Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has acquired a rare, intact Carleton Watkins album of the Sunny Slope farm and distillery. The album, which dates to the 1880s, includes 27 circular photographs that measure five inches in diameter on six-and-a-half-inch-square paper. Intact Watkins albums are rare, and a number of  albums have been broken up in recent years. The Huntington album is, as far as I can tell, the only known intact album of Watkins’ circular prints.

“It’s so unusual,  so rare,” Huntington photography curator Jennifer Watts told me. “Basically through neglect there may be some Watkins albums that are still out there. I can’t think of another album like this that I’ve seen. There’s certainly never been an example here going back many decades.”

The album was donated to the Huntington by the great-grandson of L. J. Rose, a Bavarian immigrant who developed Sunny Slope. According to the Lewis Publishing Co.’s 1899 “An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California,” Rose came to the United States with his family as a 12-year-old. His parents settled in New Orleans before moving up the Mississippi River to the Waterloo, Iowa area. As an adult, L.J. tried to make a go of farming in Iowa and later Missouri, but after a couple of devastating winters in 1858 he decided to try his luck in California. Rose was one of the first migrants to use the just-opened route west along the thirty-fifth parallel. The journey was so rough that Rose stopped for almost two years in Santa Fe, where he operated a hotel called “La Fonda” (which is unrelated to the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe today).

When Rose finally reached California in 1860, he plowed the $14,000 he made from his hotel into a property about two miles from the San Gabriel Mission (which still stands). The estate eventually covered 2,000 acres, on which Rose planted fruit trees and grapes. In time, the Roses became some of the first Southern Californians to make wine and brandy. By the mid-to-late 1880s Sunny Slope was producing 750,000 gallons of wine and 125,000 gallons of brandy per year and the farm’s brands were considered among America’s finest. Like many self-made men of the era, Rose loved to raise and train horses, though it’s not clear if Rose kept his horses at Sunny Slope or at Rosemeade, his other, nearby estate, or at both.  (Rosemeade which later gave its name to the Los Angeles suburb of Rosemead.) Many of Rose’s horses, such as “Stamboul,” were among the fastest and most valuable steeds in America.

The Sunny Slope estate wasn’t just a working farm and distillery, but a popular tourist attraction as well. This provides one possible reason the album exists: Watts told me that it was unclear if Rose commissioned the album from Watkins or if Watkins presented it as a gift in the hopes of drumming up future work or in the hopes of providing images to tourists who visited Sunny Slope.

“One of the things that intrigues me about this album is why,” Watts said. “If Watkins does it after 1880, which he must have, was he trying to get money and offered the ability to make a deluxe album for the family? Or did the Roses come to him and commission this? I can’t figure out the timing and why they’d do it.”

One possible reason is that it is marketing: The Rose family sold Sunny Slope to British investors for over $1 million in 1887, a sum equal to about $25 million today. It would not have been unusual for Watkins to have produced a series of photographs that a property-owner might present to prospective investors or buyers. (This was a function Watkins fulfilled for clients as early as the late 1850s.) Watkins is known to have been in Kern County, California in the late 1880s, but to date it is not known that he was as far south as San Gabriel in that period. However, as we’ll see in a minute, there are pictures in the album that wouldn’t seem to fit this potential use.

I saw the album last November before the Huntington formally acquired it. At just slightly longer than 10 inches square and an inch-and-a-half deep, the album was barely too big to fit into my hand. The pictures themselves are extraordinarily good and are in extraordinary condition. While Watkins’ so-called mammoth-plate pictures and his stereoviews have been extensively studied by historians, far less is known about the range and depth of Watkins’ production of medium-sized pictures such as cartes de visite and images of the size that make up the Sunny Slope album.

“The mammoths have been studied and are of interest for all sorts of reasons and they’re spectacular,” Watts said. “But I love this smaller size. These are so, so beautiful because of the way they’re vignetted and because of the way Watkins masked them and conceived them. They’re much more beautiful than what you see in a stereo format. Watkins composes these pictures in a way to use the circular format, compositions that you can’t use with a square format. In this album you see him really thinking through composition in the circular format.”

The pictures are part of Watkins’ investigation of what was a new landscape for him: For the first 20 years of his career, from the late 1850s through the late 1870s, Watkins photographed the dramatic landscapes of the Sierra Nevada and northern California. In the late 1870s Watkins began to travel to the southern half of California, particularly to Los Angeles and Kern counties, where he encountered land that was flat and open. The landscapes of the Southland presented new challenges: How to make this intensely horizontal landscape as visually engaging as the pictures he took elsewhere in the West? The Sunny Slope album, full of tight, layered compositions, seems to come after Watkins had solved that riddle. One particularly magnificent example is the picture of fields shown above, on the right. here Watkins juxtaposed a field of ground-hugging crops against a dark, distant orchard. Beyond the orchard lies a short hill, with taller foothills beyond. In the middle of the photograph these faint diagonal lines dramatically come together, compressed into about three-quarters of an inch of picture. [Clicking on any of the images in this post will expand them to actual size.]

Another superb image is the picture below and to the right, wherein Watkins uses a path, and the line of the back of a field to guide the viewer’s eye through the picture and ultimately to the San Gabriel Mountains, which rise faintly in the background.

Watkins more commonly addressed the question of the circular format by building compositions that press in from the edges of the circle toward the center of the picture. In paging through the album I noticed that in picture after picture, it doesn’t matter where the viewer’s eye starts, Watkins most often guides it toward the center of the picture. This is acutely different from his rectangular mammoth-plate pictures, which rarely guide the viewer toward a single point. In the photograph of a Sunny Slope farm building at left ,Watkins uses a path, lines of planting and building lines and shapes to guide the viewer to the horse and farm works in the upper left of the picture.

Taken as a whole, the Sunny Slope album presents a visual narrative of Rose and his farm, a kind of short-story told in pictures. Watkins starts the album with a photograph of Rose (above, right), followed by a still-life of a bouquet of roses. (Rose’s farm was also known for its bountiful rose garden.) This kind of punning would become common in art after cubism, but to see it here, at least 20 years before Picasso and Braque worked together, is striking.

The album then presents a narrative that starts with pictures of Rose’s farmhouse continues down a road to the fields, and then through the orchards. It continues through fields of a plant that is hard to identify, but that may be related to spirits as Watkins soon includes distillery buildings in his compositions. After the agricultural pictures, Watkins focuses on the distillery operation (complete with a picture of some men enjoying a drink at a shaded table) before concluding the album with a photograph of the ass of one of Rose’s horses, “Sir Guy.”

While the narrative is pretty straightforward and easy to follow, one picture is a particular puzzle: The next-to-last picture, slotted between two photographs of horses, is of a Native American family and the two huts in which they presumably lived or worked. Like other Western photographers, Watkins only rarely showed Native Americans or their homes in his pictures. And it’s hard to believe this picture would have been included in an album meant to market Sunny Slope to potential buyers.

Watts said that the Huntington has no immediate plans to display the album because of its fragility, but that all of the images in it will soon be available on the Huntington’s website.

I’m just back from nearly two weeks in Texas. Some thoughts on what I saw…

1.) In 1966 John Szarkowski gave a Museum of Modern Art solo show to Boston-based photographer Marie Cosindas. For the exhibition, she made a series of exquisite color Polaroids. They’ve been little-seen since until now: They’re in this special, revelatory show at the Amon Carter. Art in America has more. [Image: Marie Cosindas, Fernando, Key West, 1966.]

1a.) Seriously: cannot look away.

2.) Stephanie Barron’s Ken Price retrospective is at the Nasher Sculpture Center, where it looks fantastic. This time I found that the more time I spent with Price’s Ordell (2011-12), the more I saw it as a kind of ‘Jeanette VI,’ a kind of further abstraction of Matisse’s “Jeanette” series of busts.

Speaking of the Nasher, its summer Katharina Grosse exhibition should be a standout. Look for the museum to remove one of the glass walls separating its interior spaces from the garden for one of her pieces.

3.) This Isaac Witkin, on long-term loan to the Nasher, is wonderfully exuberant. It points from Anthony Caro toward Franz West.

4.) At the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the big, new Jenny Holzer (at left) and the big, new Mark Bradford might get the headlines — and deservedly so — but seeing some under-appreciated Texas-based artists is a special pleasure. MAMFW’s terrific Cynthia Brants is on view now, as is a marvelous 1988 Julie Bozzi (MAMFW surveyed her career in 2003) and a series of 1952 geometric abstractions by Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle. (Alas, only the Brants is on MAMFW’s website.) All three are good examples of artists who are underappreciated for reasons more about geography than art.

5.) Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-86) at the Chinati Foundation is one of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces. As I noted here, I’ve been to Chinati enough times to be over the shock effect that comes with viewing minimalism in a cavalry fort in the high desert. On each visit I find myself thinking more and more about how good or great 100 untitled is, where it fits within art history. With each visit I’m more certain that it’s about as great as great gets, right up there with Les Demoiselles, Blue Nude, Rebus and The Kiss.

About 10 days ago the interwebs went all awwww! over this, an animated gif that William Wegman offered up on his web page. Wegman, the site said, “joins the ranks of reality TV stars, epic fails, and of course, feline internet sensations with our first ever animated gif. Be warned, this puppy is hypnotic!”

It is. But Wegman’s gif is also loaded with art historical mojo.

The Wegman gif doesn’t just work because cute puppy is cute. It’s cool because we believe that the bowl and the puppy are goin’ ’round and ’round. As best we can tell, they always have, and they always will. Wegman takes advantage of the medium’s inherent properties to eliminate transitions: It’s not clear where the gif starts or ends, where the ‘front’ of the image is or where the ‘rear’ of the image is, it’s just cute puppy turning, cute puppy turning, awwww!

As such, the Wegman gif is something of a digital extension of an idea that Henri Matisse brought to his sculpture early in the twentieth century. In a series of works from about 1899 to about 1909, Matisse made sculptures in which he sought to eliminate transitions between front and back, objects in which the idea was to create a dynamic line that ran through the form so as to create an even, 360-degree sense of energy. Or to put that in non-art-speak, as you walk around one of Matisse’s early bronzes, you almost feel like you’re always seeing it from the correct angle, that you’re always in front of it. You never have a moment of thinking, “I’m behind the bronze,” or “I’m looking at the side of the sculpture.”

In the catalogue for “Matisse: Painter as Sculptor,” Baltimore Museum of Art curator Oliver Shell writes that Matisse started developing this idea in drawings. Shell and the 2007 exhibition’s other curators present a series of drawings Matisse did for his Jaguar Devouring a Hare after Barye (1899-1901) and notes, “[o]ne of these shows the jaguar, viewed from slightly above and behind, and reveals Matisse’s fascination with the line that begins with the tail and spirals through the rib cage and shoulders almost like a helix to animate the beast.”

From Jaguar, Matisse progressed to Madeleine I (1901, at right) and Madeleine II (1903), sculptures in which he started to transfer the idea he pursued in Jaguar into the human form. Humans don’t attack or devour whole hares, so Matisse’s pursuit of a transition-free, 360-degree object doesn’t quite make it around the whole. Still, Matisse got to about 270 degrees and seems to have been content. (It’s hard to see that in the SFMOMA and Metropolitan images to which I linked above. But how cool would it be if the crackerjack digital teams at those institutions included animated gifs of their sculptures on their collection-object pages?)

Matisse returned to the idea later in the decade. His Reclining Nude I (Aurora) (1906-07, at left) the sculpture that helped inform the great painting Blue Nude (1907), is pretty darn close to being transitionless. The only place a viewer is conscious being ‘behind’ the sculpture is when looking at the figure’s scapula, the back of its elevated shoulder. Reclining Nude I has a wonderfully peculiar effect on a viewer: Walking around it, when you reach the scapula you’re suddenly aware of being behind it, for the first time, of having discovered a transition point… and then a split-second later you’ve left it. It’s the kind of thrilling art-viewing moment at which The Thing is revealed.

The next best example of Matisse nearly eliminating transitions, of attaining what Nasher Sculpture Center curator Jed Morse calls in “Matisse: Painter as Sculptor” an “insistent linearity,”  is The Serpentine (1909). Matisse’s triumph here has been much noted by art historians. Alfred Barr said that in The Serpentine Matisse “thinned and composed forms so that the movement would be completely comprehensible from all points of view,” which it is. Morse too: “The limbs wrap around the body, encircling her, reaching out into the surrounding space and returning again to the figure. The composition leads the eye on a similar path and entices the viewer to move around it to see it completely.”

I don’t know if Wegman thought about any of this while making his gif. Probably not. The lessons of Matisse are 100 years old and I suspect that many artists dip into Matisse (or Rodin or Picasso or whomever) without quite being aware that they’re doing it. But it seems plain to me that with his gif Wegman is utilizing a recent technology to lead the eye on a path, to entice the viewer to completely see a cute puppy in a shiny bowl.