 Photos by Lorette C. Luzajic. The Second Coming House Last summer I travelled from the town I was born, Niagara Falls, Ontario, an hour from my home in Toronto, across the river into Niagara Falls, New York. I went to visit an old friend, but the trip was also a pilgrimage to a spectacular visionary shrine on Ontario Street. It was a perfect summer day, with clear blue skies, and I stood dazzled before the creation of Prophet Isaiah Robertson. "When God had me to dig up all the ground, people thought I was crazy," the Prophet told the Buffalo News back in 2006. "When Noah started to build the ark, praise God, on dry land and told them it's going to rain, they thought he was crazy also." But dig up the yard he did, and in the six foot deep hole in front of the humble house at 1308 Ontario Street in Niagara Falls, USA, Robertson erected a 25 foot cross. It was a cross like no one had ever seen before, despite two millennia of artist-inspired crosses. This cross was downright psychedelic, a kaleidoscopic array of brightly painted oak wood cutouts, concentric circles and a constellation of pointed stars. It was the first and central artwork of The Second Coming House, which over time, bloomed with the same dizzying array of exploding shapes, meticulously arranged in stunning geometric patterns. The whole yard was covered, and every inch of the home’s façade, front, sides, and back, as well as the inside of the dwelling. Thousands of wood cutouts form intricate mosaic arrangements, each piece painstakingly painted in red, white, purple, blue, yellow, turquoise, and green. The colours represent the rainbow covenant God made with Noah, that He would never again destroy the world with a flood. It was a covenant Robertson saw affirmed every day, in the perpetual rainbows hovering over the Niagara Falls, the trilogy of water falls separating Canada from the United States. Additionally, every single motif has rich symbolic meaning for Robertson: a six-pointed star, for example, represents the Jewish people; a twelve-pointed star represents the twelve tribes of Israel; an eight-pointed star represents Jesus; three circles represent the Trinity, and so on. There is nothing else that compares, for frame of reference. With some imagination, the bright, opaque colours hint at Caribbean arts. The shape-work bears some resemblance to the detailed folk art patterns of the Pennsylvania Dutch, German immigrants to the neighbouring state. The stylized geometric ornaments are commonly seen as “hex signs” on barns and on quilts. The esoteric symbolism behind the decorative folk traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch (which is really “Pennsylvania Deutsch,” and “Deutsch” means “German”) is convoluted through time, with a blend of ancient agricultural and cosmological interpretations, and Biblical meanings that parallel Robertson’s symbology. The work of contemporary Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes also shares an aesthetic kinship to Robertson’s. Her vivid palette and kaleidoscopic optics of overlapping circles and shapes come to mind, but it is not likely that either artist were aware of each other’s work. Robertson used no blueprints or plans. Instead, he said, he followed directions straight from the voice of God, the master artist and master carpenter, maker of all things. He placed every piece where God told him to put it. “This is not the work of man,” the Prophet told his friend, photographer Fred Scruton. “No man could be capable of this.” Robertson was born in Jamaica. Just before his mother’s untimely death when he was twelve years old, she received a vision that God had special plans for her son. He decided to become a carpenter because that was the profession of his Saviour, Jesus Christ. He took some work making coffins, and then built a house with no training in carpentry. In his early twenties, he moved to Canada and worked in construction. When he learned of the lower prices for homes “across the ditch” in Niagara Falls, New York, he moved there with the intention of renovating and reselling homes. It was while doing some repairs with sheet rock for the Mount Erie Baptist Church that he first received instructions from on high, telling him to use oak instead. He used his own money to supply the oak, and inside the patterns of the wood grain, he found Biblical messages from God on how to proceed. Following this calling, Robertson received another prophecy, and began work on his own house, transforming it into a riot of sacred symbolism and joyful rainbows. He worked for ten years on the house, and believed the second coming of Christ would take place in 2014. Every soul, living or past, would see his tribute to God’s will on Judgement Day. The year of Isaiah’s prediction came and went. In 2020, he had a stroke and passed on into glory. The Kohler foundation began the work of preservation to keep the cultural treasure standing in perpetuity, like the promise rainbow it represents. Lorette C. Luzajic     A vintage poster for Pennsylvania Dutch barn signs.
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 The Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis (England) 1856 The Marvelous Boy: the Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis Death, in purple and auburn. Lying supine in satin and fading sunlight, his hand is poised nonchalantly, teasing his puffy shirt ever so slightly away from his hairless chest. His body is a perfect, graceful arc, and his face is a pale sad moon between the sartorial lavender and the natural halo of fiery red hair. What are we looking at? Here lies Thomas Chatterton, in his pauper’s attic garret, anonymous for now, his genius unrecognized. Around him are shards of words, torn up scraps of poetry, lost forever. The painting is The Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis, depicting the frail puer as a martyr. Cause of death, confirmed by inquest: suicide by arsenic at the tender age of seventeen. Thomas Chatterton is a myth. Perhaps he was the first, the very prototype of the brilliant, tortured, impoverished, isolated ingenue. The starving artist. There were others before him, yes, but seen this way- romanticized- only in retrospect. The young poet in the painting was the catalyst who ushered Romanticism into being. Romanticism, of course, was the late 18th century movement with a focus on emotion over reason, awe over the power of nature, individualism, and a fascination with the mystery and darkness of the Gothic. Lord George Gordon Byron saw in Chatterton his soul mate, another misunderstood maestro of poetry. William Wordsworth referenced him in his 1802 poem, “Resolution and Independence,” as “the marvellous Boy/ The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride.” Percy Byshe Shelley’s 1821 pastoral elegy, “Adonai,” mourning John Keats, likened Keats to Chatterton, who died young before him. And John Keats’ 1818 “Endymion” was dedicated to Chatterton, and famously begins, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." Coleridge started things off in 1790 with a monody for the fallen poet. “When Want and cold Neglect had chill'd thy soul…” The pre-Raphaelite painters were, in turn, heavily influenced by Romanticism, especially their emphasis on beauty, tragedy, and imagination. Henry Wallis was respected for his travels researching antiquities like medieval tiles and ancient pottery, and he published numerous illustrated volumes on the subject. But it is this iconic painting that gave him immortality. Depicting the vulnerable young poet on his deathbed in the room he rented cheaply from Mrs. Angel of Gray’s Inn, a brothel, he used purple velvet to anoint the tragic orphan to royal status. The open window behind him contrasts the squalor and symbolic prison of the poet’s poverty and pain with the world outside, and represents the freedom he has finally found, the escape or flight of his soul. Clenched in his dead hand and scattered in the foreground are torn up papers, showing us the tatters of his rejected poems. The message is clear: the poet died for his art. The painting was a triumph for Wallis. It was his first exhibited work and his most successful. He painted it several times over. Whenever the need for money arose, Wallis created another Chatterton. The artwork is layered with tragedy, irony, and scandal. Wallis’s model was his friend George Meredith, a poet influenced by Keats, and a novelist. Meredith’s beautiful wife left him to run off with Wallis, with whom she had a child. Though he posed as the quintessential failed poet, he went on to write several bestselling novels and take seven nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature. The poet in the painting was declared, in his earliest days, an imbecile. He never knew his namesake, because his father died a few months before he was born. Prone to daydreaming, crying jags, and long silent spells, he was assumed to be a simpleton. Then, he surprised everyone when, barely out of nappies, he taught himself to read from a Bible and a trove of medieval illuminated papers stored in St. Mary Redcliffe’s, the Gothic church he liked to play in. Thomas lived for many of his childhood years in a children’s hospital, where in every spare moment he devoured books of heraldry, history, theology, and poetry, work by Chaucer and Spencer, John Weever and William Dugdale. By the age of eight he spent full days at work writing. By age eleven, he was writing for the Bristol Journal, and shortly after, for Middlesex Journal and Town and Country Magazine. He sought patronage for his work with limited success, and did administrative writing for a paltry paycheque. Although he was able to avoid the workhouses through his office jobs, he lived in abysmal poverty. He wrote 1200 poems before declaring himself a rejected failure, and swallowing the arsenic in 1770. Chatterton’s verse followed in the tradition of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, with flawless rhyme and metre atop a satirical undercurrent. They ponder history, spirituality, and man’s constant wrestling with death and meaning. But he was best known for perpetrating a brilliant literary hoax. Unable to find the acclaim he yearned for with his own poetry, his imagination took him back into the dusty mysteries of time of the cathedral he’d been reading in for all of his short life. There were old oak chests in the muniment rooms there, and Thomas helped himself to the forgotten and abandoned leftovers of parchment and vellum dating back to the 1400s. These ancient manuscripts had long been picked over: those deemed valuable removed and filed in archives, and others taken and used be congregants, including his father, to wrap the beloved books in their own libraries. Thomas loved the archaic writing on these documents, and began composing poetry in a medieval script and voice. AN EXCELENTE BALADE OF CHARITIE: Thomas Rowley,1464 Liste! now the thunder's rattling clymmynge sound Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs, Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown'd, Still on the gallard ere of terroure hanges; The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges; Again the levynne and the thunder poures, And the full cloudes are braste attenes in stonen showers. These were persona poems, and the persona was Thomas’s own invention, a 15th century poet-priest named Thomas Rowley. Chatterton’s extensive knowledge of history and theology and his poetic mastery made the work itself convincing, and skillfully written on the old papers, his audience believed they were a legitimate discovery found inside the old wooden coffers. Historians and publishers were excited by this epic find and eagerly praised the fictional priest’s contribution to the canon of literature. Many academics and historians refer to Chatterton as a forger, irate on behalf of all who had been duped. And he did forge the poems, so well that the belief in a writer-priest named Rowley continued long past the boy’s premature demise. But it was not really a forgery. It was an elaborate literary hoax, the creation of a character in writing so brilliant that the fictional character had true believers. It was a prank on parallel to adolescent phone calls, “is your refrigerator running?” only by a genius who outsmarted the great minds of the times. There is a long tradition of literary hoaxes aimed at mocking the experts and tastemakers of the literary establishment. In1988, Canadian cult writer Crad Kilodney, notorious for his demeanour of misanthropy, widely submitted the works of literary giants under the pseudonym Herman Mlunga Mbongo. Attached to this name, the writing of the greats was summarily rejected across the board. Thomas’s inspiration for the prank may have come from Horace Walpole, a dandy writer and tony politician he admired. Walpole’s now-famous Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was first published as “from the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto." Chatterton sent his Rowley poems to Walpole and received due praise for them, but Walpole turned on him when he began to question the veracity of their provenance. Chatterton responded privately with “To Horace Walpole,” a poem he never sent. Walpole, I thought not I should ever see So mean a heart as thine has prov’d to be, Thou who, in lux’ry nurst, beholds with scorn The boy, who friendless, penniless, forlorn, Asks thy high favour- thou mayst call me cheat. Say, didst thou never practise such deceit? (After Chatterton’s untimely death, Walpole softened. “I do not believe there ever existed so masterly a genius,” he said of the boy poet.) Chatterton was a prolific and talented writer but members of his class were seldom taken seriously. The entire Rowley fabrication was meant to show what he was capable of. In another irony, when he tried to confess that he had written the priest’s poems himself, he was not believed: a young man of the precariat could surely not produce such skillful, historically knowledgeable poems. He was a child prodigy, yet the works in his own name continued to go unnoticed, rejected, or unpaid. That Chatterton suffered for his art is known absolutely. He was half-starved, unable to earn enough to cover his lodging and meals in long office hours as a scrivener, writing legal contracts or property documents. He stayed up until the wee hours in his attic working on his poetry, and like the painting shows, he was known to tear up poems he deemed worthless because they did not meet his perfectionist standards. But even so, what is almost true is not completely true. The entire tragic Romantic myth of the poete maudit and tormented starving artist, purified, or made real by poverty and suffering was invested in the suicide of this marvelous boy, too pure for this cruel world. It’s a pervasive notion we still romanticize today. Great artists are tragic, destitute and depressed, uniquely incapable of managing their lives. But it turns out that Chatterton more than likely wanted what the rest of us want: to live, to survive, to have the chance to grow and thrive and prove himself, however that would have played out. Many scholars today have changed course as records reveal another story. The revised edition reveals that Chatterton was so bent on life, he was taking nasty prescribed medication with a high-risk profile, like toxicity and accidental overdose: arsenic. His affliction was much more mundane than a writer’s desolation, a condition commonplace at the time: gonorrhea. Arsenic was believed to be a cure. Chatterton was buried in the pauper’s cemetery for Holborn’s Shoe Lane Workhouse, his remains unmarked, in a mass grave. Lorette C. Luzajic  Frenzy, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1893 Frenzy What is passion, if not a runaway train to which one clings for dear life, or a powerful stallion rearing up on hind legs, foaming at the mouth, dark and dangerous and wild? Władysław Podkowiński’s 1893 painting scandalized eastern Europe in its month on display at the Zacheta, and ushered in the era of Symbolist painting in Poland. Twelve thousand people flocked to the national gallery to see the massive, volatile depiction of a naked woman, arms and legs wrapped tightly around a frantic bucking steed, face upturned and head thrown back. From those thousands, not one brave enough to buy the work from the struggling painter who lived on fumes and slept on the floor. The ten-foot tall canvas was executed entirely in black, brown, and fiery orange, with the redhead’s tresses roiling into the storm of the stallion’s mane and motion. You could say she was the anti-Godiva, nowhere close to vulnerable and saintly. The legend of Godiva was about a pure and wholesome beauty devoted to justice, who rode naked on horseback through town in protest of taxes eating the poor. Here, instead, was a woman astride, given completely over to desire, in the throes of ecstasy. The title, Frenzy of Exultations, or, usually, just Frenzy, said it all. In another kind of frenzy, on the 37th day of the show, Władysław Podkowiński entered the gallery and stabbed the canvas with a knife, ending its exhibition. The artist had been very upset about not finding a buyer for the artwork. He had given all he had to that painting, body and soul. Podkowiński was severely ill with tuberculosis and worked to complete the art in utter exhaustion for months, often working from his bed. Some said the price was simply too high at 10 000 rubles, a ridiculous ask. Other accounts say there actually had been an interested patron, but he offered a third of that and his offer was turned down. From Podkowiński’s point of view, he understood the value of this work, that it was his magnum opus, a painting unique in all of art history. Plus, the chance for rest and real medical treatment was on the line. His life literally depended on that sale. Then there was the other side of the story: his fury towards his muse, Ewa Kotarbińska, whose husband had hosted the artist at his estate. People were talking: some said that the beautiful brunette’s face bore only a passing resemblance to the woman on the horse, but that clearly the artist had seen her body for himself and portrayed it accurately. Other stories held that when he had made his desires known to her, she had rejected him, refusing to leave her wealth and marriage for a starving artist. She banished him from the house to the rainy gardens overnight. Already sick, this was the nail in the coffin. Nine months following the exhibition of Frenzy and the vandalism of the painting, Władysław Podkowiński was dead. He was 28 years old. The artist’s stormy horse and rider was, one way or another, the end of him. There is no parallel artwork in the artist’s portfolio. Frenzy is considered the first Symbolist painting in Poland, the movement sweeping Europe, born from the belief that realism did not actually portray the real world. The mystical undercurrents of life, the hidden, esoteric, mythological, and unconscious were the keys to understanding humans and history. Symbolists in poetry, other literature, and visual art sought to show the deeper truth through metaphors, to both tell their stories and decipher the world around them through symbols. Podkowiński was known as a highly skilled magazine illustrator. After a trip to Paris where he discovered Monet, he was credited with bringing Impressionism to life inside of Poland. His gauzy, drowsy, sun-dappled ponds and gardens were populated with innocent children at play and happy ducks. With white picket fences! They were sweet trifles, lovely, and forgettable. It was his illness that drove Podkowiński into the subterranean recesses of his mind. He was face to face with the grim reaper, declining in the prime of his life. Death was consuming him from the inside out. He began to draw various rigorously detailed skeletons, and turned his attention from light to dark. Tuberculosis is a bacterial respiratory infection known in those days as consumption, because of the way the illness consumed you. In the late 1800s, upwards of 70% of people who lived in cities were infected. The disease has been traced back at least 9000 years and found in mummies, and is thought to be much older, even millions of years. It has been around much longer than humans. We often associate TB with tragic poets and artists like John Keats, Amedeo Modigliani and Edvard Munch. But it affected everyone, especially city dwellers who lived in close proximity and squalor. One in seven people in Europe in that era died from TB. Tuberculosis is still the world’s most deadly infectious disease, with over a million deaths per year. The vaccines are only moderately effective and antibiotic treatment is complicated, often involving four different drugs for a period of up to two years! In the context of what Władysław Podkowiński was facing, as a gifted young man with hopes and dreams rapidly going down the drain, nothing about the painting or its attempted destruction seem like madness after all. The profound disappointment in his rejection from the object of his affection would have stood in for all of his chances at love and life. And her sensible sentencing of a lusty youth to the outdoors after inappropriate advances, if that is what happened, could literally have accelerated his inevitable demise. Seeing her power, both sexual and financial, from his destitution and looming destruction, his obsessive desire and need is understandable. In his mind, Ewa held power over his life. Interpretations of the artist’s Frenzy draw from symbolist ideas as a whole. Certainly, there is the heady pleasure of an unapologetic woman and a visual representation of orgasm. But the painting also looks terrifying, showing the power and danger of desire and obsession, and the struggle between life and death. Though the woman is in rapture, the horse looks quite deranged, suggesting that in experiencing the pleasures of life, we are often oblivious to the headlong collision course with death. In ancient mythology about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the black horse represents famine and hunger. Thinking of hunger symbolically, we see ourselves completely consumed, driven mad by desire. But sex and passion are, of course, symbolic of the life force itself, for obvious reasons. After the artist succumbed to his illness, the painting was repaired. It toured to Moscow, Lodz, and St. Petersburg. In 1904, it was given to the National Museum in Krakow where it remains a prize part of the collection. In the absence of the artist’s voice, we can only speculate on the exact meaning and intention of the work. But one thing is certain: this painting about life was about death. Lorette C. Luzajic ** Poems and stories inspired by this artwork: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ekphrastic-writing-responses-wladyslaw-podkowinski  Children in the Garden, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1892  Portrait of Madame de Florian, by Giovanni Boldini (Italy) probably 1888 Giovanni Boldini’s Portrait of Madame de Florien The woman is pretty in pink, an ice cream cone or swirl of cotton candy under Giovanni Boldini’s brush. She is a whirlwind of cerise satin and soft lace, limbs and torso and upturned throat impossibly long. The viewer’s eyes follow her swan profile, the strong line of her nose, past the single gleaming rope of pearls adorning her tender decolletage. Her slim fingers splay suggestively, invitingly, framing the mystery of her small, elegant breasts. Boldini, from Italy and working in Paris during the Belle Epoque, was a society portrait painter extraordinaire, known for his whirlwind, razzle-dazzle aesthetic, as if the beauty of his subjects was a kind of electricity. In 1933, Time Magazine crowned him the “master of swish” for this frenzied quality. Countless beautiful women of status hired the painter, and also became his lovers. He immortalized them in a whirling thrum of vivacity, attuned to the most enchanting aspects of their personalities and their sartorial splendour. And like his frenetic, slippery style, he himself was tough to pin down, a man with many models and muses, but no wife. Until he had finished painting, that is. At the age of 86, Boldini married Emilia Cardona, sixty years younger. One particularly beautiful lover was Madame de Florian, the subject of the most famous painting of Boldini’s career. Its date of creation is widely contested, with sources pointing at a range of dates from 1888, when Marthe was 24 years old, to 1910, when she was in her forties. Whatever her age, Boldini’s passion and devotion was evident in every stroke. The portrait was a secret for at least a century. It was not seen until 2010, eighty years after the death of the artist. Along with the painting, it was Marthe, too, who was forgotten. After her death in 1939, she drifted into obscurity in the mists of time. Initially a humble seamstress from a modest family, Marthe had been a great beauty from the Paris half-world, the society that lived in the twilight margins, at the fringe of respectable society. In the gilded world of the Belle Epoque, or “beautiful era,” before WW1, there was a parallel society in full swing, one that rejected the Victorian mores of the era, one that prized beauty, art, music, and pleasure above all. It was a society of spectacle and indulgence, and the arts bloomed from the attention that wealthy patrons lavished on them. Fashion, too, blossomed. Haute Couture and French lingerie were ushered into the world on the bodies of the beautiful women mingling on display at operas and parties. The fluid, sensual curves of Art Nouveau embodied the era’s aesthetic in jewelry and wallpaper. Marthe had two infants named Henri, “paternity unknown,” the first deceased at three months old. Legend says she was hired to repair garments for the legendary courtesan Cora Pearl, and grew fascinated with the demi-monde. She herself became a demimondaine whose beauty was widely pursued. If she was not quite at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of courtesans, the crème de la crème as it were, Marthe certainly held her own with several prime ministers as her patrons. In the Belle Epoque, the courtesans were the queens. They ruled everything. These celebrities were known as “les grandes horizontales,” and grand they were, glittering in gorgeous gowns and jewels and silk stockings. But they were hardly “horizontal,” rather, women on top. They were prestigious, and did not associate themselves with the much more common streetwalkers or brothel attendants. Sadly, those impoverished women were quite literally a dime a dozen, in those times. While most of the grand courtesans came from humble origins, they competed for the wealthiest, most exclusive lovers, like men who owned businesses abroad or who lived in palaces. The courtesans expected to be established in mansions, furs, diamonds, carriages, and horses, with an eternal spigot for impulses and the finest Champagnes. And it wasn’t just about the money: these women were free to live on their own terms, love who they wished, travel, learn languages, attend the theatre, drink, and gamble. They wielded significant power as patrons of the arts, influencing tastes and becoming investors and collectors. The courtesans achieved their ranks for a variety of reasons: skills in the art of seduction and the boudoir, of course, but perhaps their performances outside of the bedroom were much more important. Spectacle was key: the more flamboyant and luxurious her personality, the bigger her clients. Most essential was being good company. A good conversationalist was smart, witty, and well informed. These women learned independently about those things that interested them, especially art, music, history, and business. Marthe’s portrait by a fashionable painter as lover was stunning but hardly unusual. If the courtesans were “kept” by wealthy gentlemen, artists in the era were “kept” by the courtesans who collected them and became their patrons. The women had some dependency on the painters, too, to ensure their likeness could be both looked at and preserved. What was unusual about the story of Marthe modelling was not her identity or her love affair with Boldini, but simply the way that the painting is a time capsule to another era, Marthe frozen like Sleeping Beauty for a hundred years, awakening in the age of Instagram to invite us backwards, to Paris and the golden age. Perhaps few visitors to her home after her retirement would have seen the greatest Boldini of them all. And certainly, Marthe had no idea when she died in 1939 that she would be resurrected, and that her story would be told in no less than four novels, capturing the public’s imagination. (The Paris Apartment, by Michelle Gable; Paris Time Capsule, by Ella Carey; The Paris Secret, by Karen Swan; The Velvet Hours, by Alyson Richman.) Certainly she would not have anticipated that her granddaughter, to whom she bequeathed her Paris apartment, would have to flee south to get away from the Nazis, or that the girl would never return but would pay the monthly rent for 70 years. It was only then, at the time of Marthe’s granddaughter’s death, that the rent went unpaid and the apartment entered into. And inside, under decades of dust, was another world, another time. Marthe’s realm was untouched for seven decades. It was a world of endless mirrors, of fleurs de lis wallpaper in ivory and pale green, of magnificent candelabra and elaborate gold carved picture frames, of floral porcelain basins, of velvet cream coloured drapery, of chinoiserie pottery. A taxidermy ostrich, now quite dusty and dead, was once an exotic treasure of decadent opulence. And in the middle of all of it, the centrepiece, and the masterpiece. Boldini’s painting, valued now at three and a half million, leaving Marthe, too, untouched, infinite, resurrected, the goddess of the story. Lorette C. Luzajic  Voice of Ire: on Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire I was still a teenager when a big brouhaha broke out in Canadian media and around the dining room tables of people who loved art and outrage. In 1989 and announced a year later in 1990, the National Gallery of Canada had blown $1.8 million dollars on three vertical stripes of red and blue paint by American abstract expressionist colour field painter Barnett Newman. The work had been exhibited at a fair in Montreal and purchased with our tax dollars during an economic recession. As the Canadian weekly newsmag MacLean’s wrote later, “Public umbrage boiled over.” Barnett Newman’s works are common belt-notch purchases for curators and so most museums have one or another version of his zip paintings. He is hailed as an artist concerned with spiritual meaning, depicting Bible stories and Jewish concepts in elegant minimalism. His works are hailed as a million-dollar protest of American wars and imperialism. Voice of Fire was no less than God speaking to us through the burning bush in the Old Testament. “My goal is to give the viewer a feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time, of his connection to others, who are also separate.” Say what? I was between worlds in that era, extricating myself from high school and family, having just landed fresh and naïve in the big city, Toronto. My entire adolescence had been steeped in the passionate embrace of paintings and sculptures. For me, art and art history was at once substance and escapism. And I was of two minds about this particular controversy. I was a young writer on board with rebellion and anything anti-establishment. But I was also keenly aware that the National Gallery was, after all, the establishment; and that such money could go a lot further supporting artists of less fame and more talent. More, I didn’t like the painting. Almost no one liked the painting. MP Felix Holtmann said it for all the struggling commoners: “It looks like two cans of paint and two rollers and about 10 minutes would do the trick.” The intelligentsia mocked him as a clueless and blundering pig farmer. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones would gush later about the painter’s blue and white stripes, Onement VI, selling for more than forty million: “a powerful example of his ineffable style at its height of confidence and magic. A single white line divides a flat expanse of blue: it seems to rip open the universe, a crack in space and time.” he wrote. “Great art is essentially priceless.” But the greatest and ever-acerbic art critic Robert Hughes emphatically declared Newman “by far the least formally gifted” of the new minimalist abstract artists in my prize signed copy of The Shock of the New. “He had no discernible talent as a draftsman.” Hughes attributed any success the painter had to his temperament. “…He was tenacious and argumentative, and his reductive cast of mind served him well in the studio.” Newman’s admirers were just “avid for one more hero in an age of entropy.” He went on to say that “Their simple, assertive fields of colour hit the eye with a curiously anesthetic shock. They do not seem sensuous: sensuality is all relationships.” Hughes took the words right out of my mouth. This is exactly the nothingness I felt when standing before the giant stripes, on a visit to Ottawa three and a half decades later, finally seeing the infamous work in person for the first time. In that time, I have myself become an artist with “no discernible talent as a draftsman.” A few decades have convinced me even more profoundly of the importance of other skills and values in art: meaning, aesthetics, symbolism, creativity, texture, contrast, innovation, imitation, provocation, protest, ritual, to name a few. Though I do not share the staunch modernist’s rejection of traditional art, being a huge admirer of the wonders of our artistic past, I do not share the old western art academy’s rejection of modern or multicultural digressions from their viewpoint. Art is an incredible journey of different cultures, different eras, different skills, and different perspectives. And so I desperately wanted to feel something less ambivalent when I got there. I was at least expecting to be in on the joke. Lorette C. Luzajic  Voice of Fire, by Barnett Newman (USA) 1967  Voice of Fire at National Gallery, Ottawa. photo by author.  I'm Lorette, an award-winning mixed media artist; a widely published poet and writer of flash fiction; founding editor of two literary journals, The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw; founder of The Ekphrastic Academy where I teach art appreciation and creative writing; and much more. Looking at art and learning more about it has been my lifelong obsession and fuels all of my creative and professional practices. Here, you will find occasional essays and musings on art and artists. Enjoy! |
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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