"Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered"

A few days ago, I was sitting on the porch with Jeannine, enjoying breakfast in the cool morning air, when she mentioned that it might be fun to go sometime to the new Howard Pyle exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum. My interest was piqued -- I've always loved Pyle's work, especially his illustrations of Robin Hood. Given that I had nothing particular planned for the day, I suggested that we not wait, and go that day, and she agreed.

The show was great -- many of Pyle's original oil paintings were on display, as well as some watercolors and a goodly number of his black and white ink drawings. One of the paintings -- I think it's titled "The Mermaid" -- is one of Pyle's best-known works and one I have seen reproduced many times in books and on prints and posters.

However, it was not until I got close up to the painting that I noticed a really nice detail…

… clinging to a rock under the crashing surf is a little crab.

I am so used to thinking of beautiful color when considering the work of Howard Pyle that this painting, an illustration from an edition of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, surprised me with its monochromatic look.

I was also struck by the way Pyle had rendered the giant in such a way as to emphasize his great size by painting him in soft, almost cloudy tones, as if seen from a great distance through the haze of intervening air, while the human in the lower left is rendered in harsher, more solid shapes and tones.

The influence of Pyle on the later works of Frank Farazetta is clear to me in this closeup detail of that human figure… it puts me in mind of a number of the cavemen which Frazetta painted.

There were many pieces which dealt with scenes set on or near the ocean, but I think my favorite was this one, an illustration of the "Flying Dutchman" from a story in Harper's Monthly Magazine. I love the way Pyle achieved the look of the foam on the ocean's surface in this watercolor… and the composition is brilliant.

I really enjoyed the show, but I have to mention two things which caught my eye, two silly mistakes that struck me as pretty obvious… and made me wonder about the process of putting together shows of this nature.

The mistakes were on two "tombstones", those descriptive cards which accompany the pieces hung on the walls and also those in display cases. One of them was for a print by another artist, something which had inspired Pyle. As I read the card, I noticed this mistake:

… the unnecessary repetition of the word "the".

Moving into another gallery (if I am remembering correctly, the show occupied four rooms in the museum), I was looking at some examples of books with Japanese prints in them from which Pyle had derived some inspiration, when I noticed the following:

Obviously, the word "extensive" should have been followed by another word like "collection" or "library".

As we were leaving the museum, I spoke to a woman at the front desk and told her about these two errors. She listened to me politely and seemed to be somewhat concerned, but also said she didn't know if they could be corrected, as the show had come from another museum, and the cards belonged to that museum.

So how did these mistakes survive through one exhibition and into another? It seems pretty absurd to me that such obvious errors could not be caught with even slightly careful proofreading. I am pretty certain that I am not the only person who noticed these things, so it is pretty likely that in the show's previous incarnation someone MUST have mentioned them. So why no corrections? I know it's a minor point (or two minor points), but it seems to me that when you are putting on an important show of a major artist like this, you would want to have it as perfect as humanly possible.

Moving on…

Having enjoyed the show, and beginning to feel slightly peckish, Jeannine and I considered our food options. We checked out the Rockwell Museum's cafe, which was a pleasant space but only stocked with pre-made sandwiches, most of which had some variety of (gag!) mayonnaise slathered on them. Then Jeannine remembered something from our last trip to the Rockwell -- on a whim, I'd taken the road from the museum in the southerly direction, to see where it went, and as it turned out, it took us to Great Barrington, not far from one of our favorite restaurants, Xicoh Ten Catl.

The idea of fresh, delicious Mexican food won out over stale mayonnaise-ridden offerings, so off we went. Xicoh Ten Catl did not disappoint -- we got a table outside on their shady porch, the air was slightly cool and soft, and the simple meals we ordered (a vegetarian burrita for Jeannine, the chicken version for me) were just perfect.

We followed the meal with a casual stroll around downtown Great Barrington, doing a little shopping, and then headed home, with one more stop in Hinsdale for a soft ice cream. Not a bad day. -- PL

Everett Raymond Kinstler exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum

After enduring an unpleasant prep for a medical exam this morning, I decided to treat myself by driving out to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. I'd read on the museum's website last week that there were two intriguing exhibits -- one about pop-up books, and the other a show of illustrations and portraits by the artist Everett Raymond Kinstler. It was a beautiful day, though not quite warm enough to take my motorcycle (I guess those eighty degree days we had a few weeks ago really WERE an anomaly).

The pop-up book thing was kind of a bust -- I was expecting something with in-depth looks at how pop-up books are made, why they appeal to us so much… but it was basically part of someone's collection of pop-up books.

It was fun to look at, but certainly not worth a fifty-five mile (one way) trip.

However, the Kinstler show was great -- lots of examples of his illustrations, both ink drawings and paintings, many of which were portraits -- and from what I could gather, all painted from life, not photographs. Here's a nice one of Katherine Hepburn: 

He's definitely one of those "old school guys" -- and at the age of 86, he's still going strong. I was wandering around looking at a lot of his beautiful work, when I realized that the crowd of people in one of the galleries were actually listening to Mr. Kinstler himself!

I had not realized that he was supposed to be there today, so I decided to take advantage of this bit of serendipity and listen to the rest of his talk, which was very interesting and humorous.

My favorite part was when he described a meeting he had with Theodor Geisel (aka "Dr. Seuss") when Kinstler was painting this portrait of the famed children's book writer…

It seems that somehow in their conversation, the topic of a children's book Kinstler had illustrated some years previous came up. It was titled "Cowboy Andy", and as Kinstler told the story, he confessed to Geisel that it was the worst illustration job he'd ever done…

… to which Geisel replied "No, it's the worst illustration job ANYONE has ever done!" Apparently, Kinstler didn't disagree too much with Geisel on this point (or at least didn't take great umbrage at that description of his work on that book), as he told the story with a big grin.

After the talk, the crowd thinned out to the point where I was able to get a minute or two to talk with him, and I asked him what tools he had used to do this 2011 drawing (and other drawings of a similar style in the exhibit). 

I thought for sure he would say a brush, but he told me that he actually did them with broad nibs for pens which were dipped in India ink. I was hoping to ask him if he'd known Jack Kirby during his years of working in comics, and what he thought of fellow illustrator Norman Rockwell, but other fans were itching to ask him some questions, so I didn't get that chance.

It was fascinating to study his artwork up close, especially the large black and white pen and ink drawings, to see how his loose, sweeping style was also so well-controlled as to produce some amazing shading and rendering effects. The guy can DRAW! Definitely worthy of being shown alongside Norman Rockwell.

Before I left the museum, I stopped in their gift shop and bought three things: a Norman Rockwell tie, a little bear which I am going to send to a bear-fancier friend of mine, and a beautiful autographed hardcover collection of a lot of Kinstler's illustration work titled "Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962". This is definitely a show which any appreciator of fine illustration should see. -- PL

Dürer and Pinkney

I can't recall exactly when or how or where I was introduced to the work of Albrecht Dürer (though I suspect it was probably in college), but I do know that I immediately found his stuff, especially his engravings, very impressive and inspirational. The level of detail and the complexity of his images always appealed to me. And when I took printmaking classes at UMass and discovered exactly how difficult and time-consuming it is to engrave even a simple image on a copper plate, I was even more gobsmacked, as the Brits say.
So when I discovered a few days ago that there was a new show titled "The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer" at the Sterling and Francine Clark art museum in Williamstown, I immediately set to trying to convince Jeannine that we should go to it, perhaps even make it a "twofer" day by also heading south from Williamstown to see the Jerry Pinkney show at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.

Because Jeannine had already wanted to go to the Pinkney show, it didn't take much convincing. She was a little concerned about running into a snowstorm while traveling over the Mohawk Trail, but we lucked out, and only saw a few slight flurries and an inch or so of snow on the ground up in the hills.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that admission to the Clark is free from November through May, but to be honest I would have been more than happy to pay double the usual price to see the Dürer exhibit. This was the first time I had ever seen any of his actual prints -- wood engraving, etching, and metal engraving -- and they were fantastic. Literally so, in many cases, because Durer had a wild imagination and some of his prints have some pretty crazy creatures, including a multi-headed monster in several of them which would not look out of place in a book by Dr. Seuss (if Dr. Seuss were a bit more gnarly, that is).

I'm not sure if it was because we were there on a weekday, or if it was the cold, or what, but I'm pretty sure Jeannine and i were the only people at the show (except for a few bored museum guards). There may have been one or two other people, but I was so into peering closely at the prints that I really can't say for sure.

In fact, I was looking SO closely at the prints that at one point Jeannine took my arm and started to tug me away, saying something about how the museum guards might frown on my getting so close to the art. And it wasn't but scant seconds later that one of the guards DID speak up -- but it was to offer us the use of magnifying glasses in the next room, so that we could look even MORE closely at the art. Cool!

So we did, and had even more fun. Dürer's work is full of serious religious imagery, and chock full of symbolism and hidden meanings that I can only guess at, but the neat thing, something that Jeannine and I both found delightful, were the touches of warmth and humor that could be found in many of the works. I pointed out to Jeannine a very cute little cherub struggling to get up on some stilts in the lower left corner of one print, and she directed me to a very tiny (about the size of a grain of rice) but beautifully rendered goat standing on a cliff way off in the background of Dürer's well-known "Adam and Eve" print.

Of the three different types of prints on display, I have to say that it was the ones made by engraving on copperplate that I found the most amazing. Dürer put so much into the shadings and textures in these pieces -- it was almost staggering to contemplate the level of intense concentration required to achieve those precise results with the difficult process he used.

We left the show feeling inspired and awed, and talked at length about the artwork we'd seen as we enjoyed a lunch of Indian (and Chinese/Indian) food at a restaurant in Williamstown, the Spice Root. Then it was back in the car to head south to the Rockwell Museum for a very different show -- "Witness: The Art of Jerry Pinkney".

Jerry Pinkney is a well-known, prolific and justly-lauded illustrator who has done tons of work over a fifty-year career. (In fact, he did an illustration for a piece Jeannine wrote which was published in an anthology titled "Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out". He is a master of watercolor, one of the more difficult art media (in my opinion, anyway). We were both looking forward to seeing this show. And it was nice.

But… well, maybe it was seeing all of that work in one place (the exhibit filled most of three galleries at the Rockwell Museum), but I found myself at several points just wishing for something, ANYTHING, with a hard-edged line and/or a dramatic juxtaposition of varying tonal values. (There was one piece with these qualities which really drew me in, a painting depicting -- I believe -- some fugitive slaves crossing a river at night… it had a great composition and beautiful colors, with a dramatically dark sky.) Pinkney's technique in most of these works combines an underlying pencil drawing with watercolors applied over the pencils. It's a lovely technique, and Pinkney does it exceedingly well (and it helps that he is a superb draughtsman, with an excellent eye for detail and the willingness to extensively research his subject matter), but I found it ultimately kind of disappointing. As I said to Jeannine as we discussed the show on the drive home, it was like wanting some milk and some chocolate… and only being offered milk chocolate. Most of the art seemed to exist in a kind of warm and friendly middle-ground of tonal values, which (at least for me) when seen in such quantities as in this show, becomes like a vaguely annoying background drone (if I can mix my metaphors for a moment).

One piece sort of sums up the downside of the technique. It's a beautifully drawn, well-composed illustration of the horrific conditions below decks onboard a slave ship transporting kidnapped Africans to the New World. It cries out for a real sense of gloom and darkness to capture the sense of deep despair in such a situation, with perhaps a few stray bits of dramatic light to suggest the desperate hope for freedom that these men must have kept in their hearts.

But in Pinkney's signature style (the slightly sketchy but assured pencil drawing washed with watercolor) it just doesn't have it. Again, everything exists in a kind of middle range of values, which for a piece of this nature, depicting this kind of situation, is ultimately uninspiring.

I would love to see what Jerry Pinkney could create if he broke out of this obviously well-loved way of illustrating and did some ink drawings with watercolor, or scratchboard, or maybe even woodcuts -- anything which would bring more drama to the tonal values in the work.

All that being said, though, I would still recommend this show.

(And the Dürer one!)  -- PL