Elihu Vedder - American Symbolist

Numerous posts ago on these pages we made mention, in the context of an enduring mystery concerning a dead man found on an Australian beach in the 1940s - the mystery of the Somerton Man - Edward Fitzgerald's famous translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. See the post here. In the context of that post we noted the extraordinary popularity of Khayyam's quatrains up until, say, the 1960s after which the work retired into the same relative obscurity as many other great works of the orientalist movement. Indeed, we could almost describe what has happened with the following symmetry: after the cultural watershed of the 1960s Khayyam's work was replaced by New Age renderings of Rumi as the central text of popular Western engagement with the Mahometan East. The Rubaiyat is still known, of course, but is no longer a best seller. Rumi - through the lens of such New Age writers as Coleman Barks - is the most widely read poet in contemporary USA. This mantle once belong to Khayyam - through the lens of the orientalist Edward Fitzgerald. This is a revealing point of cultural decline, and there is much we could say about it, but the purpose of the present post is to celebrate the work of the artist who illustrated the preeminent edition of Fitzgerald's rendering, namely Elihu Vedder. 

Over a period of ten months from May 1883 through to March 1884 Elihu Vedder completed a series of some fifty four drawings which illustrated the 1884 edition of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat. These drawings are rightly considered his masterwork and the Vedder-Fitzgerald Rubaiyat is regarded as the pinnacle of late Victorian artist book design. It is a magnificent work in every respect, a masterpiece of orientalist literature, a moment in time when the orientalist genius reached its acme. Not since the work of William Blake had illustration and poetic text come together in such a profound synthesis. Indeed, Vedder's drawings bear comparison with those of Mr. Blake in their visionary strength. Fitzgerald's renderings of Khayyam into English verse are very fine, albeit seeming somewhat antiquated and stolid nowadays, but Vedder's accompanying illustrations are sublime and luminous and enduring. The book as a whole stands as a single work and needs to be appreciated as such, but here are some samples:

The Vedder-Fitzgerald Rubaiyat was published in Boston on November 8 1884. It met widespread acclaim as a masterwork and the edition completely sold out within a week. It established Mr Vedder's reputation as America's greatest spiritual illustrator and more generally as the greatest living American artist. The comparison to Blake is not accidental. He is counted as a 'Symbolist' painter and had a deep interest in the work of Blake along with the mystical poetry of William Butler Yeats. His visual style is informed by the work of the English Pre-Raphaelites but, happily, this is very often turned to overtly orientalist themes. This is what qualifies as 'Symbolist' painting, an altogether ill-defined label for a very diverse movement in modern Western art. Today, the word 'Symbolism' is  used with pejorative undertones rather like the word 'Romantic'. The 'Symbolist', though, is often motivated by spiritual, visionary concerns expressed in orientalist and mythological themes. The overlap in this with orientalist art is revealing - Europeans looked to the East for spiritual renewal primarily (an age-old habit of the Western soul). The deepest motivations of Western orientalism were - and still are - essentially spiritual (and not political-imperialist as certain tawdry and shallow sociological theories would have it.) Elihu Vedder is one of the great spiritual artists of this movement and one of America's most profound painters. Regrettably, his reputation is diminished today for the same reasons the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is not widely read. Still, he made his mark upon the art of the American nation; his allegorical murals adorn the reading room at the Library of Congress:

His later work shows a stronger debt to the classicizing styles of such painters as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones. Here is one of his best known mythological works, the Sibyll Coming to Rome.   

What is depicted here is the Sibyll from Cumae clutching her scrolls of prophecy and making out on the road to Rome with ancient determination. Living in Italy, Vedder was familiar with the archeaological remnants of Cumae and it was natural that the ancient prophetess should feature in his visionary art. He rendered this image in other forms too. The painter was completed in Rome is 1876. He made the following drawing in 1872:

Here is another of his paintings on the subject of the Cumae Sybill:

Perhaps his most famous and arresting image, again prophetic and symbiline in spirit, is the following:

It is entitled Listening to the Sphinx or else The Questioner of the Sphinx. It is often reproduced in various contexts today, sometimes erroneously with the title Ozymandiaz after the poems by Horace Smith and Percy Shelley. It is remarkable in the way that it shows a further motivation in the orientalist spirit - a need and a willingness to listen to the distant past, as against the arrogant ignorance of modernity. Europeans turned to the East in search of the ancient and the authentic, as a reaction to modernity. This painting by Mr Vedder is one of the most powerful and haunting renderings of such a spirit. It was this spirit that led Vedder to Egypt on a journey up the Nile on a traditional Egyptian houseboat from December 1889 to April 1890, just as it has led countless others to seek some whisper, some omen, from Egyptian antiquity.  

The image and the idea of the sphinx reoccurs in his work in the same way as the sibyl. Here is one study made after his Egyptian sojourn:

And here is a further example entitled The Sphinx on the Seashore:

He left a detailed  visual record of his Egyptian travels, not only in completed paintings but in a large number of sketches. An example:

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There are too many great and wonderful works by this artist for us to consider even the most notable of them here. The following are a few that stand out in the present writer's estimation, but there are many others:

The Alchemist

Greek Girls Bathing

The Star of Bethlehem

The Pleaides

The Genie and the Fisherman

The Cup of Death

Yours, Harper McAlpine Black

Musician Painters (and some reflections on jazz)

Django Rhinehardt painting in a suit.

On several occasions these pages have featured paintings done by persons who were not, first and foremost, painters. For good or for bad many writers, actors, musicians - plumbers and politicians - and many others, like to try their hand at painting. The present writer is no exception. Not having the good grace to stick to the written word he sometimes takes up a paint brush and inflicts visual images upon the world. Arguably, painting is the worse for it. Other arts are not so infected with the pretensions of amateurs. Everyone thinks they can paint. In part, no doubt, this is a result of the manifest degeneracy of modern painting. Who has not wandered through an art gallery and said to themselves, very often, "I could do that!"? And very often it is true - modern painting is a field in which talented amateurs may very well put the professional painter to shame. 

In this post we will look at several musician painters: notable musicians who have turned to painting supplementary to their musical careers. It is an inherently interesting combination because music is itself often suggestive of elements of painting (colour, tone, etc.) and vice versa. There is a long and quite rich overlap between the two arts, music and painting. Of course, the visual arts are, by definition, silent. An art gallery is generally a silent space. Seeing is the mode. But in Western art, at least, there is an age-old preoccupation with the fact that the visual arts might well 'sing' and play a silent music. Think, for instance, of the wonderfully musical sculptures of Luca Della Robbia who took up the challenge of making stone sing:

In painting, it is the colourists who are most likely to attempt the musical image. This synaesthesia was explored formally in modern times by Kandinsky. His so-called 'abstractions' - some of the more interesting 'abstractions' in modern art, we must say - are explorations of the common ground of music and painting and are often quite successful in those terms. An example:

 

Musicians often describe "hearing" colours or else they find that their experience of music is imagistic. Kandinsky took this to profound depths. 

In other cases, though, what we have are dabblers and hobby painters and there is no deep or intrinsic connection between the music and the painting. Very often - as the present writer finds regarding the written word - the attraction of painting is that it is wholly unlike another art and so offers an escape from verbal modes of communication. So with musicians: painting may be an escape from sound. In the cases we will consider here there are two possibilities: painting is somehow related to the music and so is a music by another mode, or else it is a diversion and is embraced precisely because it is a silent art form.

Let us begin by saying that it may sometimes be better if musicians refrain from such dabbling and instead do what they do best. One thinks of the Beatles legend Paul McCartney for instance, whose tunes are felicitous but whose paintings are most definitely not. See the picture below:

There seem to be no redeeming features to Sir Paul's paintings and, worse, nor do their shortcomings reflect upon or tell us anything about his music. Neither are they a useful contrast to his music. This is a point of failure that makes them entirely uninteresting. The reason we might be interested in the art of famous amateurs is because it often illuminates or complements the other aspects of their life. Alas, this does not seem to be the case with Sir Paul. 

Consider, though, the paintings of the highly decorated Bob Dylan. These are really quite good and are conceivably a valid extension of his music. Two examples:   

Dylan began sketching at an early age and has continued to sketch, draw and paint throughout his musical career. Indeed, his music is often best regarded as 'sketching'. He lays out a song in words and music with bare instrumentation and rough charcoal vocals and leaves it for others to fill in. He paints in colour but these are still expressionistic sketches that seem a-piece with much of his music. They add to and illuminate his musical work. He also has a distinctive hand - we see it clearly in his early sketches and it persists - that is complementary to his equally unmistakable musical and vocal style. 

* * *

We now turn to the paintings of two jazz greats, Django Rinehardt and Miles Davis, who offer a strong contrast in approach that is revealing on many levels.  We will also use the occasion as a pretext for saying a few words about jazz. This is a music - more so than McCartney's pop or Dylan's folk - that lends itself to colourist and imagistic interpretation. Music rarely features as a topic on these pages because the present author is, by his own admission, musically illiterate, but of recent times he has received some expert instruction in the history of jazz by an accomplished saxophone player and jazz aficionado, and so this post will venture somewhat into that new terrain - hopefully the first of many subsequent posts on the subject. 

Firstly, Django Rinehardt. It is little known that the three-fingered French-gypsy master guitarist was an enthusiastic painter. In fact, towards the end of his life he devoted more and more of his time to painting. He was a genuine amateur and received no formal instruction in the visual arts at any time. He was not by any means a good painter, but he was a sincere one. Good reproductions of his work can be hard to find, but we can see from those available that his oeuvre consisted primarily of nudes (with a few landscapes included.) Here is a gallery of some of Monsieur Rhinehardt's canvases:

It would seem, then, that Django was a lover of women. One paints nudes either with a dispassionate concern for the high ideals of form or else as a means of prolonged meditations upon feminine beauty. His paintings suggest the latter. Here is a photograph of him with his guitar and one of the models he often painted:

The photograph reminds us of a pertinent fact: the guitar is a feminine instrument and it is no accident that its shapes and curves resemble those of the female form. This fact enables us to better understand his manifest preoccupation with nudes. The guitar is the great love of his life, but the female form is an extension of that. His landscapes, perhaps, are more interesting as paintings, per se, but the great number of nudes he painted is the most notable feature of his visual work and their resemblance to guitars tells us why.

This emphasis on the guitar reminds us that Rhinehardt was a pioneer of jazz in Europe - France, that is - and so was one of those responsible for carrying jazz away from its American roots. The guitar does not feature as an important instrument in American jazz. French jazz is characterised by quite different instrumentation (and different 'colours' and 'textures'). It was largely a creation of Rhinehardt, along with the violinist Stefan Grapelli. For the present writer this is a virtue. Jazz is very often enhanced when removed from its American context and given different flavours and interpretations. The American context, very often, is fetid with racial tensions and other sociological intrusions. For all its African-American roots (which are often exaggerated at the expense of a debt to white marching band music) jazz is often best when it is decidedly not African-American in character. 

Secondly, there is the trumpet genius Miles Davis, definitely an African-American and representative of the African-American tones in jazz. This is very clear in his paintings too. Like Rhinehardt he was an enthusiastic painter but, we must say, more accomplished and much less a hobby artist. There is surprisingly little music in Rhinehardt's paintings. They are more about the sensuality of the guitar. In the case of Davis we find paintings which are obviously an attempt to render a certain music in paint. Here is a gallery of some of his work:

    

We are somewhat closer to Kandinsky. In these paintings the painter is attempting to paint a visible music. There is a debt to African art, too, (masks etc.) while Rhinehardt's paintings, like his jazz, have no overtly African/primitivist elements at all. Rhinehardt used jazz (outside of its American context) to explore the musical legacy of his gypsy and European folk background. Miles Davis, musician and painter, explored very different (essentially African-American) terrain. The two painters - and their respective music - form a stark contrast. In some respects it is a contrast between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. The folkishness of gypsy jazz is 'traditional' compared to the increasingly experimental nature of Davis' "modern" jazz, and it shows in the paintings too.

The paintings of Miles Davis are more interesting for this reason, but at the same time less accessible. This is also true of his music. Davis was a jazz genius, certainly, but Django Rhinehardt's genius is more widely accessible. Here we must comment upon the trajectory of jazz. There came a point, post-war, when it diverged from its popular modes and veered into the wildly experimental forms of Be Bop and so-called Avante-Garde jazz with complex chord progressions, dissonances, changes of key and daring displays of instrumental virtuosity. Jazz artists like Miles Davis, Dizzie Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Theolonius Monk, et al, took jazz into new and unchartered waters. As with modern art, though, this virtuosity often left the general audience behind; the average listener was left scratching his head. As it happens, this was not always a wholesome outcome for jazz music. As it became more esoteric it lost its audience and it fell from its once unassailable place as the characteristic popular music of the modern era. It was replaced by rock, a music that rocks rather than swings. 

These deviations of jazz can be seen illustrated in the life and times of the clarinet legend Benny Goodman. At first he embraced Be Bop and the more experimental departures that had emerged, but later he rejected them and described them as a "betrayal" of jazz. Many 'white' jazz exponents felt the same. Certainly, jazz went wayward and ceased to be the dominant popular form of music in America and beyond. The general population could not follow the new music. It became not only experimental but self-indulgent and obscure, a musician's music. This left a void in popular music that was filled by rock n roll. And jazz has never recovered.

In any case, much of this might be seen as documented in the paintings of Miles Davis. They are good paintings, and a successful extension of his music (which is undoubtedly good) but this is also to say esoteric and modernist and not to everybody's taste.

Yours, Harper McAlpine Black