The Swimming Hole - Song of Myself

Leo Yuan
Thomas Eakins, Swimming, 1885

"I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself to be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize.

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time."

---Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

 Once a friend of mine challenged me to go skinny dipping with her. I told her challenge accepted, but I need to get my six pack abs first. Even though I haven't worked on my abs since, when I occasionally glance at them, as they remain one united pack, I wonder whether I have the guts to just strip and jump in even if I have a perfect six pack abs. It seems true that we are less vulnerable in clothes, as shame and self-consciousness are carefully kept in check, and the rule of civilized people is followed. But funny that we started out envisioning our gods naked. Obviously because they are perfect, so David wouldn't mind standing in a museum naked with hundreds of people walking around. But we are human beings. And with the increasing functions that we added to our garments, once upon a time, it became the artists' job to find beauty in nudity and understand who we are in the state of nature.

Thomas Eakins was one of the artists in late 19th century America to explore such a theme. With the development of photography, unlike many of his contemporaries, Eakins saw photography as a way to better observe and understand his objects. In a lake outside Philadelphia, he would set up his Kodak camera and capture the bath session of his nude students on films. In The Swimming Hole, Eakins employs the classic pyramidal composition; six figures are deliberately placed to form a triangle, where each figure poses in a classical, Hellenic gesture, demonstrating the ideal beauty and strength that seen in Greek sculptures. Hardly conscious of their nakedness, each figure seems content and fitting with the arcadian surroundings. It is perhaps that only in Arcadia, where no civilization rules applied, and no moral judgments are forced upon, can one fully accept oneself, and reflect, and be free. Like Walt Whitman writes in his Leaves of Grass, "I exist as I am, that is enough, / If no other in the world be aware I sit content, / And if each and all be aware I sit content. / One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself."

I will work on my abs.

  • 7:00 AM

Eleven A.M - The Great Gatsby

1926
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M.

"I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Eleven A.M., like majority of Edward Hopper’s paintings, reflects solitude and missed connections. Here we see a woman staring aimlessly at events unfolding on the streets of New York. Although the outside is not shown, we can easily assume a busy morning start in the restless city, which echoes with Nick Carraway’s perception of New York as “racy, adventurous” and filled with the “constant flicker of men and women.” In the ever-expanding metropolis in the 1920s, a subtle placelessness seems to be growing as well. It is easy for individuals to feel like “just a number,” and Fitzgerald depicts just this spiritual emptiness in flamboyant lifestyle of the riches. 

Realistic, firm and direct construction of buildings was Hopper’s calling card. The straight lines on the door frames, curtains and cabinet suggest sureness, coldness even, and gives a sense of solitude to the painting. Sunlight falls on the woman, making her isolated from the crowds of solid, dark background. Outside the window we see the top of another building, suggesting a relative high place this bedroom is. Therefore the woman is physically separated from the people or events outside. With her legs slightly apart, arms resting on her knees, she leans towards the window yet still sits deeply in the chair. Hopper conveys her indifference and detached attitude from body position without painting a single facial feature. 

Similarly, Nick Carraway senses his own sense of loneliness at the high of New York party scene. Returning from Gatsby’s elaborate gatherings, he walks and fantasizes about romantic encounters with strange women. I find this idea oddly compelling. Nick prefers personal imagination of intimacy over the enforced, physical closeness at parties. His sense of solitude, much like the woman in Eleven A.M., reaches high in the restless modern urban life. 

  • 7:00 AM

The Bridge—The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Joseph Stella, The bridge, 1922

“Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world” - The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve always loved New York. I feel a little corny saying it sometimes—I’m not from New York and I haven’t gone there nearly often enough. But I’ve always liked everything I saw. And in my opinion no one writes about New York better than F. Scott Fitzgerald. More than anyone else, he seems able to capture its power and its beauty. Even though it often serves as the stage for the destruction of Fitzgerald’s characters, it has a presence all its own. In novels like The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby it provides a stunning backdrop for the action and changes the way the reader understands those novels. 

Fitzgerald was also a Midwesterner who arrived late to New York but always kept a special place in his heart for it. Two of his books take place largely in Manhattan—he lived there with Zelda much of his life. When he wrote those two novels—at around the same time Stella painted The bridge, Americans enjoyed an era of unthinkable plenty and unbridled optimism. The new generation of men and women coming of age glowed with a type of joie de vivre. Although many of Fitzgerald’s characters of course meet tragic ends, men and women like Gatsby still live in the spirit of this great, hopeful era.

The work of Stella and this painting in particular embody this feeling. These cities to Stella represent a newfound opportunity—the painting is awash with bright colors that portray the energy and life that New York has. Great buildings stretch up and out of the painting, dragging the viewer into an ever-brighter future. In spite of this, it seems to me that the work carries a certain malice. The painting is icy—the dark blues and blue-greys feel intimidating. The bridge pulls me in, but I can’t tell if I will like what I arrive at. This is the darker side of this new landscape that both Fitzgerald and Stella seem to notice. Great new cities like New York may offer opportunities never before heard of, but for every success story hundreds of flattened souls lie by the wayside. As they emerged from World War I into the sunny 1920s, men like Fitzgerald and Stella displayed these anxieties in works like The bridge and The Great Gatsby.

  • 7:00 AM

The Tower of Babel and Ozymandias

Becky Reilly
Peter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- "Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, famous for his paintings of the Little Ice Age, peasants, and vices and virtues, presents a vividly colored but somberly themed religious work.  Something seems immediately troubling about it.  "Ozymandias," Shelley's 1818 poem, is written in iambic pentameter to mimic the heart's normal palpitations. The poem's imagery of starkness where there once was life, leaving the reader to listen only to his own heartbeat, creates feelings of desolation and even fear.

The biblical Tower of Babel and the poem "Ozymandias" share fleeting, glorious moments and lifeless lows. Between the humanity of Genesis attempting to build a tower reaching to heaven and King Ozymandias trying to immortalize himself in stone, it is hard to say which is a loftier goal.  Nonetheless, the Old Testament God - or forces unknown - punish them for their ambition, and their works and hopes fall to disrepair.  The contrast of light on either side of the canvas catches the eye, and the succession of arches from the top level cascades into ruin, taking the viewer's gaze with it.  Especially interesting is the juxtaposition of the sunlit, glorious left-hand side of the tower and the shadowy decay of the lower front.  One other detail I find interesting is the strange angle of the tower, not quite perpendicular to the ground, as if evoking a sinking ship.  No real building would ever be constructed like that.  It also appears that some of the upper floors were built before lower ones could be finished. And ever in the background of the painting are the vast sprawls of flatlands of Shelley's poem, all that will remain when humanity disappears for good.
It would seem that the works stand testament to the transience and futility of earthly pursuits, but I do not think this is the case.  Instead, I believe that they are cautions against hubris.  We have ideas worth sharing and bringing to life, but these works suggest having a certain humility and respect for forces beyond our control.

  • 7:00 AM

Sunrise in the Sierras and Yann Martel

Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt, Sunrise in the Sierras, 1872

“If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” - Life of Pi, Yann Martel

When I read Life of Pi, I was so inspired by the theme of religion that I was immediately transported to the children's sanctuary where I belted so many hymns as an elementary school student. I specifically recall the lines to one song in particular that says ,"Though the sorrow may last through the night, the joy comes in the morning." This sense of hope came to me as an image of a sunrise, but what I fell in love with about this particular sunrise, is the despair that looms at the bottom that so perfectly captures the feeling of doubt that Martel talks about. Bierstadt perfectly materializes the sense of hope that Yann Martel describes through emphasis of the coming of a new day.

The lower third of the painting is harsh and undefined, with wide horizontal strokes that provides a contrast with the definition of the mountain peaks. Slightly higher up, the strokes become softer and smaller, which transition the eye to the beautiful orange and blue of the new day. In addition, the snow on the peaks represents the possibility of life that comes with having hope. Though it is easy to get caught up in the chaotic blur of navy and black that is doubt, Bierstadt ultimately captures the beauty and hope of life that comes with each new day.

  • 7:00 AM

David and Goliath and Edgar Allen Poe

Caravaggio
Caravaggio David and Goliath, 1605

"Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded – with what caution – with what foresight – with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it – oh so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly – very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this." – Edgar Allan Poe, Tell Tale Heart

Caravaggio, a master of dark and light, creates a few portraits of David killing Goliath. I have seen this painted many times, seen the sexy sculpture of David by Donatello and paintings that display a young boy overcoming his fear. Of course, the picture here is much different. We see David holding Goliath's head, or rather Caravaggio's head, with his stale, emotionless face. The agony in the face shows his life ripped away from him so suddenly and almost as if he didn't deserve it. But we know from the story that Goliath was no saint, and neither was Caravaggio. 

What strikes me most, and reminded me of Poe's Tell Tale Heart, was obviously the meticulous nature of David and the killer in Poe's story. David looks as if he does this sort of thing for a living, and the methodology of the killer plus his excitement makes these characters a bit more than creepy Granted, Poe and Caravaggio had a particular dark taste in their works, but the combination of these go particularly well together for me. They make me uneasy because people don't simply kill for sport if they aren't getting paid or have some serious troubles. Caravaggio paints the suffering it causes him, but we lose the intensity in David's face which makes the murder less personal and more terrifying. The same way – or even the worse way – the excitement the killer has to tell his story, explain the murder in full, because he is proud of his work. 

 Edgar Allan Poe and Caravaggio were both masters of dark and light. Caravaggio can use the darkness in his paintings to help illuminate emotion and pain. In his particular story, Poe uses a the lighter tone of the killer to make Tell Tale Heart so riveting and horrifying.      
  • 7:00 AM

The Unexpected Answer and Red

John Logan
Rene Magritte, The Unexpected Answer, 1933

"You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes, but it's also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL. Not nice. Not fine. Real. A moan of rapture. Something divine or damned." – John Logan, Red

That gaping hole in what may have once been a doorway can either be seen as an entry or an exit, or even a acidic silhouette that has eaten its way through. Or it can be infinitely more complex, if you so choose. Personally, every time I have viewed Magritte's The Unexpected Answer I've always felt that it was more of a mirror than a hole. It stares back at me, but I am lost in the darkness. Either that, or I'm a vampire.

As the floorboards recede away, dissolving into the black, I find myself asking where exactly do they go? Do they drop off into some crawl space abyss or do they lead on through some Nosferatu corridor? In fact, the longer I look, the more questions gurgle up like magma. What caused this? Would it be better to walk through the hole or turn the knob? Does the knob even work? And chiefly, where does the darkness lead? I think that's what makes Magritte's painting one of my favorites. Darkness has always been synonymous with fear, something to turn away from. The door itself reminds me a bit of something you would see in a horror movie, perhaps it's Norman Bates'.

But here, I find that shadow reaching towards me, beckoning me forward. I want to touch the darkness. I want to follow it. Perhaps if it were just a door, I would want to turn and run. The dark is what pulls you in, probes your curiosity. Like John Logan's depiction of Rothko states above, it's not nice. It's not pretty. The darkness reveals something, "feral and foul and primal and REAL," about oneself. A side of us that may not be as terrifying as we had previously imagined. In fact, it may be what we had been looking for after all. There, within the darkness, is your expected answer.

  • 7:00 AM

Brook in the Woods near Oosterbeek and The Road

Brook in the Woods near Oosterbeek
Matthijs Maris, Brook in the Woods near Oosterbeek, ca. 1860

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." - Cormac McCarthy, The Road 

 A post-apocalyptic world filled with horror and misery around every turn for a father and son. Death and destruction described in practically every scene, and yet, McCarthy leaves the reader with this passage. Gracefully depicting the flow and design of fish swimming in untarnished streams, McCarthy uses this imagery to impart buried wisdom to the readers, wisdom that completely escaped me the first time I read the passage. Class discussion and personal reflection on the novel allowed McCarthy's hidden lesson to float to the surface, and I realized that this passage, in conjunction with the novel, was the most powerful thing I had ever read. The contrast of this passage to the rest of the novel is shocking, as if McCarthy just needed to reach a quota of 287 pages and decided that confusing readers would be fun, but at same time, the novel would be incomplete without this addition.

 Mystery lies on each page in the novel, and this final passage explores the power of mystery. McCarthy never explicitly tells the reader the event that altered the Earth, or the names of the two characters the novel follows or what really happens to the boy in the end. But isn't that what we want as readers? We get to shape our own opinion regarding the novel without being handed every minute detail. Suddenly, the boy and father become the reader and the reader's father, hopelessly trekking the barren Earth in search for some sign of hope or faith. The reader begins to imagine the scenes in his head, playing out similar scenarios and seriously contemplating, "What would I do?" And while the boy and father never directly locate their goal, the reader finds a semblance of faith in the last passage. The presence of fish, and life, and flowing, pure water refresh the reader after the dismal novel, suggesting that life may return to the Earth as it once was. However,  McCarthy simultaneously suggests that not everything can be undone. Even the last passage, although it alludes to the power of mystery in the rest of McCarthy's novel, contains mystery in itself. Can the barren land recover what it once lost? Or has man completely unraveled and destroyed nature to an irreversible state?

 The final passage of The Road leaves no question answered, but explains why the reader has so many questions. And much like the novel, this painting alludes to that mystery. I may not know where that brook goes or who will swim in it or who or what will eventually tarnish it, but I do know that my imagination will create a multitude of possible endings, something that would be impossible without the presence of mystery.

  • 7:00 AM

Bolt of Lightning... A Memorial to Benjamin Franklin and American Gods

American Gods
Isamu Noguchi, Bolt of Lightning... A Memorial to Benjamin Franklin, 1933-1979
“And the sky...

The sky was dark. It was lit, and the world beneath it was illuminated by a burning greenish-white streak, brighter than the sun, which forked crazily across the sky from end to end, like a white rip in the darkened sky.

It was lightning, Shadow realized. Lightning held in one frozen moment that stretched into forever. The light it cast was harsh and unforgiving: it washed out faces, hollowed eyes into dark pits.

This was the moment of the storm.” – Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Isamu Noguchi, born in America to a Japanese father, took the world of 20th century sculpture by storm. (Sorry - couldn’t resist.)

Noguchi worked in a wide variety of different mediums and formats, designing everything from stage sets to furniture. His modernist, abstract forms come in steel, marble, cast iron, basalt, bronze, water, and more, forming smooth and mysterious shapes. After the wartime atrocities and widespread persecution of Japanese-Americans during World War II, he became a political activist as well, founding a group named “Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy” to combat American prejudices. Noguchi’s sculptures can be found around the world, especially in America and Japan - in fact, Kansas City’s own Nelson-Atkins museum features the Noguchi Sculpture Court, the largest public collection of his works outside the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Museum in New York and Japan.

Noguchi first proposed this sculpture in 1933 as a Philadelphia monument to Benjamin Franklin, specifically his experiments with the nature of electricity. The concept went ignored for decades until, in 1979, the original sketches and models were displayed as part of an exhibition of Noguchi’s past work. The Fairmount Park Art Association, intrigued by the proposal, commissioned a full-sized version of the sculpture, allowing Noguchi freedom to pick the site. The massive stainless steel bolt of lightning balances atop a stylized key, while a kitelike structure tops the other end. Four cables connect the lightning bolt to the ground, symbolizing a connection between the earth and the sky. Altogether, the structure weighs almost 60 tons and looms more than 100 feet tall.

American Gods, a novel by Neil Gaiman, draws its source material from myths and religions from all over the world. Settlers in the New World brought their beliefs with them, creating gods, demons, and spirits to populate their new surroundings, but America proved to be “a bad land for gods” and their powers waned over the years. New “gods” personifying the media, drugs, cancer, automobiles, and other elements of modern life have risen and are threatening the old. In this universe, roadside attractions are built through the same forces that inspired the construction of temples and holy sites in the Old World. Perhaps Noguchi’s monument is the same; a shrine to the discovery of electricity, a thunderbolt of discovery.

  • 7:00 AM

Mrs. Richard Bennett Llyod and Edith Wharton

Dan Humphrey
Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Richard Bennett Llyod, 1775-76

“It was not the first time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of comments had imperceptibly coloured his view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt. This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?" – Edith Wharton, House of Mirth

Back in the day in Gotham, the well-heeled would embark on a party/event season that took them through drawing rooms where tuxedos and diaphanous gowns would mingle… and steal kisses…and gossip…and make ethically-challenged decisions. Usually, there was someone who stood aloof – a social scribe of sorts, pen at the judgmental ready.

The youngsters may wonder if I speak of Gossip Girl, with lonely boy Dan Humphrey as the misfit who will extract his literary revenge by chronicling the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite. 
 Instead, dear youth, I speak of the original G.G. – Edith Wharton. Reading Wharton’s House of Mirth delivers a dastardly kind of pleasure as she shish-ka-bobs pretension with an almost untoward relish. But she knows that which she criticizes.

Ms. Wharton grew up in a household that has been apocryphally credited the inspiration for the phrase “Keeping up with the Joneses.” She was unhappily married to Teddy Wharton, a Boston man of class and leisure who was significantly older. She and Teddy were often ill, nervous and didn’t much sleep in the same room. However, it took Edith 23 years to get out.

In Reynolds portrait, Mrs. Llyod carves her husband’s name into the tree. We could speak to how Wharton does similar things to the rich and powerful, wielding her sharp pen to slice into the New York social scene of her yourth.

But we could also look at how Reynolds places Mrs. Llyod. The 18th-century graffiti artist leans slightly forward with an unmistakably anticipatory look on her pale face. Also unmistakable, the focus on the midsection and those oh-so-naughty bare feet. Reynolds has beaten Sargent to the Madam X punch by a full century.

Lily Bart enacts this painting in the tableaux vivant scene captured above that gets Lawerence Selden all huffy towards those who mention Lily's foxiness. He sees Lily as Miranda in the forest. We don’t. Lily’s a hottie, but also indecisive, rash, and materialistic. She cuts a teasing, provocative path through high society, only to have her fickleness and desperation lead to social and emotional ruin. Clearly, a total loser Dan Humphrey moment; only this one’s delivered with an aplomb that can only be Wharton.

Editor’s Note: I would like to introduce you to a new class of art history students. For the next couple of weeks they will be bringing you passages of literature tied to paintings. I hope you will enjoy their insight and passion as much as I do.

  • 7:00 AM