Now that I’ve been studying art history, I’ve noticed that it is hard to stop being a historian. I find myself frequently studying the artist’s personal history more than the aesthetics of the artist’s work. Though it is just a subtle difference, I’m probably doing it wrong.
Take Vincent Van Gogh, for example: I spent a couple of days reading about whether or not he was murdered or committed suicide, despite the fact that there is no way to definitively prove it one way or the other. (Though the lack of gunpowder residue on his hands is very interesting: It is almost impossible to fire a black powder weapon without having…. there I go again.)
Van Gogh was assuredly batshit crazy, with more than one infamous example of looney behavior to prove it. He once put his hand directly over a candle, threatening to leave it there until his first cousin (who by all accounts was terrified of him) agreed to marriage. This might have been an interesting experiment had not her father simply blown out the candle and banished Vincent from the house.
You have to wonder if Van Gogh’s streetcar hadn’t originally jumped the tracks, so to speak, at a young age. On his daily walk to school, Vincent passed a grave where a tombstone bore his own name. The grave was that of his own brother, who had died before the artist was born, and his parents gave their next child the same name.
This recycling of names may indeed warp the sanity of artists. Salvador Dali not only carried the name of a deceased older brother, but his parents both encouraged and shared his lifelong belief that he was the reincarnation of his brother.
The backstory about art frequently fascinates me more than the actual art. I’ve written several times about how art has changed hands because of wars or royal marriages, and I confess to being fascinated by art forgeries and art theft. A good example would be the Mona Lisa. The painting itself is rather boring and every time I see a copy of it, I wonder why the artist never gave the poor woman any eyebrows. But, the idea that the only men in history who could claim the painting as their personal property are the artist, the King of France, Napoleon, and the Italian peasant who stole it and admired it in his one room apartment, is endlessly fascinating.
Or take the work of Christo for example: As an artist, Christo is known for huge extravagant works of art, such as building a cloth wall 24.5 miles long, constructing floating Styrofoam bridges linking islands, or erecting 3,100 blue umbrellas in California—then moving the whole installation to Japan. Hell, if the artist had lived long enough, he would have filled the Grand Canyon with multicolored ping-pong balls and wrapped the moon in purple chiffon. His works were outrageous and challenged even a poor dumb ol’ country boy like me to think about what is art.
Note. Christo did not work alone, for most of his professional life he was partnered with his wife. Properly, the work should be credited to Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. And now, you know why their work is usually just credited to Christo.
For all his grandiose projects, when I think of art, the piece that first comes to mind is that of a simple wheelbarrow. In the late Fifties, Christo began to create artwork that consisted of wrapping objects. Called the work his Inventory, his first object was to wrap a simple can of spray paint. Over time, the objects kept increasing in size and complexity. Christo died this last May, before his last great installation could be completed, but the project is going forward in his memory. If all goes well, about this time next year L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped will be ready for viewing—assuming that someday the virus will be gone and we get to travel to Paris again.
In November, 1963, however, Christo was still doing relatively smaller objects and had not yet earned an international reputation. After blocking a Paris alley with 240 barrels, a work he called Berlin Wall, Christo was invited to have a show at the Galleria del Leone, in Venice, the only contemporary art gallery in the city at that time. Gallery workers were surprised when Christo arrived with more tools than finished pieces, obviously intending to create new work for the show.
In the courtyard of the gallery, Christo spotted an aging wheelbarrow, the metal tarnished and rusting, the wood splintered and stained by the countless loads the wheelbarrow had transported. The handles were worn smooth by the rough hands of the workmen who had used it over the years. Having escaped oppressive Communist rule in Bulgaria, Christ identified with the wheelbarrow—it, too, was a stateless nomadic object constantly on the move.
The gallery put the work in the window, and it rather quickly drew lots of criticism, some of it from other galleries who thought a common wheelbarrow was not a fitting display on a street where the other gallery windows displayed some rather expensive art work. It was more of an assault on the economics of the art world than the aesthetics.
That type of criticism was to be expected, but the gallery was surprised to learn that the Bishop of Venice was also deeply offended. Eventually, the Bishop ordered the local police to close the gallery, which they did under the pretext of claiming the gallery was acting dishonestly for presenting a common tool of a workman as an object of art. Only after several appeals was the gallery allowed to reopen, and then only after they had removed the offending wheelbarrow.
The real reason the show was halted and the wheelbarrow was removed was simply because the bishop claimed the unknown wrapped object was “obscene”. And, every time I hear about Christo, my mind races to that wheelbarrow and I ask myself the same unanswerable question:
Just what the hell did the bishop think was wrapped up in that tarp?
I've got some relatives who do lawn art. Their art supplies include old cars and pickups, rolled up rugs, kudzu, poison ivy, trees and random scraps of wood and steel.
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