Hard Truths by Jay Kuo

 

Hard Truths

How can we make sense of the nonsensical?

JAY KUO NOV 6

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If you’re like me, you’re still in a state of stunned disbelief. The election results feel absurd and counterfactual, and you want desperately to make sense of what just happened. 

This feeling perhaps is akin to watching a family member return to an abusive spouse, even after nearly being beaten to death. Or watching in horror as a loved one, whom you thought was finally clean, start using drugs again and spiral helplessly out of control. How could someone choose that over what we have to offer?

I admit a bit of trepidation in trying to address this topic on the day after this travesty, because I know how raw emotions are running, and any messenger is pretty much asking to be shot. But here’s a bit of where I am today.

One could almost excuse this nation for electing Trump the first time. There were millions of people willing to take a chance on a “business man” they knew from television. Roll the dice and see, why not? A foolhardy and costly mistake, but one we could learn from, right?

But after all we went through with him, after all his crimes and assaults, after his disastrously mismanaged response to a pandemic that killed one million Americans, and after all he did to undermine and ultimately openly attack our democracy, it is inconceivable that we would reelect such a man.

Yet that is what we’ve done. We are officially in the upside down.

There is a temptation, completely understandable, to suspect something in the contest was amiss. We certainly saw the other side do so when they believed their guy couldn’t have lost the 2020 election fair and square. But unlike them, we require that any extraordinary claim produce at least some credible evidence, and we won’t likely find any here. Our elections are secure, despite Russia’s best efforts to disrupt them with bomb threats.

Moreover, to look to foul play, rather than foul decisions, is to absolve the majority of the American electorate of the blame they carry for this catastrophe. 

No, we must talk instead about some hard truths.

Before we do, let me be clear. I won’t spend any time assigning blame, and I’m not interested in hearing it from others. By any objective measure, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ran a superb campaign; raised record amounts of money; had a forward-looking, positive message; and ran through the tape at the finish line, pedal to the floor, all in just over 100 days time. We were all proud of what they’d accomplished. By contrast, and again by any objective measure, the Trump campaign was crude, mean-spirited, laced with violent rhetoric, fueled by hate and fear, and frankly boring and weird. You know it, and I know it. Even the other side knows it.

Nor was this ever about who was actually the better candidate. Harris, an eloquent, experienced prosecutor, drubbed Trump so badly in the first debate that he fled from even the idea of a second. Harris produced detailed policies and common sense plans for an opportunity economy. Trump had no plans other than his tariffs, and his speeches were uniformly unintelligible, rambling, and on many levels disturbing. His own top aides even came out against him publicly, and our senior military officials warned us all that he is fascist to the core.

His supporters did not listen, or they did not care.

And Harris’s electoral loss came not from any bad choices, such as who to pick as her VP.  You simply don’t lose all seven battlegrounds from that, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because she “didn’t go to Michigan.” There is something far deeper at work.

One hard truth is that a majority of voters simply wanted what Trump offered: a champion for their grievances. I didn’t believe they actually would, but lower propensity male voters came out for Trump in appalling, historic numbers, underscoring the misogyny at the heart of his message and personified by JD Vance. 

Other voters decided to mortgage the future of American democracy out of anger over high grocery bills, failing to understand (thanks to the media) the worldwide nature of post-pandemic inflation, how the Biden Administration had actually succeeded in taming it, or how Trump’s tariffs and economic policies would empty their wallets.

Many progressives, myself included, placed our hopes in the basic goodness and common sense of the American people, who of course would ultimately know better than to put a convicted felon and Russian asset into the Oval Office. This was especially true given how Trump had promised openly to rule as an authoritarian and to come after the press and his political opponents, wielding all the might of a compliant Justice Department and even the military if necessary.

And there, another hard truth: Either the voters don’t believe Trump will do what he has openly promised to do, or they simply don’t care. Neither brings any comfort. 

I lay all this out because if we are to defeat the rising threat of fascism in America, we must be clear-eyed about how it preys upon our weaknesses as a society. 

The same deeply rooted misogyny that has twice kept far more qualified and capable women from the presidency is now also being weaponized to strip away fundamental rights to bodily autonomy. Their next, inevitable, and indeed plainly stated goals include national bans on abortion and contraception. We must understand and prepare for how they will bring these assaults, even while we try to understand why so many women, and in particular white women, continue to support Trump and even voted for him this time around.

Not an easy or comfortable question.

It doesn’t stop there. “Traditional” notions of gender roles are also justifying vicious and sustained attacks upon trans people, whom the GOP demonizes at every turn in order to teach its base how to hate and dehumanize. If we parrot their language, look the other way, and fail to stand up for them, we allow that wedge to be driven deeper, and for discrimination and even calls for “eradication” to flourish. These attacks upon trans people are tests of the extent of our compassion and the strength of our principles, and we must not fail them.

We must also develop a deeper understanding of how racism operates and drives white grievance and white supremacy, which in turn powers the MAGA movement. But this is far more complicated than we understood. For example, we believed, incorrectly, that Trump’s openly racist attacks upon Latinos and threats of mass deportations of migrants would keep those voters in our column. Instead, the hardships of the post-Covid economy endured by Latino families swelled support for Trump within that community, even while African Americans remained relatively committed to the Democrats. If we cannot find a way to win back these voters, the entire American experiment is imperiled.

None of these issues will be solved overnight, nor must we have any of these painful conversations now while we are still in shock and grief from this heartbreaking loss. I raise them here because they are the questions we should truly be weighing, certainly before assigning blame to any of the hardworking team or incredible candidates.

In the end, Kamala Harris did not fail us. We as a nation failed her.

And that is a very hard truth.

Lee Krasner . Important American Abstract Painter. Not just Pollock's wife.

 Lee Krasner (October 27, 1908 - June 19, 1984) was an influential American abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century. "Painting, for me, when it really 'happens,' is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon-as, say, a lettuce leaf."1 Although she consistently refused to "explain" the meanings of her works, Lee Krasner often indicated that even her most abstract paintings had ties to nature.  For decades she had to struggle against the title of "wife of" but she was far more than that. 

She faced many prejudices and she knew it. Her skin must have been as thick as an elephant’s to have put up with all the crap she had to face. Once, when asked if she had seen the film Reds (1981), about the American journalist John Reed and his sympathy for the Russian Revolution, she said that she didn’t need to see it because she had lived through it. She wasn’t interested in becoming a historical figure, the wife of Pollock. On another occasion she was having lunch with three art historians and told them that the only reason they were interested in her was because they wanted to enhance their careers after she was dead.

"Lee Krasner is one of the most significant painters of the 20th century--an artist whose importance is only now being seen." This prophetic statement made by art critic Barbara Rose in 1977 leaves the reader questioning: What is it that has made the work of Lee Krasner such an integral and irreplaceable chapter in the progression of American art?

Lee Krasner's place in American art can be qualified in many ways, including through her role as a forerunner of the first original American art movement, Abstract Expressionism. This style can be seen as a manifestation of the horror felt in the wake of WWII, a horror unique to most Americans. The calculated slaughter of innocent Jews, the use of the first weapon of mass destruction on the citizens of Japan, the first direct attack on US soil---these were all unprecedented events in the minds of most Americans. Emotions of helplessness and confusion overwhelmed these artists and created a state of mind that we can identify with today, in the wake of the tragedies of our own era.

While trying to come to grips with the ever-complex world, Abstract Expressionist artists found no form, no figure or landscape that could judiciously represent their sentiments. Only pure, unaltered paint and canvas, works stripped to their most basic elements could begin to express these inexpressible feelings. This revolutionary style came forth without the contamination of recognizable form.

Craftsmanship, attention to realistic detail and pleasant subject matter all became secondary to the most important element of the work: expression.

One view of Lee Krasner’s career is that there is no dramatic rupture marking the emergence of something new — at least not like the widely celebrated ones that occurred in the work of her husband, Jackson Pollock, or with Willem de Kooning, or, later, Philip Guston. This is just one of the many judgments coloring our view of what is clearly a remarkable career, beginning in the early 1930s and culminating with her death in 1984.

The other caveat is that Krasner does not fit comfortably into any of the narratives of Abstract Expressionism. She never became a gestural painter armed with a loaded brush (de Kooning and Franz Kline). She never developed into a field painter (Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman), or a geometric one (Ad Reinhardt), nor did she work in a large, all-over mode during the late 1940s. The point of these and other damning reservations is to diminish Krasner’s independence and strength, to deny her singular achievement.

We know that Pollock was self-destructive, but Krasner was not. There are no stories of her drinking, as there are of other Abstract Expressionists, including some of the women. There are no tales of her losing control. Known for being highly critical of her own work, and for destroying many of her works, Krasner changed paths a number of times throughout her career, an arc that has divided critics. She didn’t internalize destructiveness, she externalized it, which goes against our romantic view of the Abstract Expressionists and their hard-drinking ways.

Krasner herself knew that no successful process ends at its apparent completion, but rather that all experiences will be revisited, changed and utilized at a later date.

She was fond of a particular quote of T.S. Elliot that exemplifies this thought:

"We shall not cease from exploration

And at the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know it for the first time

Krasner never stopped exploring and utilizing lessons from the past. Her life's work is an intricate balance of both her past and present, one that did not take any experience for granted. Her work is rich in experience, reflection and understanding. Barbara Rose said it best, Lee Krasner is indeed one of the most important painters of the 20th century.

https://hyperallergic.com/296877/the-fly-in-the-ointment-lee-krasner/

Hans Maler zu Schwaz. Painter of the wealthy and royal (if not always good looking)

 

Anne of Bohemia, dressed to show off her wealth and status. Holding a precious lapdog. One hopes the pendant didn't bang her nose when walking. 

Emperor Ferdinand 1, displaying the unfortunate Hapsburg Jaw. The consequence of intense inbreeding which became worse with each member of the dynasty. 

Hans didn't do many portraits of children - it probably upset him to see how some children treated their beds.  As indicated by this little girl who was suffocating her bird. 

Poor Ferdinand - painted in 1524 and it appears that he can barely breathe. 

Wearing a chin clout like this woman of the Klammer von Weudach family would have been undignified. Something an emperor just would not do. High fashion of 1485. 

Here we have a portrait of a much more handsome man - wearing a most fashionable hat and stylish jewelry. 

Hans Maler zu Schwaz (1480/1488–1526/1529) was a German painter born in Ulm and active as portraitist in the village of Schwaz, near Innsbruck. Maler may have trained with the German artist Bartholomäus Zeitblom, who was chief master of the School of Ulm between 1484 and 1517. He painted numerous portraits of members of the Habsburg court at Innsbruck as well as of wealthy merchants such as the Fuggers.

Maler's two most important patrons were Ferdinand I of Austria, who at the time was Archduke (Later Emperor) and the celebrated Fuggers. Ferdinand is known to have commissioned at least three portraits of himself and four of his wife, Anna of Bohemia and Hungary. Maler also painted portraits in 1517 of Sebastian Andorfer, a successful metal maker and merchant from Schwaz. His portrait style rarely varied from his bust-format. 

Hokusai. Endlessly versatile.

 

Hokusai was, in turns, a romanticist, a classicist and an expressionist; a reverent traditionalist and a pioneering, crowd-pleasing populist. He revolutionized Japanese art by elevating lowly genres, such as landscape and “bird-and-flower pictures,” to high art; and he melded the recessive space of Western perspective with that of traditional Asian art, in which forms farther away are stacked above those closer to the viewer. The supreme master of multiple artistic personalities (30 changes of name; at least 93 changes of address) didn’t, so he tells us, hit his stride until late. On the colophon page of “A Hundred Views of Mount Fuji”, at the age of 75, he confessed that until 70 his drawings were beneath notice. “When I reach 80 I hope to make increasing progress; at 90 I will see the underlying principle of things . . . at 100 I will have achieved divine status as an artist and at 110, every dot and stroke will be alive.”

He only made it to 89 but that bounding animal vitality and leaping line never left him. Perennially hard-up, housed in rough lodgings, “old man crazy to paint” as he signed himself, crouched over the tatami, dressed in a ratty lice-run quilt, helped by his gifted pipe-smoking daughter Eijo, he worked ever harder, faster, deeper. By the age of 80, he had suffered a stroke, the death of two wives, poverty and the intransigence of his grandson, whose debts he was forced to pay. Destitution beckoned. Yet even under these circumstances his vision never fails (nor his eyesight) and his imagination always soared. 

Hokusai, who died in 1849, is often thought of as the last genius of the woodblock colour print revolution, a people’s art if ever there was one, which had begun over a century earlier. But his long life stretched all the way back to the middle of the 18th century when the supply of woodblock prints — costing about the price of a double helping of noodles — transformed how art was consumed. It was a genre invented to satisfy the cultural appetite of the biggest city in the world, the million-plus population of Edo (now Tokyo). 

Ostensibly the power and the authority of government belonged to the Tokugawa shogun immured in his urban castle. But to keep them out of mischief the nobility were required to stay in Edo, along with their retinues and families. Inevitably, as at Versailles, an emasculated, over-dressed, politically pointless class compensated for its impotence with stupendous conspicuous consumption. That led to the rise of a merchant class to service their ever more extravagant needs. Although the chonin were officially at the bottom of the social hierarchy (in moral status, beneath peasants and artisans), they were the ones who held the moneybags and called the cultural shots and what they wanted above all was entertainment: the courtesans of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter; the star actors of the kabuki; copiously illustrated ripping yarns and epics. Prints from cherrywood blocks with their runs of hundreds and then of thousands — many in eye-popping colour — catered to this visual greed. Like all brilliant entertainment cultures drenched in feel-good fantasy, it gorged on sex and celebrity, sentimental romance and over-the-top dramatics.

Hokusai played his part in this. For all his exalted sense of vocation and Buddhist devotion, he was, in his own way, an outrageous showman with art as his magic. Summoned to perform before the shogun he laid down a thick band of blue, then pulled a live chicken from a basket which hopped around in the paint. Hokusai declared the result “Autumn leaves at Tatsuta river”. In 1804, before an audience come to see a temple sculpture, Hokusai used a hemp broom and 54 litres of ink to make a colossal, 20-metre-long portrait of the founder of Zen Buddhism. 

It is hard to think of any artist more indifferent to some notional line (alien, in any case, to Japan) between high art and pop culture. There was nothing he couldn’t or didn’t do: comic book illustration, travel guides, haikus, paintings of sparrows on grains of rice, designs for netsuke, epic battle scenes and military lives, devotional images of holy men, spooks and tigers, raccoon-dog priests and giant flowers. 

His adoptive father was a high-end mirror maker to the shogun’s court and Hokusai began fairly quietly, mastering the traditional arts. Like all conscientiously exhaustive shows this one wants us to look again at the screens and scrolls. But Hokusai’s own judgment was right. An elegant hand is evident but nothing compared with the dynamite to come. 

In the 1820s he began experimenting with liberated surges of waves and whirlpools, some of them decorative designs for combs and pipes. The great themes make an early appearance: a spectacular woodblock stained with the Prussian Blue that would become a tonal obsession, fishing skiffs racing down heaving waves, the churning water flooding the whole field of vision. He surfed between fine calculation and free impulse. An enigmatic still life features a halved watermelon, set on no visible means of support, the nakiri knife that cut it resting on a finely translucent piece of paper veiling its surface. Above the fruit, lengths of rind like curtain cords hang from a rope. The whole thing is delicate and somehow violent at the same time, appetising and inaccessible, the visual conceit as tantalising as a Donne sonnet.

Old Man Crazy to Paint. 

In his 80's Hokusai, portrayed himself as not as some benign patriarch but as a a cheerful, witty and mischievous man, still eager to paint. In what might be his last work he found the power to paint a dragon soaring over Mt. Fuji, it's writhing form wreathed in a cloud of smoke. To the end of his days, Hokusai never ran out of images to paint, only out of time. 

Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp

Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp (October 20, 1620 - November 15, 1691) was one of the leading Dutch landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. The most famous of a family of painters, the pupil of his father Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp (1594?1651/52), he is especially known for his large views of the Dutch countryside in early morning or late afternoon light. Little is known about his life. He married a wealthy woman and stopped painting. 

In this image: Aelbert Cuyp (Dutch, 1620 - 1691), A Milkmaid, 
about 1642 - 1646. Black chalk, graphite, gray wash, 
12.1 × 14.8 cm (4 3/4 × 5 13/16 in.) Accession No. 86.GG.672 
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Herdsman with 5 cows by the river

Orpheus with animals

The year after his marriage, Cuyp became the deacon of the reformed church. 

Houbraken recalled that Cuyp was a devout Calvinist and the fact that when he 

died, there were no paintings of other artists found in his home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelbert_Cuyp

Lucas Cranach the Elder. painter & printmaker of the Reformation

 

 Died (alas!) on this day in 1553, Lucas Cranach the Elder, painter & printmaker of the Reformation in Germany. Here by his son Lucas the Younger, at age 77.

Johann Frederick of Saxony, aka the Magnanimous, painted in 1509 at age 6 in totally fab outfit (especially the hat!

Fall of man, with Adam quite puzzled by it all. And lots of animals, including unicorn and clearly vegetarian lion.

Princess Sibylle of Cleves at 14 years old, looking quite the vixen

Duchess Katharina von Mecklenburg, in v. fine outfit and with an adorable  little dog, in 1514

Also supremely well dressed w/ truly extravagant slashing but rather odd headgear:Duke Henry the Pious, looking quite the fashion plate...plus his quite fierce dog.

Women messing with men’s heads du jour...Salome looking very pleased with herself. 

The infamous dinner where the desert was the head of John the Baptist.  Perhaps you would prefer something sweet? 

Lucas Cranach was born in 1472 and took his name from his birthplace, the Franconian town of Kronach, which was part of the bishopric of Bamberg. His father, Hans Maler, was an artist and it is assumed that he was Cranach's first teacher. Around 1501, Cranach traveled to Vienna where he stayed until at least 1504. In addition to several woodcuts which were strongly influenced by the graphic art of Albrecht Dürer, these years saw an outpouring of paintings of extraordinary quality.

Although the exact date of his appointment is not known, by April 1505, Cranach was employed at the court of Friedrich the Wise, Elector of Saxony, at Wittenberg. The Venetian, Jacopo de' Barbari, was also at court from 1503 to 1505 and his art had a continuing influence upon Cranach. During this time Cranach supplied paintings, murals, and decorations for the various ducal residences at Wittenberg, Veste Coburg, Torgau, and elsewhere. The murals no longer survive, but the altarpiece of The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine monogrammed and dated 1506 contains views of the castle of Coburg and was most likely a ducal commission. In 1508, Cranach spent several months in the Netherlands, particularly Antwerp; in his Holy Kindred altarpiece, dated 1509, the women's kerchiefs are clearly Netherlandish and critics have seen the compositional and stylistic influence of Quentin Massys and Jan Gossaert.

Cranach headed a large workshop that included his sons Hans (c. 1513-1537) and Lucas the Younger (1515-1586) as well as numerous apprentices and journeymen. Well in excess of four hundred paintings have been assigned to Cranach and his atelier. The early works are often signed with the monogram LC, but in 1508 Duke Friedrich the Wise granted Cranach a coat-of-arms depicting a serpent with upright bat wings holding a ring in its mouth. The winged serpent probably had humanistic or hieroglyphic significance and could stand for Kronos, the Greek god of time, a pun on the artist's name in Latin as well as German. Cranach used this device of his paintings from 1508 onward. After 1534, however, the serpent's wings are those of a bird and shown folded. The new form is prevalent from 1537 onward and has been connected with the death of the artist's son Hans in 1537. The presence of the serpent with folded wings on paintings dated 1535 and 1536 undermines this somewhat romantic notion but has been seen as an attempt by Cranach to distinguish the work of his sons.

Lucas Cranach is probably the artist most closely associated with the Protestant Reformation. He was a friend of Martin Luther who lived and taught in Wittenberg under the protection of the Electors of Saxony. Cranach and his shop produced great numbers of portraits of Luther, his wife, and other Reformers, as well as depictions of such "Protestant" themes as Christ Blessing the Children and Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. It should be remembered that the artist also worked for Luther's adversary, Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg and in 1525 and 1527 depicted the Cardinal as Saint Jerome in indoor and outdoor settings. The range of subject matter in Cranach's paintings is, in fact, quite wide. In addition to religious works, he produced a variety of mythological and secular subjects, probably intended for humanist or courtly patrons. Cranach was also an excellent portraitist.

For most of his life Cranach lived in Wittenberg in Saxony, and loyally served not only Friedrich the Wise, but his successors Johann the Steadfast and Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous.

Numerous documents testify to Cranach's industry and prosperity. As one of the leading citizens of Wittenberg he owned several houses, as apothecary, a publishing firm that specialized in Reformation literature, and on several occasions served on the city council and as burgomaster. In 1547 when Johann Friedrich was taken prisoner by Charles V, Cranach joined him in exile in Augsburg and Innsbruck, and in 1552 followed him to Weimar where Johann Friedrich re-established the Saxon court. Lucas Cranach died in Weimar in 1553 at the age of eighty-one.

The Cranach family’s genealogy is still traced in Germany, where descendants have included Goethe and Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.

[Hand, John Oliver, with the assistance of Sally E. Mansfield. German Paintings of the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1993: 26-27.]