Beaux

Fatuous observations on Cecilia Beaux

In one of my frequent firm grasps of the obvious, a brief perusal of the catalogue of the High Museum’s “Cecelia Beaux: American Figure Painter” exhibition reveals that her portraits were perceived as every bit as disturbing in the world of 1893 as they seemed to me when I discovered them on the walls a few weeks ago in this scholarly survey of a painter who has always been overshadowed by her male counterparts. (William Merritt Chase called her the most important female painter of her generation. But.)

My enthusiasm, then, is a naiveté comparable to realizing with excitement that Moby Dick incorporates a good deal of actual information regarding the hunting of large cetaceans. Only in this case the whales are psychological states, and the perceivers didn’t know they were hunting for them, only that something big was out there.

Sita and Sarita was as bothersome to American viewers of the 1890s as Whistler’s The White Girl, which Beaux would have seen, had been some years earlier. And many of Beaux’ other 1890s portraits, Dorothea in the Woods, et cetera, seem to reflect not just perceptive glimpses of feminine psychology that were missed by Beaux’ male counterparts, but intense personal attachments. Beaux knew these subjects’ inner lives, and it shows, but she also brought her own strong feelings to the enterprise.

Portraits in Summer, which I can find on the web only in a vintage black and white photograph, is another arrestingly unusual accomplishment; I wonder about its stylistic predecessors, since it almost seems to foreshadow later decades in its particular idealization of Beaux’ nephew and his bride. They seem to be facing their radiant future rather more resolutely than I would expect in an American formal portrait of 1911. I can think of a whole host of earlier Central European strength-and-beauty allegories (this was the age of that brand of bodily romanticism) but that is not where this couple is coming from, or going, either. Everything about the gestures and postures puzzles me, though not necessarily productively.

To use the fashionable term, Beaux is using some visual codes I just don’t recognize. Yet she doesn’t seem like the type to have self-importantly invented her own. She seems to have invested these portraits with a good deal of psychological baggage just because she understood her subjects so well, and put so much of them and of their relationships with her into the resulting artwork. Her formal portraits of military men and Unitarian ministers are as well-done but blankly unrevelatory as I, with a sense of anticipatory depression, would expect. These folks didn’t want their inner selves revealed, and they got what they paid for.

I am so self-evidently not an art historian that it is pointless to add to Sylvia Yount’s excellent study. But I wanted to attempt to get at what so arrested my attention when, by and large, the portraiture of that period in American history leaves me slightly worse than unmoved.

unnatural histories

The Anti-Creation Museum, or, a Visit to the Museum of Unnatural History

Not literally, in either case. The Fernbank Museum of Natural History presents the story of evolution, of course, and does it well, and features casts of the skeletons of the world’s largest dinosaurs, dominating the three-story atrium.

It’s that “casts of” that got me to thinking. Some objects at Fernbank are exactly what they say they are; two fossil tree trunks from South Carolina, for example; or the Franciscan friar’s robe that now sits in a case next to a Yao shaman’s ritual costume, thanks to a donation from a local monastery.

And the birds and animals in “A Walk Through Time in Georgia” have real feathers and fur. The rocks are fake, as are the icicles. I presume the fish in the ocean do not have real scales or sharkskin.

This requires a little explication. “A Walk Through Time in Georgia” is concurrently a cycle of the year, a tour of the state’s natural terrain, and a replication of life in the area from the primeval seas onward. This means that full-scale replicas of giant dragonflies and ground sloths in their natural habitats share gallery space (though in side galleries) with deer, foxes, wild turkeys, seagulls, alligators, modern-day sharks, and the odd sea turtle.

All of the aforementioned are, of course, fakes, and in terms of up-to-date verisimilitude, the taxidermy is neck and neck with the completely imagined sculptures of archaic soft-bodied sea creatures that left very little in the way of a fossil record.

What I like, of course, is that this makes the indisputably real world as unreal as the hypothesized paleontological record. (In all the years I have been typng the name of the science, I have never before noticed it breaks down into “pale-ontology.”) One walks through all the regions of the state from mountains to piedmont to coastal plain, and the seasons vary from winter to spring to summer and autumn, with the coast and the swamp in a hard-to-define seasonal interregnum, though the flowers on the water lilies imply spring or summer for the walkway through the dark-resin imitation of swampy water.

The Gnostic in me delights in this use of precisely constructed simulacra to render full-scale mock-ups of the real world as science defines it. Since the Creation Museum in Kentucky apparently uses equally artificial dioramas to present the co-existence of dinosaurs and post-Adamic Neanderthals, I love the notion that while the physical evidence strongly supports one opinion over the other, when it comes down to public presentation of the meaning of the evidence, it is your fake against my fake.

Whereas the color photographs presenting close-ups of grasshoppers and butterflies, which was the show I had come to Fernbank to consider writing about, were indisputably documentation of the real in all its profligate diversity; but it was, of course, documentation, pigmented ink impregnating porous paper with an image representing an absent physical object.

There is a good reason why the two permanent exhibitions on the floor above “A Walk Through Time in Georgia” are titled “Sensing Nature” on the left-hand side and “Reflections of Culture” next door on the right.

And in case anybody calls me on it, the current exhibition on the ground floor apparently features real live lizards and snakes. I didn’t go in to look. It would totally have undermined the premise of this essay, and then what would I have done to kill the afternoon while waiting for copy to fact-check?