Category: artists

“The body says what words cannot.” –Martha Graham and the Art of Dance

Adele Fasick1 Comment

Dance is one of humanity’s oldest art forms. Tomb paintings in India dating from 8000 BCE show pictures of people dancing. Throughout history people have danced to celebrate happy events such as births, marriages, and victories as well as to commemorate deaths and defeats. But dance is an art that has not been easy to record, so we know very little of what ancient dancing was like or how the performances looked. And so, it seems that every generation must reinvent the art of dancing.

Fortunately for us, the twentieth century brought us new ways of recording visual arts and movement. At the same time, many artists were turning to dance as a way to express their feelings and ideas. Martha Graham is remembered as a woman who revolutionized the way dance was taught and performed in America. She was born in 1894, and lived through most of the twentieth century, dying in 1991. During her long life she transformed the art of dance.

Martha Graham

Graham was born in Pennsylvania but moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California when she was 14 years old. It was in California that she first saw professional dance performances and decided to study dance. She enrolled in the Denishawn Dance School in Los Angeles and soon became one of their star dancers. In 1923, she left the school and moved east where she started her own studio and school in New York City in 1926. The school which she started has been an important part of the modern dance world ever since its founding and it is now the oldest active dance school in America.

Most dance performances staged in New York before the twentieth century had been based on the European tradition of ballet dancing. Dancers wore gauzy tutus and ballet shoes that allowed them to dance “en pointe” and move about the stage as if they were floating.  Graham’s approach was very different. She developed the concept of “contraction and release” as the major style of movement. Some fans of the more familiar European style of dance considered Graham’s work a betrayal of the traditional culture of ballet. Graham herself felt that she was expressing the spirt of her time. She wrote: “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that the others are behind the times.”

Graham had strong feelings about social and political issues. In 1936, she refused to dance at the Olympics in Germany saying, “I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time” because of Hitler’s persecution of Jews. Many of the dances she created were based on American traditions, or on ancient Greek drama. Through her work she celebrated democracy and freedom. In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt invited her to perform in the White House, making her the first dancer to appear in a performance there. Years later, in 1976, President Gerald Ford presented Graham with a Medal of Freedom in a further acknowledgement of her work.

During her long career, Graham created 181 dances. One of the most popular and influential was “Appalachian Spring” which was first staged in 1944 with music by Aaron Copeland. It was welcomed as a major achievement in American dance and music. As her work became more widely acclaimed, and filming techniques improved, Graham gave up he early objections to having her work photographed. A number of films of Graham’s dances have been preserved at the Library of Congress. In recent years, many have also been made available on YouTube.

Graham continued to create dances and to perform in them during the postwar years of the 1950s and 1960s. The records aren’t clear on when she gave her last performance, but in her unfinished memoir, she said that she last appeared on stage in 1970.

During the years after her retirement from the stage, Graham had a period of depression that lasted for almost two years. Her health declined and she spent some time in a hospital, but in 1972, she returned to her studio and to choreography. She created new dances and coached young dancers in performing them. Her death in 1991 led to an outpouring of honors to celebrate her contributions to the arts.

Several biographies of Martha Graham have been published, most recently, Neil Baldwin’s Martha Graham: When Dancing Became Modern (Knopf 2022). Baldwin’s bookhas been praised as the most complete account of Graham’s life and work.  It is widely available in bookstores and public libraries.

Music, Movies, and Much More–Dolly Parton

Adele Fasick1 Comment

Anyone who has been listening to popular music during the past fifty years or so has some impression of Dolly Parton. They may remember her as one of the feisty heroines of the movie Nine to Five and the song inspired by it. Or perhaps they remember her blue grass period or her recent recording “A Holly Dolly Christmas”. Parton’s career has been a long one and her music has won many awards, but her life has consisted of far more than movies and music.

Born in Eastern Tennessee in 1946, the fourth of twelve children, Parton grew up poor in a  rural community in Tennessee. Few people would have predicted that she would have a long, successful career which would have a dramatic impact on all of Eastern Tennessee and on many young children around the world. But that’s exactly what has happened. Not only has Dolly Parton become one of the richest musicians in the world, according to Forbes magazine, but her work has changed lives in America and abroad.

Dolly Parton

Parton and her family lived on a small farm and her parents struggled to support their large family. Like most people in the region, they were active in their church and that is where Dolly started her musical career. She sang in church and soon began performing on local radio stations. She also composed songs, encouraged by her uncle who gave her the first real guitar she ever owned. At thirteen she appeared on Grand Ole Opry and met Johnny Cash, who encouraged her to build her career.

Parton graduated from high school in 1964 and moved to Nashville the next day to start her career. She found success as a songwriter, often working with her uncle, Bill Owens. Her first recordings were of popular songs, but she soon moved to country music, which she preferred. From that time on, she found success writing and singing in several different genres.

Two years after her arrival in Nashville, Dolly Parton married Carl Thomas Dean. In 2016, the couple celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Although her husband remains in the background of her career and seldom appears at public events, the couple remain close and are important figures in the lives of their siblings and other relatives. They do not have children of their own.

The largest business venture that Parton started the Dollywood Company, which operates a theme park and several restaurants. The tourism brought by this venture has stimulated the economy of Eastern Tennessee and provided jobs for many residents.

Despite being such a successful businesswoman, Dolly Parton still retains her image as a glamourous entertainer. Although she is in her mid-70s, she is frank about the amount of time and effort she has spent on maintaining her spectacular appearance. She once told Larry King, “I look at myself like a show dog. I’ve got to keep her clipped and trimmed and in good shape.”

One of Dolly Parton’s most unusual ventures, and perhaps the one which will have the most lasting impact on people around the world is her Imagination Library organized by the Dollywood company. This Library started as a local Tennessee project to send each child enrolled in the program a free book every month from the time of birth until the age of five. It has grown and now includes groups in several countries.  

Parton has said that she decided to provide books for children because her own father was illiterate and she realized what a difference that made in his life. The books sent to children are carefully chosen and include both classic children’s stories and current books in both English and Spanish.

It is impossible to sum up the life and career of Dolly Parton in one short blog post. The Wikipedia article about her provides an overwhelming amount of information. Someday, I am sure, a full biography will appear. Until that happens, we should all recognize, when we see her slim, attractive appearance on the screen, that we are looking at a powerful woman who has had an impact on many areas of American life.

Dorothea Lange—Picturing America during Difficult Years

Adele Fasick2 Comments

People alive today are no doubt the most photographed generation that has ever lived. Cell phones record our daily life and let us see what is going on in the rest of the world. We are accustomed to seeing people splashing through floods in India, scratching for food in drought-stricken fields in Africa and enduring bombings in Europe.  But documenting news through photographs is a fairly recent development. We owe the richness of our visual lives to a handful of photographers whose work made photography a vital source of information in the modern world. One of the influential women in this field was Dorothea Lange, a documentary photographer who introduced thousands of Americans to the sight of the landscape of our country and the people who live and work in it.

Born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange grew up in New York and its suburbs observing and living with people in the city. As a child she suffered a bout of polio that left her with one crippled leg. She always felt self-conscious about that, but she did not let it hinder her activities. While still a teenager, she made up her mind to be a photographer even before ever owning a camera. After graduating from high school, she travelled to California with a friend and settled in San Francisco. There she got a job in a photography studio and within a few years became a successful portrait photographer. In 1920 she married the painter Maynard Dixon with whom she had two sons.

Dorothea Lange

For ten years or more she and her husband lived busy social and professional lives. They became part of the progressive artistic life of San Francisco and knew many painters and journalists. Dixon loved painting scenes of the rural areas of California and Arizona, so the couple spent a great deal of time traveling in the Southwest. Unfortunately, when the 1920s ended with a financial crash, the market for photographic portraits and for paintings almost disappeared

Both Lange and her husband were ardent supporters of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal policies of providing help for workers, including artists. For a decade starting in the early 1930s, Lange worked for the Farm Security Administration taking pictures and writing reports about conditions throughout the western and southern states. When the dust storms of the mid-thirties pushed thousands of people from their barren fields in Oklahoma and other Southern states out to California, Lange took some of her most famous pictures, including the iconic “Migrant Mother.”

As World War II started, the United States began to force Japanese American families who lived in Western states into internment camps. Lange proposed a project of documenting this move through photographs. She also interviewed people as they were being moved into the camps and documented their difficult lives. Most of her pictures of camp life, however, were impounded by the government and did not become available until after the war. They can be seen now in the National Archives and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California.

“Migrant Mother” one of Lange’s most iconic photos of the Depression

Dorothea Lange’s life and work continued for twenty years after the end of WWII. For those who are interested in her life and achievements, Linda Gordon has written an absorbing biography. Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (2009). Gordon not only makes Lange and her personal live come alive, she also paints a picture of California during the first half of the twentieth century. Reading about Lange’s life, we learn about how farming developed in the West and about the variety of Californians—Indigenous people, Latinos, and Easterners fleeing the Depression. Lange’s life was lived at a turning point for the country and her pictures help us understand how important those years were. You can find  the book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, at most public libraries.  

Becoming a Pro—Berthe Morisot

Adele Fasick3 Comments

In 1874, a group of French artists opened an exhibit of paintings that shocked Paris, attracted crowds, and created a sensation. The paintings they showed were different from the traditional, careful pictures that had been exhibited year after year at the official Salon show in Paris.

Most of the people who crowded the new exhibition were shocked by what they saw. Critics wrote that the new painters, who called themselves Impressionists, had “declared war on beauty” and very few of their works were sold. It took courage to turn against the critics and persist in painting in a new and different style. The men who exhibited paintings at that exhibit included several who are now considered major artists, including Monet, Pissarro, Degas and Renoir. And there was one woman who earned a place among them in that first show—Berthe Morisot. She may not have realized it, but she too was forging a new role for women in art.

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot was born in 1841 in Bourges, France. Like many daughters in prosperous middle-class families, she was given a good education and excellent artistic training. Even though women were not allowed to enroll in the professional art training available to men, there were artists willing to offer private tutoring for young women at home.

By the time of the first Impressionist show, Morisot was thirty years old. Some of her paintings had been accepted and shown at the official Paris Salon, but she was interested in exploring new ways of developing her art. Most women at that time gave up art when they got married, but Berthe Morisot was more interested in painting than in marriage. “Work is the sole purpose of my existence,” she declared. “Indefinitely prolonged idleness would be fatal to me from every point of view.”

Developing a career as a painter was difficult for a woman. Men were free to participate in the lively social gatherings in cafes and to attend private parties. It was there that painters met art dealers, arranged exhibits, and sold paintings. A respectable woman , like Berthe Morisot, could scarcely leave her home without a chaperon. She  had to rely on the men in the group to set up exhibitions and publicize the work of the Impressionists. Morisot was lucky because the Impressionist painters, especially her friend Edouard Manet, respected her work and opened opportunities for her to exhibit with the men. Eventually Morisot married Eugene Manet, brother of Edouard.

Morisot received her share of ridicule from critics who scoffed at Impressionist paintings because they considered them not as carefully finished as traditional paintings. One critic wrote: “If Mademoiselle Morisot wishes to paint a hand, ‘she gives as many brushstrokes, lengthwise as there are fingers, and the thing is done.”

Berthe Morisot stood firm in her decision to paint freely and offer a fresh, new view of the world. It took years of struggle by the Impressionists, but gradually an audience for their work grew. Despite finding it difficult to sell their paintings, many of them stayed together and continued offering group shows. It was not until 1879  that the group had a successful exhibit and started to make money.

Berthe Morisot was the first woman to become part of the Impressionist movement, but she was followed by others. Mary Cassatt, an American artist, joined the group in later exhibits as did another French painter, Marie Bracquemond. In 1894, the art critic Gustave Geffroy described the three women as “les trois grandes dames” (the three great ladies) of Impressionism.

As the twentieth century started, more and more women became professional artists, but it is enlightening to look back and learn about how they joined the art world as colleagues and equals.

Impressionist paintings, of course, can now be seen in major museums, there are also films and prints widely available. Several books have been written about the history of the Impressionists. One that I recommend highly is The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Harper Collins 2008) by Sue Roe, which is available in many libraries and bookstores.

Making Art during Difficult Days

Adele Fasick1 Comment

Across the country and around the world, thousands of people are spending more time at home than they ever expected or wanted to do. As we enter our third month of sheltering in place, many of us are searching for new and satisfying ways of occupying our leisure time. According to a New York Times report, sales of groceries are booming as more people cook at home. The gaming industry is expanding. And even the sales of coloring books designed for adults have increased. Sheltering in place can lead to all sorts of new activities.

Mary Queen of Scots

All of this may be new to most of us, but we are not the first people to experience long, tedious months of forced isolation. Over the centuries, some people have used unexpected free time in remarkable ways. Mary Queen of Scots, for example, although she is remembered now mostly for her good looks and her political losses, showed an entirely different side to her talents during the eighteen years of her imprisonment in England. She designed and stitched a wealth of embroidered pieces that are still as attractive and appealing as when she first made them.

If you remember your history, you may recall that back in the 15th century Mary struggled with Queen Elizabeth I of England over who should rule Scotland and England. For many years Mary was a prisoner of Elizabeth’s and some of those years were spent in an uncomfortable, cold, drafty medieval castle of Tutbury in Staffordshire. The castle had been built many years earlier and repaired infrequently so it had become extremely damp and had a marsh underneath it from which “malevolent fumes arose, unpleasant enough for anyone and especially so for a woman of Mary Stuart’s delicate health” according to Mary’s biographer Antonia Fraser. Nonetheless, Mary was stuck there and had to make the best of it. One of the ways she did that was by turning to art and developing her skills by designing and executing lavish embroideries.

Design by Mary Queen of Scots

Embroidery is not usually considered a major art form, but it has been used to produce work of lasting value by producing pieces that combine images with words and symbols. This combination can make embroidered pictures into art works to read and understand as well as view. Many of Mary’s embroideries are in the Victoria and Albert Museum and can be seen on their website.

If you want to explore further the kind of art that has been created in isolation, the Tate Gallery has a fascinating selection and discussion of modern artists who have created art under situations that would have silenced most people. Each of the pieces on display is different and the stories of how the artists came to create their work varies. Not all of us can create masterpieces in isolation, but perhaps we can at least attempt to explore new possibilities.

Andy Warhol–Fifty Years Later

Adele Fasick3 Comments

This week I saw the exhibit Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In that large museum the art works stretch out over three floors and many galleries and include not only Warhol’s famous pictures but also some of the films that he and his associates produced.

3D rendering by steelblue for SFMOMA

For me it was a reminder of my first glimpse of the Warhol world back in 1966. We were living in New Jersey then, near Rutgers University and tantalizingly close to the glamor of Manhattan just a few miles away. The university was a lifeline that gave suburban housewives like me a glimpse of that glamor. I remember the evening when a friend and I went to a Warhol event on campus (our husbands stayed home with our preschoolers) to watch some flickering films and see a new group called The Velvet Underground.

We arrived to find a crowd waiting at the door. A heavily made-up girl in a floppy brimmed felt hat was taking moving pictures of the audience as they entered. A long-haired, paunchy man followed her around while she aimed her camera to take close-up views of the people’s eyes, faces, lips. At one point she sat on someone’s lap to photograph a face. 

When the audience had settled in, the films were shown. One was Vinyl, which featured the beautiful actress, Edie Sedgwick. Undergraduates hooted and made rude comments as she appeared on screen drinking glass after glass of wine and finally ended the film crouching over a toilet.

After the movie, the Velvet Underground went on stage. Some of the performers played, one sang, a couple danced at the side. The loudspeakers were turned so high that the music was deafening—our seats vibrated with the force of the sound. Behind the singers, the movie screen showed flickering pictures of the performer’s face, hair, lips, eyes…

Velvet Underground

All this was new and eye-opening to us and to most of the audience in 1966.  My friend and I went home with headaches from the noise, but satisfied that we had caught a glimpse of the future with Andy Warhol and his fabulous friends.

One advantage of living a long life is having a chance to discover how often what seems to be a foreshadowing of the future turns out to be a dud, while other startling changes affect our lives for years to come. Warhol’s influence has certainly not diminished. His paintings brought daily life into the realm of art. We started looking at everyday objects with new eyes. And his films and music have changed the way we have listened and looked at entertainment for more than half a century. Seeing his work now reminds us of how much he meant to all of us.

Museums sometimes seem out of the mainstream, preserving artifacts from places, cultures and times that may seem distant. But the moments they preserve are vital to understanding how the world changes. I for one am eternally grateful for museums and the people who work in them. They increase our knowledge and broaden our view of the world.

I recently read that some museum staff members in many cities are unionizing amid complaints that they do not get paid enough for their work. All of us who care about preserving our society and enriching our lives ought to support funding for museums and their workers. They make our lives better by showing us where we have been and how we got to where we are now.