  Born in Holstein in 1837, he received his initial training in saddlery in his native country, then moved on to an apprenticeship in England, which had the reputation for being the best in the business.  He then moved on to Mexico city, where he learned the art of silver-decorated saddles, the basis for the American western saddle.  He came to San Antonio in 1866, where he set up a shop on Commerce Street, then the principal business street in the city.  He and his workers quickly built up a reputation for quality saddlery, and prospered during the period of the cattle drives during the next two decades.  The firm produced work saddles too, but the Heye saddle became the darling of wealthy stockmen, with their distinctive concho pattern and quality leather work (Durham called them “the Cadillac of Saddles).”

Heye died in 1896, but he had taught his trade to his sons, and later the business was continued by his grandson.  Among other projects, the Heye enterprise made many of the saddles for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who trained in San Antonio.  Later on, they became saddle makers to Hollywood cowboy stars and wealthy ranchers, and as automobiles displaced horses as transportation, they branched out into all sorts of luxury leather goods, including fancy luggage.

Over their long business operation, the enterprise moved several times to larger quarters, but the upper facade of the original workshop is marked by a commemorative sign that still reads “G. Heye, Est. 1867” (it is now occupied by the Coyote Ugly Saloon).

The saddle on exhibition at the Briscoe Museum was made for Rex Stout, a now-forgotten country singer who was popular in the mid-20th century, and so was presumably custom made at that time.  It has the characteristic conchos and silver-adorned tapaderos.  I can’t say how closely it resembled the Diedrich (or Dick) Heye saddles of the 1870’s, but I  think it’s terrific that it occupies the same gallery as Untiedt’s painting, so you can really understand what the painter’s reference is.

The Rex Stuart Heye Saddle. Briscoe Museum of Western Art

Rex Stuart (?)

But it gets even better: the D. Heye original San Antonio saddlery site, nicely marked, is just one block north of the Briscoe Museum—you could even see it from a window in the gallery if it weren’t blocked by a parking garage.  For Art Historians, it is completely rare for a work of art, its iconographical source and the location of its origins are all in the same place.  We should all go to Coyote Ugly after a Briscoe Museum visit and raise a glass to Heye, McNelly, Untiedt and brave Martha too!

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Michael Ome Untiedt’s personal website is at: https://michaeluntiedt.weebly.com

There are numerous recounting of the attack on the Nuecestown store.  Though it was written down nearly 50 years after it happened, there is the eyewitness account by former “Little McNelly” George Durham (written in 1934 as told to Clyde Wantland, it was not published until 1962):

George Durham (told to Clyde Wantland), Taming the Nueces Strip.  The Story of McNelly’s Rangers.  UT Press, Austin 1962

Leopold Morris, “The Mexican Raid on Corpus Christi,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 1900), pp. 128-139

William A. Hager, “The Nuecestown Raid of 1875: A border Incident,” Arizona and the West, No. 3 (Autumn, 1959), pp. 258-270

More contemporary newspaper accounts:

Noakes’s account in the Galveston News:

“Statement of the Postmaster at Nueces. A Narrow Escape from Death,” Galveston News, March 30, 1875, p. 1.

Consequences of the battle in the salt marsh at Palo Alto:

”Letter from Brownsville” The San Antonio Daily Express, May 29, 1875, p.2

Diedrich Heye’s Obituary:

“Death of an Old Citizen,” The San Antonio Daily Light, February 26, 1896, p. 2

A brief history of the Heye Saddlery:

“Identified With Growing Cattle Business,” San Antonio Express, October 25, 1935, p. 16.

Art History H11: “Western Art” vs. WESTERN ART

         Take a look at your basic art history survey textbook, and it will often have a title called  HISTORY OF WESTERN ART or some variation thereof.  Back in the late 1950’s when I was an undergraduate student,  my professor for this course was H. W. Janson, who wrote one of the original gold-standard books on this topic.  In those days, WESTERN ART meant about five or six countries of western Europe: Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and generally in the timeframe ending with Impressionism, or maybe even Cubism.  Other countries, like ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, Romanesque and 16th-17th Spain, and a few other places at a few moments in history were included.  This canon, basically designated by European scholars, museum curators and art aficionados covered the “major arts” of painting, sculpture and architecture, primarily limited to religious and court art, with a nod to Dutch 17th century bourgeoisie.  Key works of art were discussed individually, generally authenticated or attributed, analyzed and praised or damned in relation to the canon.  Renaissance Italy and the 17th century Netherlands seemed to have been regarded as the pinnacles.

At Harvard, where I got my Ph.D, anybody like me, with an interest in late Medieval Spain was considered a loony outlander, a lover of inferior provincials, left to myself in my madness.  It was only in the later 20th century and now in the 21st, that the discipline of Art History has changed, widened, and effectively now includes old and new visual imagery all over the world, in diverse media and diverse intent.  The line between “commercial” and “fine” art has virtually dissolved, and changed our viewpoint of what “fine” art is, since until the 18th century, all “fine” art was basically commercial anyway, and most of what is preserved is skewed towards what had been preserved in churches and palaces of the rich, the more common stuff relegated to mere archeology or “decorative arts” or “popular arts,” of no aesthetic consequence. 

In the United States, and especially for those living west of the Mississippi. “Western Art” can have a completely different meaning.  Here it means art of the American West and encompasses American and western themed art and objects.  You can think of “Cowboys and Indians,” but it spans and includes much more, from imagery done by early visitors from the early 19th century, through landscapes, portraits, works and objects chronicling 19th-century westward expansion, to both interpretations of 20th-21st century  life in the west, and a large body of realistic painting and sculpture that preserves the dream of native Americans, the pioneer and frontier life. It also encompasses what in the old days would have been called “minor arts, but they’re hardly that: elaborate saddles, swords,  firearms  spurs and other accoutrements also qualify. It is a vast field, as broad as the regional differences through time and space of the west itself, and there are more than a dozen museums devoted to it.

During the last fifty years or so, serious art historians have been applying themselves to it, particularly to its 19th-century manifestations. For a blog entry, it is way too large to discuss this Western Art as a whole, so as an art historian here I wanted to look at only one work each of two contemporary painters that are now on exhibit at the Briscoe Museum in San Antonio, both part of a show lent from the Booth Museum in Atlanta entitled “Into a New West.”  I have chosen them because the painters themselves generously gave me permission to reproduce them, but primarily also because I can apply some of the criteria connected with the old parameters put forth from that earlier HISTORY OF WESTERN ART tradition.  Both artists have some training and experience in graphic design as well as gallery pieces, but their styles, subject matter, and manner of narration are very different though both are set in the American southwest.

Michael Goettee: Red Rocks Romance,  Booth Western Art Museum Permanent Collection, Cartersville, GA  

Nardo di Cione Madonna and saints,
Washington, National Gallery

The first piece is Michael Goettee’s Red Rocks Romance.  Divided into three sections, it shows at its sides two kneeling men wearing the familiar dress of “cowboys:” stetson hats, jeans or work pants, western boots.  The one to the left carries a bouquet of sunflowers, the other has his hat over his heart in a gesture of homage or a humble request.  Between them, and somewhat larger in scale is a standing woman, wearing a fringed skirt, starred vest over a yellow blouse, western boots and a stetson.  She is framed by what looks like a serrated scarlet body halo, and rays flow out beyond that forming a gloriole. Beyond all three figures is a continuous red-rock landscape, billowing cumulous clouds at the horizon and a brilliant blue sky above.  Executed in acrylic on board, the whole thing is framed with a tripartite wooden frame, with a gable over the center and gilded stars and hearts.

Hugo van der Goes, Monforte Altarpiece,
Berlin Gemäldegalerie

The men seem to be on bended knee perhaps adoring the lady, and that and the frame evoke medieval altarpieces, such as the one by Nardo de Cione in the National Gallery of Washington, though there, the Virgin Mary is flanked by standing saints.  But the kneeling gestures of homage of two of the three kings and removed hat of Saint Joseph also recall such works as Hugo van der Goes’s Monforte Altarpiece in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie.  And of course the lady with her body halo brings back memories of the Virgen de Guadalupe. This work is basically laid out as a secular triptych.

Virgen de Guadalupe

This sort of sampling of earlier artworks is, of course, widely popular in today’s artistic and popular culture in many media.  But Goettee’s work is totally in contemporary American Western Art tradition.  The lady appears to my to be the ideal Western Art Woman, a Goddess of the West. The brilliant, flat coloring of the painting reminds me of billboard art, though the picture’s scale is quite small.  Are the two men rivals who are courting her?  Do their white and black stetsons indicate hero and villain in old western movie tradition?  Or are they, as a LGBTQ colleague interprets the work, two gay cowboys whose union is being blessed by the Goddess?  

Goettee, whose painting and mixed media work uses a lot of art historical and commercial art motifs, has a lot of wry humor—that same type of frame is more explicitly used in other works, Ecstasy of St. Elsie where the iconic figure is a haloed cow, or Holy Cowboy, a sort of devotional triptych having a more Renaissance-style frame with a cowboy in the center flanked by two half-length cows, one of whom is the same Elsie.  His website features other imagery satirizing the mythology of the Old West.

Dennis Ziemienski, Indian Detours, Booth Western Art Museum Permanent Collection, Cartersville, GA  

Indian Detours by Dennis Ziemienski is an example of another facet of Western Art: nostalgia.  The scene is a tribute to tourism in the 1920s and early ‘30s.  It is set in an unidentified southwestern pueblo, replete with adobe buildings, a ramada, chile ristras, and native American inhabitants in striped serapes.  A touring car of Anglo-American tourists (but with a local driver) has stopped to shop from the town’s native inhabitants.  Under the ramada, a lady dressed in fashionable riffs on native clothing, except for her high-heeled shoes, kneels to inspect a blue pot from a seated, serape-clad villager.  Behind her, a man in a white, three-piece suit and hat fingers a rug, while two local women and a baby look on, and a third woman offers another a pot to a cloche-hatted lady within the car.  Behind this grouping are two local men and a woman in a rebozo.  One of the men sits on a horse (maybe an allegory of old transportation vs. new?); in scale he is far larger than anyone else.  The equestrian man and the automobile form strong horizontals, echoed by the rugs. the crossbeam of the retama, and the ground.  The tourists and their dress make an obvious contrast to the pueblo inhabitants, and their postures and demeanor suggest a patronizing noblesse oblige. The whites of the man’s suit, the horse and the white-shawled woman center the composition. The color palette of brick reds, tans and blues suggest the desert country of the southwest, and the canvas support, in contrast to Goettee’s work, has a matte finish.

This painting recalls one of a similar theme by Goya, one of his tapestry cartoons now in the Prado Museum.  Once again the ceramics vendor is a man, who instead of sitting, reclines on a blanket. Three seated middle-class ladies examine his wares in a landscape, rather than a town scene. 

Francisco de Goya, The Crockery Vendor, Madrid, Museo del Prado

Two men, possibly companions of  ladies, sit on a pile of straw mats behind them, their backs to the viewer. But once again there is a division of classes, not only between the vendor and his clients, but in the aristocratic lady in a coach behind the seated and reclining foreground group.  Her vehicle has four liveried outriders, reinforcing her status.  

Here both the coloring and brushwork are much softer than Ziemienski’s, and the composition is based on diagonals, with the coach diagonally placed too, suggesting greater depth.  The verticality of three footmen on the coach and the tower behind them, counteract all the diagonals, but there is a general sensation of lightness and action, whereas all of Ziemienski’s figures appear still and static.  Goya’s painting is part of a much larger cycle of twenty tapestry designs for the Royal Family featuring “typical” scenes of country life, meant to animate an entire room.  Unlike Ziemienski’s painting, this design, dated 1779, has everyone in contemporary dress, and the finished tapestry would have been in reverse, and because of the change in medium, the tapestry would have harder contours and a less vaporous atmosphere. Because these tapestries were designed for a palace, only the elite had access to this view of suburban life.  Ziemienski’s painting can be viewed by a far greater cross section of viewers.

Both surely address class issues, but Ziemienski’s scene is clearly a carefully researched evocation of a time in the past—in that  sense a history painting rather than a slice of contemporary life. Goettee's composition is a more  contemporary icon.  I wonder if Ziemienski ever saw Goya’s painting—on his biographical webpage, it is stated that he has traveled frequently to Europe—but Indian Detours is not really sampling, rather a creation or recreation maybe of a memory.  On the other hand, it would make a splendid tapestry too!

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Michael Goattee's Website: http://michaelgoettee.com/michaelgoettee.com

Dennis Ziemienski's website:http://ziemienski.com

Biographic Information for Ziemienski:https://www.altamiraart.com/artists/14-dennis-ziemienski/biography/

Miserables III: Movie and Mini

           There have been so many movies, television productions and Miniseries retelling Les Misérables, that I have lost count.  They include myriad versions in from Japan, as well as Turkey, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Spain, not to mention the numerous French and English ones, going all the way back to the Lumière Brothers in 1897, just twelve years after Victor Hugo's death.

A poster for a 1912 film version of Les Misérablesdirected by Alfred Capellani

            I will give some internet resources for analyses of these various versions at the end of this post.  For myself, I just wanted to discuss two: the very latest television production from the BBC of 2018, now being streamed on PBS in America, and the French film directed by Raymond Bertrand of 1934. Both are exemplary for me in the retelling of Hugo's massive novel with limited, but expanded time frames (6 hours for the miniseries, nearly 5 hours for the movie).  It's a pity that the 1925 French silent version isn't readily available--it ran about 7 hours and used to be shown over two days.

            Though there have been numerous films made of the novel since Bertrand's black and white classic, I don't think that any of them measure up.  Lack of color (still in its infancy) is no problem.  The superb cinematography (including hand-held cameras for the barricade sequences), expressionistic lighting and a moody score by Arthur Honegger all syncronize beautifully with Bertrand's direction.  The casting too is perfect.  Harry Baur, I think, comes closest to my own literary impression of Jean Valjean. He is not young, even at the beginning, heavyset, definitely a peasant tree-trimmer, not at all attractive, with hair that whitens during the film as per Hugo's description, but so expressive and eventually so likeable in his plainness!  I find the process of his redemption, not by overacting, but by restraint, not only believable but increasingly sympathetic as the film progresses. 

Harry Bauer and Charles Vanel: Les Misérables, 1934

            The same can be said of Charles Vanel who plays Javert--he too is massive, often monolithic, and his looming inflexibility makes his presence a heavy adversary in each scene he is in. This film introduces him in a low-key first scene in which he appears as one more figure in the Prison system, where he simply reminds Valjean as he leaves prison of the consequences of recidivism. Only later, in the role of the police chief at Monfermeil, does he take up his adversarial relationship with Valjean aka Mayor Madeleine.  When he appears at the dying Fantine's bedside, he seems to fill up all available space in monolithic menace.  While not quite Hugo's gorilla-man, he comes very close. Homely, like Baur, the two men really portray two men of humble beginnings, and their conflicting growth as poles of inflexibility on the one hand and the possibility of redemption on the other.

            The rest of the cast is wonderful too.  I wish I had space to discuss them all, but you can check them out on IMDB.  The film does a splendid job of both complex character portrayal and staying close to many incidents in Hugo's novel.  A few of the book's key narratives are cut:  there is no second imprisonment of Valjean, and once he rescues Cosette from the Thenardiers' clutches, the tale fast-forwards to Cosette's 16th birthday--no time at the Gorbeau house, no pursuit then by Javert and escape and time at the convent.  Likewise, the Thenardier parents disappear after they get arrested in their extortion manouvers--there is never an encounter with him by Valjean and Marius in the sewers, and no subsequent blackmail attempt.

            The ending is simplified too: the day after Valjean frees Javert at the barricades, the policeman arrests him as he emerges with Marius from the sewer, allows Valjean to take Marius to his grandfather's house--where Valjean identifies himself as the young man's rescuer, and all is quickly resolved, including Javert's suicide.

            The episodes that are included, though, are rendered in meticulous detail.  Fantine's brief romance and tragic decline and fall are rendered beautifully.  The actress Forelle portrays Fantine in a way that recalls Hugo's character: blonde, fragile, and a little feckless. The scriptwriters choose to show the beginning of her seduction, then fast-forwards to her working at M. Madeleine's bead factory. Her descent from poor-but-fastidious mother to toothless prostitute is carefully but quickly shown. It's really M. Madeleine's remorseful care that restores her spiritual respectability. When he goes to liberate Cosette, we not only feel the child's gratitude, but the emotion of human tenderness that begins to grow within her rescuer.

            Likewise, the entire sequence of Thenardier and his cronies' attempted robbery of Valjean, Marius's dilemma as a witness, Javert's raid on the robbery and Valjean's escape is tightly edited and very exciting.  And Orane Demazis's Éponine is so different from the sexpot waif of the musical! She's a little chunky, a little cheeky, and very much a street girl, as is Émile Genevois, who plays her brother Gavroche, the supreme urchin (he, ironically, later had a bit part as an omnibus driver in the 1958 French remake of Les Misérables).

            Most splendid of all is the barricade sequence, from its initiation during Lamarq's funeral procession to the total defeat and slaughter of the student rebels, including the execution of Enjolras and Grantaire. The drama escalates in tension and violence, some of it filmed by hand-held camera as if it was actually happening, to the heroic, futile last stand of the remaining protestors, with time to narrate Éponine's and Gavroche's deaths, and Valjean's liberation of Javert.

            It's this examination of Jean Valjean's transformation, and Javert's corresponding inability to live beyond his own rigidly set parameters that makes this film so effective, and it's done without any histrionics, over-acting or excessively corny emotionalism.  This film is hard to find, and doesn't stream anywhere--you have to by the remastered DVD.  It's worth seeking it out.

            The 2018 miniseries has even longer to tell the story, and, as directed by Tom Shankland and written by Andrew Davies, earnestly attempts to cram as much of Hugo's novel as can be done in its six hours. Hugo is not strictly chronological: the Battle of Waterloo occurs midway through the novel.  In the BBC series it is, of course vastly compressed, but it does set the stage for both the stories of Thenardier and Marius Pontmercy and the political problems of his family. In this way, it pays tribute to Hugo's historical digression, but sums it up by visual spectacle and that all-important last paragraph.

            Not only is a good deal of the novel's content in the series, but some embellishments are added: Fantine's fall is very much expanded and drawn out, with an emphasis on an almost operatic-like pathos, including her consignment of Cosette to the Thenardiers, and focusses on her sacrifice of her teeth and hair in agonizing detail.  Lily Collins, who portrays Fantine has dark hair and is model-slender, quite different from the blond, vulnerable innocence conveyed by Forelle. There is also an added incident depicting the Thenadier's eviction from their inn by Javert's men to transition them from lower middle-class to Parisian petty extortionist criminals.  

Dominic West, Lily Collins, Mailow Defoy and David Oyelowo: Les Misérables 2018

            The two opposing characters are played by very handsome and charismatic actors.  Oyelowo's Javert is portrayed as acknowledging Valjean's challenge to his narrow definition of good and evil and its non-changeability from the very beginning.  It begins while Valjean is serving his 19 years, first when Javert witnesses Valjean's loosening of stone and then saving a chain-gang guard's life at the stone quarry (this episode is not in Hugo's work, instead Valjean is shown supporting a falling caryatid on a building so it can be repaired--and this figures in the 1934 film), and a subsequent altercation in which both Valjean and Javert establish their respective points of view.  The latter is more or less in the musical, but not in the novel.  

            What overwhelmingly dominates the 2018 production is this epic opposition the two main protagonists  The executive producer of the miniseries is David Oyelowo, who plays Javert to Dominic West's Jean Valjean, and I wonder if this is why he is a more dominant and forceful presence here.  In Hugo's novel Javert is indeed Valjean's bloodhound-like pursuer, but so much of this pursuit has to do with the coincidences of where fate places the two protagonists.  Indeed, in Hugo's novel, when he finally corners Valjean and Marius at the sewer exit he's actually there in pursuit of Thernadier as a corpse robber of the sewers.

            In the BBC production, Javert becomes so obsessed with capturing Valjean that he prioritizes above helping to quell the 1832 uprising, his primary duty as a police chief.  He goes to the barricade in disguise because he believes that Valjean will show up there, not really to spy on the student rebels.  Another problem is that these two characters never age over the period from 1815 to 1832.  Hugo has Valjean's hair turn white after his rescue of Cosette.  Dominic West is slender and fit right up to the end; he's well into his 60's according to Hugo at his time of death, and here his hair finally, in the last scene, is gently frosted gray.  Javert, no spring chicken either, is unchanging not only in his philosophy but in appearance.  He looks exactly the same right up to his suicide.

            When these two characters are on the screen, they dominate it, and the others seem paler in comparison, though many of them are impressive on their own when they have the chance.  Marius and his contentious relationship with his grandfather is examined in detail--indeed more even than in the book, for the miniseries has Marius' visit to his dying father much earlier in his life, and is able to talk to him, while in the novel he never does meet him when he's alive, and Marius only discovers the truth about his heroism when he's grown up. But the aristocratic Guillernormand's character, similar in a way to Valjean, begins to see things in a very different way by the time he consents to Marius's and Cosette's marriage.

            One of the more appealing qualities in the miniseries is the examination of the extended Thenardier family and their changing dynamics. We are shown the love for Mme. Thenardier for her two daughters, even as everyone disintegrates as their circumstances fall, and her confession that she loves her daughters, but not her son.  Both Éponine and Gavroche are portrayed as intelligent and resourceful; Éponine is not a sex-kitten any more than her 1934 counterpart, she's somewhat more blatant in her sexuality, even turning up as a whore in a brothel scene, but unlike Fantine she dabbles in this as just another source of income. Much like the 1934 film, the deaths of both at the barricades comes off as tragic and touching:  they are heroic in their deeds, but will disappear without a trace or a memory when everything settles down again.  I wish the scriptwriters had made the relationship of the two youngest Thenardier boys with the rest of the family clearer.  In the novel they are literally rented out so early that Gavroche, when he adopts them and trains them in the arts of urchinship, doesn't even know that they are his brothers.  The very last scene in episode 6, when the other Thenardiers are dead or scattered, shows the two boys begging in the street, an eloquent reminder of the miseries of the underclass after the uprising.  The screenwriters used them as symbols of the futility, but, in their own words, didn't associate them with the Thenardiers.

The Original cover for the Classics Illustrated Comic: 1943

            In the conscientious way that the series unfolds--in a literal sequence of storytelling with various episodes unfolding by intercutting them, in the gorgeous costumes and strong acting, and with so many of the novel's details put in, including Valjean's second imprisonment (though not his manner of escape), and the harrowing pursuit of Valjean and Cosette by Javert's men averted by that tense climb over the convent wall, I commend this production.  But for evoking the spirit of Hugo's novel in a human way--even with abridgements--I find that Raymond Bertrand's 1934 film, with its homely Valjean and Javert does it better and touches my heart more deeply.

P.S.: Les Misérables just keeps going in many media.  If you have little time to read thenovel or slog through five or six hours of film or Television, you can read the Classic Comics version.  It came out originally in 1943, but has been republished with a new cover in 2015.  It costs $9.95 on Amazon, but you can download Hugo's massive novel for free.

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You can download Hugo's complete novel in Isabel Hapgood's 1887 translation (with illustrations) athttps://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm: 

Two short retrospective reviews of the 1934 production can be found at:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/25/les-miserables-raymond-bernard-dvd-review-best-film-adaptation

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/245809%7C0/Les-Miserables.html

A recent review of the 2018 series: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/arts/television/les-miserables-collins-oyelowo.html times review of BBC show

A nice visual analysis of several of the other films is from a new blog  "Infrequentmusings":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtGJX0JCqFk film comparisons