American Realism. Gerry Souter

Чтение книги онлайн.

      In 1886, United States Treasury agents accompanied by New York City police bustled into one of the saloons owned by Theodore Stewart and demanded a painting be removed by order of the Federal Court. The painting was titled Still-life – Five Dollar Bill and the officers peered closely at it shaking their heads. They declared the confiscated work to be a counterfeit and removed it from the premises. Shortly thereafter, Federal Secret Service agents rapped on the door of the artist, a wan, thin, moustachioed man named William Michael Harnett and informed him he was under arrest for counterfeiting U. S. currency. The agents also confiscated other money paintings in the cluttered cell of a studio. Eventually, Harnett faced a federal judge, who, after examining the paintings closely through his pince-nez, told the artist: “The development and exercise of a talent so capable of mischief should not be encouraged.”

      The young man was released with a warning and the paintings were returned.[22] Harnett never painted money again and died four years later, almost universally recognised as America’s finest still-life painter.

      This painting that created such a turmoil was a prime example of the excruciating detail Harnett created when rendering ordinary objects to a degree of accuracy that people felt the need to reach out and touch the painting’s surface. Some viewers of Still-life – Five Dollar Bill tried to peel the bill off the wood tabletop with their fingernails until it was hung out of reach. The lines of the engraving tools are shown as are the slightly rolled edges of the tears caused by wear. As the wrinkles in the paper’s surface rise and fall, so does the image giving the illusion that there is actually space between the bill and the grainy wood surface. The signatures, the tiny writing and age-worn seals; everything is there giving a power to that crumpled slip of paper money it never had in reality.

      By 1886, William Harnett had built up a considerable reputation as a trompe-l’œil, or ‘fool the eye’, painter. Sadly, his active career as an artist lasted only sixteen years from 1876 to 1892. In that time, he managed to produce about five hundred paintings, many of which have been lost; an even greater number have been forged and some achieved major recognition in collections around the world. Over that period of sixteen years he was either ignored, or excoriated by the art critics and taste-makers. He won no medals and received no prize awards from prestigious New York or Philadelphia academies. Only after his untimely death at the age of forty-four were his paintings held up as examples of excellence – and then only for a short time – until Impressionists from Europe waded ashore and he slipped from the scene for almost fifty years of obscurity.

      Harnett was actually upholding a tradition in the United States begun in the eighteenth century with miniature painters and ‘Illusionists’ by the likes of Raphaelle Peale, his brother Rembrandt and his father Charles Wilson Peale. They called their work ‘deceptions’. One of their most famous collaborations is titled Catalogue for the Use of the Room, a Deception (1817). This painting by Charles Wilson Peale shows full-length portraits of Raphaelle and Titan Ramsey Peale mounting a flight of stairs framed by a real doorway and step.

      The Peales in their time were cast in the same mould as ‘mechanics’ who slavishly copied nature without bringing a moral uplift or dramatic statement to the subject. These ‘Illusionists’ with their ‘deceptions’ fell into the pit of ‘marginalisation.’ Still-life painting was considered the lowest rank in the classifications established by the academies back in the eighteenth century. In his essay, “Sordid Mechanics” and “Monkey Talents” – The Illusionistic Tradition, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr writes:

      Raphaelle Peale started out as a portrait artist, but achieved little patronage in Philadelphia. He tried cutting profiles with a patented ‘physiognotrace’ machine, but his reduction in circumstances sent him into alcoholism, delirium tremens and crippling gout that put him on crutches. He eventually turned to still-lifes, which at that time were considered fodder fit only for amateurs. Regardless, his work was displayed at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts from 1814 to 1818. Peale’s bad habits plus arsenic and mercury poisoning from helping out with taxidermy exhibits in his father’s museum added to a night of heavy drinking, finally killed him on 25 March 1825.

      The same prejudice against СКАЧАТЬ