 Like many others, one of my earliest memories of poetry was Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” I was too young to understand anything, but this line struck me deeply and stayed with me for life: “And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbour/ And she shows you where to look/ Among the garbage and the flowers./ There are heroes in the seaweed.” I was moved by the idea that treasures of the human spirit lurked in the detritus and the darkness, running parallel to the suggestion that jewels glittered in garbage. It’s a theme that runs through my own art and writing to this day. What poetry could better encapsulate the peculiar passion people have for thrifting, mudlarking, flea markets, and collecting objects? Humans collect things. There are fine lines between collectors, pack rats, and hoarders. But even the most minimalist among us delights in particular possessions. We invest a great deal of meaning in the objects of our affection. The things we are most drawn to tell others so much about who we are. Chance finds in a ditch at the side of the road or unearthing a mysterious, ancient thing while tilling soil at our property’s edge are more intense experiences than choosing a hammer at the hardware store. But judging from the crowds breaking down doors at the mall on Black Friday, and the staggering success of easy access click and pay sites like Amazon, consuming is compulsive and satisfying however it happens.  Mosvintage Event Hall. Tess Mattew, CC BY-SA 4.0 Collecting is related to shopping, but it is an even more elevated experience. A collector has a profound attachment to the kinds of objects she pursues. For some, the peak experience depends on the chance. Mudlarkers and metal detectorists rescue refuse, digging up the recent or distant past. For others, bargain hunting is the name of the game. Finding a special piece for next to nothing inflates the excitement. Big ticket item thrill, too, bringing a certain satisfaction after a long dream of acquisition, or signalling wealth and status for those who can make big purchases without sacrifice. Some people seek very specific treasures: coins from a particular place or era, jewels from beloved designers, or variations on a theme like Raggedy Ann dolls or blue and white pottery. Bibliophiles may hoard heaping volumes of books with very little else to their name. Others still value rarity most of all, and vigilantly hunt impossible items, original art or fragile glassware, or letters from long-dead poets, where only one or few are known to exist. Money may be no object to such collectors, who spare no expense to possess that unique thing. Whatever one’s motivation or hunting style, the pursuit, acquisition, contemplation, and “having” of the object bring extraordinary pleasure and purpose to our lives. Objects mean so much to us. They might be beautiful or strange, ubiquitous or rare, useful or useless. But they tell us stories about our existence and connect us to others who have shared them. They take us into the mist of the past and the mysteries of the mind. They are talismans, mementoes, markers, artifacts.  The Odalisque with Puppets, by Georges Brasseur (Belgium) 1930 Perhaps most of us are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of “objectophilia,” a unique fetish or paraphilia sometimes called “object sexuality.” Some people experience romantic and erotic attraction focused on a specific object or kind of object. Google’s AI defines this as “a form of romantic or sexual attraction focused on specific inanimate objects, such as structures, vehicles, or items. Individuals often feel deep emotional bonds, love, and a sense of reciprocation from these objects, sometimes identifying this as a core aspect of their identity rather than a mere fetish.” You may have read the story about the woman who married the Eiffel Tower, after a previous relationship with her archery bow. A more promiscuous fellow claimed to have had relationships with more than a thousand cars. There were people in the news who fell in love with chandeliers and vacuum cleaners. “Objectophiles often perceive that the objects have souls, personalities, or consciousness, and that they can return affection.” Probably few of us (maybe?) feel an erotic attraction to antique milk glass dice or old puppets, but the rest of this profile likely resonates in some way. Our attachment to objects is often intense, and with our most special objects we experience a kind of relationship or emotional bond. I feel next to nothing about the fork and spoon in my daily dinner setting, but I have deep feelings for a tiny pair of antique sterling silver sugar tongs with chicken claw feet. The gravel in the parking lot does nothing for me, but the crystal geode heart that my late husband brought for me from the east coast sits on my work desk twenty years later, easy to seize on my way out of the apartment if there is a fire.  Lorette and Gonzalo Cardenas in 2014. Nearly as long ago, in 2007, I worked with a brilliant friend, Gonzalo Cardenas, on an essay for the anthology Shift: Positions (edited by Gordon S. Grice, OCAD Student Press.) “I Heart: is True Love Possible Between People and Products?” asked whether acknowledging and nurturing this bond, rather than advertisers and corporations exploiting the emotional high of acquisition, could be a solution to the ecological problem of stuff pollution. We examined the intimate relationship that people have with products, considering whether understanding this long-term commitment we have with certain objects could contribute to overriding the impulse to have many fleeting objects that we care little about and discard easily. “Deep bonds between humans bring great emotional satisfaction and meaning to life. I believe that trying to create such bonds between humans and their possessions can replace some of the empty, desperate materialism our culture is dying from with meaningful experiences.” It is obvious that decades of shaming each other as for shallow object lust has had no effect on mitigating consumer culture. Could the key to ecological stewardship be in cultivating our natural need to collect and cultivate these objects? Could fostering rather than attempting to eradicate this deep bond between man and thing be its own solution?  Marie Kondo’s 2014 book of clutter clearly struck a chord, selling over nine million copies, an irony for a treatise on minimalism. The premise behind The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was that less is more, with an important twist: every object in our life should be one that “sparks joy.” Kondo encourages overwhelmed consumers to slow down, touch every thing, garment, fork, and book in our lives, and keep only those things that fill us with happiness or strong emotional connection. Moving forward, we should prioritize purchases that matter most to us rather than quantity. Her method points out that need a lot less than we have been programmed to think, and most of our things cause us stress and anxiety. She encourages us to think about the things we love the most, rather than drowning in superficial relationships. What if every day was a special occasion? Shouldn’t we want to always wear our most valued accessories and beloved fabrics, and eat on a few beautiful dishes? Isn’t one prized belt or our favourite mug far more valuable and enriching than countless options that mean nothing to us at all? While Kondo’s personal rule to keep only thirty books in her library was impossible for me to match, the gist of her philosophy did indeed change my life. Just by reading her book, I found myself putting things back and turning away from the checkout line. Did I really love the thing in my shopping cart? Would I rather not save my hard-earned money for the vintage Mexican silver and amethyst Mathilde Poulat ring I’d always coveted instead of the pair of cheap earrings in hand that I might wear once? Wouldn’t I treasure one of the many old art books on my list more when I found it than the handful of paperbacks that caught my eye but likely wouldn’t add anything to my soul? Perhaps the success of Kondo’s method is the implied acknowledgement that objects have an essence. Artifact collectors and antique aficionados understand that the treasures they seek are not just metal and wood, but possess a mysterious inner force that speaks of human creativity, history, and the relationships they have with people. Intricate cultural handicrafts and precious gemstones are obvious. But even plastic has magical properties and tells stories about a culture. The Kondo method and other decluttering initiatives promise personal freedom and a new kind of relationship with our material goods. Reducing future acquisitions of thneeds (coined by Dr. Seuss in The Lorax, meaning useless, overhyped objects created for mass sales) and a more connected, intimate relationship with objects we keep is a positive direction for us all. But missing in such missions is the age-old conundrum. What should we do with all this stuff? Everything we have ever produced ends up somewhere. Hoarders try to save it. Minimalists ignore it. Junk collectors repurpose it. But all of it is out there, heaped up in our landfills, swimming in our oceans, tucked behind glass in our museums, gathering dust in our attics. Artist and photographer Barry Rosenthal understands the lure of objects as well as their disposability. He is a hunter and collector, a beachcomber like Suzanne in the above-quoted song. He picks up forgotten detritus from the shores of the New York harbour. It’s not the same harbour as Suzanne’s in Montreal, but a poetic parallel nonetheless. Rosenthal embodies the old adage that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. He gathers only what is discarded and keeps it, assembling it in various ways to create still-life arrangements that he photographs in striking compositions that tell stories about our stuff. Rosenthal is a lifelong collector, starting in childhood with baseball cards and coins. Today he collects a lot of things, including pot metal horses and cast-iron frying pans. Mudlarking and beachcombing found objects for his artwork is related to but different from personal collecting. His series, Found in Nature, uses only objects that are free and lost or thrown away, that have ended up on the shores of the harbour. He was working on a series of botanical photographs at the time. “I was scouting out a bird sanctuary, looking for plants to collect and shoot,” Rosenthal told Meta Nexus Magazineonline. “Instead I saw vast amounts of colourful plastic trash. I picked up the trash and decided to work with this new material instead of my usual subject.” Rosenthal picks up materials indiscriminately, regardless of his personal attraction to them or any utility they may have once had. He cleans them up at home and stores them. Then he sets up presentations of his found objects, on a black or white background, organizing them by type, by colour, or other aesthetic variables. One particularly striking assemblage is of all blue rubbish, mostly plastic. The arrangement includes hair combs, an array of Paper Mate pens, several children’s sand shovels, a broken propeller, a broom head, a flip flop, and numerous balls and lids. There is a toy crab, and an octopus, a toy soldier, and a kid’s rowboat. Another piece features plastic jugs in various colours and sizes, the kinds of jugs that engine oil comes in, yellow, orange, blue, green, black and red. Some of the jugs are dented or crushed, some are pristine. One piece features only caps and water bottle nipples, forming an abstract piece of colourful circles. Another shows only balls, including footballs, golf balls, tennis balls, and so on. Rosenthal even rescues plastic eating utensils, criss-crossing spoons, forks, knives and sporks into an artful composition. Most are white but two are blue and one is red. The prettiest of these works is of old glass bottles, mostly brown and clear glass, showing apothecary designs of the past. Barry’s Found in Nature series has been widely published and exhibited, landing in National Geographic Brazil and the Museum of Modern Art. The artist considers himself today a witness, who hopes his work inspires future sustainability by raising awareness of marine pollution. But it is the act of collecting that garbage that led him to this place, which was not the original motivation of the work. In this way, Rosenthal’s art is both a love letter to stuff and a lamentation. He told Meta Nexus, “I didn’t conceive of this project from a political or environmental point of view. As an artist, I was visually attracted to this stuff. I had no ax to grind. I knew that I could make something out of the detritus. It was just my curiosity at work... I am shocked and disgusted by what I find. No coastal area in the world is protected from this human created mess.” Today, he speaks about the perils of plastic pollution in the oceans. As we read above, there are “heroes in the seaweed.”  Busy Intersection, Knolling, photo by Norm Wright via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 This kind of photography, of documenting categorized objects, meticulously and neatly arranged, usually from above is called “knolling.” The word was invented in 1987 by Andrew Kromelow and Tom Sachs, working in architect Frank Gehry’s workshop, and referencing the angular design of Knoll furniture. Technically, knolling means objects are arranged in a grid with 90-degree angles. But popular perception has expanded the idea to tidy arrangements in general. It was a way to visually keep track of tools and inventory objects but became a popular aesthetic for storytelling in photography and for advertisers. Knolling has shown up in photos of everything from cell phones, makeup, Lego, magic markers and pasta. The knolling approach appeals to both our fascination with and love of objects and our desire to manage them, order them, categorize them, and display them. How we organize our objects and display them, then engage with them or contemplate them, is part of the way we experience our stuff. Artist Kija Lucas creates photographic art with a similar aesthetic and style. Her series Objects to Remember You By showcases personal object collections to tell stories about individuals rather than humanity as a whole, zooming in on the objects someone keeps and presenting them carefully on a black background. Different from Rosenthal, Lucas does not collect the objects herself. Rather, she collects the people and their stories, documenting their private collections. Rather than coming from the collective anonymity of disposal, found along coasts, her images capture what people have chosen to keep and invested with personal meaning. In Shelf 1 of the series, we see three tidy rows of belongings, including a Virgin Mary statuette, several brass bangles, a Chanel lipstick tube, a pterodactyl, a postcard from Daytona Beach, and a copy of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. In Shelf 4, we see a vintage Singer sewing machine, a cowrie shell, The Silver Palate cookbook, a menorah, a trophy, and a white elephant planter with leaves. “I feel like each person has a history that should be told,” Lucas said in HAF: New Photography magazine online. “I am a collector in a way because I photograph these things, and I care for them and the related stories… But, the objects go home with their owner.” She names related works in several series The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy. “I have a lot of feelings about museums and the colonial impulse to collect and own, and what ownership of certain histories and certain objects is. Museums hold onto the actual thing, assigning monetary and provenance value to it. I'm only interested in the sentimental value of a thing. And I'm only interested in photographing it.”  Cabinet of Curiosities, by Domenico Remps (Italy, b. Germany) 1690s I share Lucas’ interest in the sentimental relationship people have with certain material products, and her concern about the role of museums. Museums have come under scrutiny in recent years for problematic practices of coercive acquisition and looting, commodification of sacred cultural artifacts, and displaying other cultures through primitive or exotic lenses. Collecting and categorization are seen from this perspective as theft and dominance. Many museums today have modernized to align their best practices with repatriation in mind, returning stolen and sacred artifacts to their original owners, and updating their knowledge resources with more accurate descriptions of other people and cultures. But perhaps these true criticisms tell only part of the story. Curiosity and education about the world are at least partial drivers behind the idea and practice of the museum. The word “museum” comes from “muse,” a concept of inspiration. The museum is the house of the muse. However problematic past practices of archeology and research have been, museums now exist in cultures all over the world, sharing important information about people and the past. Museum goers and antique and artifact aficionados and collectors are often driven by genuine curiosity and admiration for the history and artistry of cultures beyond their own. And collecting is a universal impulse and practice, not limited to colonial powers. Even nomadic cultures like the Bedouin collect objects, often incorporating coins, amulets, and beads into portable adornment. Collecting was known already as far back as 3000 BC in Mesopotamia. Nor is object amassing a uniquely human phenomenon. Many animals collect things, too. Bowerbirds gather shiny objects to adorn their nests. They love blue objects best. Decorator crabs use shells to create disguises. Crows are known to collect coins and bright, shiny objects. Rats steal and hoard stuff, too, keys, coins, buttons, rings. Lacewing larvae, also known as “junk bugs,” have been gathering trash and debris for over a hundred million years, carrying dried vegetation and carcasses of other insects on their back since time immemorial.  Bowerbird. JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 4.0 Despicable violence such as marauding and looting are not limited to specific colonizer cultures, either, but are evident in the histories and manifest in present day life in a wide variety of circumstances. Archeological sites and ancient graves the world over are routinely plundered by individuals and groups from multiple cultures and traded unscrupulously on the black markets. The origin of museums themselves came from a kind of object lust. Some expressions of this fascination were indeed problematic and racist. Others were of genuine curiosity and even admiration. As wealth grew in the 1500s, private collectors began amassing interesting objects for home display, growing eclectic collections of historical and global cultural artifacts, taxidermy specimens, geology, other items of natural history, coins, bottles, relics, and works of art. They were sometimes called “curiosity cabinets,” reflecting curiosity about the world, and sometimes called “wonder rooms” or “Wunderkammer.” These object displays certainly showed off the wealth of the individual collector, who often opened the door to friends and colleagues to view them. Eventually, many of these collections grew into private or public museums.  Corner of a Cabinet, by Frans Francken the Younger (Flanders) 1619? Wunderkammer and muse houses were and are viewed as holy and magical. Their enchantment comes from the widespread human belief that objects themselves are enchanted, and the stories they hold about humans and profoundly important and meaningful, even mystical. This value is beyond monetary worth, but intrinsic and even otherworldly. The idea that certain objects have immense meaning is widespread among cultures and eras. Objects have deep sentimental value, connecting us to our own ancestors, to people we worship such as saints or celebrities, or to people and cultures that have vanished. Objects that are handmade have much deeper emotional value than objects that are mass produced. We believe that many objects have a kind of spirit or life of their own, and many objects are believed to hold symbolic or actual ritual powers. Amulets, talismans, and religious objects are often considered more valuable than those made of jewels or precious metals. It doesn’t matter if these objects are simple stone or wood, or garbage. People comb thrift shops and yard sales or riverbanks for debris that could hold such a treasure. A rusty old tin object with no monetary value is deemed priceless if an emotional, cultural, or ritual value is attached to it. Our attachment to objects is so universal that many religious practices seek to eschew this desire in the same way they encourage us to overcome or control our natural sexual urges. The idea of “living like a monk” is not just about chastity, but about detachment from possessions. Interestingly, in such practices, limiting the number of objects available to the observant means an intense attachment to specific objects. They enter into a deep relationship with particular revered objects that are invested with sacred, priceless, symbolic meaning. If all of us have some kind of attachment to objects, some are more attached than others. Collectors of course have specific, deep interests in objects of a particular nature. But worthless objects are an obsession for people who hoard. The type of object amassed distinguishes maximalism-prone collectors and hoarders, who compulsively gather stuff indiscriminately, often viewing refuse and precious artifacts as having equal, intense value. They might be equally attached to a Canadian Tire flyer or cheap mass manufactured holiday ornament as they are to a precious heritage artifact or diamond ring. Hoarders are also distinguished by the lack of organization and by the scale: they can fill all available space in their dwelling, to the point of peril for those living in the mess, and even if they occasionally attempt organization, mountains of assorted objects grow unruly around them, rather than being tidied and categorized aesthetically for display.  Hoarding. Photo by Vicki Moore via Flickr. CC BY 2.0 I grew up in such a situation. My mother was a hoarder. There was no refuge from the refuse, it piled up on every surface in every room. Mom squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars on junk, often in doubles or triples or more of the same objects, most never used, and died penniless. We had five refrigerators and they were stuffed full of spoiled food. When she passed away last year, there were bags of food still in her fridge from 1987. No attempt at clearing or change was ever made: our sizeable house was filled from top to bottom with crap never recycled or donated or tossed away. This included thousands of empty margarine containers, rancid toiletries decades old, plastic flowers, a sea of unopened boxes of Christmas decorations, cardboard, toilet paper rolls, envelopes from promotional mail, baby food jars, and dozens of trays of used cat litter. Mother consumed obsessively, too. I recall visiting a bead shop in the early ‘90s and she delighted the owner of the small store with a $700 purchase. She made two necklaces and the rest of the beads were rescued thirty years later from cartons of dusty Styrofoam, yellowing Woman’s Day magazines, and mouldy coffee grinds. Very little is understood about the psychology of hoarding. In Japan, it is called gomi yashiki, which means “garbage mansion.” It is often equated with poverty trauma in the developmental years, yet people who hoard are not universally poor. Furthermore, they spend to the point of desolation on space for storage and unused objects, seldom acting with frugality in mind. We were neither wealthy nor poor: my father was a factory worker with one job through forty years, and Mom inherited a large house and small farm from my grandparents. Every red cent and acre was spent on hoarding crap: the farm is long gone. Father worked himself into the ground trying to pay off the shopping bills, and he had nothing but his truck when he passed away in 2018.
If I have inherited these tendencies, it manifests very differently for me. I’m an impulsive shopper, marginally better with a bit of wisdom of the years. I am also prone to cleaning binges, eager to donate boxes of discards. I have no problem with parting with them. However, certain objects hold tremendous fascination and value for me. I avidly collect treasures and house them in my art studio on shelves lining every available space on the wall. I refer to this area as my “little museum.” Most people would unkindly refer to the objects that attract me as knickknacks or tchotchkes. It is an eclectic collection to be sure, but only certain objects make the cut. They must be small, the smaller the better, with miniature and tiny objects considered the most enchanting. I would never choose a regular sized doll, but tiny dolls and figurines abound. Original works of art or craft are also prioritized. Antiques and ancient artifacts are important, the older the better. Treasures from the world are as essential to me as personal sentimental pieces. And objects that are magical, talismanic, or spiritual, from an array of traditions, are the most important of all. None of the objects in my museum are valuable, but the collection is valuable to me personally, on par with only my library.. I want these objects around me at all times, which is why they are in my studio and office, where I work every day. A few objects in the collection: Himalayan chime earrings meant to spook away evil spirits with their rustling; a seahorse skeleton dipped in sterling silver that I have owned since I was ten; cuff links from a friend who took his life a few years ago; my Opa’s broken harmonica; a lapis lazuli game piece from Jiroft, a civilization unearthed and discovered a few decades ago in Iran; a plastic miniature Teletubby doll; several original smurfs; a camel tooth; a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce from my long-ago days on the streets of New Orleans; a Roman era hat or cloak pin; a wooden angel from Germany with my mother’s name on it, from her childhood; a Stanhope rosary from Mexico with a tiny bead where you can squint into and see the Virgin of Guadalupe; a terracotta woman figurine from the women of Sejnane in Tunisia; a meteorite; exvoto art from a Mexican flea market; tiny figurines of Santa Muerte, purchased on site of the shrine of the goddess of death in the notorious Tepito district of Mexico City; pale pink pointe ballet slippers; filigree, coral and turquoise wedding ring from Uzbekistan; a childhood lock of a late bestie’s hair; tiny sterling dice; penca de balangandan, a 19th century pin full of silver and alloy charms, worn by enslaved women for protection and luck; a Moo cow creamer; a human rib bone from a medical specimen provider; a certificate from my then-young brother awarding “best sister in the world”; a small brass box from a girlfriend who was murdered in high school; a little Cuzco style painting I bought in Lima, Peru; a creative writing medal from eighth grade; a nkisi nkondi doll from Congo; a small wooden Madonna figurine from Bogota. Objects of this variety are a core part of my identity and bring a great deal of magic and meaning to my life. They connect me to other people, to my own memories and ancestry, to the creativity and imagination of other people and cultures, and they fuel my art, poetry, and stories. Images are also matters of profound fascination for me, whether of interesting people, objects, religious imagery, or art. Images have always been the backbone of my visual art practice, which integrates collage and mixed media on canvas or in three-dimensional “treasure boxes” that also incorporate tiny found or gathered objects.  Soap Bubble Set, Lunar Variant, by Joseph Cornell (USA) 1950 A like-minded soul who was equally charmed by intriguing objects and imagery was an American artist by the name of Joseph Cornell. Cornell was a prolific collector. He scoured thrift stores and antique shops on his daily walks, treasure hunting for addictions to his collection. Cornell chose a wide variety of materials: photographs of actresses and poets and ballerinas; toys, goblets, seashells, balls; flotsam and jetsam like springs and pipes and old watches; pictures of birds; maps; book pages. He sorted his treasures in a heap of boxes with labels in handwritten marker on the side: Durer; corks; tinfoil; dried pigment. He kept collages and found images in more than 160 folders or “dossiers” or visual material. Cornell was a shy and reticent man, intimidated by large groups of people. He largely kept to himself, and spent most of his time at home with his mother and with his brother, who had cerebral palsy and depended on Joseph for care. He had crushes on Emily Dickinson and ballet dancers but seldom talked to women. One exception was his friendship with Yayoi Kusama, then a little-known artist from Japan who was 26 years his junior. Kusama was struggling for recognition in a misogynist art market. Her work was radical and performative and overshadowed by men around her who stole her ideas. Both found each other easy to talk to and developed a deep bond. Kusama found Joseph gentle. She described their relationship as a “platonic romance.” In the long evenings strained by an uneasy relationship with Mother and preoccupied with his brother’s needs, Joseph sorted and arranged his stuff. He began juxtaposing his favourite images, gluing them into small boxes, adding twigs and trinkets and ephemera until he found them sufficiently aesthetic and poetic. Behold, assemblage, and shadowbox art, were born. Cornell’s object and image shrines were utterly enchanting and charmed audiences. The poet Charles Simic wrote in Dime Store Alchemy, a collection of poems inspired by the life and work of Joseph Cornell, “Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they'll make a work of art. That's Cornell's premise, his metaphysics, and his religion.”  Cornell's Studio. Simic’s collection of spare poems and impressions after Cornell has become a classic of ekphrasis. But he was just one writer inspired by the object art. Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote a poem called “Objects and Apparitions”: “Monuments to every moment, refuse of every moment, used: cages for infinity./ Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice, pins, stamps, and glass beads: tales of time.” Anne Tyler wrote a novel in 1974 inspired by the artist, Celestial Navigation. Jonathan Safran Foer gathered short stories and poems after Cornell for an anthology called A Convergence of Birds. Our collective attraction to objects has always been difficult to explain. Theories abound about status, ownership, control, security, trauma, poverty, memory, superstition, and more. It’s likely they are all relevant to the discussion. But do they go far enough? It’s totally understandable, for example, that as children grappling with alienation, we create friends in our plush toys. Equally, that expensive shiny acquisitions can provide security for us if we grew up in poverty. But what explains the unique thrall that specific objects hold for each of us, over others? We derive incredible pleasure and purpose from our objects. And those that don’t have this effect are easily disposed of. Objects tell the story of our life and our ancestry, or they connect us to other lives and stories. They seem to have their own spirit, and our relationship with them reflects deeply on our very identity.  Handmade objects are widely perceived as having greater value than factory-made objects, whose thrill is often fleeting. Artistic objects, along with religious objects, sentimental objects, rare objects, and objects that are ancient are especially important to most of us. Psychologists, religions, writers, and artists continue to explore the role of objects, positive and negative, in our lives, and what might be at the heart of this mystery bond we have. One thing is true: overconsumption and greed are only part of the story. The large population of our current world, and our easy access to products, has helped steer us toward excess and environmental degradation. But objects are not a current vogue. People who own very few objects may have an even more profound attachment to their things than those with an embarrassing abundance. Anthropologist and archeologist Ian Hodder wrote a book in 2018, Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things (Yale Press), with a different take. He talks about the intricate layers of dependency that humans have with their objects. Whether practically, socially, or spiritually useful, we are bonded to our objects because we depend on them to live, to define our identity, culture, and lifestyles. Such a relationship and dependency is nothing new. Hodder says it goes back more than two million years, and that there aren’t any people or eras where we did not depend on things for crucial aspects of our existence, whether hunting, farming, faith, or as a way to connect to our past or to other cultures. Extracting from nature and leaving a mess behind has also always been part of the object drama. In the Stanford Report, February 5, 2019, Hodder said, “Entanglement is the idea that describes a dependency in our relationship with the things we make. We, as humans, depend on things in all sorts of ways, as tools to keep warm and gather food or as a way to show our social status. In my view, being dependent on things is what makes us human. We cannot be without things.” Lorette C. Luzajic
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 Death of the Master, by José Villegas Cordero (Spain) 1884 No Bull: the Bullfight in Art and History Spain in 2019 was a whirlwind of art, with one religious experience after another. Gaudi’s Sagrada, and the Antoni Tapies museum, for starters; Picasso’s Guernica, coined by a fellow artist friend as “one of the real seven wonders of the world.” But it is in Seville that I see the painting that will stay with me and get under my skin, a work I encountered for the first time in its natural habitat at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Seville. Jose Villegas Cordero’s Death of the Master, 1884, is a massive painting, 129 x199 inches. I count 24 life size figures gathered around the master matador in repose. It’s an astonishing piece of complexity, resplendent with detail, the glittering jewels of matador costumes on most of the gathered, their lean and muscular dancer’s bodies artfully arranged. The composition is flawless, opening to the viewer on the body of the master matador, as if we are standing there in the throng to mourn or pay our respects. The palette is sublime: murky green and greige for the concrete walls, with the bright white sheet over the supine master to draw us dead centre. Splashed overtop of the stark white sheet is a satin or silk chemise, pale peach, feminine. Our eyes move around to catch the red coat of the figure on the floor in the bottom left-hand corner, curious as he tenderly sorts the matador’s personal effects, including the delicate little slippers. The priest is shrouded in black. The mourners dazzle in shimmery golds, braided trousers, blues, purples, expertly muted. The story goes that this work took 15 years to complete. Villegas Cordero was a painter of genres, historical narratives, Orientalism, and costumbrista works. His work stands out from peers stylistically however, for an irresistible blend of raw, almost abstract gesture and texture, mixed with meticulously detailed and skillful draughtsmanship. His palette was idiosyncratic, too, managing a tremendous range of colours somehow corralled into a subdued overall effect. It’s a stunning painting, inspired by Manuel Fuentes Bocanegra, a Spanish matador who didn’t actually die until 1889, five years following completion. Bocanegra was gored in the stomach and died of infection after, at the age of 52. The romantic dramatization captures the reverence of Spanish culture towards the symbol of the matador, the beauty, the artistry, and the solemnity, too, the reality of death. **  The Dead Toreador, by Edouard Manet (France) 1864 It was my idea. The bullfight. I'd been reading too much Hemingway, and I'd fallen hard for Mexico. I'd been drawn in by Picasso and his peers: the bullfights were as integral to the creative intelligentsia and to bohemia as the cafes and disreputable absinthe parlours. And Manet's painting, The Dead Toreador, had cut me from the inside out. It's a brilliant painting, using a bold perspective that positions you standing over the corpse. The chiaroscuro heightens the drama. In the fall of 1865, Édouard Manet traveled to Spain. He wrote a letter to poet Charles Baudelaire, describing a bullfight he attended in Madrid as “one of the finest, most curious, and most terrifying sights to be seen.” I kept finding my way back to the painting. It was hard to look away. I'm not overly disturbed by my occasional bloodlust, if one wants to call it that. Reality is bloody as much as is beauty. One way of reconciling the paradox is accepting it. Another trait is that I take every opportunity for experience, regardless of my personal tastes or proprieties. I am curious about everything. Nosy. As an artist and writer I want to experience different things, to bear witness to everything I can. It is fascinating to watch people in their many habitats, observing what they do and trying to understand why they do it. I had missed bullfight season when I was in Mexico City. La temporada takes place for a specific time frame from November to March, the opposite of Spain, which runs March to October. There are few countries left where the age-old gladiator sport is still legal. Peru is one of them, so when I was planning a visit to Lima in 2016, I asked my friends to get me a ticket. I knew even then, before going, that it would be a one-shot deal for me. It would be the first time, and the last. I knew I would witness something terrible and epic. That I would be part of an ancient spectacle soaked in blood and roses. **  Taurobolic Altar to Cybele (France, former Roman Empire) 160 AD The modern corrida tradition dates to the early 1700s, spreading with Spanish colonialism to Latin America, where it was enthusiastically received. But variations of bullfighting trace back through Spain’s history, with appearances in written chronicles in the early 1100s. It was enjoyed by kings, peasants, visitors, and invaders. There are parallels to a variety of hunting games and spectacles in different cultures from Africa to Asia. Parallels have also been made to games and rituals where humans tortured and sacrificed other humans, which were shockingly commonplace everywhere, from Rome to Mexico to the west coast of Canada, with some suggesting that the animal came to stand in place for older atrocities. Perhaps. The oldest known mention of bullfighting is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose stories date back as far as 2100 BC, with a scene where Gilgamesh and Enkidu fought and killed the Bull of Heaven: "The Bull seemed indestructible, for hours they fought, till Gilgamesh dancing in front of the Bull, lured it with his tunic and bright weapons, and Enkidu thrust his sword, deep into the Bull's neck, and killed it." Various mystery cults involved stories about killing bulls, or real-life practices. Tauroctony was an essential mythology in the worship of Mithras in classical antiquity, with depictions of bull killing in every Mithraeum, or temple. In turn, these ideas were borrowed from the even older Persian cult of Mithra, the lord of light, who was ordered by the sun god to sacrifice a bull. He did so reluctantly, but at the moment of death, creation of the moon, stars, skies, and earth was realized. The dead bull’s blood and seed fertilized every creature on earth, making us alive and sacred. An old Mithraic hymn declares, “Thou hast redeemed us too by shedding the eternal blood.” Such gruesome rites were not man’s domain alone. The taurobolium was the cultic practice in the Roman Empire of massacring bulls to the Magna Mater (the Great Mother). Her priests would baptize themselves in the blood of the beast, then leave the bull’s testicles as an offering. This strange gift of virility stood in for previous rites to the goddess when she was known by the name Cybele, and her priests castrated themselves in her honour. Mother was worshipped as the goddess who stood on the thresholds between the known and the unknown, the civilized and the wild, and the living and the dead. Today we continue to purge manifestations of our pagan past. The bullfight has been banned around the world, surviving today in only eight countries. In Portugal, the sport has been modified to outlaw the killing of the bull. Last year, Mexico also changed the rules towards a bloodless bullfight. Colombia is moving towards a ban as well. In France, the practice prevails legally in only a few historical regions. Protests between animal welfare groups and aficionado activists in favour of cultural preservation are ongoing in the few remaining places that practice the corrida, Spain, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru. **  Plaza de Toro, Lima, Peru, photo by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2016 The matador. He is nineteen years old. He is taut and haughty and heartbreakingly beautiful in his elegant lime green satin capris. He strikes a pose, and then another, and then another. The song "Vogue," by Madonna, runs through my mind. He is smooth and sequined and his carefully choreographed elegance, his entrega, is pure artistry. But there is something raw and primal there, too, a jolt of bitter and addictive testosterone. He is very skilled, but even a rookie like me understands what this is all about: his very youth is at risk of being conquered. Andres Roca Rey might die in front of our eyes. He can disappear in the blink of the crimson magician’s cape. He is a sand mandala, a beauty that could be snuffed out in a whoosh of our collective sense of temporality. Yes. For him, for us, the fact he is staring death in the balls is exactly why we are here. ** It is horrible. We are horrified. The crowd screaming. A sea of men, and row after row of women in their finest maquillage, waving handkerchiefs. We watch as the carcasses are dragged out of the arena after each victory. The crowds cheer wildly. The whole thing is an affront to my Canadian cultural delicacies. It is inconceivable to me that humans would subject an animal to such cruelty and scream for it. There are vestiges of this primal behaviour in other contexts, of course, in hockey and football, in our taste for grisly murder dramas on Netflix. These sociological phenomena bring our brutal past to light: sport was once about throwing men to the lions or gladiators fighting to the death. In Mexico, an ancient kind of Mesoamerican soccer, ōllamalīztli, known for 3500 years, ended with the losing team (and sometimes the winning team) losing their heads to appease the gods and restore the order of the universe. Some reports show subsequent matches using the heads of the sacrificed ones. Such games were so popular that more than 2000 ballcourts have been excavated. The enduring popularity of the corrida be damned, from where we sit, it is senseless brutality. Thousands of us have gathered to participate in the killing of the bull. Ruddy-faced, tubby men; young labourers; old aunties with walkers and even wheelchairs; emo youth with guyliner and lashes as black as the night water of Barranco. Every square inch of real estate in the stadium is occupied. My friend next to me says, "I almost wish it is not the bull who loses." This is the dominant emotional response from the modern, progressive perspective. American female matador Bette Ford said, “In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.” I nod in agreement with my friend, but realize in an instant I'm a fraud because I don't share this view. Roca Rey is barely just a man out there, vulnerable, dangling a gauzy swatch of fuchsia before a steaming thousand pound monster. If one outcome is heinous, the other is even worse. The bull had no choice in this. This is true, and it is barbarism. But the matador, I grudgingly respect. He is putting his money where his balls are. He is standing there before the beast we are all here to kill. He is risking his own life. and we risked nothing but a few centimos and a headache from too much sun. We are safe in our seats, tidy, protected, basking in the luxury of the higher moral ground. In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway said, “It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could.” The matador puts his life at stake. But we are here for the same thing he is. We have paid to witness it. The death of this magnificent creature. ** Roca Rey of Peru is from a “taurine family.” His older brother Fernando is also a matador. His uncle was an ejoneador, a bullfighter on horseback. His grandfather worked in the Peruvian bullfighting administration. Roca Rey started in the arenas at the tender age of seven. As I sit ringside, he has just this year gained the status of full matador. He has already been gored countless times. A sensationalist headline in The Sun proclaimed him the “World’s Worst Matador.” My friend’s brother, who got the tickets for me, says this is nonsense. Roca Rey is already well-known and admired for taking extreme risks. His artful aesthetics are apparently unparalleled. Markos says that injuries reflect the daringness of the matador, the chances he is willing to take. They show that Roca Rey is fearless. Newspapers that deride such injuries as failure do not understand the obvious danger of taking on an angry 900 pound beast. But the matador we behold understands it very well. Markos tells me that at his last appearance, Roca Rey was stabbed in the buttocks. He was also gored in the mouth on another recent occasion, with several teeth knocked out. Both times, he swallowed his agony, and returned from the wings to take his enemy down. Indeed, by 2021, Roca Rey appears in an interview with Christopher North in The Critic Magazine. North says he is “arguably the best torero in the world, and unarguably the most popular.” Not every kid wants to be gored by a bull when he grows up. I am repulsed and awestruck. It is a war crime to place a child in the face of death this way, and everyone who attends these affairs, including me, are guilty of atrocity. But I also tremble to consider the depth of the passion of this thing, this longing. To be a matador is a vocation, a calling, a sort of possession. It is extreme sports or religious extremism, or both. "Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death," Hemingway famously stated. The sentiment echoes something my late husband said about his favourite sport, boxing. He loved it because it was a real fight, not a reenactment. The appeal of smashed zygomatics and mandibles and brain damage eluded me, but for a certain kind of person, the edge of the cliff is the most honest way to approach the truth about life. To grapple with reality and destiny. It is not a game. To truly understand that we are alive, we must face death head on. This perspective can help us understand what drives a matador, and why the spectacle appeals to sold out audiences across time. It’s not that the criticisms of animal cruelty and human rights fall on deaf ears. It’s that those are the obvious. You can’t stop the wars between man and nature, between gods and mortals, by wishing them away. The bullfight is not about killing bulls, not really. It is about life and death. No matter how often he prevails, the success of the matador is a temporary triumph. **  In his memoir, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death, now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.” Hemingway visited Spain and attended his first bullfight in the ‘20s. He was so taken by the experience that be became a lifelong aficionado of the sport. He even participated in bullfighting himself, in amateur events. Hemingway’s wife had suggested around this time that he transition from journalist to novelist. The Sun Also Rises is a book that explores the bullfight and its attendant moral questions, contrasting traditional masculine moral values with the emerging new mindset of the 20s. Hemingway examines life, death, tradition, and the relationship between men and women. Hemingway’s hardboiled, adjective-averse literature was widely admired but has less acclaim today, often viewed as prominent examples of the old boys’ school known as “toxic masculinity.” I confess to finding Hemingway’s flat, Spartan prose tedious at best. But his philosophical consideration of the bullfight as a mythic reflection of those subjects most central to the human conundrums of living and dying bely the notion that such a brutal sport is a meaningless one. Hemingway’s understanding of the corrida as a spectacle rooted in complex confrontations with the most essential questions of our existence was one shared by his friend with whom he attended the fights, the bullish artist Pablo Picasso. Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso regularly accompanied his father to Sunday fights from a young age. He viewed the corrida as a core part of his Spanish heritage. Picasso’s first known painting is The Little Yellow Picador, depicting a bullfighter on horseback. It’s an exceptionally sophisticated painting considering it was rendered at eight years old. It was a theme that Picasso returned to over and over. The corrida is the subject of at least 100 of his paintings. In 1970, just a few years before his death, he painted a series of matador works, including several of himself in the role, illustrations of a man wrestling with his own imminent demise. Aside from his most repeated subjects, the women he loved or loved to hate, perhaps the corrida was the theme with which Picasso was most consumed. Picasso saw the bull as symbolic of the unconscious mind, the inner animal and mystery with which me must all contend. In the violence of the drama of the bullring, he saw the mythic come alive, beauty, tragedy, and ritual. For him, the bull represented passion and sexuality, a raw force of eroticism. Picasso viewed the bullfight as a spectacle harkening back to the days of the minotaur, a mythology of man as half-bull. He saw himself as the mythic minotaur, an emblem of sexual power, instinct, violence, and irrationality. Viewed from this perspective, the bullfight then becomes something other than man defeating death. It becomes man’s battle against his own sexuality and nature. It becomes a symbol of man against himself. **  The Little Yellow Picador, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1889  The Bullfight, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1934  Self Portrait as Matador, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1970 An intellectual alliance and camaraderie between Picasso and Hemingway is unsurprising, given their parallel brutal personalities and reputations. The friendship between the thundering, virility-obsessed Picasso and the urbane, effete aesthete Jean Cocteau is perhaps an unexpected one. The polymath Cocteau was lanky, aquiline and utterly romantic. Referred to as The Frivolous Prince by his peers, after the title of his early poetry collection, his creative output spanned novels, drawings, plays, films, ceramics, paintings, wit, erotica, modelling and choreographing surrealist photography, and an avant-garde, performative approach to the world, infusing drama into everything he was and did. He saw everything in art and daily life as connected to mythology and the epic highs and lows of tragedy and comedy. He insisted only on calling himself a poet and all of his vast creative output as poetry, whatever its form. Cocteau was a fervent admirer of Picasso’s gate-crashing approach to art, viewing the driven, passionate Picasso as a formidable genius. He persuaded Picasso to design sets for the Russian Ballet in the ‘20s, bringing the avant-garde into the classical. Picasso, with his usual megalomaniac self-absorption, was unable to see anyone, least of all a flamboyant homosexual, as his equal, and accused Cocteau of sycophancy, mocking him in an interview. This led to a two decade rift in their friendship. In time, the pair reconvened. They were often seen seated together at the bullfights. Cocteau shared Picasso’s views of the corrida as ritual participation in ancient mythological drama. High tragedy had followed Cocteau since he was nine, when his father shot himself in the head.. Cocteau became obsessed with the subject of death, constantly incorporating classic myth tropes about death and the underworld into his creative work. His life and work embodied the idea that beauty and death were inextricably linked, opposites dependent on each other for meaning. Tauromachie, for Cocteau, was poetry itself, a space for the contemplation of the most profound mysteries. It was a form of ancient ritual and a fatalistic art form. The spectacle of the corrida was living myth. An aesthete to his core, the choreography and costume of the toreros were of deep significance to him. The artistry of the matador’s dance was essential, a ballet that was willing to lose itself in the ultimate sacrifice. Art to the death, complete surrender to destiny. For Cocteau, of course, the eroticism of the corrida was not just about machismo or even symbolism. As a connoisseur of male beauty, the matador was less a stand-in for the idealized male self, but an object of erotic desire. To the Spanish, the role of matador was entrenched in the perception of hypermasculinity. This seems strange to outsiders who see the obvious archetypes of femininity intertwined with the macho: the matador is beautiful, elegant, balletic, and graceful, with sequins and ornament that reflect women’s fashions. The dressing of the matador in his traje de luces (suit of light) is itself a ritualistic ceremony. (Does the suit of light harken back to Mithra, bull slayer and god of light?) The enigmatic costume is skintight, heavily embroidered and tasseled, with zapatillas (little slippers) and pink or white silk stockings. The sense of the feminine alongside the masculine was so strong for me that I wondered if the secret of the corrida had been hiding in plain sight all along: that like Cybele, it is the female who ultimately tames the bulls, and who vanquishes death while personifying life. In any event, it is no stretch at all to see the artful, idealized, perfected, prettified male as a source of erotic attraction for women and gay men. Cocteau depicted countless matadors and bullring dramas in his artworks. His trademark line drawings highlight the grace and dazzling beauty of the matador, and the intimacy of the dance and struggle with the animal. **  Picasso in white, Cocteau in tie beside him, at bullfight.  Matador, by Jean Cocteau (France) 1961 If the torero represented masculinity and virility, it makes sense that women share Cocteau’s ardent admiration for the erotic male bodies and the archetype of the matador. The matador has long enjoyed a kind of rock star status, easily attracting the attention of women. Pop icon Madonna expresses female desire in this context in her 1994 video, Take a Bow. In this ballad, she plays the lover of Spanish bullfighter Ernesto Munoz, so obsessed with the corrida that he neglects his wife. She celebrates the aesthetic of the torero and his dance, intersplicing sensual, contrasting scenes of his rippling adorned buttocks and thighs with her own soft lingerie, cleavage, and curves. She writhes in needy ecstasy, he moves in an eternal erotic dance, as the drama plays out between them and her rival, the bull. Madonna’s work grapples constantly with the personal and political portrayals of female desire, exploring the subject from every angle, accepting the submissive elements of female eroticism without neglecting the fuller bouquet that includes women’s sexual power. In a later performance, Living for Love, she assumes the role of the matador instead, slaying a stable of minotaurs, bringing the mythic and ancient motifs to the modern. **  Video still, Take a Bow, Madonna, 1994 Depending on one’s perspective of the corrida spectacle, the idea of the matadora is either obvious, or turns tradition on its head. There are more than ten thousand licensed bullfighters in Spain, and of those, around 800 are full status matadors. Only eight are matadoras- women who fight bulls. Women were banned from the role altogether until 1974. Some skirted the rules historically, eschewing the ban on foot by fighting on mounted horses. Francisco Goya, the grand master of Spanish art history, frequently portrayed La Tauromaquia. He immortalized the female bullfighter Pajuelera in his 1816 drawing, Manly Courage of the Celebrated Pajuelera at Zaragoza. Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada depicted a matadora in an engraving, dated between 1890 and 1910. Picasso portrayed his young mistress in a 1934 etching, Marie-Thérèse as Female Bullfighter. Predictably, in Picasso’s work, the woman appears in a submissive position, upturned, and docile, vanquished. The rare women toreros hold a different view. American matadora Bette Ford said, “I’ve been gored, my back’s been broken, my hand was almost ripped off.” She told Guernica Magazine, “… When you’re out there in the ring, the bull certainly does seem to stand a chance. The unfairness seems the other way around. I’m in the ring, I weigh 90 pounds, the bull weighs 900. I have a cape and a sword. The bull has two sharp horns. The bull is a 900-pound athlete, an intelligent athlete. It’s capable of guile. A bull will try to outwit you. “ Yet she was never vanquished. She described the fight as a “very spiritual engagement with power, with power and death." In her ten year career, she killed 200 bulls. **  Marie-Thérèse as Female Bullfighter, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1934  Manly Courage of the Celebrated Pajuelera in the Ring, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1816  Matador and Bull, by Elaine de Kooning (USA) 1972 While countless male painters have been inspired by the corrida, few female artists have explored the bullfight theme. Mary Cassatt painted a matador. Another notable exception is the abstract expressionist and figurative expressionist artist Elaine de Kooning. “I went to Juárez to see the bullfights, which immediately struck me as a heightened image of Southwestern landscape – the panorama of the arena, the heraldic colours…” (quoted in E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 1979, p. 255). Her series of abstract paintings shows the energy of the struggle, with bold gestures that captures the essence of chaos, aggression, dynamic physical action, and spectacle. **  At the Pub Torre del Oro, Madrid, photo by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2019 In Madrid, exhausted and exhilarated from the Prado, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the streets, we enter a tiny, buzzing pub and drop our weary selves onto a couple of barstools. What a place! An array of dusty, steely-eyed taxidermy bulls glare down at us. The walls are plastered in gore, in grisly photographs and newspaper clippings about bullfights. There are shrines to fallen matadors. TV screens compete with the din, blasting out replays of fights. We order cervezas to beat the heat, and, scanning the menu, decide to brave the rabo de toro y vino tinto: a Spanish delicacy of oxtail in red wine sauce. The Torre del Oro was mostly established for tourists, but it is based on a longstanding tradition of bull bars in Madrid, where corrida aficionados would gather after a fight to discuss the nuances of the event. Such drinking holes are familiar around the world as sports bars, with one distinguishing difference: these ones serve up the meat of the fallen bulls. Locals tell us the stew we adventurously ordered is more likely made with cow’s tail. There are specialty restaurants, however, where bull meat is served following the fights. We are told that historically, the dead bulls were butchered and distributed to the poor as a form of social welfare. Extra meat was consumed in village festivals by the whole community. This answers an important question for me. I could never say that I’m “for” bullfighting. Still, it is not so much a position on the subject that I seek, but understanding. But I had wondered what happens to the carcasses of defeated animals. I am relieved to learn that they are used for food and not thrown away. In my youth, I was a vegetarian for many years, but eventually resumed consumption. This return to nature had positive effects on my health. Refusing meat is an honourable religious act to minimize the suffering of God’s creatures. If cats and sharks do not concern themselves with the brutality of their diet, humans wrestle with questions of cruelty and sometimes seek out alternative options. For the rest of us, coming to terms with eating death can be difficult. Many of us live in denial, preferring not to think about it at all. I try to remember animals’ gift to us as something sacred. The gravitas of this sacrifice requires ongoing gratitude on my part. In this view, the bullfight takes on even more meaning. Sexuality, power, and the mythic battle between man and nature, between humans and the gods, are certainly aspects of the spectacle. Another is that most of us participate in this as more than spectators or philosophers. Perhaps the bullfight is also a ritual confrontation of the reality of sustenance. Most of us leave the actual killing of our dinner up to someone else, letting them do the dirty work for us. There’s an old adage that if you can’t kill it, you shouldn’t eat it, an idea that emphasizes understanding and accountability and moderation. Is the bullfight is an age-old reminder of the rites we participate in every day while we look away, oblivious, from the truth of death? In this view, the corrida is an artful and honest ritual, far more so than our obtuse, sanitized consumption of meat packaged in Saran wrap and Styrofoam. Lorette C. Luzajic  La Mano Poderosa, artist unknown (Mexico) 1880 La Mano Poderosa Combing the thieves’ markets for macabre trinkets of faith and death is one of Mexico City’s charms. There is no shortage of gruesome religious folk art curiosities in Mexican history. At the flea markets, if you find a treasure you can keep it and take it home. But you will also find an endless array of colourful and bloody saints, statues, and paintings in the nation’s churches and museums, situated around altars to God and fine art from master painters, among opulent gold-covered objects of worship. These small and plentiful pictures are testaments of devotion from the past, reflecting the syncretism of various folkways and Catholic traditions. The small paintings, usually oil on found scraps of tin or copper, are retablos, made for tables and walls surrounding altars, also known in Mexico as laminas. They proliferated in the 1800s but date back centuries before and remain popular now. Collectors and scholars view laminas paintings as bearing authenticity because they were created by ordinary people or local talents rather than by trained, institutionally-commissioned artists. They are “bottoms up” from the grassroots of belief rather than “top down” works approved by the authorities. They show how real people approached faith, and like folk art around the world, they show how devotion, for common people, is usually a merging of old and new cultures, institutionalized storytelling mixed with folk beliefs in magic, old ways, and older religions. This unusual laminas shows La Mano Poderosa, or the All Powerful Hand of God. It is a recurring motif that appeared occasionally in Mexican art during the 1800s. It depicts the hand of Christ crucified, emerging from the clouds, the wound a fountain of blood filling a chalice. Atop each finger and thumb is a member of the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Anne, and Joachim. These are Las Cinco Personas, or the Five People, sometimes known as Los Cinqo Senores, or the Five Lords. Drinking from the chalice of blood are seven lambs. The lambs represent the seven sacraments in Catholic Christianity, and the drinking of the blood specifically represents the Eucharist or mass, when believers in communion with God and neighbours consume bread and wine to symbolize the body of Jesus. Like most laminas, this particular rendition of the Mano Poderosa is quite small, measuring ten by seven inches. The significance of the imagery is easy to guess: a helping hand in times of trouble. God’s hand protects the devoted from evil, or it is used to petition assistance for complicated situations beyond the scope of human hands. Meditation on La Mano Poderosa means asking God himself for help, with the handy assistance of his back up crew, intercession from the Holy Family. There is a novena that accompanies this ancient imagery: Mano de Dios, ponderosa y pronta, liberal y benigna para los que se valieren de la intercesión de sus cinco Gloriosos Dedos. JESÚS, MARÍA, JOSÉ, JOAQUÍN Y ANNA. Cuya novena ofrece para encender la devoción, un devoto de estos Santísimos cinco SEÑOR. (Hand of God, ponderous and prompt, liberal and benign for those who are deserving of the intercession of its five Glorious Fingers. JESUS, MARY, JOSEPH, JOACHIM and ANNE. Whose novena serves to ignite devotion, a devotion to those five Holy LORDS.) I have not been fortunate enough to find an original All Powerful Hand of God painting in my travels. On auction websites or in high end antique stores, they are valued in the thousands of dollars, well beyond my range. I did find a small reproduction in a nicho shadowbox that I treasure, and will be content with it until I stumble on the good fortune of an original. It has been suggested that I pray the novena and meditate on La Mano Poderosa, and make my acquisition request directly. But I am admittedly the type who feels one should ask God for genuine help and strength and not selfish favours. I am so intrigued with this particular motif that I have often used it in my own artwork, collage shrines and mixed media urban expressionist works that are themselves syncretic amalgamations of all that I absorb. The maximalism of Mexican aesthetics and the macabre folk tastes that I blame on my German ancestry are two elements of many that fuel my work. The curious artifacts and imagery that humans use as amulets, talismans, and aids for devotion get quite a bit of airtime in my artwork, alongside all manner of creative and cultural objects from the great big world. The hand in particular is a recurring symbol for me, not just this specific manifestation, but more generally. The hand holds for me a wide spectrum of meanings. It represents both self-sufficiency, and relationship, because we act and do with our hands, as well as communicate with and connect to others through touch. That touch can be loving or violent. The hand is also magical, for me. It is how we most often express our divinely inspired creativity or do things that seem impossible. Hands are as much the source of art as our souls: indeed, we use the term “handicraft” or “handmade” to designate real art from the work of machines. Hands, for me, as an artist, and as an enthusiast of anthropology, archeology, and anthropology, are our magic wands. That magic has always been in mind, or at hand, if you will, in my DIY ethos and my ecumenical symbolic interests. The hand appears again and again throughout the decades of my art, and in my collected artifacts such as the hand door knocker from Tunisia, as well as in the jewelry I wear. (Frida Kahlo also wore dangling hands as earrings, a gift from Pablo Picasso.) While I have never been convinced that the way the skin creases on the palm can tell the future, in another, more practical sense, the hand does indeed direct one’s fate. Of course, there are times when one needs a helping hand. And that aid might be the hand extended by a friend or neighbour. And it might come from the Almighty. The symbol of the hand of God appears at least 160 times throughout the Bible, signifying the array of suggested interpretations in this powerful folk art of the Mano Poderosa: divine authority and power, judgement, divine intervention, deliverance, guidance, help, creation, love, and God’s presence. While the idea of God’s protective hand is certainly a comforting one, you’re not alone if you find this particularly imagery disquieting, and suggestive of practices beyond the scope of the Church. It is perhaps no surprise that the Mano Poderosa as a folk motif has an array of ancient influences. The All Powerful Hand of God is sometimes used in brujeria practices, that is, Mexican witchcraft, or in Santeria, where Caribbean folk religions merged with Catholicism. It has been suggested that the hand’s use as imagery, or as three-dimensional sculpture or even as a candle in occult practices stems from macabre European black magic traditions of the hand of glory. The Hand of Glory is a literal severed hand, a terrifying tool in the magician’s arsenal. The hand was believed to hold the power to make people invisible, open doors, put people to sleep, and provide light as a literal candle made from human fat, each fingertip a flame. The corpse’s hand had to come from a hanged and guilty man. Was this an inversion of Christianity, where Christ was hanged from a cross, and innocent? It’s quite likely that the hand of glory is more legendary than practical. A few have been found but most are in stories and poems, with an early mention appearing in an artwork, The Elder Saint Jacob Visiting the Magician Hermogenes by Pieter van der Heyden in 1565, during the witch craze heydays. The origins of the All Powerful Hand of God are much older still. The Mano Poderosa was most popular in Mexico and Puerto Rico, but originated in Spain and Portugal, as most Catholic imagery in the Americas did. From there, things get convoluted, the way they usually do, because folk symbols have a life of their own. Every symbol tells a story of countless miles, untold centuries, and a wide array of souls. Throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa, there is another hand that has been extraordinarily popular and pervasive. The hamsa’s appearance is benign in comparison: it does not have the same severed, disembodied appearance, and it is not covered in bloody wounds. You’ve seen it a thousand times: an open palm splayed, sometimes ornately enameled, or covered in beads or other decorations. It is hanging in every home, rearview mirror, and market of anyone in or from the Mediterranean region. It is so commonplace that modern people may forget the ancient apotropaic symbolism inherent in these ornaments: they were amulets meant to protect the innocent from the Evil Eye. The hamsa is also known as the Hand of Fatima within Muslim cultures. Older Christian cultures call it the Hand of Mary. To a still older culture, the hamsa represented the Strong Hand of God to the Jewish people, a symbol associated with the Bible verse Deuteronomy 5: 15. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” But there are older traditions yet in the region. Do the hamsa and the Mano Poderosa motifs shake hands with even older gods? The upright open hand shows up on tombstones in Carthage, alongside inscriptions to the Punic goddess Tannit, dating back to at least 500 BC. The mano figa, or fig hand, is another form of the goddess hand amulets. With fist clenched and thumb between the index and middle finger, the fig hand appears all over the world, still widely used as a symbol of protection in Brazil, with many modern homes featuring a statue of the upraised fist. The fig hand is said to symbolize the genitalia of the goddess as well as her helping hand, and has been used by seafarers all over the world for millennia. We can trace this hand symbol back to the Etruscans around 600 BC, but some experts believe the symbol goes as far back into history as 6000 BC. A tiny jade mano figa, a gift from a deceased lover, is one of the prize possessions in my collection of meaningful artifacts. Reaching even further back into the past is the Mano Pantea amulet, or the Hand of the All-Goddess, also a symbol of ancient protection against the Evil Eye. It goes back to about 3000 BC in ancient Egypt. This amulet had two upright fingers and two folded down. It is no coincidence that hand positions like these show up in sacred art depicting both Christian and pagan stories. In old Christian Orthodox art, Jesus is often making mysterious hand signals that we understand to mean peace or love, gestures often used in Christian blessings. In turn, the Hindu and Buddhist use of hand gestures as spiritual symbolism predates these depictions by millennia. The Mano Pantea motif resurfaces in the region in an especially mysterious manifestation. Votive hands of various types were often used in Roman era cults, for protection and assistance, and none is stranger looking than the hand for the god Sabazios. Bronze hands in the two-fingered mudra were used in processions for this god, paraded atop long poles. Little is known today about the cult of Sabazios. He was one of numerous Roman deities, a horseman god and sky father god of Phrygian and Thracian peoples. Archeology has revealed a few stunning examples of this ancient type of Mano Poderosa, adorned with bizarre symbols: entwined and atop the fingers are lizards, an eagle, turtle, lizard, ram, branch, serpents, a pinecone, a horseman, and more. Visually, this uncanny hand looks an awful lot like the grisly Mexican depiction of the Roman Catholic All Powerful Hand of God, with the Holy Family growing from the fingers instead of lizards and pinecones. Mexico is a long way from Sabazios…but on the other hand, Rome is not far from Rome. Lorette C. Luzajic  Powerful Hand of God, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2024  Hand of Power, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2025  Self Portrait Dedicated to Dr Eloesser, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940. Frida is wearing the earrings gifted to her by Picasso.  from Les Devises Héroïques, et Emblemes, a book by Claude  Unusual khamsa pendants, silver and pearl, from Tunisia, Tunisian Chichkhana style. c. early 1900s.  Jewish Hamsa, silver. This one is possibly from Iraq. c. 1800s.  Mano Pantea, Sabazios, from Pompei c. 100 AD  The Hand of Tanit, Punic Goddess, dates back to at least 500 BC. The upraised hand symbolized protection. Her hand can be seen on many tombstones throughout Carthage in Tunisia, North Africa. This gravestone dates to 1 BC.  Ancient hand amulet, worn by the living or buried with the dead, for protection. c. 1500 BC.   Hand amulet door knocker. These knockers appear throughout Tunisia, the Mediterranean, Europe, North Africa, Mexico and beyond. I took this photo in Tunisia in 2017.  La Mano Poderosa motif used in magical rites.  La Mano Poderosa (Mexico) 1800s  La Mano Poderosa Sculpture, Caban Group Folk Art (Puerto Rico, USA) 1875-1925  My Manu Figa charm. Jade, sterling. Contemporary.  The Sewing Machine, by Leonor Fini (Italy, b. Argentina) 1978 The Sewing Machine A woman sits at an old-fashioned sewing machine with a massive gauzy swathe of orange fabric. Sewing is typically viewed as a menial domestic task of necessity, almost always women’s work, and historically, a form of near-slave labour, whether to clothe the family or as immigrant employment in the harsh conditions of factories or “sweat shops.” Leonor Fini turns our presuppositions upside down and gives us a seamstress who is both powerful and sensual. The woman takes the wheel with certainty, her hands directing both the cloth and the machine, her focus determined. The painting contrasts a rich, dark mahogany palette with a figure whose body and face are pale alabaster. The painting is almost chiaroscuro. And the sewing woman is almost a ghost. But an earthly, earthy human she is nonetheless, with skirt hiked up, for practicality of labour, perhaps, but revealing shapely legs and drawing our attention to the bullseye centre of the picture, also the centre of life itself. Fini was a master of mystery, illuminating her work with enigmatic women who exude sexual confidence and who explore and determine their own paths regardless of social or cultural obstacles and stereotypes. They are also mythic and archetypal figures. Even the most mundane and ordinary scenario suggests longstanding links to fairy tales, legends, folklore and mythology. Fini’s seamstress is not just a wife, mother, or servant. She is a creator and designer and an artist. Her imagination and her hands determine her own fate. Lorette C. Luzajic  Siamese Twins, Los Angeles, by Joel-Peter Witkin (USA) 1988 The Valley of the Shadow of Death: Jerome Witkin and Joel-Peter Witkin When Joel-Peter Witkin read about Yvonne and Yvette, the craniopagus conjoined twins, in the Los Angeles Times, he immediately set out to photograph them. The McCarther sisters were fused at the top of their heads. Their mother had turned down the chance to surgically separate them after birth because of the risk of one or both dying. The sisters were thus literally inseparable. They did everything together. To earn money for their medical expenses, the McCarther children worked in sideshow acts for the circus, getting paid to let crowds of curious onlookers gawk at them. Later, they became gospel singers, recording and touring as Yvonne and Yvette: the Siamese Twins. When they passed away in their early forties, they were enrolled together in a nursing program in college. Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin was always looking for models whose bodies subverted societal norms. The controversial artist pursued people from the margins, the mutilated, medical anomalies, the amputated; people with deformities, people who were damaged, or different; little people; transexual people, people with transgressive sexual identities; as well as the already deceased. Even with a bountiful repertoire of subversive models and severed body parts, the McCarther twins would be a rare camera capture: Witkin had never photographed conjoined twins, and craniopagus conjoinment was the rarest kind of all. The artist has faced, of course, constant backlash and opposition for his work, which some view as gruesome, sadistic, pornographic, and perverted, and others view as degrading and objectifying to those who are disabled or marginalized. Witkin has a much different perspective, viewing his practice as both religious, and driven by beauty. He often describes his work as a kind of prayer. The McCarther sisters consented to pose for him, and the resulting artwork is ethereal and eerie. Hands entwined, the women wear white lace negligees and white Venetian masks, contrasting against their Black skin. One holds a bird and the other a bouquet of flowers. The artist recalls the sitting on his Instagram page. “During the shoot the twins very distinct personalities became apparent,” he says. “Yvette on the left was frightened of the bird so she got to hold the flowers while Yvonne was thrilled to hold the bird. Being in the twins’ presence was like being given a gift. They were so sweet and kind and were embracing life making up for lost time. The air was electric.” Unlike Witkin’s other photographs, there are no severed limbs or bizarre sexual fetishes depicted, no blood or oozing fluids. Even so, the image is still haunting. The photo captures the profound connection between the women. There’s more to the story in this artwork, moving from what we see to what we don’t see. Joel-Peter Witkin is also a twin, but by 1988 when this work was created, he had been estranged from his identical brother Jerome Witkin, also an artist, for more than two decades. ** In 2014, the Jack Rutberg Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited Twin Visions: Jerome Witkin and Joel-Peter Witkin, showing the work of both brothers together for the first time and ending a 50 year separation between them. The exhibition then travelled to Mexico City. An audience hungry to make sense of such a dramatic severance would have been disappointed. There were no such explanations offered before, during or after the historical event. All we know is that they amicably drifted apart and went their separate ways. There was no seminal event or argument referenced that triggered their schism. Perhaps the mystery of it all gives an even more compelling context to the Witkin name. By the time of their reunion, Joel-Peter was a widely collected artist with works exhibited in top tier museums like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Louvre, world famous for his art of darkness. Unbelievably, so was Jerome. Joel-Peter used a studio to stage scenes and models and a camera to immortalize the strange and the dead, drawing from and recreating the traditions of the old masters. Jerome’s work ran parallel in paintings. Jerome Witkin, described by the New York Times as a “virtuoso figurative painter” creates narrative art rendered in a style that combines classical realism with gestural abstraction. A recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer travelling fellowship and the Guggenheim fellowship, the artist’s subject matter is social and political, focusing on atrocities like sexual violence, terrorism, death, AIDS, destitution, and destruction. For 23 years, Jerome immersed himself in the darkest recesses of human history, obsessively researching and painting the Holocaust. ** Given the gravitas and morbid imagination inherent in the work of both Witkins, it is perhaps surprising that both brothers are known for their charming, gentle, warm and witty demeanours. Joel-Peter is seen as wildly intelligent, and a more solitary figure, deeply engrossed in his work (“It’s all I have. It’s all I need.”) Yet in contact with others, he is theatrical, gregarious, demonstrative, hilarious. He wears polka-dotted eyeglasses. Jerome is quiet and mild in mannerism, possessing also an extraordinary intelligence, while agreeable and funny. A Facebook page created by his fans and students proclaims, “Anyone who has had the pleasure of taking a class with Professor Jerome Witkin can tell you he is quite easily the most random, amusing, and quotable man to walk the earth.” ** It can safely be said that Jerome Witkin has no contemporary peer. Few figurative painters maintain such a consistent laser focus on human suffering. The influence of Goya is obvious. Jerome is unrelenting in depicting the pain and chaos of the human body and psyche. Fewer still have the skill and vision to carry out what he does, immense, visceral works with supreme technical prowess. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker wrote, “Witkin’s only peer is Lucian Freud…. Witkin is one of the finest realist painters working today…he stages pictorial dramas that grapple with contemporary historical crises and moral pressures, while offering a lavish physical display of his medium…. ” His unusual style that blends the academic with abstract expressionism is uniquely suited to his work, making for an urban, dystopian sensibility, the impression of souls and their surroundings in demolition and ruin. They are important, unflinching, honest works, created by a master artist. I’m a more reluctant admirer of Joel-Peter’s work, and yet I find it endlessly compelling. I’m easily drawn to the macabre and see truth and beauty in darkness. But I’m also squeamish about biological and medical realities. Perhaps I am also prudish about penises out of context, especially disembodied ones, and about the more extreme outer limits of human desire and violence in sexuality. I don’t care to see explicit private acts like spread-eagled sodomy by foot, thank you very much. I am fascinated and mesmerized by the artist’s imagination and aesthetic. But I am also shocked and disturbed. Joel-Peter is also without peer, contemporary or historically. No one has ever plumbed the depths of darkness so fearlessly and elegantly; no one has ever so brazenly embraced death and sex and the extremes of the physical in such a spiritual way. And no one has done this with photography and real live (or real dead) models. Arts writer Marina Isola describes his work in one of his monographs as “Part Hieronymus Bosch, part ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” And if other photographers like Diane Arbus have bravely photographed the forgotten and dismissed, Joel-Peter’s art is not just capturing and curating what he sees. He is an installation artist first, staging theatrical scenes. Then he is a photographer. The essence of his work takes place after both of these stages, when he prints and paints and scratches and engraves into the images to make them look antiqued and otherworldly. Joel-Peter seeks his subjects firsthand, approaching real people whom, like the McCarther twins, he learns about through research and newspapers. Driven by the desire to make visible the invisible, he has even placed calls through classified ads: “Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.” He has, of course, been routinely criticized for his fetishistic quest for the most mutilated and marginal of human bodies, for constantly pushing the boundaries: morbid obesity, intersex people, people with no arms, dwarves, the sick, the elderly. His grisly obsessions are not limited to the living. Joel-Peter does not flinch at death, procuring human corpses and body parts from medical institutions and Mexican morgues, using cadavers and severed limbs in still life arrangements. Vanitas, indeed. If the artist’s search for taboo and bizarre bodies seems precariously close to the freak shows and human zoos of yesteryear, that is not far off the mark at all. It is the literal beginning of Joel-Peter’s art. When they were young men, Jerome took Joel-Peter to the “freak shows” on Coney Island. Jerome himself was working on a painting that incorporated sideshow people and asked Joel-Peter to bring his camera to take pictures. They encountered severely handicapped people, and a man with three legs, and a hermaphrodite. Joel-Peter claims he had his first sexual encounter with the hermaphrodite, that is, someone with both male and female genitalia. “I wanted to travel with them, but they didn’t need a photographer,” he said. Joel-Peter was deeply moved by the people he encountered in the Coney Island sideshows. Later, he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve always been attracted to things that are looked on as ugly or taboo. I don’t want to live feeling that I can’t communicate with someone, because there’s a form of beauty in everything. I’ve been thinking about St. Francis, who had this terrible fear of lepers. One morning he was walking down the road and saw the most grotesque leper and he knew that to get beyond the demise of his own flesh, he had to kiss that leper. And at the instant St. Francis kissed him, the leper turned into Christ.” If we see his subject matter as salacious, Joel-Peter sees something else entirely. “My work is all about human dignity, caring and compassion... Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.” As for death, Joel-Peter insists unequivocably in his work and philosophy that death is a part of life, even if most of us prefer to ignore it. Death is actually a mainstay of art history tradition, including the practice of working from the real thing. Chaim Soutine would take dead animals from the butcher shop and hang them on a meat hook in his apartment, painting from the raw material. Theodor Gericault borrowed body parts and corpses from the morgue so that his massive historical narrative painting, The Raft of the Medusa, would be as realistic as possible. The raft was a makeshift lifeboat assembled after the sinking of a naval boat in the early 1800s. Dehydrated and starved, the few survivors on the raft resorted to cannibalism while awaiting rescue. Gericault interviewed two of the survivors as part of his research as well. (Joel-Peter Witkin recreated the Medusa masterpiece in his 2006 political work, The Raft of George W. Bush.) Death was much more personal, however, than pragmatic for the artist. He has spoken often of a pivotal moment of imprinting when he was a child. “We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother's hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it – but before I could touch it someone carried me away.” Later, Joel-Peter enlisted to work as a combat photographer during the war in Vietnam. His training was intense: across American and in Europe, he had to take pictures of all kinds of death. He never went to Vietnam: he was discharged from the army after a suicide attempt. Much later, in 2024, Joel-Peter made a remarkable claim in a documentary about himself and his twin, Jerome. He said that he had memories from his mother’s womb. (Interestingly, Salvador Dali also claimed intrauterine memory. Most experts consider such claims to be false memories or fraudulent. But others believe that very rarely, some individuals recall their experiences much earlier than the rest of us. It is considered an aspect of hyperthymesia, or unusually detailed memory processes, and only 100 or so people in the world are considered to have this form of memory.) While I could find very little reference to this online, Joel-Peter said that he and Jerome were actually triplets. Some online sources state that the sister was stillborn. Joel-Peter described in the documentary his recollection of knowing his sister in the womb, and connecting with her at the time of her death. “In that sense, I knew death before I knew life.” ** Jerome, too, has always depicted violence and death. While Joel-Peter views his own work on these themes as joyful, inclusive, and beautiful, Jerome makes no such claims. He believes himself instead a witness to the depravity and pain around him. “I’m a witness. With the paintings and the drawings, maybe they make other people say, ‘There shouldn’t be this. There shouldn’t be this again.’” On his website, he states, “Since the times we now live in are not pretty and do not have a possible future remedy for those societal troubles, neither are the images I present.” ** How did Jerome’s path so closely mirror Joel-Peter’s? Both men became artists, which is perhaps not surprising. Siblings of any kind who pursue similar careers are common. But it is exceedingly rare for artists to become successful, internationally acclaimed, awarded, and exhibited in premium galleries and museums. Both brothers’ work is deeply rooted in art history, and also in spirituality, albeit with dramatically different expressions of these shared origins and motivations. The audience’s natural curiosity wants to get to the why of the spirit of their work. All people have a morbid curiosity about human depravity and a desire to make sense of or understand it. But few devote themselves so completely to the task. The dark mysteries of the human heart and the frontiers of the unknown are evergreen fodder in art history and literature: from the Psalms to Picasso’s Guernica, we grapple with evil. Yet few artists fuel their work entirely from this question. Countless studies of monozygotic twins like Jerome and Joel-Peter confirm fascinating but still little-understood matters of genetic inheritance. Our comprehension of biology is really still in its infancy, and epigenetic explorations are even more mysterious. Nothing about genes is simple: biology is destiny, and yet genes do not guarantee an outcome. We phrase things in terms of “predisposition” or probabilities, or potentialities. The body and all that is inside of it is far more essential to our natures than most of us are willing to acknowledge. While few of us still subscribe to old “blank slate” theories, we usually favour nurture over nature. Even if something is in our nature, we are not slaves to our biology, we believe. Even the most die-hard materialist holds murderers to account for their choices, though the instinct to kill is clear to anyone paying attention. We might be a fat family, and yet we are sure that a person can modify their predisposition to corpulence. Addiction may be innate to some, yet many outwit their inheritance through practice and grace. Even if higher testosterone and lower intelligence quotients are shared traits among most violent men, most men manage to contain themselves and function in a civilized fashion. A high sex drive is normal for the vast majority of younger people, and yet only a small percentage commit rape or are otherwise unable to contain themselves. Most people, even when experiencing the most intense sexual desires, wait until they are behind closed doors and don’t start humping like dogs beside a public fountain. We have at least some control of our biology, then. Most of us give much more credence to nurture than nature. We perceive that fat follows poor self-control or emotional factors. We see that many antisocial criminals were badly abused in childhood and understand that early imprinting and trauma contributes in a major way to how we behave. We believe that hate is taught and that most of what we are is learned in some way. After all, even if we possess particular abilities, whether athletic or mathematical or artistic, we must still attend school or apprentice somehow to grow our gifts. Perhaps our best understanding is that our raw material is given by biology, and then it is impacted by our experiences and pursuits. Everything that happens to us and that we witness and learn interacts with how we are made to become the people that we are. This fascinating interplay of our environments, biology, families, and chance give us infinite variations of humanity, and we never tire of unpuzzling it. We comb through these mazes constantly- humans are naturally nosy, never tiring of discussing the neighbours and our families and scandalous celebrities. It could even be said that much of the basis of literature, art, religion, and Netflix follow this white rabbit, and that we never do get to the bottom of it all. ** The parallels for Joel-Peter and Jerome make some sense, then, simply because they are twins. They also shared an upbringing: they were not twins separated at birth, but rather in young adulthood when they were already partly formed. It is likely they were born creative, driven, highly intelligent, and curious, and so their paths as artists was long set into motion. It is just as likely their shared experiences in their formative years contributed to their direction. If Joel-Peter’s seemingly impossible intrauterine memory of their sister’s brief spark is real in any sense, then it is also real for Jerome, even if he doesn’t remember it. Did those mystical moments of connection and untethering impact the way they saw the world? ** If Joel-Peter’s artwork seems at first incomprehensible, even grotesque, it is still inexplicably beautiful and summons profoundly conflicting emotions in the viewer. We are enchanted and disgusted. We can’t look away, and then we cannot unsee it. One of Joel-Peter’s most famous photographs shows two parts of a man’s head positioned as if in a kiss. He recounts the genesis of this disturbing arrangement as accidental. Working in a medical research lab, he was unaware that a head had been bisected, and when he picked it up, it slipped, ultimately suggesting a man kissing himself. Joel-Peter emphasizes that while he worked extensively with deceased bodies and parts in his photography, he did not kill or dissect their bodies himself. His material came as is from research labs or morgues. Objects trouve, indeed. It all goes so far past our collective sense of taboo in so many ways. But when we hear Joel-Peter’s account of the pivotal childhood moment of trauma, where he witnessed the gruesome death of another innocent child, a young girl tragically beheaded in an automobile accident, it starts to make sense to us. When we learn that he witnessed the dead constantly in preparation for a grisly but necessary job as a war photographer, we feel his wounding. We unravel some of the unfathomable mystery of it, the mystery of death itself, something liminal and luminous, the innocence of being and of the body and psyche at once. Our empathy for the girl and for the artist who witnessed the event when he was just a child give us more context for what he sees and feels and why he seemingly does not hold the same boundaries that we do. And we are able to go where he goes and be inside that space. We can almost shed our own limits in a way that lets us see past our own shock and natural fear and disgust. Perhaps we can even see the way he sees, and lose our repulsion altogether, that death, sex, pain, deformities, and otherwise marginalized bodies are mirrors, after all, not something outside of us. They are us. In light of this story, the artist’s insistence that such depicting such bodies is an act of love, rather than gratuitous or revolting, resonates. We are able to see and feel the truth of what we usually deny. ** Our penchant for nurture and fear of the body as truth, and especially of death and putrefaction and anything that might hint at it, has made death the ultimate taboo. Perhaps our rejection of the body in general stems from this fear: our bodies show us the grisly reality of our finite selves, a decade or nine before the inevitable comes to pass. It may also be that our aversion to the corporal is innate on a biological level: the dying and death itself are both symbolically and literally contagious. We burn or bury our dead and don’t live with them. Some cultures have elaborate ceremonies for the diseased and deceased, most brief and geared toward assuring the longevity of the soul, limiting the contact and communion with the actual body to prescribed rituals. The rest of us dispose quickly of our dead after a few days and entertain any further communion in spirit alone. Too much interest in the corporeal in life is viewed as superfice or vanity, and in death, as depravity and perversion. We find it traumatic to see death literally, even though most of us will not be able to avoid it. And yet, and yet…we all have an insatiable curiosity about this threshold, if we are honest. And if we are not honest, our obsession is still obvious. The most holy theme in religion is death, and in Christianity, the literal corpse of God is the most sacred of all imagery, connecting the eternal with the most raw fundamentals of the human body. We all tune in to the daily news, where war, murder, and pestilence are universally decreed the most important stories. Millions tune in to murder on television, relentlessly filling ourselves on series like Criminal Minds or serial killer specials. We really can’t look away. ** The crux of my fascination with Joel-Peter’s photographs might be this: I am no different. I also turn tragedy and mortal flesh into sculpture and cinema, only I call it poetry. I dissect people like frogs, expose them in composite revelations in my stories, summon their spirits with the abracadabra of rhyme and simile. I want to know everything. I want to understand what cannot be understood. I have my own reasons. I pursue beauty relentlessly, too, but I know that we are also knit from darkness. Given the chance, I have volunteered to watch a bullfight, lurk in the shadows of BDSM fetish festivals, attend murder trials for strangers in court. In my wayward youth, I ingested massive doses of various psychedelics to see what I would find at the outer limits of consciousness. I’m comfortable confessing to a lifelong fascination with death. Like Joel-Peter, I was imprinted with the macabre realities as a young child. There were several incidents that impacted my psyche in this direction: the suicide of a young playmate, poetically ending a young life of torment and sexual abuse by hanging herself from a tree; the suicide of my mom’s brother, broken in front of a train; and the gang rape and murder of a teenage friend, strangled and then burned in an abandoned house by hooligans after marching a protest against capital punishment. Oh, the irony. Later, a teen neighbour boy hanged himself if the basement of the same house I used to babysit in. I did not witness any of this death in person, but these events had an immeasurable effect on my psyche. Indeed, I have been so closely taunted by the grim reaper, felling acquaintances nearby and intimate beloved with a ferocious frequency and all manner of gruesome, tragic methods that in my less stable days I believed I carried a curse and was some kind of mystical danger to others. I attribute these experiences for my morbid curiosities, as I have always been drawn to death in literature, art, and television. When I travel, I visit cemeteries and catacombs. I dive headfirst to find out more about any sordid cultural customs and relish anthropology on cannibalism and human sacrifice. I read constantly about murder. I write about death. I feel something of Joel-Peter’s conviction that this subject, in all of its manifestations, is a necessary theme for art, simply because it exists. On one occasion, I was invited to the morgue by a friend in medical school, a chance I jumped at. It was a terrible and incredible thing to experience: a hands-on session with thirteen cadavers, faces peeled back, stomachs slit open, for students to see inside ourselves. In the name of science, there was a Tupperware-type container filled with human organs preserved in formaldehyde: I held a human brain in my hands. I was filled with emotion and overrun with tears, this rare opportunity to connect physically with the most interior part of a person, the place where a million moments were both programmed and recorded. ** Jerome’s work is much easier to approach, even though it dwells equally on darkness. Unlike his brother, Jerome does not see his art from the standpoint of beauty and love. But he does believe that his art also comes from a place of spirituality and compassion. He enters into the darklands for the purpose of truth and witness. We approach these paintings with a clear understanding that the artist’s motivation is to bring us into communion with victims. Even as the images are unrelenting in their horror, we recognize clearly the messages of social justice and human rights awareness. Jerome is quoted in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery. “I wish to be remembered as a religious artist who attempted to portray the most intimate range of human feelings and the meetings of the human with life's demons and deities.... Art and the holy are twins. Rembrandt, Kollwitz pray with muddy and bloody hands.” (Kathe Kollwitz was a German artist who painted grief, after losing a son and grandson in the world wars.) Most of Jerome’s work grapples with intense and harrowing of human experiences, grief, war, oppression, AIDS, 9/11, urban violence. One of his works is called Unseen and Unheard (In Memory of All Victims of Torture (1986), the title pointing again to the idea of the artist as witness. Addiction is a subject he paints often, for example, in his stark portrayal The Crack House (1990). Another recurring theme in his work is homelessness: he spent several months visiting My Father’s Kitchen, a homeless resource centre in Syracuse, New York, sketching marginalized people and talking to them. “I like drawing people,” he said. “They need to be seen.” And of course, the Holocaust. Jerome spent twenty years researching, processing, and painting themes of the Holocaust, daring to enter into the depths of the depravity and horror to bear witness. His works draw as much from art history as his brother’s, referencing specific artists, such as his portraits of Van Gogh and Kollwitz, for example, as well as working from the narrative framework of the Old Masters, who used mythology and Biblical stories to contemplate the complicated morality of human history. He also uses styles and aesthetics from the great painters, ancient and modern, blending them to form a recognizable continuum in contemporary form. His vast works are magnified further in size and impact as he frequently uses diptychs, triptychs, and polyptychs of five or more panels in a single work, a common convention in historical religious paintings. While Jerome’s work fits more easily into our psychological paradigm of right and wrong, assuring the viewer that both they and the artist are on the right side of history, so to speak, we can’t help but question how he got here. He was not the one who witnessed the terrible car crash and decapitation of a young girl, and nor did he photograph the dead as employment. So how did he end up in the same haunted corridors of the mind as his brother? ** Perhaps our why mind can be satisfied by the quote of another artist, Francis Bacon, to whom Jerome has been compared. In his last interview with his friend Francis Giacobetti in 1991, Bacon stated, “Since the beginning of time, we have had countless examples of human violence even in our very civilized century. We have even created bombs capable of blowing up the planet a thousand times over. An artist instinctively takes all this into account. He can’t do otherwise. I am a painter of the 20th century: during my childhood I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein, and the wars, Hiroshima, Hitler, the death camps, and daily violence that I’ve experienced all my life. And after all that they want me to paint bunches of pink flowers…” ** Is it enough? Yes, and also, it’s not enough. We return to our unquenchable curiosity. We are always looking for pieces of the puzzle, for clues to give us more context. The audience is not much different from the artist in this regard: we both want to dig around behind the scenes, to excavate shards and artifacts that can shed light on the human condition. A neon light in the dark blinks out from our minds, glowing: make it make sense! But can we? Yes and no. ** We can follow the breadcrumbs with this question as our headlight: why does this man, this artist, feel the weight of the world? Rifling through the detritus of any man’s life, you will find ruins and dried blood. As both brothers remind us constantly through their art, life is full of death. Jerome and his work’s ongoing struggle with grief and dying owes at least something to the tragedy of losing his 16 year old son, Andrew. Andrew suffered from a rare blood disorder and ultimately died after the hope of healing from a bone marrow transplant. The artist felt the agony of unfair loss firsthand, and perhaps no pain in life is as acute as bearing witness to the suffering of their child. “…This is going to sound very strange—but when you have one child walking between life and death, you start going on your knees a lot and praying. You simply realize that life is everything and holding onto life is everything,” Jerome told Larry Groff in Painting Perceptions. “I love that child more than anything on the planet. He is just so amazing.” Yet this painful ordeal happened in 2010, when Jerome was already in the twilight years of a long trajectory as an artist. He speaks more often of the impact his father had on his psyche. The Witkins, like most of us, had a complicated family. Their father was Jewish and their mother was Catholic, and these religious differences proved impossible to reconcile, ultimately contributing to their divorce when the twins were around four. Max was a glazier by trade, but had tremendous difficulty making ends meet and keeping a job. He suffered from depression. Mother was volatile, often throwing tantrums and dishes. Max became itinerant, living on the streets, and attempting suicide. Ultimately, he died tragically, beaten to death by hooligans from a Puerto Rican gang. It happened at Coney Island, where both brothers had drawn inspiration for their burgeoning artistic oeuvre. Max had given Joel-Peter his first camera, a gift that at the very least set the dominoes of fate into motion. Yet the photographer claims that he had little intimacy with his father. Much later, he told the Los Angeles Times, “His death didn’t affect me at all.” It’s a strange declaration of detachment from a man who constantly stresses that his raison d’etre as a visionary is his love, like Christ, for “the least of these.” Jerome, on the other hand, admits how much his father’s life and death weighed on his mind. He was drawn to the experience of homelessness through his heart for his father’s battle with depression and instability. “My father was a homeless man,” Jerome told Larry Groff. “He failed in his business. He failed in two marriages. He tried to commit suicide. He was mugged to death in a park in Brooklyn. You couldn’t find him, and all that stuff. My father was a very sad case of not succeeding in anything. But at the same time, as a homeless man, where homeless people look alike, it’s usually very sad. And they are open to being hurt by other people.” He was also drawn to learn more about and understand his father’s, and his own, Jewish ancestry through this loss. The painter spent more than two decades studying and painting the depravity of this time of unimaginable horror. On Syracuse.com, Katherine Rushworth describes Jerome’s monumental five-part painting Entering Darkness (1998-2002). “In this painting, Witkin provides a brutally frank depiction of the Holocaust as detailed by Dachau nurse Dorothy Wahlstrom in a series of letters — the flames from the ovens, medical experiments on prisoners, starvation and torture are all there.” Are their shared and divergent experiences enough to explain the Witkin twins’ twin obsessions with the dark side of the moon? Or were they knit this way, their shared DNA encoded with both brilliance and a need to plunder the darkness and examine it, reveal it, through their creative gifts? Both? Cintra Wilson, writing for Salon Magazine in 2000, said, “True perverts are born, not made…I believe that Joel-Peter Witkin is a true, born pervert.” She means his soul, or aesthetic- she can’t speak to his private sexual predilections, of course. Perhaps, like the Witkins, I am prone to asking unanswerable questions. It seems reasonable to surmise that everything we are and become is both nature and nurture, a dynamic interplay of predisposition and possibility, and the chance roll of the die along the way. And while inquiring minds want to know, to figure out, to understand why someone does what they do, the origin of the Witkins’ muse must remain, to some extent, in the murky mists of mythology. How we each play out our fates and what we are drawn to remains a conundrum, even as we look for explanations. After all, so many people suffer unspeakable agonies and turn to cutesy crochet animals or ascetic meditation practices. They don’t make horror movies. They don’t even watch them. And others emerge radiant from unbroken homes to run church charities but collect serial killer paraphernalia. When Musee Magazine’s Andrea Blanch asked Joel-Peter why he dwells on the morbid, he explained that he doesn’t see his work as morbid at all. “I photograph social outcasts because I want to celebrate their singularity and the strength it takes for them to engage life.” He talked about a man he met and photographed who was profoundly disabled because his mother used a drug called thalidomide for morning sickness during pregnancy. The drug caused extreme deformities and was banned. “He’s born without skin, and without arms or legs. He’s in pain from the moment he was born… I had a friend in L.A. who saw him begging on the sidewalk…I got on a plane to L.A., to convince this man to be photographed. I was very struck and emotionally engaged in photographing him.” Variations of this statement abound in Joel-Peter’s interviews. Reading it brought to mind Jerome’s statement about the homeless people he sketched. “They need to be seen.” Curiously, Jerome has a painting called Looking: Bob Bersani in the Studio, of a different bald figure without arms, using electronic prosthetics. My own belief is that we are each made up of our genetic inheritance and our experiential imprints. And also, something more, something intangible and elusive, beyond our understanding. Fate, faith, destiny. I believe some have assignments or callings. They have specific challenges or blessings or burdens or tasks or purposes. Others are exempt those callings; they have their own. I believe some people simply are, and rhyme or reason for what they have to do is not always apparent. I feel like the Witkins had no choice but to bear unflinching witness and create honest, transgressive art from the mysteries of darkness and show it to the rest of us. ** Time marches on. Today the Witkin twins are 86 years old. Joel-Peter has said, “I will die in the darkroom, printing.” ** An interesting twist of fate: Joel-Peter Witkin’s son, Kersen, is a neoexpressionist painter. And Jerome Witkin’s son, Christian, is highly successful fashion photographer. ** Jerome Witkin created an artwork about twins, too. The Rounds Twins, Before the Camera, depicts two stunning redheaded women in a dressing room, with clothes, wigs, and high heeled shoes scattered around. Like all of his work, it is an arresting image, fraught with tension and disarray. Twins appear again in another of his works, perhaps overlooked in the big picture. Division Street: Mad House, Family of Fallen Man is a heartbreaking painting, depicting a chaotic interior scene with a red faced mother pulling viciously at a young girl’s ponytail, arm raised about to strike. A clown’s head and the statue of a saint look down at them from the wall. Witnessing the mayhem, two boys stand in the shadows, helpless, their backs to the viewer and faces hidden, hands of one boy behind his back. We know the boys in the striped shirts are Jerome and Joel-Peter, because there is a sketch of this scene made after the fact, in 2015, the year after the Witkin’s reunion. Jerome titled it, Joey and Jerry. ** Another photographer I admire very much is John Paul Caponigro. He says his work is about “the nature of perception and the perception of nature.” He has photographed spectacular images of deserts and of Antarctica, and his work has been collected by top tier institutions like The Smithsonian. Caponigro pays homage to photographer Witkin as an influence on his own work and thinking. “Witkin’s work challenges me to look at things I turn away from, and my own denial.” ** Perhaps Caponigro’s insight holds the key to approaching the most difficult, disturbing artwork and the truth they might contain. What if, rather than seeking a way out, we would instead look for a way in? Lorette C. Luzajic   Division Street: Mad House, Family of Fallen Man, by Jerome Witkin (USA) 2015
 The Mermaid's Tale, by Joel-Peter Witkin (USA) 2018  The Crack House, by Jerome Witkin (USA) 1990  Forest, British Columbia, by Emily Carr (Canada) 1931 or 1932 Deep Forest: the Soul of Emily Carr The forest is alive, a living, breathing entity, for Emily Carr. In this painting, Forest, British Columbia, circa 1931, viewed at the Albright Knox Gallery’s exhibition, Northern Lights, in Buffalo, the artist enters the inner sanctum and shows the interior with exquisite reverence. It is often said that the west coast forests of Canada are Carr’s cathedrals. Here, the spirit of the woods is an almost figurative goddess, a presence both tangible and fluid, a hooded, shrouded being of mystery. The curvatures of trunks and boughs wind together, and combined with our profoundly intimate point of entry, creating an almost sexual suggestion, similar to the effect of Georgia O’Keeffe’s extreme close ups of flowers. Canadian artist Emily Carr, who lived from 1871 to 1945, trained in a range of ways, starting at the California School of Design in San Francisco as a teenager after the death of both parents, followed by a couple of years in London, England, time in Paris, and a stint in an English fishing village artist’s colony. But wherever she went to work and study, she longed for the ancient forests of home. The spectacular woodlands of west coast Canada include the coastal forests, old growth forests, dense interior forests, inland temperate rainforests, and the boreal or Taiga forest way up north by the Yukon and Alaska borders, considered today to be the world’s largest intact forest on earth. These multilayered canopies danced with conifers like western hemlock and redcedar, and some of the largest spruce trees in the world, along with balsam poplars, trembling aspens, and ponderosa and lodgepole pines. From coastal muskeg peatlands to alpine tundra, these forests are home to grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, moose, caribou, coyotes, wolves, and eagles. This was Emily’s real classroom, the soul of her work and everything that mattered to her. The natural world and its mysteries and power was as important to Emily as it was to the Indigenous people she revered. She travelled to islands and northern and interior forestlands solo on horseback and boat, and into remote Indian villages, to learn all she could about nature and the first nations people, all of which were, to her, the real world. "The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss," she wrote in her diaries. Emily rejected the traditional, mechanical, representational perspective of art that still dominated instruction in her day, a view that was dissolving as more and more painters were looking to participate in creativity as a divine act driven by expression and witness over technique. She used bold, rhythmic brushstrokes to convey the dynamism and magic of her subject matter. “There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.” Emily’s rejection of tradition in art and in femininity was looked upon with wariness and misgiving, and it cost her clients and pupils. Her respect for Indigenous peoples and their ways was met with suspicion, too, by the society surrounding her. It was exceedingly rare for women to be independent, unmarried, and defiantly travel alone into dangerous realms and into men’s terrain like the frontier. Emily didn’t care: she did what she wanted. And she painted the way she wanted, for her own reasons. She found profound meaning and importance in both her own artistic growth, on her own terms, and in the history of the land and its original peoples. “Whenever I could afford it, I went up north, among the Indians and the woods, and forgot all about everything in the joy of those lonely, wonderful places. I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art; whether anybody liked them or not…. I painted them to please myself in my own way, but I also stuck rigidly to the facts because I knew I was painting history.” Emily’s spirit of independence and refusal to pander to the norms of Victorian society led to a diagnosis of hysteria, and she was placed in an English tuberculosis sanitorium for eighteen months. This strictly regimented institutionalization quashed her painting but only temporarily. She returned to Victoria, B.C. Canada, and to her beloved forests, spending time on the Ucluelet Peninsula with the Nuu-chah-nulth people (often called Nootka), by whom she was given the Indigenous name Klee Wyck. On a trip far up north to Alaska, she made it her life mission to paint the “vanishing totems.” Totem poles are a form of tree tower wood carvings by Pacific Northwest communities such as the Haida, Tligit, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Coast Salish, honouring ancestors, clan lineage, animals, and spiritual beliefs of these peoples. "I glory in our wonderful west and I hope to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Briton's relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past." For Emily, the living past and the secrets of the forests and the original peoples who were its guardians were the essence of her art and soul. She viewed the woods as a deeply spiritual place filled with the truth and the manifestation of God. “Real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.” Lorette C. Luzajic  Beauty Revealed, by Sarah Goodridge (USA) 1828 Beauty Revealed It was a century or so before the suffragettes achieved voting rights for women in Massachusetts, with the landmark ratification of the 19th amendment. And it was half a century before the most famous of Boston painters, John Singer Sargent, (who was not actually from Boston), scandalized the Paris art world with that infamous slip of a strap on Madame Gautreau’s evening gown, immortalizing her as Madame X. The New England region was, of course, steeped in Puritan history, the derogatory term given to the early American colonists seeking freedom from Protestant persecution in Europe. The Puritans had a reputation for being dour, stodgy, and prudish. This was the social context in 1828 which 40-year-old artist and “spinster” Sarah Goodridge painted her naked breasts. The miniature portraitist wore the severe, heavy clothing of women of her time and region, but privately stripped naked and created one of history’s most remarkable paintings, a self-portrait. The tiny work of art, measuring around 3 by 2.5 inches, is a delicate rendering in watercolour on ivory, of Sarah’s own breasts, idealized stark white teacups with rosebud nipples, swaddled by swathes of white fabric. They look remarkably close to the classical Greek and Roman sculptures of Venus and Aphrodite, unblemished but for the personal touch of a pale mole just under her right collarbone. Goodridge specialized in portrait miniatures and had painted various public figures and well to do personalities, operating her own studio in Boston. This particular miniature was one that she presented herself as a gift to Daniel Webster, a politician who had sat for her, after he was widowed. Miniature jewelry portraits on brooches and pendants of a lover’s eye had been recently popular in Europe. And erotic miniature paintings surface from their secret drawers throughout art history, from all cultures, European, Persian, Indian, Mexican, Peruvian, and beyond, some of them extremely explicit. Human desire and beauty is of course an evergreen theme in our story, and miniatures are more suited to discretion and economy than large-scale works. But a woman artist’s own depiction of her assets, deliberated gifted to a man she admired, was something extraordinary. The determination behind such an action, and the confident expression of desire, was unique. It is quite likely that Sarah had remained single on purpose to protect her vocation as an artist. Perhaps at forty, past the years when pregnancy would distract her from her true purpose, she set her sights on a man that she believed saw her as an equal, in hopes of marriage. Perhaps the token was purely unabashed eroticism: a sext, if you will, a secret, an invitation. In any event, Webster remarried someone else, a woman of more means, some said. Whether he otherwise responded to her call is uncertain. He wrote over forty letters to Sarah and posed for her again, and Sarah visited him in Washington, DC. Whether she simply accepted his choices and gladly resumed their friendship, or if they were also lovers, is a matter of speculation. We all have this story, don’t we, an occasion where we chanced revelation, bared our breasts or our teeth or our soul. The risk of such a situation is always uncertain, sometimes leading to what we wanted and sometimes leading to something unexpected, or to nothing at all. Risk happens, and the various outcomes shape us, as do our personal choices. Most of us don’t have writers and museum folk prying in to our private text messages or rendezvous. We do not know exactly what transpired in the hearts or loins of Sarah or Daniel after the gift of this Beauty Revealed. But we do know this: now part of the permanent collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Webster kept the gift until the day he died, the ivory gently worn from his touch. Lorette C. Luzajic  Mingling among my books are an assortment of artifacts, curiosities, and novelties; I have always prized trinkets of art and history and nostalgia. Perched in my art book library: a cheap made-in-China Jeff Koons balloon dog knock off, a three-footed polka dot pottery bowl made by a dear friend, and my Vincent Price action figurine. Vincent nests atop a row of eclectic critical art writings: Robert Hughes, Robert Motherwell, Frank O’Hara. He is the guardian or perhaps the gargoyle of this treasure chest of the wonders of human creativity. Vincent Price is best known as a charismatic, handsome actor in dozens of horror films spanning the ‘30s through early ‘90s. His urbane, campy sophistication and the mellifluous, velvet, baritone qualities of his vocal delivery elevated the lowliest movies of the genre into artful dramas. Classic performances include House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and House of Wax. My own introduction to Price was his iconic narration of Rod Temperton’s rap in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” a genius performance that helped catapult Jackson’s album to become the world’s bestselling record of all time.
Like everyone else, I enjoyed Price’s witty, dramatic flare in fun films over the years. But in 2022, I was commissioned to create a small collage tribute to the Crown Prince of Terror. And that’s when I fell head over heels. Vincent’s voice, face, and genius for menace could make anyone swoon, but discovering his passion for art history and work to democratize access and exposure to that knowledge is what really sent shivers down my spine. When working on themed artworks, I like to immerse myself in my subject matter and learn as much as I can about the topic at hand. So I danced to “Thriller” in my library and spent a few cozy nights curled up with Vince and various bloodcurdling film flashbacks. But diving into some behind-the-scenes research, I found what was, for me, pure gold: not just a pretty face, Vincent’s first passion was art, and before he started acting, he studied for a degree in art history, from Yale, no less.  Vincent Price, commissioned mixed media artwork, Lorette C. Luzajic 2022 Vincent Price was born in St Louis, Missouri, with English and Welsh ancestry. His family was wealthy with a candy empire and a booming tooth powder company, and so he was fortunately able to afford prestigious higher education. But as it turned out, his access to that knowledge benefited the rest of us. Price developed an interest in theatre after graduation, even as he started working on his masters in art history at the Courtauld Institute, quickly securing acting roles at the Gate Theatre in London. With his stately intelligence and quick wit, his stage presence was formidable, and he landed a variety of roles, moving into character acting for films. His first horror movie was Boris Karloff’s Tower of London. The IMDb puts him in 190 films, from minor cameos to starring roles, and 69 television shows. Vincent’s acting work spanned sixty years from 1930 to 1990. With his good looks, cultured demeanor, and incisive wit, he was effortlessly popular with directors and a heart throb for the ladies…and for men. Vincent was married three times for ten plus years each, but it was an open secret that he was also gay, something his daughter confirmed posthumously. Throughout his entire career as an actor, Vincent had two other passions. One was cooking. Vincent was a formidable gourmet and he loved to dine on his world travels and share his discoveries and experiences with others, inviting the masses to the pleasures of world cuisine. With his second wife, Mary, he wrote a 500 page cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes, aimed at showing people how they could create their own “dastardly delights” and "travel around the world using your cooker." He even had a TV cooking series for budget gourmet, Cooking Price-Wise. His other passion was the one that preceded his involvement in theatre and film. Art was Vincent’s first love, his foundational interest, and perhaps even his raison d’etre. Price was an avid art collector, growing his collection with his film earnings. He was interested in an eclectic range of visual culture, from Rembrandt to Pollock. Vincent’s first acquisition was a Rembrandt drawing that he purchased on a payment plan with his own allowance when he was a young boy. He was especially interested in pre-Columbian art and artifacts and amassed hundreds of examples over the years. Price saw his position of privilege as an opportunity to democratize art and become a kind of art activist or advocate. He believed that art was not just for wealthy or elite people, but was something that everyone should experience and own. This conviction is what drove the extensive work he did to bring art education out of the scholarly and museum realms and encourage a wider populace to look, learn, and collect. “The indoctrination of art at Yale and the Courtauld really set my life’s pattern,” he said in a 1992 interview, “And I’ve probably kept up more study in the history of art than most people who are in it professionally. Because I’m not a professional at it. I’m an amateur — in the French sense of the word, a lover.”  Early in his acting career, Price saw the potential of well-paid, idolized Hollywood actors to contribute to a thriving marketplace for artists. In 1943, he opened a small gallery in Beverly Hills- The Little Gallery- showing his own collection as well as emphasizing little-known local talents to his movie friends. “Our openings consisted of anywhere from 50 to 400 people cammed into our little room, drinking the strongest, cheapest vodka martinis we could make. Everyone came…” Vincent wrote in his memoirs. “…Tallulah Bankhead, Fanny Brice, Katharine Hepburn, and other assorted actors, writers, directors, and just people.” Around 1950, Vincent and Mary visited a small college art gallery in Los Angeles. He saw the need to expose young people to art and donated ninety works from his personal repertory of paintings, drawings, and artifacts, establishing the first teaching collection at a community college. The East Los Angeles Junior College renamed themselves the Vincent Price Art Museum, eventually holding over 2000 works donated from the actor’s private collection. The museum is still active today, continuing Vincent’s legacy and his desire to expand access to art, broaden community participation and representation, and remedy historical erasures and omissions in the story art. In 1959, Vincent wrote his memoirs, I Like What I Know: a Visual Autobiography. The book tells the story of Vincent Price through his love of art, his childhood introduction to museums, and his world travels to view art everywhere. This rollicking adventure from one artwork to another is at once erudite and down-to-earth, extolling the magic to be found in diverse works like the Arnolfini Portrait, Modigliani, Oaxacan pottery, Titian, Veronese, Yoruba sculpture, and much more.  Double Day and Company, 1959 In 1962, Price established a monumental partnership with Sears to bring original art into everyday homes. He was given carte blanche to curate an ongoing collection of affordable works for the general public. Price travelled the globe, choosing works from historical and modern artists from a wide array of cultures to be sold through Sears. It was a major project that spanned nine years and brought original works into contemporary households. All in all, fifty thousand originals were sold through the initiative, empowering people from all walks to collect art. Prices ranged from $10 to $3000, with payment plans starting at $5 per month. Artworks were advertised widely and shown in Sears catalogues, with travelling exhibitions and displays in Sears retail stores. Price commissioned artists like Salvador Dali and Andrew Wyeth to create works specifically for the collection, and the partnership offered works by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Peter Paul Rubens, James McNeill Whistler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many more. Perhaps due to the typically corny aesthetic of ‘60s advertisements, the project was later criticized as a corporate cash grab. But Price’s visionary work with Sears afforded thousands of people the opportunity to experience art and empowered them to collect originals through reasonable pricing and payment plans, as well as giving thousands of artists paying work and exposure.
 In 1972, encouraging interest in American art history, Price wrote the book, The Vincent Price Treasury of American Art,published by the Country Beautiful Corporation. Here, Price brought his expertise and insights to the expansion of general knowledge for Americans on their own legacy of visual art, with brief essays and colour plates on Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Charles Sheeler, Elihu Vedder, Mary Cassatt, Horace Pippin, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and beyond. He referred to his book in his foreword as a “biography of America” and suggested that readers visit the public galleries where the works resided to experience the pieces firsthand, saying, “the real thing will always come as a surprise.” In each short essay, Price highlighted interesting biographical snippets of the artist and background on the specific painting shown, with his trademark clever and conversational style.
Throughout these years, Price also served fourteen years on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, for the advancement of Native American artists. He collected Native American art and included essays on indigenous artists in his American art book. He was invested in the promotion and visibility of contemporary Indigenous artists. He used his celebrity to bring attention to Native American artists like Oscar Howe and Fritz Scholder. He also established the first creative writing awards for Indigenous students at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, and he read their poetry on the Johnny Carson Show. He helped Indigenous artists discover economic opportunities and ways to sell their work. Another important art advisory role for Vincent was serving the White House Commission of Fine Arts by invitation from Jackie Kennedy! With the objective of making the White House a centre for American art, Vincent’s expertise and flare were invaluable. He gifted President Kennedy an Albert Bierstadt painting. Price never stopped evangelism for his cause. Somehow between a prolific schedule of filming, writing, and haunting, he found the time to deliver over 400 lectures to different colleges and universities on art history, igniting passion for visual art in countless inquiring minds. He also recorded a series of narrated tours of museum collections, called the Colorslide Tours, for the Columbia Records Club, taking people on tours of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Prado, and the Louvre. And he wrote a syndicated art column for the Chicago Tribune-New York News, published in the Washington Post, Allentown Morning Call, and numerous other papers throughout the States. Once again, Price’s objective was to empower people to look, explore, and learn more about visual art, rejecting scholarly elitism in favour of making his favourite subject accessible to everyone. In a 1985 interview for the Clockwatch Review, Price summed up his passion for James Plath: “Art lifts the spirit. It edifies. For me, it’s the great escape!” In a 1987 article for the Washington Post, Price wrote, “To my mind, museums do as much good as hospitals.” If Vincent is most remembered for his exquisitely sinister and sardonic performances in dramatic horror cinema, it is his forgotten advocacy work that has changed the world. “Art belongs to everyone,” he said often, and his efforts to democratize art and empower people to engage deeply with visual art profoundly impacted his audiences of millions to become passionate, knowledgeable participants in the art of looking, in museum-going, and in collecting. The extraordinary popularity of art among people of all walks of life in North American life today is due in part to Price’s tireless cheerleading and promotion. He inspired countless fans to explore, understand, and discover visual art from the past and present. He championed both historic and modern artwork, as well as showing a wide audience what it means to appreciate creativity from many cultures. “One thing is certain,” Vincent wrote in his autobiography. “The arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge…If at times I’ve been demanding…that you like this or that because I do…it’s because I believe this is a way to start seeing something you perhaps have missed…I hope that my life’s devotion to seeing may open a few eyes that have been shut by fear of seeing something new…Art is only another person’s way of seeing…it is, or can be, a way of seeing through another’s eyes the wonderful world of reality or imagination…of truth or fiction…of actuality or abstraction. The human mind and the human spirit are not, and never have been, one sided.” Vincent’s evangelical zeal for art is a mirror of my own. You have often heard me say that “art is everything” and my work to promote ekphrastic literature is partly driven by my conviction that writing is thinking, and that writing about art is an incredibly intimate way to look closer and engage deeply with images. For me, the power of images to connect us with other individuals and other cultures, and with our very soul, is unparalleled. Nestled among my library of enchanted pictures, the Vincent doll is a droll reminder of the everyday magic available to all of us through human creativity. “Life is short and art is long,” Vincent wrote. “A man’s art, a civilization’s art, are its immortality.” Lorette C. Luzajic   Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez (Spain) 1656 Old Woman Poaching Eggs Las Meninas is one of those paintings that everyone who has ever opened their eyes has seen. If not in the flesh at the Prado, its home since the grand museum’s opening in 1819, then in textbooks and on postcards and mousepads and memes. Diego Velazquez’s 1656 masterpiece is widely considered one of the most important paintings in art history. Baroque era artist Luca Giorgano said it represents the “theology of painting.” Picasso painted 58 versions of his fellow Spaniard’s magnum opus. The massive canvas lets you walk right into the artist’s studio, and there he is, painting the picture before you, a shadowy, angled affair that draws the eye right to its centrepiece, King Philip the IV’s infanta daughter and her entourage, including her beloved bodyguard, a mastiff, and an attendant with dwarfism. By the time he created his masterpiece, Diego Velazquez was a few years shy of the finish line, after a long and illustrious career as court painter to the King of Spain. Las Meninas was his opus work. Before the Prado, it hung in the palace, where Diego lived and worked on site.  Old Woman Poaching Eggs, by Diego Velazquez (Spain) 1618 Nice work if you can get it. Few painters in history lived in palaces with guaranteed paycheques. And this was the Spanish Golden Age, no less. It was a rare life of privilege, a position deserved for Velazquez talent and determination. But perhaps I’m not the only one who laments a gift that seems squandered on dreary portraits of the court, of this count and that, for the Royal Collection? Velazquez works are pure mastery of technique. But what else? If Las Meninas is full of provocation, curiosity, complexity and innovation, many others are stalwart, standard, even dull portraiture. If I should feel awe or admiration looking at Pope Innocent X or another portrait of a court lady, I don’t. I feel nothing. Velazquez used tenebrism, a word from the Italian, tenebroso, which means “dark, murky, gloomy.” Artists like Velazquez and Caravaggio worked with tenebroso and chiaroscuro, painting inside this drama of dark and light for enigmatic effects and strong contrasts. Velazquez prepared his canvases with a deep ruddy brown and worked directly from there, seldom using separate drawings and sketches. But what do we feel of that moody approach? Where is the immediacy and the intimacy? Perhaps what could have been is best glimpsed in his early painting, Old Woman Poaching Eggs (housed today at the National Galleries of Scotland.) Diego was around eighteen or nineteen when he created this exceptional artwork, a bodegon painting featuring a haunted old woman making eggs for a young man. Before Velazquez moved to the royal palace of Madrid, he was a young man of modest background in Seville. He began a six-year apprenticeship with Francisco Pacheco at the tender age of ten, training rigorously in the techniques of art like proportion and perspective. Pacheco literally wrote the textbook of the era with The Art of Painting, a posthumous treatise on technical and thematic prowess for Christian painters that remains a classic in Spanish. As with Italy especially and European art history in general, art was a rich tradition of Catholicism, offering an array of dramatic themes, an integral part of the spiritual and community life of the Spanish. Diego of course painted religious works as had his teacher and all of his predecessors and peers. But paintings of everyday objects and scenes rather than religious or mythological stories were becoming widespread around this time, and Diego’s practice included pictures of citizens at the table, bread, leeks, bottles, and eggs. Paintings of peasants and merchants and foodstuffs came to be known as bodegon paintings (sometimes called tavern paintings) in the Spanish tradition, which were still life paintings of culinary objects and food, often featuring people and scenarios as well. Still life and genre paintings were historically on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy of art. Painting peasants in everyday life, or objects without people, did not match the lofty ideals of myth and meaning in religious, royal, and historical narrative painting. But even so, they were exceptionally popular and beloved. Art was an integral part of spiritual and community life, a staple of the Catholic churches. But after that, many more people visited taverns than royal corridors or the hallowed halls of academia. Bodegones showed off the prowess of the artists, enticing those with some means to commission a painting- look at the details here, the transparency of the glass carafe of dark wine, the metallic glint of the brass mortar and pestle, the glaze inside the cazuela. And they spoke to the people with representation of familiar objects and events, reflecting their world. Diego’s egg painting is extraordinary. Eggs in art history held layers of symbolism from ancient times, including essential nourishment, life itself, and regeneration and renewal. The artist contrasts the new potential of life in the eggs and the youth and the wine with the elderly woman near the closing of her chapter. Velazquez honours her with a dignified posture, elevating her life as a subject worthy of attention. Cooking and sharing food is exalted. The depicted characters could be our own family. The dignity afforded here to peasants turns up again later during Diego’s time in court, when he gives humanity and depth to the faces of people with differences and disabilities, such as his portrayal of a court jester, Portrait of Sebastián de Morra. The Spanish court had the regrettable practice of employing people with dwarfism or deformities in a similar spirit to their later employment in circuses and zoos. Under Diego’s brush, however, they were fully human. The tenebrism that defines much of Diego’s work is already present in Old Woman Poaching Eggs, but here, the shadows are alive, flickering with intrigue and possibility and bustle. The painting balances mastery and mystery, while offering common, everyday people a place at the table. Lorette C. Luzajic  Las Meninas, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1957  The Exhibition at Galería de Arte Mexicano, 1940 “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world," said Andre Breton once. Anyone who has set foot in this strange and wonderful land of cacti and volcanoes, of luchador and matadors, of masks and micheladas, fierce stone gods, dancing calavera skeletons, cemeteries strewn with bones, nuns, and churches teeming with colourful and gory polychrome, has experienced this firsthand. “Mexico, half-awake of its mythological past keeps evolving under the protection of Xochipilli, God of the flowers and lyric poetry, and Coatlicue, Goddess of the Earth and of the violent death… This power of conciliation of life and death is without a doubt the principal attractive that Mexico offers. This keeps an open record of endless sensations, from the most benign to the most insidious,” Breton famously wrote. The French artist and writer was the founder of the surrealist movement, but on a visit to Mexico in 1938, he saw that surrealism was much older and deeper than he had ever imagined, thriving naturally outside of the confines of his own definitions. He was not the only European surrealist to have this jarring experience. Salvador Dali, the great genius of surrealist painting, visited only once. "Under no circumstances will I return to Mexico, as I cannot stand being in a country that is more surreal than my paintings." During his visit, Breton struck up a friendship with the most important artist in Mexico, Diego Rivera, and therefore, also, with Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Diego was of course the master muralist painter, but he dabbled constantly with new influences, pumping out a few cubist works after his time in Paris and a visit to Picasso’s studio, and now painting some winding mandrake roots and adding a spider web and skull to a portrait, expecting centre stage for Breton’s planned exhibition of surrealist art in his city at the Galería de Arte Mexicano.  Symbolic Landscape, by Diego Rivera (Mexico) 1940 Far more important to Breton’s Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo in Mexico City in 1940, organized along with Wolfgang Paalen and César Moro, was the contribution of Frida Kahlo. Breton was very interested in Frida’s work, describing it as “a ribbon around a bomb.” He also arranged her Paris debut the year before the big Mexican show. Kahlo rejected the label of surrealist artist. “I never knew I was a Surrealist until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was,” she said. In a letter to Mexican-Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was one of her lovers, she said, “They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Nonetheless, she busied herself with the creation of two important paintings for the exhibition, which would feature work by major artists like Dali (The Persistence of Memory, no less), Rene Magritte (the seminal Treachery of Images painting), Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, and May Ray, and cement Mexico as a recognized hub of surreal art. Frida seldom painted large-scale works, possibly because her intermittent health and mobility issues meant she often worked from her bed or a wheelchair. But both of the paintings in the show were uncharacteristically massive. Clearly she was savvy about positioning herself confidently and memorably in a way that would make an impact next to the mostly-male and European bigwigs of the exhibition, despite her disdain for the surrealist label, and for the surrealists, too. (In that letter to Nickolas, Frida continued, “They sit for hours in the cafés warming their precious behinds… thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true… You don’t have even the slightest idea of what kind of old cockroach Breton is, along with almost all those in the Surrealists group.”)  The Two Fridas, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1939 The first of Fridas paintings created for the exhibition would become her most famous piece. I was lucky enough to see The Two Fridas at its home in the Museo de Arte Moderne in Mexico City. The painting was a larger-than-life double self-portrait of twin Fridas sitting with her upright trademark form, holding hands, against a roiling dark and cloudy sky. Frida took inspiration from a work she saw at the Louvre in Paris that same year, The Two Sisters, 1843, by Théodore Chassériau. Both Fridas have their anatomical hearts exposed for all to see. One Frida is dressed in white, holding surgical forceps to try to stop her own bleeding. The other is dressed in a traditional Mexican blouse and skirt, and holding a tiny photograph of Diego. The timing of the exhibition overlapped for Frida and Diego with a time of great personal turmoil. Their marriage was on the rocks in 1938, following his affair with her sister and Frida’s affair with Leon Trotsky. They divorced in 1939, but it didn’t stick, and they married again December of 1940, later in the same year as Breton’s show. The Two Fridas boldly addressed the artist’s inner turmoil and how love and pain, and Diego himself, were so integral to her identity.  But it is the second painting, The Wounded Table, or La Mesa Herida, a painting few today have heard of and none or few living people have seen, that is arguably the most important work of Frida’s career. The painting showed at a handful of world exhibitions, and was last seen en route to Russia as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union. It was politely rejected and ostensibly shipped to a museum in Poland for a show. The trail stops there. Dealers and scholars have been looking for the painting ever since, and imposters have been trying to sell fake copies on the black market, but the whereabouts of the artwork remain to this day unknown. Frida probably created The Wounded Table, a sprawling, eight foot wide oil painting, with the intention that it would be the wow centrepiece of the exhibition among giants like Dali and Picasso and her ex-husband and again fiancé, Diego. The impressive work was not simply grand in size, but in complexity, theme, and skill. In The Wounded Table, we see Frida’s trademark weaving together of subjects of self-portraiture and Mexican folklore and mythology. Frida unabashed declaration against surrealism was, “I painted my own reality.” In this remarkable depiction of that reality, then, she seats herself audaciously and quite literally at the head of the table of martyrdom, where Christ sat at the last supper, with her wounds on display for all to see.  Replica of The Wounded Table, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940 To the profoundly Catholic society of Mexico, this painting would have been deeply sacrilegious. Yet Frida often incorporated Catholic-tinged images, along with older and indigenous Mexican motifs and beliefs, into her artwork. Frida and Diego were both well-known as Marxist atheists who rejected the colonial institution of the Catholic church, but they were both sympathetic to the vast array of folkloric and religious imagery that meant a great deal to the Mexican masses. They considered Catholicism problematic, but also understood the power of its imagery as a visual language that meant a great deal to Mexicans. They collected and promoted pre-Columbian art and artifacts, much of it used as part of Breton’s exhibition on surrealism, and they also collected exvoto paintings, popular works of devotion by the people that were left in churches and at shrines in gratitude to saints. These folk paintings were an essential influence of Kahlo’s work and style. Frida could paint as intricately and realistically as Diego, but the vast majority of her works have a flat, almost-cartoonish affect to them, an aesthetic that is often called “primitive” that was a direct style choice in homage to this folk art tradition. Very early on in her trajectory as an artist, Frida had come across an exvoto that depicted a scene similar to her experience in a trolley accident. She was still a teenager, recently enrolled in medical school, when she was impaled by a steel rod during a streetcar crash, a kind of crucifixion that changed her destiny completely. The accident that injured her back and speared her uterus was the source of her lifelong debilitating pain and struggle with her legs and spine, and it robbed her of her hopes of having children. Frida altered the folk painting to make it personal, including adding her infamous bushy unibrow. In that year that she was bedridden in a body cast, she entertained herself by painting, ultimately taking her work to show to Diego Rivera. And the rest is history.  There was only one other known Last Supper painting by a female artist before the time of The Wounded Table, an extraordinary 25-foot wide work by a self-taught painter and Italian nun, Sister Plautilla Nelli, completed in 1568. But it was also lost, rotting away in a forgotten storage, until its recovery and restoration in the 1990s, so Frida, along with the rest of the world, was unaware of its existence. From this perspective, this makes Frida the first known female painter to use this religious motif to fuel her art, and the first to give women a place at the table. There would be numerous female and feminist renditions later on. Irish painter Nora Kelly recreated the classic scene by adding women as present at the supper. Mary Beth Edelson famously collaged the work from a multitude of underrated women artists. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Table installation was much different but referenced the historic theme in its conception. There are just a few photos of Frida’s painting in existence, and from these black and white pictures, reproductions have been made, with and without colour. She holds her head defiantly, sitting straight-backed as always, wearing a traditional Tehuana dress. Under the dress, her dripping blood seeps into the floorboards. The table itself has human legs and feet. At either side of the table are two children to her right, and a baby deer to her left. Frida loved her pet animals, including a deer named Gambizo. She also painted herself later as The Wounded Deer, summoning St. Sebastian with a body pierced by arrows and her own face on the deer. The children shown in The Wounded Table are her niece and nephew, the offspring of her sister Cristina, whom she loved, but by whom she was betrayed in the recent affair with Diego. Perhaps these children represent an even deeper wound than that betrayal: the pain of her own inability to have children. Frida desperately wanted to have Diego’s children, and by this time had already had three miscarriages or medical terminations because of the internal damage from the trolley crash. The strange figures that flank her blend Mexican folklore with her own mythology. The large paper mache figure of Judas towers over her the way Diego does, in every way, physically and symbolically. The Judas motif figures into Mexican folk practices, with annual burning rituals of Judas effigies. Frida is enmeshed with this figure of betrayal, enveloped and unable to escape him. There is an odd Nayarit figurine beside her too, a pre-Columbian sculpture collected by the artist couple. The skeleton we see is a popular Mexican motif. In this case, there is a hole in its pelvis exactly where Frida was impaled. Its foot is also amputated, precisely where Frida herself had several toes removed. The face of the skeleton is not the same as the cartoonish calavera emblems seen everywhere. Rather, she resembles Mictlancíhuatl, the Aztec Goddess of the Dead who died herself in childbirth. These characters, Judas, the skeleton, the Nayarit statue, and Frida, all appear in her work from the previous year, Four Inhabitants of Mexico, showing that their representation, herself included, mean Mexicanidad to her. The Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund, Baden-Baden, of Germany, which displays a replica of The Wounded Table, interprets this work parallel to all of her works: the profoundly personal is blended with Mexicanidad. Frida and Diego were both committed to this idea, that the Mexican identity of the people was the essence of their liberation and salvation, the truth that would set them free. The loss of aspects of Mexicanidad was the symbol of their dissolution and oppression. It's a powerful, magnificent painting. Frida wrote to Nickolas in late 1939 to say she was “working like hell” to have it ready for the big exhibition. The work was shown a few times and then in 1943, Frida decided she would donate it to the Soviet Union. This was a gesture of goodwill: Frida and Diego were staunch Marxists, but they had been supporters of anti-Stalinist deserter Leon Trotsky, harbouring him and his wife in the Casa Azul. While the couple stayed with them, Frida had a passionate affair with Trotsky, possibly as revenge for Diego sleeping with her sister Cristina. (Trotsky was assassinated several months after the surrealist exhibition.) Frida and Diego wanted to assert their commitment to communism in the aftermath of these complications. While Russia accepted the painting, they didn’t exhibit it. “It is necessary to bear in mind that we are interested in the works of the realist movement,” a Soviet official wrote in 1948. Kahlo’s work was “alien to the principles of Soviet Realist art…the possibility of displaying such artworks in the Soviet Union is excluded.” The painting was sent to be stored at the Pushkin Museum. Rivera convinced the Soviets to show the painting in an exhibition in Warsaw, Poland, the year after Frida’s death in 1947. This was the last time that the work was seen. Experts say it is unlikely it was returned to Russia, which didn’t really want it. But where it ended up is mystery. In 2020, a Spanish art dealer claimed he was in communication with an anonymous source in possession of the lost masterpiece. They were asking $45 million for the work, stating that the buyer could choose to work with historians to validate its origins after purchase. But art experts expressed concern about the painting’s substrate, suggesting that the original had been painted on wood panels, not canvas. The dealer maintains his conviction of its authenticity, saying that Frida used wood panels only for small paintings, and for her larger works, canvas. Canvas can be removed from its stretchers and more easily shipped to international destinations for display. It is true that the vast majority of her works were on canvas, and relatively few on wood. The Two Fridas, which was also painted for the surrealist exhibition, was on canvas. The Soviets dismissed Frida’s painting as, "Bourgeois, formalist and decadent." This leaves me scratching my head, wondering if I quite understand the meaning of these words correctly or need to revisit my definitions. Unconcerned with, or oblivious to, Frida’s feelings towards him, Breton himself stated that her work was “pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of Surrealism.” The Wounded Table went on to exhibition at the Palace des Bellas Artes, a prestigious and, yes, bourgeois museum in Mexico City. Then it was sent to Russia, and on to Poland, and from there the trail goes cold. It might be said that Frida’s reality personified surrealism: the dominant voice inside us that is the unconscious, the one that ultimately speaks louder than the mundane and real. The Wounded Table is a self-portrait, after all. And Mexicanidad is, arguably, itself, surreal: ancient, mythic, contradictory, colourful, and theatrical, rippling with ancient spirits and the everlasting battle between the worlds of beauty and terror, between life and death. Lorette C. Luzaic   The Last Supper, by Plautilla Nelli (Italy) 1560s |
Lorette C. LuzajicLooking at art and learning about it has been my lifelong passion, and it fuels everything I do: art creation, publishing, writing, and teaching. Visit this blog for occasional essays and musings on visual art. Categories
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