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ARTSY QUIRKY GENIUSES
These days, I, like many people in these unexpectedly serious and dangerous times, feel a sense of isolation. Somehow, it’s gotten me thinking about oddball people I know a tiny bit but not enough about—I think of them as quirky geniuses.
An inadequately short gallery. Just some that have strayed across my artsy quests and that I’m aware of for their genius and quirkiness to which I’m especially attracted. I’ve had to do some research to help fill in some background. (Note that, despite my great enthusiasm for Abraham Maslow, I don’t think he was “quirky,” I don’t include Picasso–not quirky, just a self-absorbed genius.) My format is to give some faint clues and end the short renditions with the geniuses’ names. It’s all fun and games. And far better than twiddling thumbs.
Because of my lack of universal knowledge (HA!), the current compendium is, I know, inadequate. My list includes too-few musicians and too-few women. My bad! I’d be happy to have suggestions—that describe why your suggested genius was/is quirky.
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Created paintings and individual prints plus books of prints beginning in the late 18th century and to mid-19th century. Reportedly moved from one residence to another about 90 times, supposedly for non-payment of rent. Created a series of woodblock-printed sketchbooks referred to as “Manga,” did two series of prints about Mt. Fuji, Considered by many as the greatest Japanese artist ever. Described himself as “The old man crazy about painting.” Just before dying at age 90 he reportedly said, “If heaven would give me just five more years, I might become a true painter.”
Below, a cropped image from the 3-volume set of books, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Fuji shown small, upside down in a cup’s liquid. As the mountain here is a mere reflection, an unsubstantial creation, possibly the picture is symbolic of art’s unreality and is a self-portrait expressing Hokusai’s great reverence for Fuji.
HOKUSAI
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Began his adult life as a minister in a neighboring country. Later did oil paintings of the poor peasants who lived there. Began paintings influenced by early Impressionist work. Suffered several mental breakdowns and was hospitalized. His brother did much to help him personally and commercially. Vincent hoped to start an artist group in southern France. Reportedly cut off his ear—but actually only cut a small part of it (Who cares about truth when exaggeration is so much more entertaining?) . Only one of his paintings sold during his lifetime. A quote from Vincent: “Real painters do not paint things as they are…they paint them as they themselves feel them to be.” Apparently, with the onset of another mental breakdown, shot himself in a sun-filled field and died.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
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Wrote poems and plays about his native country and town. Traveled his land with a mobile theater group, performing for the people. Associated with some of the foremost creative artists of his day, including Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, with whom, it’s said, he had affairs. Dali and Bunuel reportedly made the experimental film Un Chien Andalou mocking him. (Un Chien Andalou in English=The Andalusian Dog.) At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he stayed with a good friend in his home town, Granada, Spain, thinking it safe for him, but was taken by a rebel group and shot. Buried in an unknown grave.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
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Creator of some of the most innovative literature of the early 20th century. As a child was sexually molested by siblings of both sexes. Throughout her life had bouts of depression/psychosis.
Married Leonard Woolf and they created a self-sustaining publishing house that published her work and that of other major literary artists. Created strange, modernist written works before it became fashionable to do so. Wrote volumes of diaries about her life and her work, edited and published after her death by her husband (who had supported her emotionally and intellectually and promoted her works after her death). One condensed volume: A Writer’s Diary, constitutes the best and most fascinating author’s description of life and creative process that I know of:
What it wants is presumably unity; but it is I think rather good (I am talking to myself over the fire about The Waves.) Suppose I could run all the scenes together more?—by rhythm chiefly. So as to avoid those cuts; so as to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end—I don’t want the waste that the breaks give; I want to avoid chapters; that indeed is my achievement, if any, here: a saturated unchopped completeness; changes of scene, of mind of person, done without spilling a drop. Now if it could be worked over with heat and currency, that’s all it wants. And I am getting my blood up (temp. 99). But all the same I went into Lewes and the Keynes came to tea; and having got astride my saddle the whole world falls into shape; it is this writing that gives me my proportions.
With the world—including one of her homes with the published books bombed out by Nazi planes at the beginning of World War II, and beginning another psychotic episode, the last words in her A Writer’s Diary, in 1941, three days before she filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked to her death in a nearby river, she wrote:
Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn’t quite fall in. Suppose I bought a ticket to the Museum; biked in daily and read history. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
April 12, 1937
VIRGINIA WOOLF
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Twentieth-century artist/anti-artist, painted a “nude” which was rejected or decried by major art expositions. He exhibited many “found objects” as “art,” including a urinal signed R. Mutt.
According to–https://www.theartstory.org/artist/duchamp-marcel :
“A taste for jokes, tongue-in-cheek wit and subversive humor, rife with sexual innuendos, characterizes Duchamp’s work and makes for much of its enjoyment. He fashioned puns out of everyday expressions which he conveyed through visual means. The linguistic dimension of his work in particular paved the way for Conceptual art.”
He was thought to have given up art for decades, devoting himself only to playing chess. But, in secret, for more than 20 years, he was developing a strange, three-dimensional construction, “Etant donnes” that can only be viewed by one person at a time looking through small peepholes at a landscape background and, in the foreground, a casting of part of a woman’s naked body. He wrote an elaborate user manual for disassembling and reassembling the piece, which now resides, assembled, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art where, through the peepholes, I have peeked.
MARCEL DUCHAMP
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He influenced a new generation of performers and listeners through his illuminating piano interpretations of the music of a variety of composers, including his 1956 recording of J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” His playing was fast, precise, cold, and elegant.
He found a particular piano that responded to his style, and the seat his father made for him he took with him to use for all his concerts—if fitted him just right. He stopped public performing in April, 1964—he disliked public performances and felt that recording in a studio, with all its technical possibilities was preferable:
“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
In 1967, he created his first “contrapuntal radio documentary,” The Idea of North, an innovative tapestry of speaking voices, music, and sound effects that drew on principles from documentary, drama, music, and film. He explored in it the nature of solitude. His first biographer, Geoffrey Payzant, argued that these were “hybrids of music, drama, and several other strains, including essay, journalism, anthropology, ethics, social commentary, [and] contemporary history.”
He died in October, 1982, just after his 50th birthday.
“My idea of happiness is spending 250 days a year
in a recording studio.”
GLENN GOULD
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Rhodes Scholar. Projects great joy and intelligent humanism in her broadcast work, sometimes uses a situation we’re familiar with to metaphorically explain a difficult current issue. Pursues ideas with logic and organized ideas. Out-of-the-closet lesbian. She, in her spare time—it seems so strange—pursues fly fishing.
I am enamored of her joyous, intelligent persona.
RACHEL MADDOW
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Co-originator of Fluxus art movement, created happenings, quirky books he and others wrote. Though he lived as a starving artist, with inherited money he established his Something Else Press, a publishing house devoted to the unexpected and quirky. Married a woman poet—they had twin daughters, they divorced and later remarried. Loved a guy named Eugene (no relation to me). After performing a piece consisting of screaming as loud as he could for as long as he could, that evening he died of a heart attack.
DICK HIGGINS
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What an extraordinary experience for those who only knew of his “foreign man” role in Taxi to see him turn himself from the doofus foreign persona into Elvis Presley and do such a good rendition that Elvis himself regarded it as the best of all imitations! Having turned foreign man into Elvis, amazed audiences applauded. He thereupon transformed back into his first level created persona, foreign man bowing, saying, “Dank you veddy much!”
His foreign man persona got him the major Taxi role which made him well-known and rich–but he quickly came to hate it–he was forced to copy his same (scripted?) role month after month–he wanted to do new creative stuff.
In stand-alone performances he also created other quirky comedic bits, some masterful, some not so. Bio-pic MAN ON THE MOON gives some sense of his bizarre genius, as do the couple of biographies of him.
ANDY KAUFMAN
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ʺAutism [neural atypical] is part of who I am.” When young she was considered weird–teased and bullied in high school. ʺI had people in my life who didn’t give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher.”
When Allison and I met her at a small gathering, we asked how we could help our autistic son when he became obsessed with something—she said we should help broaden out his obsessions into related fields.
She is the author of over a dozen books. She thinks in pictures and thus solves problems in an unexpected way. Having a special empathy toward animals, and finding that they were often difficult to control on the way to the slaughterhouse, she designed special facilities for humane slaughter. These designs are used by about 1/3 of the U. S. cattle industry.
DR.TEMPLE GRANDIN
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Comic who, manipulating early TV technology with camera tricks, turned our world sideways and upside down, creatively messing with our minds. Sometimes he just amused us with the unexpected–such a being part of a gorilla musical group called “The Nairobi Trio.” I can’t adequately describe this–you gotta see/hear it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-tFyBLo71U).
In one scene his doofus character Eugene (no relation) is seated in a room. He removes his lunch from a brown paper bag and puts it on the table in front of him. He pours milk toward a glass and it goes way beyond its target, seeming to defy gravity’s logic. He puts a handful of grapes (?) on the table and they go bouncing across it and off onto the floor. What is happening to the law of gravity?! He’d had the entire set including TV camera constructed on an angle so that on-screen he and the set appeared upright—but weren’t. The effect for the viewer was gravity-defying.
ERNIE KOVACS
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Enamored of Jean Shepherd’s genius, she schemed and successfully stole him from his wife, Miss Chicago of 1948, the actress, Lois Nettleton. She began as his gofer and eventually became his radio and performance producer. He sometimes treated her badly, even on live radio. Despite his self-absorbed mistreatment of her, she stuck with him, devoting to him her creative mind, body, and soul. She mostly abandoned her own dreams of creative work, except for writing a novel, The Show Gypsies, focused on her former profession as a horse-show-jumper. She dedicated the book:
For Jean Shepherd…this fool’s rainbow.
As if the dedication was not enough to express her idealistic dedication to Shepherd, I believe the book’s entire story is a metaphor for the uneasy relationship she had with him. The final scene between the novel’s loving couple:
Diane squeezed his hand. “Oh come on,” she said, “since when have I been a cop-out? Of course I’ll go with you. Only I’ll expect you to make an honest woman out of me.”
He smiled and put his arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, I’ll get around to that one of these days.”
As they left the stabling area, a sleepy saddlebred came up to its door and pushed an inquiring nose in their direction. Diane absently patted its neck. As they stood, she could hear the faint sounds of a radio from the stall where the grooms were already beginning to measure out the morning’s feed. The sound followed them as they walked along the echoing hallway to the elevator.
From the rocking of the cradle to the rolling of the hearse
the goin’ up was worth the comin’ down.
As he ended his radio career 15 years after they’d begun their affair (two years after her book was published), he made an honest woman out of her. They remained married for 20 years until her death in 1998. Not being able to live without her, he died the next year.
The full photo, un-cropped, does not show her
doing her own creative writing—as the caption to it indicates,
she is taking Shepherd’s “dictation.”
LEIGH BROWN
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He was a wild and crazy guy. Best known for his written/illustrated children’s books, he had spent years touring the world and writing cartoon-illustrated, humorous stories for Playboy. Most people are not aware of his bawdy songs, and are unaware that he wrote the Johnny Cash hit, “A Boy Named Sue.” Nor that the song is a loving poke in the ribs at his best friend, Jean Shepherd, who often complained on his radio broadcasts and privately about having “a girl’s name.”
Dedicated to living every moment of life to the fullest and freest, Shel drew fast and furiously, refusing to correct errors. For a theater piece assembled of Jean Shepherd’s friends, “LOOK CHARLIE,” he drew the entire program, including descriptive comments of the participants, only to be told he’d have redo the cover because he’d left a letter out of CHARLIE. Instead, he fixed it in his own quirky way.
SHEL SILVERSTEIN
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JEAN SHEPHERD Kid Story–Public Speaking & (133) ARTSY Like a Clenched Fist
“Araya Yabaya Arayaa!”
One of the great terrors that I had in high school involved being signed up for what they called the “general college preparatory course” and having to take Public Speaking. The little handbook listed required subjects you had to take. Okay, I’d fooled around in English—I’d declined verbs, once in a while I’d diagramed sentences and I’d handed in themes. I was great on book reports. I could ad lib a book report. Give me one paragraph of a book, any book, and I could write you a seven-page book report on it that carried weight and got a B-plus. But the course that absolutely terrified me was Public Speaking.
You had to take it before you were a senior. The first year I said, “I’ll take biology instead. I’ll study about worms and stuff, and I’ll take swimming.” So, in my sophomore year, my advisor said, “When are you going to take Public Speaking?” I said, “Well, ah, maybe next semester. I’ll take band instead.” Oh, I was scared. It was approaching. It was approaching. Every couple of days I would walk down the hall and I would see the classroom where Miss Parsons taught Public Speaking. On the floor was a little platform with a lectern and I’d get that sick feeling down in the pit of my stomach.
Every couple of weeks we’d have an auditorium session and some kid would get up and give a talk along with the regular auditorium session. I’d sit way in the back and watch and wonder how the devil this kid did it! I’d say, “Oh boy, he must be scared. Wow! Oh man!” Of course, I’d always put it down like the rest of the kids: “Ah, who wants to get up there and talk in front an audience?” Each one of us had this sense of inadequacy.
Much more to come.
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COMPACT LIKE A CLENCHED FIST
(Like an unhostile, living human hand).
I have a great affinity for small objects that are compact like a clenched fist. I say “clenched fist” but visualize an image of a comfortable, living human hand, an unhostile threat. Objects one can hold firmly and fondle, that feel comfortable and that don’t have extraneous, extruding barbs and long spikes that might easily impale one—or that might easily break off.
Inappropriately carved modern
objects referred to as “netsuke,”
not meant to be worn,
but to be displayed by the unknowing.
Note ugly, pointed, non-utilitarian protrusions.
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An ultimate example is Japanese netsuke. They have to be small, and, other than the oddball long, slim variety, they have to be compact. Raymond Bushnell was the best-known authority on netsuke, author of several wonderfully thoughtful books about them in addition to a small basic one, An Introduction to Netsuke. He begins this book:
The Japanese love of the miniature in art is well known—dwarf trees, tray landscape, sword fittings, woodblock prints, and other diminutive arts….
Netsuke are works of sculpture in wood, ivory, lacquer, porcelain, metal or other materials.
He points out that a netsuke is part of an ensemble, suspended from the sash and strung to such objects as a medicine case, a tobacco pouch, or a purse, by means of a cord.
It must be designed so that the overall shape is smooth and rounded; no jutting parts or appendages are permitted that might break off or tear a kimono sleeve.
One of the most appealing qualities of a netsuke is a quality that, amazingly, was not carved into it by the artist who created it. It is the smoothness and luster brought about by generations of loving handling and wearing.
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My 18th c. piece on the left lost three of its legs long ago–one can see that the broken ends have been worn smooth by wear after the breaks. In fact, the piece was originally, probably, faulty for the jutting of the legs, and now the wounded piece has achieved the more compact shape it should originally have had. Bushnell, in his Netsuke Familiar and Unfamiliar, says, “The older a netsuke is, the longer it has been subject to accidents and exposed to the elements, the more wear and injury it may be expected to have sustained during its lifetime.”
The 19th c. piece also has much smoothness caused by wear and the traditional use of it. It has no broken parts, though the crack in its traditionally held ball does show its age.
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20th c. shi shi. I sent Bushell a letter to his question-& answer column in the journal of The International Netsuke Collectors Society. Apparently the carved dividing lines between body parts were carved with a 20th c. Dremel machine—does it matter how quickly/efficiently the artwork is achieved—even with a modern tool? (After all, it’s the creative aspect that matters.) He found my question surprising and intriguing.
The idea for my very small collection was to concentrate, but not limit myself, to the shi shi dog in all its multiple manifestations, inspired by Bushell’s suggestion in Netsuke Familiar and Unfamiliar. I find of particular interest his comments regarding variations on a theme. In describing “specialized collections,” he notes that a particular subject for an extensive collection might have scores of variations, including different carvers, poses, styles, materials, and other considerations.
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The piece on the left appears to me authentic—maybe 19th C., the nearly uncarved bottom seeming to be in an uncommon-but-traditional style of carving roughly (Bushell puts it: “Ittobori is a quicker method of roughing out and completing a figure, since it eliminates several steps of smoothing, polishing, and finishing.”) I tend to doubt that a present-day carver would think to do this, as most unknowing buyers would not be aware of that style and would want completely realistic renderings only, not what they’d think were half-finished pieces. That on the right, fully carved and realistic, is one of many current examples that are obviously not older, but seem to have been churned out in China by the hundreds to sell for well under $10 each. (The impoverished carvers probably earn about 20 cents an hour.)
END PART 1 OF 2
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JEAN SHEPHERD Kid Story–Old Man’s Car & (131) ARTSY Variations
He used to sit there, but I’m sitting in the front seat now, working the keys. I’ll turn it over and warm it up for the old man. Arummmm, arummmm, rummmgudagudagudagudaguda. I love to look at the dials. I see it’s got three-quarters of a tank of gas, which is at least two quarters more than the old man usually had. He’s got a big weekend. The needle flicks over toward the C so it’s charging. Gudagudagudagudagudagudagudagudagudarummmm! I put my foot on the gas Rummmummmummmmmm! I feel that little vibration.
So what is the next step? Ah huh. I ease in the clutch. I think I’ll back it up just a little bit to get it out of the sun, get it in the shade of the house. I put it in reverse and I roll it back about, maybe, five feet. It feels good to ease the clutch out. I put the brake on, put it back into neutral. Rummmummmummm. Little do I realize I am approaching a disaster that would forever be part of the folklore of the Shepherd clan. When it is mentioned there would be a dead silence.
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VARIATIONS & PRIMITIVE ART
I like various types of “primitive art,” yet many individual examples I don’t much care for. While working on the Museum’s Peoples of the Pacific Hall with anthropologist and social thinker Margaret Mead, I asked her a question that related to works of various indigenous cultures of the Pacific region. It involves political correctness in the world of art. The term “primitive” has negative connotations.
In a 1961 Chicago Natural History Museum scientific publication, Phillip H. Lewis, Curator, wrote:
The utility, or function, of art is part of the European concept of art and leads to ethnocentric bias when Europeans consider non-European art….
It is clear that most, if not all, objects of primitive art, suffer diminution of art value if the criterion of creation for art’s sake alone is involved….
Erwin Panofsky (1955, p. 11) says: “It is possible to experience every object, natural or man-made, aesthetically. We do this…when we just look at it…without relating it, intellectually or emotionally, to anything outside of itself.”…
The characteristic of an artifact which makes it recognizable as art is the aesthetic organization of its visible form. Both Panofsky and Forster emphasize the intention of the artist to make artifacts that will be aesthetically important….
It is possible to distinguish art from non-art on two levels. First, by looking to form alone and with no specific knowledge of the life of the people, we may seek evidence of design and composition for visual appeal. At a second and deeper level, we seek to know the artist’s intent, function and meaning, using knowledge of the culture and the society,…
Primitive art is defined as the art of societies that can be regarded as primitive by virtue of type of social organization. The term “primitive,” although it carries certain invidious connotations and has some confusing aspects, is appropriate, if used to refer to an ideal type of early society and then extended to later societies of that type.
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I asked Dr. Mead: “Do you find the term ‘primitive art’ offensive?”
Without hesitation, she strongly responded: “No!”
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I’ve acquired my modest collection of different pieces of art under many different circumstances, and I’m a total amateur regarding their significance. I have only a couple of objects from New Guinea and environs. They mostly have some variation on curved, concentric patterns that I recognize (however rightly or wrongly) as being produced by the same or related cultures of New Guinea.
One is a small coconut with abstract surface carving. It has a long carved piece that fits inside the hole in the top. It’s my understanding that the coconut is a container for indulging in betel nut use. The long piece would be used to extract the ground up nut, which is chewed alone or with the addition of lime powder—so maybe the coconut held the lime.
The other two objects I believe are from the Trobriands (now called Kiriwina Islands), a small island group just to the east of New Guinea. The art from the Trobriands, for me, seems rather more carefully conceived and formalized (what I’d say, somewhat less “primitive”) than that of other New Guinea forms. The thicker piece I believe, is a pestle used to grind something like lime or betel nut, in a mortar. The long, thin piece, with its tweezer-like end, I’m told, is like a fork, for eating—possibly for consuming human flesh.
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Although not involved in designing a temporary exhibit of art of New Guinea at our museum, I stopped into the exhibit-in-progress to see what kind of material they were installing. I found that the organizers were two Caucasian fellows, who were contracted to collect the material for the New Guinea government’s exhibit, then distribute some of the artifacts to other museums, and sell-off much of the remaining material instead of paying for return shipment to New Guinea. (Selling exhibited material is a practice usually frowned upon in the museum world, so the potential sale was kept rather secret–only a few of our museum people and maybe a few others, were aware of it.) I noted a yam mask from near the island’s north coast, and also a drum I was interested in.
My Yam Mask.
Fortunately for me, the drum involved would have required an elaborate support that preparators had no time to make, so it was hidden in a small tent in the exhibit–no one else had a chance to see it or thus, choose it for purchase. (After buying it, I designed and made the plexiglas support.)
Drums are an important part of social life in New Guinea. I find that mine is more elegant in overall shape–though less elaborate in its carved features–than any others I’ve seen, even in museums. The double-pointed bottom, called “fish muzzle” or “crocodile muzzle,” seems to locate this style in the large, southern, Papuan Gulf region. My understanding is that the drum head–on such as mine where it’s still intact–is snake skin.
Some Examples I Found on the Internet.
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My New Guinea Drum.
(The recessed parts of the carving seem
to have been filled with white paint.)
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JEAN SHEPHERD Kid Story–more Picnic & (128) ARTSY Variations on a Theme
I said, “A picnic! What do you mean a picnic? At night?”
“Yep, they say there’s a picnic down at the forest preserve. Let’s go.”
So I got my bike out of the garage and got out on the road behind Schwartz and Flick and Bruner, peddling off into that fantastic maw—through this enormous, swirling cloud of mosquitoes, dripping sweat behind us as we went, heading to the forest preserve. The first time I ever went to a picnic that began at night.
We arrived at the preserve and there was just a great big banner across the front, and it had a symbol on it. No letters at all. We drifted down the gravel road. And there was a kind of excitement—Oh, a picnic at night! It was a quiet picnic. There was no band playing. In every picnic we went to there was some kind of a cockamamie band. Either it was the Greek-American accordion players or a Dixie band—they always had Dixie bands. Once in a while some of them would show up with a bunch of guys playing little round things—that was the Croatian-Americans. They had these black suspenders and puffy sleeves. But this picnic had no band at all. Nothing.
Through the woods we could see some lights ahead of us. Orange lights bobbing up and down. And then we saw. Are you ready, friends? Are you really ready? I couldn’t believe it. There in front of us was a whole strange, shifting mass of people like some mirage. There were big ones and little ones maybe a foot high or three feet high. There were some big, tall, skinny ones. But they all looked alike. Great crowd of them moving past a long table that had food on it. They had potato salad and it looked like boiled hot dogs. We would not stay long enough to find out.
I said to Schwartz, “What the heck is that, Schwartz?”
Schwartz said, “It’s a picnic.”
Flick said, “Yeah, come on, let’s get some. Flick was the dildock of the crowd. He was always ready to go. If tarantulas were having a picnic, he’d be there. He didn’t care.”
And Bruner said, “Aaaaa, I’m scared!”
I said, “What is it?”
Schwartz said, “It’s the Ku Klux Klan!”
We were at the yearly picnic of the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK. Have you ever seen a crowd of Ku Klux Klanners moving around in the woods with their capes and robes and those long pointed hoods with the two little black eyes? With the big cross on the chest?
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VARIATIONS ON A THEME
In music, variations can be thought of as repetitions of a theme
with one or more musical aspects changed, either slightly or drastically.
Over the years I’ve found that I especially respond to variations on a theme in art, humor, and other areas. My understanding is that it was rather popular in music of the 17th century. Beethoven and Brahms were enamored of the idea. In the 20th century, Maurice Ravel “had long toyed with the idea of building a composition from a single theme which would grow simply through harmonic and instrumental ingenuity.” First performed in 1928, his “Bolero” is widely known for its obsessive repetition. (However, the extraordinary ice dancing in the 1984 Olympics by Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, using five-and-a-half minutes of “Bolero,” doesn’t do skating variations at all, but performs continuously different and elegant moves.)
Hokusai, my favorite Japanese woodblock-print artist, was obsessed by Mount Fuji as a religious focus, and, in 1831, portrayed it in his color print series, “36 Views of Mt. Fuji” (contains 46, not 36 images), and in 1834 produced the three-volume monochromatic book set in black, white, and grays, “A Hundred Views of Mount Fuji.”
Best-known color prints from “36 Views” and
two double-page and two single-page images from “100 Views.”
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In Japanese netsuke, I discovered that the portrayal of the shi shi dog has been done in a wide variety of forms, and has become one of my favorite examples of variations on a theme.
My shi shi netsuke, displayed in sand,
including ivory from 18th, 19th, and 20th century.
Also some loose-leaf pages with photos of a few variations.
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Picasso, among his obsessions, created many images of the Artist and his Model and Artist with Created Work, especially in color, and in his 1930s series of etchings for Vollard.
An oil, and a crayon image. In the oil on the left,
I like the way he simultaneously depict the model posing,
and as the painted image on the canvas.
Two etchings in the Vollard series.
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Some humorists and cartoonists I enjoy also delight in variations on a theme. I especially remember the cartoons of Sam Cobean, who was very popular in the 1940s and early 1950s. Best known are his variations showing the thought balloon above the head of someone who is imagining the person he is viewing (usually imagined naked).
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Addendum
The New York Times of August 11, 2017, in its arts section, has a short piece on Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings. They provide a short, additional “variation.” (Note that the first and last renditions shown are very similar, and the second, third, and fourth are very similar to each other.) For me, his sunflowers are metaphors for a larger obsession Van Gogh had with the sun itself–its intense brightness, color, heat, fire (the flowers’ petals are flamelike), and life-giving power itself. I show part of the article, plus my favorite Van Gogh depicting the sun.
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