Category: Art Rant

Anachronisms, ahoy!

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Book Review, History
Deborah Sam[p]son (Gannett), oil on paper by Joseph Stone, 1797. RIHS Museum Collection, Gift of Jesse Metcalf, 1900.6.1
Deborah Sam[p]son (Gannett), oil on paper by Joseph Stone, 1797. RIHS Museum Collection, Gift of Jesse Metcalf, 1900.6.1

There’s a petition circulating in certain government circles in support of a campaign to give Deborah Sam[p]son her very own stamp. This is, in part, fueled by the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of Sharon, MA.

I’ve got no problem with that—commemoration is something we humans do and need. And Deborah Samson’s is an interesting story, but possibly not for the reasons cited in the letters from officials who shall remain nameless. They describe her as “a pioneer of promoting women’s rights and eliminating gender barriers” and “a trailblazer for gender equality,” phrases that would have been just about nonsense in the Revolutionary war period.

And that’s my problem with it: the anachronistic representation of a woman’s story, bent to the purposes of the present. Don’t get me wrong—I’m a feminist, I’ve enjoyed Deborah Samson’s story since I read about her as a kid in one book or another, so I sympathize with the Stamp Movement.

What makes me crazy is bad history.

Hannah Snell, as depicted in an excerpt from "The Life and Adventures of a Female Soldier," the narrative of the most famous cross-dressing British soldier of the century. It appeared in Isaiah Thomas's New England Almanack (Boston, 1774). Printers recycled the image on other imprints. American Antiquarian Society.
Hannah Snell, as depicted in an excerpt from “The Life and Adventures of a Female Soldier,” the narrative of the most famous cross-dressing British soldier of the century. It appeared in Isaiah Thomas’s New England Almanack (Boston, 1774). Printers recycled the image on other imprints. American Antiquarian Society.

In Masquerade, Alfred Young tells Sampson’s story well, busting myths that both we—and she—created. (This short bio is a good overall sketch of Deborah’s life. ) What struck me the most about Deborah Samson’s life was the lack of certainty, stability, and material comfort. We’ll never know the specific circumstances that led her to enlist, though Young does yeoman’s work to unearth everything he can about her life and circumstances, and the context in which she lived.

I’m not an unbiased reader—I did get a little shouty on the third floor when I read “trailblazer for gender equality,” and that phrase has lingered and grown tattered as my colleagues and I have chewed it over—but Young’s point about women of the lower sorts is well taken.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Young about the book:
“In cross-dressing, Deborah was like a good many other plebeian women we are discovering who were in flight: to escape indentured servitude, to avoid the shame of a pregnancy, to get out of the reaches of the law, and so on. But to explain why she carried it off so long, you have to fall back on her skills and resourcefulness.”

So much for that pioneer of promoting women’s rights—Samson was a pioneer in skillful deceit (no mean feat) and in using that deceit to further the main chance, that is, Deborah Samson’s chance. What’s wrong with that? I like that better, and that’s my bias and my interests.

Reading about Deborah Samson helped me think about Bridget Connor and the women like her, probably less skilled and less educated than Samson, probably even more impoverished. It’s a mysterious mix of personality and circumstances that drives us all, but considering what we can know about Deborah Samson helps us understand her not so much as a pioneer for gender equality but as a self-interested human being acting for herself despite the barriers of class, education, and gender. And that can help us understand the people we can know even less about, like Bridget Connor.

For a taste of historical prose, you can find an annotated version of Samson’s story written by Herman Mann here, at Harvard University Library’s digital page delivery system.

The Monuments Meh

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, History, Movie Review, Museums
GI guards works of art stolen by the Nazis
GI guards works of art stolen by the Nazis

Mr S and I went to the movies on Saturday afternoon to see the long-awaited Monuments Men movie. It had been the hotly anticipated film in my set– guns, art, George Clooney: what’s not to like? We knew the history would be bad, we expected inaccurate museum practices, but still. The ingredients were sound, how bad could it be?

Well…not so bad that I’m sorry I went to see it, but sadly lacking in oomph. When a movie has a website that includes lesson plans, maybe you should not be surprised by its leaden, film-strip qualities.

I’d read the Times review, I knew what I was getting into when we bought our tickets, and we bough them anyway. Art, guns, Clooney, remember?

Here’s what I thought, in somewhat random order:

That movie’s not done. The soundtrack is horrible and needs to go. Also, the voice-over. George Clooney can read me the dictionary at bedtime any time, but the kill the heroics. Please.

But that’s just a symptom of the film and director’s insecurity. This movie isn’t brave enough to be convinced of its own mission, not unlike museums today. It keeps trying so hard to sell me on the idea that art is humanity, our collective soul, that must be saved and is, in fact, worth a life. Dude, I bought that program before I was 12. To toss a cliche back, Just believe. Everything else will follow. If the film, the director, and the star keep trying to sell me on the principle idea, there’s something wrong.

A Rembrandt self-portrait recovered at a German salt mine that had been used as a storehouse, with Harry L. Ettlinger, right. Monuments Men Foundation
A Rembrandt self-portrait recovered at a German salt mine that had been used as a storehouse, with Harry L. Ettlinger, right. Monuments Men Foundation

There’s no clear enemy, and that leads to the film’s core flabbiness: no tension. Clooney looks slender as I expect my 1940s-era heroes, but the center doesn’t hold. Narrative, dramatic films need tension. (You know, plot.) “Get the art before something bad happens” doesn’t quite do it. Before Hitler burns it? Before the Soviets scoop it up and haul it back to the USSR? Ultimately, Clooney doesn’t need Nazis or Soviets as enemies: his real enemy here is time.

Surely Mr. Clooney schooled himself in the one of the loopiest but most entertaining WWII caper films, Kelly’s Heroes. Acting out of pure self-interest, a group of American soldiers on 3 days R&R race 30 miles behind enemy lines to steal $16 million in gold. It’s not great art, but this is a good movie. Anachronistic? You bet. Oddball is an unlikely character, a Joseph Heller minor figure crossed with a healthy dose of filthy hippie. Crapgame’s a stereotype and so is Big Joe. But there’s tension in this movie, helped along by a pleasant lack of music, which allows us to experience the crunches, thrums, clicks and booms of war. A few scenes in The Monuments Men refer to Kelly’s Heroes (Goodman and Dujardin’s scene on a road is reminiscent of a road ambush in the Eastwood film), but the places where you might expect to find parallels, I found the Eastwood film better. (Yes, we went home and watched it.)

And then there’s Sam Epstein from Newark via Germany. This Monuments Men character left Germany in 1938, with his parents, but his grandfather stayed behind. By 1944/1945, his grandfather had not been heard from in 4 years, but the family knew he’d been sent to Dachau. Though the family lived in a town with a museum with a Rembrandt self-portrait, Sam has never seen it; they weren’t allowed into the museum, because, as the grandfather said, they were ‘too short.’ Why can’t the film confront the confiscation of Jewish property more directly? Why can’t it do a better job with the Holocaust than Clooney’s scene with the German officer? There’s brief scene with a barrel of gold that is absolutely chilling: and I think the film would have been better served with more upfront recognition of that barrel’s contents, what ‘too short’ really means, and the pervasive anti-Semitism of most of the world in the 1940s. (Gentleman’s Agreement, anyone?)

I don’t know enough about the actual history to quarrel over that, and while I will hunt up the books and read them, I was more taken with what seemed like obvious cinematic, movie-making failings– the “I’m heroic!” soundtrack, the lack of central tension, and the curious blindness to, or oddly tangential portrayal of Nazi racial hatred that fueled confiscation programs.

(For another movie about French resistance to Nazi art theft, there is always The Train: Burt Lancaster, art, and guns.)

I wish Clooney had been more willing to frighten us, to make a Saving Private Ryan about saving (or failing to save all of) the art. Feeling the losses and the failures more might have let us see the greatness, the monumentality, if you will, of what the team did accomplish.

Pluses: Good costuming with uniforms that age over time. Plenty of hardware.
Minuses: Soundtrack, unconvincing replicas of masterpieces. Also, nobody had 2014 Hollywood teeth in the 1940s.
Damn terrifying: The vision of Clooney to come in the final scene.

At the sales this month…

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, History, Research4 Comments

It’s auction season in antiques land, and the catalogs arrived at work smelling of money and expensive ink. Sotheby’s Folk Art and Americana sales offer some lovely pieces  at the end of this month.

From the Folk Art sale, Mr and Mrs (maybe) Fitzhugh Greene of (maybe) Newport, RI.

Lot 606 from Sotheby's sale N09106 "Esmerian"
Lot 606 from Sotheby’s sale N09106 “Esmerian”

Pretty sweet stuff, right? With an estimate of $400,000-600,000, chances are good that these aren’t headed for public display, so enjoy them now.

Mrs (maybe) Fitzhugh Greene
Mrs (maybe) Fitzhugh Greene

Mrs (maybe) Greene is a pretty fantastic painting, even if John Durand lacked the grace and skill of Copley or Feke. There is an airless quality to these paintings, though the details are fine and the contrast between the husband and wife in presentation is delightful. My favorite line of the catalogue entry is the final one: “When juxtaposed to the drab coloring of her husband’s portrait, Mrs. Greene can clearly be perceived as his adornment, a fertile beauty in the flush of womanhood.”

Egads, right? I suppose she could be, but I also suppose she could be a fine way to flaunt his wealth and success while he projects fiscal and mercantile stability and restraint. Without a solid link to actual people (and there isn’t) it could be that more is happening in these paintings than the woman serving as the man’s adornment. If you read the footnotes, you’ll see that the attribution to Newport is slim (it’s a story without a real source). If a Mr and Mrs Fitzhugh Greene lived in Newport in the 1760s and 1770s, they’re not buried in RI. They could be Loyalists who fled– auction catalogs are a fiction writers dream of inspiration– but so far, no solid evidence links these portraits to Rhode Island.

In terms of documenting a man and a woman of substance in 18th century America, or the material aspirations of those men and women, these portraits are interesting whether the clothes and jewelry Mrs (maybe) Greene is wearing are real or not. Because they could be fabrications.

Mr (maybe) Greene
Mr (maybe) Greene

Mr (maybe) Greene is firmly real. The frock coat, waistcoat and breeches are all presumably made of the same fine brown wool broadcloth, worn with a fine white linen shirt and stock adorned with lace. The buttons are interesting, and neither the zoom nor my nose pressed to the catalog page clearly reveal the pattern. They look like pretty standard issue death’s head buttons, except when one looks like it might be more like a dorset pattern, or the one that looks floral. These will be on display in New York if one has the chance, which I will not.

There are pendant portraits like these in museum collections that show a man and his sister. It is possible that what Sotheby’s is offering for sale is a pair like that: a man and his highly eligible sister, not a man and his wife.

Breaking into Museums (for research, silly)

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Museums
Curator’s storeroom, World Rugby Museum

So, how do you get into museums?

Most of us come into through the front door, pay a fee or show a membership card, and enjoy whatever spectacle we’re after. Some of us like jelly fish, some of us like taxidermy, some of us like clothes.

A universal constant for going behind the scenes is a specific, and not a general, request. You can say, “Show me all your spoons,” but not even please is going to help when there are thousands of spoons.

I like researchers: they’re always interesting, they see the collections in ways I don’t, and they have insights that are valuable and useful. But someone who wants to see all the spoons, or all the chairs, or shoes, or fire buckets is really hard to help: There are too many of each of those things. Specific shoes, chairs, fire buckets or coats are manageable and realistic. “May I make an appointment to see spoon 1492.1.12, please?” is a question a curator, registrar, or collections manager can work with. One spoon, two spoons, five spoons, a few pairs of shoes: Studying these few things can take a great deal longer than you might expect.

STEAM Museum of the Great Western Railway storeroom

Think about it this way: in a Special Collections Library, you generally don’t begin with, “I’d like to see all your material on the Civil War.” For one thing, that will be a lot of stuff. Chances are good you won’t be interested in all (or even much) of it. What you’re really after is usually more specific. “All your home front diaries written by women over the age of 44,” or perhaps it’s “Battle accounts written by chaplains in the field.” Those requests archivists and librarians can and will gladly handle, and through a reference interview, can help you identify not just specific items on your topic, but help you think about your topic. But asking to see all the diaries (or anythings!) at once, is usually a non-starter. They’re all in separate collections, in separate boxes, on separate floors. Heck, I work in a place with hundreds of diaries, and I am pretty sure they’d call my therapist and the cops if I asked to see all the diaries at once. (Tempting thought that it is.)

Once in my life have I seen “all the somethings” pulled out from storage in a museum.  The Curator of  Photographs and Prints and a visiting (contracted) scholar were selecting daguerreotypes for an exhibition, and in my very junior role as the Curatorial Assistant, I got to pull out all the daguerreotypes by Thomas M. Easterly and help spread them out on an enormous mahogany table. I’ll never forget how beautiful that was, and how special, to see so same silvered plates and brass mats spread out on a dark surface. If this link is stable, you can get a sense of what it was like. Once, in a quarter century of working in museums. Sad, isn’t it? more people should get this chance, but it’s rare. However, this rule is in place for the preservation and security of the objects.

Yes, I want this wall of chairs. The Röhsska Museum, GÖTEBORG, Sweden

These kinds of restrictions are part of why museums have open storage, and it’s why I wish we could have open storage. But most museums don’t, so the key to getting into the storerooms (or the research rooms) is to ask the right way. I did a presentation on the process, and there’s more good advice over at the Still Room Blog.

Always, in museums or in libraries, if there’s a catalog, start there! You can narrow down your choices with database searches and questions in advance so that you can make the absolute most of the time you have. Your time is precious. Focusing in on what you really want to see will help the museum’s staff help you better. And if you really enjoy a collection, please consider supporting it financially, with a donation to a collections care fund, annual fund, or a membership. Your dollars count, they’re noticed, and they’re truly appreciated.