Author Archives: Jim

The Seine, Outside Paris by Frank Boggs caught my eye on my first visit to the Hunter Museum about fifteen years ago. Since then, I go see it on most of my visits, and, like an old friend who never fails to charm, I always come away thrilled at its mastery of means and usually vow, with varying degrees of success, to emulate its immediacy in my own artwork.

Frank Boggs–“The Seine, Outside Paris”, 15 x 22, Oil on canvas, 1885– The Hunter Museum of American Art

When I first discovered this work I knew nothing about the artist but that mattered little. I avoid reading the information card next to a painting when viewing it for the first time, trying instead to let the artwork tell me all it can about itself, or at least as much as I can understand on a first viewing. So what can be deduced from this small canvas?

It was painted in the second half of the 19th century; the subject matter and the style make that clear enough. The relatively small size and the freedom of the brushwork suggests it was almost certainly done plein aire. Earlier in the century the development of paint packaged in tubes combined with the invention of the portable easel (still called a ‘French easel”) freed the artist from working exclusively in the studio. By the 1880’s it was a freedom that many younger artists increasingly relished and a common practice with painters such as Monet and Pissaro. Further suggesting its plein aire origins, this image has been painted on a tan colored ground, which can be seen in the foreground and behind the boats. Working directly on a toned ground, which is allowed to appear in the finished painting, both facilitates the visual cohesion of the image and speeds up the time necessary to capture the subject–not a small consideration when working outdoors with changing light conditions and environmental distractions. My guess is that this painting, almost an oil sketch, was 99% finished on the spot with very minor touches added in the studio. Great care has been taken by the artist to keep its spontaneity intact.

The economy of means and the freedom of technique are supported by a simple and effective composition. The darks are spotted judiciously, which, when combined with the swirl of the steam and clouds form lines, give the whole a vigorous rhythm and energy. Essentially, the darks along the horizon line are crossed by a second ‘line’ of visual energy that begins with the white of the river water on the lower left and moves into the picture plane to the lower clouds behind the boast. These compositional lines cross at the boats, and given the boat’s position in the painting and their dark tonality, make them the focus of the work. But Boggs goes further. By utilizing the swirl of steam and clouds above his primary subject, which he has placed on an unusually low horizon line, he gives the painting additional energy.

Of course I eventually read the information card and made the acquaintance of Frank Myers Boggs. I had not heard of him, but there are many fine artists who are not household names. When I got home an Internet search provided the following:

Frank Myers Boggs was born in Springfield, Ohio, but left Ohio in 1876 for study with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He lived in Paris and New York, residing the last thirty years of his life in Paris. In Paris he won wide recognition for his atmospheric paintings of the ports of France and the quays along the Seine. His works were exhibited frequently in France. Between 1879 and 1916, his work was also shown in the United States, most often at the National Academy of Design, in New York, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia.

Known as a master of plein-air painting, Boggs delighted in capturing the fleeting effects of the constantly changing skies of northern France and southern England. With lush and broad brush strokes, Boggs created rich and spacious paintings, orchestrating a subtle and restrained palette of grays, deep and dusty blues, and earthy tans. Although his palette is more subtle and tonal than that of the French Impressionist Claude Monet, Boggs’ paintings demonstrate clear affinities with the early French Impressionist school. Like his fellow Impressionists, it was the transitory aspects of nature, as well as the documentation of everyday reality, to which Boggs was keenly sensitive.                                                                         –Keny Galleries- Columbus, OH)

So there you have it. The Seine Outside Paris is a small painting made by an American artist not much known today. Yet it contains much of value and, almost like a visual haiku, says much within the confines of its simplicity.

We are living in a time of increasing friction between law enforcement agencies and the citizens they serve. Violent confrontations between the police and members of minority communities have been recorded by bystanders. The resulting videos have quickly captured a national audience, causing the formation of groups such as ‘Black Lives Matter’ and leading to civil unrest. Though it was painted 32 years ago, Jack Levine’s painting “The Arrest” is more topical than ever.

Levine, who died in 2010 at the age of 95, has been described as a Social Realist, and his paintings, often crowded with satirically characterized figures, display his questioning of traditional authority and his uneasy relationship with contemporary culture. Openly hostile to the abstract styles of art dominant in the second half of the 20th century, Levine hearkened back to satirists such as Honoré Daumier and William Hogarth. “The Arrest”, while somewhat comical and obvious in its subject matter, is actually a tangle of questions about the nature and use of authority—questions that have been evolving with increasing urgency in the years after WWII.

Jack Levine, “The Arrest”, 1983 The Hunter Museum of American Art

This dramatic  painting contains three figures. On the left is an almost featureless white policeman whose powerful grip on the arrested person is both prominent and dominant in its determined act of control. Indeed, it is this figure’s muscular right arm, not his facial expression, that defines him. On the right a more shadowy policeman emerges from the background. He might or might not be African-American, and, though still an agent of the state, he exercises control in a less obvious way. Finally, and most prominently placed, is the faceless, genderless, raceless prisoner—a mysterious “everyperson” caught up in the net of social authority. This prisoner takes up almost half of the picture area and is thrust forward in the picture plane enhancing his or her visual prominence, but despite the compelling placement in the composition, this is a person controlled by powers that literally have grip on him or her. A difficult and emotional moment for anyone, but a bag with bizarrely shaped eye holes conceals the face. It is this bag, this mask covering the reality of feeling, that gives the prisoner a look of wry bemusement, as if saying, “of course this is happening to me, what did you expect?” It is a moment Franz Kafka would understand.

Norman Rockwell– “The Runaway” 1958

However in mid-century America, not too long before Levine painted “The Arrest”,  such questions about civic authority were restricted to left wing journals and “radical” publications. In 1958 Norman Rockwell painted a magazine illustration called “The Runaway”. It is far removed in its sentiments from “The Arrest”. In Rockwell’s image, the powers of society are responsible and understanding. Likely the man running the diner called his friend the policeman upon seeing the young runaway. The policeman, for his part, is using gentle persuasion to guide the boy into choosing to return home. And finally, the boy clearly accepts and respects the authority of the adults around him. The body language of all the participants is benign and caring. It’s a beautiful world in its innocence and social connectedness. No doubt it was also one that rarely existed outside the longings of the Saturday Evening Post readers, but one that Americans, at least most middle and upper class white Americans, chose to believe.  (For a recent satirical view of Rockwell’s iconic image see: Mad Magazine.)

If Levine’s painting presents a different world, perhaps it is because much happened between 1958 and 1983. The Vietnam War alienated many of America’s youth. The “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was televised to a shocked nation as viewers watched Mayor Richard Daley’s political machine use its power to crush political protest. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” became a common refrain even before the Watergate hearings showed that criminal and self-serving behavior ran all  the way to the White House. In many quarters public authority became looked upon as mere social control at the beck and call of a political and financial elite that had little interest in administering evenhanded justice.

Jack Levine– “The Feast of Pure Reason” 1937

The country may have been surprised by the events of the 1960’s and 70’s, but they led us as a nation to a perspective on authority that Jack Levine had long held. Certainly his distrust manifested itself early enough. A half century before, in 1937, he painted “The Feast of Pure Reason”, which depicts a policeman, small businessman, and rich capitalist meeting to use their resources to their advantage. Their faces are well fed and complacent. Their selfish empowerment is banal and self-satisfied. Levine, who was born poor and whose first studio was in a slum neighborhood in Boston, had little reason to think that the game wasn’t rigged. In his world the rich and powerful have the law, the police, and the courts to enforce their will.

“The Feast of Pure Reason” tells us much about how we might view “The Arrest.” The police depicted in the painting use force (though by today’s standards it is quite restrained), but they are also rather neutral and detached in the process of doing so. They offer no sympathy and show no outrage. Who are these men? What do they think? What is their stake in this moment? It appears that they are merely agents of control, pure and simple. The three figures–the prisoner in the foreground, the policeman on the left, and the policeman on the right–each recedes further into the background, suggesting that somewhere in the darkness behind them, someone else is in control. Someone for whom this moment is a desired outcome. Someone not unlike the men in “The Feast of Pure Reason”.

But what of the anonymous prisoner? Has this person committed a heinous crime?  Could he or she be a violent criminal that society must lock up for its protection? Or someone much less dangerous, a petty thief perhaps? Or a political prisoner? Is the crime merely being who or what he or she is? We don’t know and the policemen don’t seem to care. They do what they do for the people who tell them to do it. This lack of feeling extends to the behavior of the prisoner. Regardless of the force in the policeman’s grip, the body language of the prisoner is completely neutral, too. There is no struggle. And because the bag masks any facial expression, we don’t see anger or resignation or, for that matter, any emotion. Indeed, the covered face suggests the mask we all wear when facing compelling and controlling authority. To reveal true feelings at such a moment would be to give away the little dignity you still possess.

In Jack Levine’s “The Arrest”, there is force and there is submission. That is all. Right and wrong are not present.

This essay is part of the Thinking About Paintings series.

Click the link to return to the listing of other articles

Edith Cockcroft, “The Circus is in Town”, 1912 , The Hunter Museum of American Art

Edith Cockcroft, though not well known today, was an established and successful artist in her time. “The Circus is in Town”, part of the Hunter Museum of American Art’s permanent collection, is one of her paintings from 1912, done when she was 31 years old. In it, a circus has come to a small New York town and the locals have turned out to view the parade announcing its arrival. It is, no doubt, a regional circus, a mere shadow of the splendor of Ringling Bros. It’s probably been to this little town on more than one occasion. Still, though all but the youngest townsfolk know what to expect, it’s a bit of a novelty in its way and something to be welcomed. A cursory glance tells us we have a bit of Americana here, a display of the innocent joy of small town living.

Perhaps. But I think more is going on if one looks carefully and is aware of the context.

To begin with, Edith Cockcroft is painting in, what was for the time,  a modern and controversial style. The idea of a turn of the century circus arriving in a small town suggests sentimental nostalgia– a motif beloved by the illustrators of the time. She, however, approaches her subject objectively and with a technique that is rough, spontaneous, and dynamic.

William McGregor Paxton, “Tea Leaves” 1909–Metropolitan Museum of Art

Just four years earlier, in 1908, a now famous exhibition by eight artists, later dubbed by critics “The Ashcan School,” had been staged at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. At that time, it was the only gallery in the city that showed contemporary American art. Presented by the artists Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, Edward Shinn, William Glackens, Arthur Davies, Maurice Penderghast, and Ernest Lawson, the show was roundly condemned by critics for its  unacceptable and unpleasant subject matter (streetlife, tenements, etc.) and coarseness of style. Though massive changes in art had already occurred in Europe, most notably in France, the American art schools still clung steadfastly to a narrow academic style that one challenged at one’s peril. The academics set and maintained very conservative standards, and, as the twentieth century began, America was largely an artistic backwater.

The show mounted by the eight artists of the Ashcan School was a direct challenge to this state of affairs. Edith Cockcroft would  have understood and sympathized with their cause. Certainly, the young Ms. Cockcroft possessed artistic sophistication.  Born in 1881 in Brooklyn, NY,  she went to France in 1898, spending the next several years in the art colonies of Pont Aven and Concarneau. While living in Paris, she studied with Henri Matisse and exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d’Automme. Returning to the United States her work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1910 to 1915, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Art Union, the Salons of America, the Pennsylvania Academy and the Corcoran Gallery. Hardly someone with a narrow or provincial mindset, Edith Cockcroft was an artist who had her finger on the pulse of the avant garde.

So what is she up to in this painting of small town American life.

“The Circus is in Town” (Detail)

To my mind, this painting is a sly critique of contemporary American life and culture, somewhat akin to that in Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel, Main Street. Her use of such a rough, spontaneous technique would, to the viewer of the time, be a bit like our hearing the Rolling Stones do a cover of “A Bicycle Built for Two”. The paint surface contrasts with the subject in a way that underscores the provincialism of the setting.

And there is further evidence of her intent.

Look at how she uses her palette. All the color is centered on the circus. Cover the lower quarter of the canvas and the remainder goes utterly lifeless and bland. The orange figure on the elephant demands our eye’s attention. More color dances along along behind, but almost no color is given to the houses or the people in the small town. They may be the bedrock of the nation, but they are also empty, static, and drab. Color, movement, and excitement must come from elsewhere.

So is it too much of a stretch to go from there to wondering if the circus just might represent the new young artists and their work? Artists and ideas she knew were coming that would utterly change American art forever. Edith Cockcroft had been to Paris, had met the avant garde, had seen the future. Was she subtly telling the rest of her country that they would soon experience it, too? All of the speculations above are obviously my personal reaction to her painting. We will never know exactly what Edith Cockcroft’s intentions were, but I would like to think that is exactly what she was doing.

Edith Cockcroft spent her entire adult life as an artist, not giving up her career for her husband (very common at the time), though she married and lived in New York City and then in Sloatsburg, New York. Her husband, Charles Weyand, was a stock broker who was ruined by the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression. It was Edith who then supported them with her pottery, jewelry and fabric designs.

Let us savor that for a moment—an artist supporting a failed stockbroker! For that alone Edith Cockcroft deserves to be remembered.

She died in Ramapo, NY in 1962.

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