Art from the Arctic

The Arctic has spurred the creativity of artists for centuries, marking as it does the border between the known and the unknown, the visible and invisible worlds. As historian Robert McGhee so eloquently put it, they are, in many ways, the "last imaginary place" on earth. Most of the time, artists relied on the sketches and accounts of explorers, reconstructing this unearthly country by borrowing the witness of those who sojourned there; some of the most astonishing works -- Friedrich's "Sea of Ice," or Landseer's "Man Proposes, God Disposes," were painted by men who had never approached within a thousand miles of the Arctic Circle. And yet, even in the nineteenth century, there were artists -- sometimes a whole shipload of them -- who headed north to see this singular landscape for themselves. The Armerican artist William Bradford chartered annual excursions for photography ice-painting nearly every year from 1861 to 1867. In 1869, aboard the Panther, with the explorer Isaac I. Hayes as their guide, Bradford and his fellow artists journeyed father north than any such party had managed before, venturing deep into Melville Bay before being turned back by the implacable barrier of pack-ice at about 75º north. In his quest to make the most of his northern sojourns, Bradford regularly brought along hired photographers to take studies of every scene. Two of these, John L. Dunmore and George P. Critcherson, accompanied him on the Panther, making hundreds of wet-plate collodion images, from which Bradford later drew from to assemble the massive elephant-folio volume, The Arctic Regions.

Such a thing, I had until now thought, was a curiously nineteenth-century notion: putting artists on a picture-making cruise seemed somehow both bold and quaint. And yet just today, just by chance, I stumbled across a documentary, Art from the Arctic, which describes a series of voyages made between 2003 and 2005, with British filmmaker David Buckland taking the role of Bradford, and the passenger-artists including sculptors Anthony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread, choreographer Siobhan Davis, and the writer Ian McEwen. The film documenting their journeys is, happily, available to watch free online, both at Hulu and at SnagFilms (I recommend the latter, as it's free of adverts for insurance companies). The film itself isn't terribly remarkable, though there are some lovely shots of Svalbard, including calving glaciers and a polar bear which -- thanks to a telephoto lens -- looks dangerously close to a boatload of defenseless artists. Nevertheless, the story it tells is a remarkable one; in this day and age of virtual visits and Skyping sociality, it's somehow encouraging to see artists and writers actually enduring the rigors of a sea voyage -- and, in one case, a wintering-over -- simply to gain that ineluctable thing that we still can call "experience." I recommend it very highly, and hope that perhaps this sort of thing may happen again -- if it does, I'll put in for a ticket.

Franklin Curiosities: Ron Toelke

A few months ago, in one of my installments on Franklin Curiosities, I mentioned the small toy replica tins of Goldner's Patent Provisions crafted by Ron Toelke. Since then, I was very pleased to be able to get back in touch with Ron, and learn about some of his more recent artistic creations. Among the most remarkable of these, without doubt, are the portraits in his series A Sorrower on the Sea of Doubt. Based upon the famous Franklin daguerreotypes taken by Beard and his assistants in 1845, these portraits each incorporate Toelke's hand-cut portrait of the sitter on metallic paper, along with four lines from the poem, Lady Franklin's Appeal to the North, first published in the New York Times on October 18, 1851. Each portrait is framed on tombstone-shaped marbled paper, surmounted with an image of the Arctic Medal with the north star at its peak. The cover glass of each portrait is treated with a special finish that crystallizes into its own unique icy pattern. Although I have not seen one of these works in person, they're certainly among the most striking contemporary versions of the portraits of Franklin's men that I know. The collection takes its name, "Sorrower on the Sea of Doubt," from the last line of the poem.

Toelke's many other projects are no less commendable; he has another toy set, Battleships of the World, which are wonderfully crafted of wood, paper, and paint. He is also at work on a set of Arctic playing cards, which will be based in part on similar souvenir decks produced in the 1850's, with illustrations taken from the books and illustrated papers of the day. To my mind, this is just the sort of artistic endeavor which brings together the fascination with the old with a new sense of what craft and care can produce; no Franklin collection would be complete without something of his work.

Landseer Lecture

I just arrived back late last night from my lecture on Sir Edwin Landseer's "Man Proposes, God Disposes," currently on display at the Yale Center for British Art. It was well-attended, and the audience was wonderfully diverse in every sense -- in age, in background, in interests, in expertise. I was especially delighted that my partner Karen Carr and my daughter Caeli were there, along with my dear friends Mary Cappello and Jean Walton (thanks, Jean, for the photo!). This painting, along with the rest of the Royal Holloway's touring collection, has been expertly hung and lighted, and has never looked better. It's also worthy of note that the frames, which were originally all glazed and made with specially-designed latches for removing and cleaning the glass, are now hung almost entirely unglazed, which offers a view long unavailable in their original home. Landseer's carnivorous canvas finally gets its due.

There is an enduring anxiety about these bears, one which was the subject of several questions after my lecture. One person in attendance, an alumna of Royal Holloway, offered her recollection that the painting was hung with a Union Jack -- reversed -- during exams, as though the mirror image would better defeat the harmful rays of the naval ensign in the painting. She vividly recounted the anxiety of those who sat near. What horror still exuded from them nearly 150 years after they were painted? I offered my own view that the bears, in all their muscular horror, were more or less stand-ins for fears of cannibalism.

And yet whether or not these bears were simply representatives of animal appetite -- or else subconscious representatives of the upgorged horror of the "last resource" was a matter of debate. Scott Wilcox, the YCBA's curator of graphic arts and an expert on panoramas, asked whether the bears might not offer the relief of resolution -- after all, if 'the bears did it,' then there was no further need to probe the scene in search of something far worse. Ultimately, many present felt that the bears could be both a potential guard against far worse images, and an embodiment of the very fear thus allayed -- and I heartily agreed with this view.

But why not judge for yourselves? This magnificent show runs through July 26th, and New Haven is an easy day-trip for anyone in the greater New York or greater Boston areas. These paintings, as a collection, will not travel again soon, and you may be surprised to find that even the most difficult to please of museum goers -- children -- will at once be drawn to Landseer's portrait of these astonishing creatures, and will be led by them through the rest of a gallery filled with an abundance of Victorian riches.

Man Proposes, God Disposes

One of the iconic images of the Arctic Sublime, it was painted by an artist who had never travelled to the north, and whose best-known paintings were of royal dogs and ponies -- Sir Edwin Landseer -- in the strange twilight of his career. When in 1981 it was shown in the United States as part of a Landseer retrospective, New York Times art citic Hilton Kramer singled it out as the most stunning of his works, comparing it with other darkest moments of the Victorian age:

"'Man Proposes, God Disposes'" is Landseer’s 'Dover Beach' and with that painting, at least, he joins the ranks of those disabused Victorian prophets whom we still have ample reason to admire and heed."

As one of the gems of the Royal Holloway Collection at the University of London, it's part of a touring show set up to allow renovations to its original quarters; from now through July 26th this magnificent, unparalleled collection of Victorian art can be seen at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. On June 25th, I'll be giving a gallery talk on Landseer's painting from 12:30 to 1 p.m.

So how did such a seemingly staid and sober artist such as Landseer, who, though renowned for his animal subjects, had always remained with the lines of domestic propriety, come to paint such a monstrous scene? In 1864, McClintock's news of the demise of Sir John Franklin's expedition was still fresh in the air, as was the controversy, ignited ten years earlier, over Dr. John Rae's evidence of cannibalism among Franklin's men. Such dark matter was inconceivable as the subject for a serious painting -- since Géricault's famous "Raft of the Medusa" (1818-1819) tastes, shall we say, were greatly changed. Maritime tragedies were meant to be seen through a spyglass dimly, distantly awesome and only alluded to by natural features; the storms of human malfeasance could cloud horizons but not confront the viewer's eye. Frederic Edwin Church had struck just the right tone three years earlier with his "Icebergs," which contained a lone, broken mast as a synecdoche of Franklin's tragic end: man made mast.

There's a mast in Landseer's painting too, with tattered remnants of a royal ensign clinging to its side -- but it's what comes before the mast that astounds. Two polar bears, their muzzles rippling with carniverous delight, are sitting down to a feast of dead explorers' bones. The bear on the right tosses a bone from a human ribcage, while on the left a second bear rips at the ensign. At that bear's side lie a broken telescope and lens-cap, its shattered state a metaphor of the blasted vision of the dead. When the painting was first shown in 1864, there could be no doubt of its intended subject. The Times spoke of "bones -- no need to ask whose," while the reviewer for the Illustrated London News was more impressionistic:

"Under the lurid sky of Arctic twilight, among the vast fantastic blocks of ice, green, or of livid pallor, save where faintly flushed with the long, level, rosy ray of the far-off dawn, we see over a hollow a solitary spar; and on the brink of this strange and awful grave -- for those are human ribs protruding, blanched and bare from summer heat or birds of prey."

Many felt it was in poor taste, and some of Landseer's private friends associated it with his increasingly difficult struggle with nervous anxiety. For much of the time before this painting, Landseer had been laboring, long and patiently, on the sculpted lions for the base of Nelson's Pillar in Trafalgar Square. The commission had used so much of his artistic and life-force that he was driven to nightmares, in one of which the lion pinned him to the ground, about to make a man-sized meal of him. Nevertheless, Landseer labored on, and perhaps in "Man proposes" found an outlet for this sense of being warily, wearily pursued by enormously powerful and relentless beasts.

Purchased some years later by Thomas Holloway, the British patent-medicine magnate, it took up a place of honor, as well as of anxeity, in the Picture Gallery in the Founder's Building of the Royal Holloway College. When the hall was used at term time for examinations, students were averse to sitting near it, so much so that it became a tradition for the porters to cover it with a cloth beforehand. And, curiously, it was in this same building that Anne Keenleyside, the forensic pathologist who first confirmed evidence of cannibalism from the bones recovered from NgLj-2 on King William Island, spent a postdoctoral fellowship, passing the hall on her way to and from her research without ever realizing how her work, and Landseer's strange vision, connected.

There are many other reasons to see the Royal Holloway -- Frith's Railway Station and Millais's "Princes in the Tower" among them -- but I would urge anyone who has the opportunity to see the Landseer. These bears do not often travel abroad, and there is nothing quite so chilling as seeing them there before you, only a few animal paces from your heart.

Albert Operti

Albert Operti (1852-1927) was renowned in his day for his depictions of the natural wonders of the Arctic, as well as scenes of exploration and ships. Born in Italy and educated in Britain, he accompanied Robert Peary on his 1896 expedition to Greenland, a trip which resulted in hundreds of sketches and studies which would be the basis for his later work.  Many of his paintings were commissioned by, and remain in the collection of, the Explorers' Club in New York, but are not widely known in the art world.  Yet although much of his work was based on direct observation, many of his most dramatic paintings imagine scenes of terror at which Operti was not in fact present; among these, his "The Rescue of the Greely Party" is especially evocative.  He also painted scenes from the Franklin search era, including one of the "Erebus" and "Terror" under sail, and the abandonment of the "Advance" on Kane's Second Grinnell expedition.  In addition to his paintings and sketches, he was also commissioned to make plaster casts of Greenlanders for the Museum of Natural History.

Like many panorama and diorama painters of the nineteenth century, when the Arctic was also a popular subject for such entertainments, Operti had a background in theatrical scene painting, and it was with this work that he was chiefly occupied in the middle years of his life, principally with the Metropolitan Opera.  In the last six years of his life he returned to the ANMH, painting diorama backdrops, murals, and friezes for their exhibitions.  During this period, he actually lived in quarters provided by the Explorers Club, and it was there that he died in 1927.

Outside of the extensive collections there, however, Operti's work is not often seen or exhibited.  And yet, curiously, contemporary prints of some of his finest paintings can be had for a very modest sum at sites such as eBay -- thanks to the series of scenes he prepared for trading cards issues by the Hassan Oriental Cigarette Company in the early nineteen-teens.  An example -- "Arctic Moonlight" -- is shown above, and further examples from my own collection may be found here.  The most I've ever paid for one of these cards is $10, and at times I've been able to acquire small sets for around $20.  It's a fascinating way to acquire some remarkable images of the Arctic from the early twentieth century.