Bill Cunningham - our Bruegel of the Streets

Since 1966, photographer Bill Cunningham has been roaming the streets of New York with a camera, chronicling delightful little moments of human pride and vanity - er, I mean style and fashion. I've seen the recent documentary about him* (see below) and know him to be a good-hearted, down-to-earth fellow with no malice towards his fellow travelers. Still, that keen, ever-present eye is on us; the stories he tells speak volumes about our fears and our obsessions. It suddenly occurred to me this week, as I was preparing for the theme 'Daily Life' with my university Art History class this week, that Cunningham is our Bruegel, the 16th century Flemish artist whose paintings spread a wide, richly furnished table of human foibles, follies, and joys. Pieter Bruegel (the Elder) was a

down-to-earth kind of guy too, nicknamed 'Peasant Bruegel,' not because he was a peasant, but because he used to dress up like one in order to mingle with the folks he wanted to paint. It was a time when the classes were separated eternally and as a matter of course - your parents were peasants, you were a peasant, your children would be peasants - or you were a lord, your parents were lords .... etc. Few if any artists painted the lower classes - there was no money in it - but Bruegel, spurning the rich and over-mannered as subjects, created one masterpiece after another by using peasants to represent the crazy colorful range of human nature. One of my favorites is Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), a riotous delight chock-full of the fun and foolishness of life. See if you can spot 'Casting pearls before swine, Belling the cat, The blind leading the blind' among hundreds of other pithy sayings rooted in the gritty stuff of daily peasant life. (See below for a handy reference guide.) Bill Cunningham is hardly such a blatant moralizer; he's a Bruegel for our time, in true contemporary art style he tosses out his weekly hurricane of bits and pieces and lets us stitch them together into our own patchwork quilt of meaning. Where one sees chic, another may see pompous... where one sees retro, another may see trying too hard. Bill Cunningham is in his 80's now - he lives simply in the center of over-the-top Manhattan, spurns cars and cabs in favor of his faithful bike, he's our version of an intentional peasant, and still going strong in his 80's. It's fun to think what Pieter Bruegel would have done with a camera, but then again, we don't have to imagine - Cunningham has painted a clear picture.

See a trailer of the film:  
Bill Cunningham New York
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYqiLJBXbss&noredirect=1
Cheat sheet for Netherlandish Proverbs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlandish_Proverbs

Losing the Game Changers

Mike Kelley died this week at 57, an age that's old for some and just getting going for others. Mike still had a long way to go with his complicated, playful, demanding art - he's a big loss. Christopher Knight's obituary in the LA Times gave me the name for this post and made me think about artists who go away when we've only begun to understand how they've been changing the game. I can't claim to have known Mike Kelley's work well. I saw it a couple of times in person, at the Whitney and a couple of New York galleries, but the impact didn't fully hit until I started thinking about it this week. Huge clumps of stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling in furry overgrown pods like some kind of colorful fungus? It's a compelling image, rife with associations of childhood - warm, fuzzy, sentimental, and eerily precarious. In his segment of Art21/PBS Kelley talks about the initial response to these stuffed animal pieces 'they all thought it was about child abuse - my child abuse.' The reaction surprised him, but it spurred him to accept 'abuse' - of himself, of 'all of us' as a central subject. Nothing literal though - he takes a crazy, joyous, dizzying path to meaning - installations, performances, painting, photos - all of it at the same time accessible and out-of-reach. We have to run along to try to catch up and figure it out, especially now that he won't be around to explain. Keith Haring and Jean-Michael Basquiat - shouldn't we still have them around too? A trio of sad early deaths - suicide, AIDS, drugs - but worlds of inspiring breathtaking creativity - it shouldn't cost that much to be an artist, should it? We all know Keith Haring's bright jumpy creatures, including 'radiant baby' (now available on baby bibs and wall decals) but do we remember that he worked to create peace and health with cooperative projects and a foundation in his name to support AIDS organizations and children? Basquiat's work is so rich, visceral, and immediate, with wild combinations of color, drawing, and lettering that form stunningly coherent image/messages. I see his influence everywhere in contemporary art. Andy Warhol was a mentor for him. Another early death, I suppose, but Warhol had pretty much said what he needed to say - Basquiat, at 28, was just beginning to communicate everything he had. And further back? Art History offers Raphael and Masaccio, among others. Raphael, dead at 31 of some mysterious cause (Vasari says too much rollicking sex with his mistress!) had accomplished a great deal and reached the pinnacle of worldly success, changing the game for artists for centuries, but with his eye and sense of color, it would be wonderful to have seen him develop further past the heavy influences of Michelangelo and Leonardo. Masaccio, finally, is the poster child for artists dying too young but leaving an indelible legacy. Dead at only 28, Masaccio is considered one of the three founders of the Italian Renaissance along with Donatello and Brunelleschi. His celebrated frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence give us HUMANITY in the full glory of life on earth, after all those centuries of medieval ethereal spirituality. St. Peter, his halo a bit unsteady on his head, stands firm and flat-footed on the dirt of the world, scowling at the Romans demanding payment, while Christ, another man of the world sends him back to get the money out of fish. We're there too - humans along for the ride of innovation and progress, led by a visionary who moves on too soon.

Mike Kelley on Art21
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists

Drawing Life

I've been working with my sketchbooks lately, creating hand-colored prints and hand-made books out of hand-drawn memories that span many years. My sketchbooks make a huge, ragged pile of all shapes and sizes: large journals, ring bound notebooks, small moleskins, hard bound, soft covers, etc. The drawings are done with fine ink pen, pencil, watercolor, ball point, colored pencil, and anything else that seemed a good idea at the time. I have a selection of the hand-colored prints up at Fine Art America - they're fun to do and make nice gifts so please take a look. http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/marilyn-macgregor.html My artist book using a few of my sketches is in the exhibit 'The Decorated Book' at the Athenaeum in Philadelphia. The title of the book is 'Summer Travels - rightly so, though some of the drawings were part of other seasons spent living in England and France - there is a kind of 'summer' mentality to travel that pays no attention to the calendar. As a sketchbook artist, I am in good company, both historic and contemporary. 'Keeping a Sketchbook' (or a journal) has a kind of Victorian ring to it - it may be partly because bound sketchbooks didn't really exist much before that. When Rembrandt, the great master of loose spontaneous drawing, made sketches they were just that - loose (both senses of the word) sketches - rather than a bound collection. Like any artist who prizes the collaboration of mind and hand, he used his sketches to learn and explore, sometimes in the interest of a planned work, but surely often for his own enrichment. By contrast, when Joseph Mallord William Turner set out on his extensive travels, his baggage must always have been stuffed with a selection of sturdy books, most if not all of which can now be viewed, cover to cover, page by page, via the website of the Tate Collection in London. A trip through any one of his sketchbooks is a journey through the art of drawing, the ever-curious mind of an artist, the ever-observant eyes of an artist, the daily cares of a 19th century traveler, and the unfolding possibilities of a newly met destination. Look to his earlier books for tighter, more academic drawing, watch him loosen and become confident with any visual challenge, and have the delight of seeing him toss off late sketches with an unconscious grace. The last sketches are almost conceptual art - more suggestion than closely written description. Another of the great 'sketchers' is Hokusai, the exuberant Ukiyo-e master of 19th century Japan. A famous published edition of his 'sketches' (the word in Japanese translates as 'Manga',) edited by James Michener, the author, is a most delightful panorama of Japanese life in all its small interesting detail. Unlike Turner, however, Hokusai's 'manga' are not immediate drawings - instead his sketches were first turned into woodblock prints and arranged on the page (some say by Hokusai himself, some by the printers.) Another of my favorite 'Sketchers' is John Constable, the celebrated artist of English Romanticism - I once saw an exhibit focused on his sketchbooks in which it was noted that many had been picked up for nothing at London Flea Markets. Artists were along on many famous explorations, including Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, Darwin's epic journey of discovery, and the Lewis and Clark trek through the Louisiana Purchase in 1805. In a number of these cases the artist was also the scientist - this sketch page of a Salmon is by Meriwether Lewis.  The art of sketching is alive and well, in case you're wondering. I belong to a group called Urban Sketchers - they started as a blog and now have a world-wide presence with contributors from all over the world. The range of styles and perspectives is breathtaking - I'm always torn between admiration and jealousy! The beautiful watercolor here is by Isabel Fiadeiro of Mauritania. I think I'm the only member from Philadelphia - if anyone else is out there, let me know and we can start our own chapter! 

Browse the Tate Collection of Turner's Sketchbooks

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/BrowseGroup?cgroupid=999999995 

Get to know Urban Sketchers

http://www.urbansketchers.org/