American Gothic-- Favorite Photos Friday

This painting by America Artist Grant Wood is one of the ten most famous paintings in the world and one of the most parodied (along with “The Scream”). Wood painted it in 1930.  First he came upon the Gothic Revival-style house in  Eldon, Iowa, then he used his own sister Nan and his dentist  as models for the couple painted in the foreground.  (They never actually stood in front of the house. He painted the elements separately.)

Wood entered the painting in a competition sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago and though the judges first called it  “comic valentine”, a museum patron (according to Wikipedia) convinced them to award the painting the first prize of $300 and to buy it for the Museum.

When the instant fame of the painting reached Iowa, the natives of the state were outraged at being portrayed as “pinched, grim-faced puritanical Bible thumpers”, but by the time the Depression hit the country, people began to see the painting as a depiction of the steadfast American spirit.. 

The artist’s sister, Nan, was upset at being pictured as the wife of a man twice her age (the dentist who served as the model for the pitchfork-toting farmer), so she and Grant Wood told people this was meant to be a picture of a farmer and his spinster daughter. But everyone who sees the painting sees it as a married couple—pinched and solemn, hardworking and humorless, who have undoubtedly been married for so long they’ve started to look alike.

In my collection of antique photos I have two couples I’d like to nominate as stand-ins for the American Gothic couple—or, since they pre-date the Grant Wood painting by at least 30 years if not more, let’s call them the original  American Gothic.

This pair appeared together in a leather photo case I bought. The images are so clean and vivid that I nearly jumped when I opened the case to find these two sixth- plate ambrotypes on ruby glass.  For some reason, I’m convinced this is the only portrait this couple ever had taken of themselves.  They look like a no-nonsense pair who would not waste money on frivolity like photographs.

The thing that fascinates me about this pair is the woman’s hair.  (And her square granny glasses.)  I’m pretty sure her real hair color would be white, not black, but she doesn’t look like someone who would color her hair (which was considered shocking and almost never done in the 19^th century.)  Maybe she’s wearing a wig?  Also, those crazy banana curls may be made of chenille—I believe I read something about that being a fad back in the 19^th century.

This other pair hang in my bedroom, and every time I look at them I smile.  (I’m sorry I couldn’t get a clearer photo of the man but the light and reflections totally foiled me on the day I snapped the photo.)

These two are examples of painted tintypes, a format that combines two of my great loves—photography and folk art.  Painted tintypes like these usually began with a full plate (about 8 by ten inches) tintype photograph.  Then someone—either the photographer’s staff or an artistic housewife—would paint over the image, sometimes to the point that you could no longer tell it’s a photograph.  Many hilariously non-realistic portraits were created this way.

But just painting over the photograph wasn’t enough.  The mat and frame of the painting were also hand-made and painted to embellish the original photograph.

In this pair, you can see that the lady’s clothing and the flowers in her hair have been painted in, and her cheeks tinted. The man’s hair and beard have been enhanced. 

Then, as is common with painted tintypes, the maker, convinced that “More is More” embellished the mat and frame.  In this case someone did an oval of gold glitter on top of another oval of red paper under the white mat and the three-layered wood frame, which is almost like a shadow box.

These couples clearly have been together so long they started to look alike, and their stern visages embody, like the Grant Wood portrait,  the best qualities of the steadfast American spirit.  They are the salt of the earth.

May Baskets & May Wreaths

(I posted this last year and am posting it again by popular request. The crazy no-snow winter has changed the sequence of flowers now in bloom--The forsythia is long gone, lilacs are peaking, even clematis is opening, but the idea of May baskets and May wreathes remains the same--glorying in the beauty of spring.) 

Some sixty years ago, when I was a little girl in (first) Milwaukee, Wisconsin and then in Edina, Minnesota, on the first of  May we would make May baskets out of construction paper and fill them with  whatever flowers we could find in the garden or growing wild. We would hang the baskets on the doorknobs of neighbors—especially old people—ring the door bell, then run away with great hilarity and peek out as the elderly person found the little bouquets on their door.

 Thirty-some years ago, when we moved  to Grafton, MA, I continued the same tradition with my three kids, but then they grew up and moved away.  Just today I looked out at all the flowers popping up in our yard and reflected that all the old people in our neighborhood had died.  In fact, I realized, the only old people left were my husband and myself, so I picked a small May Day bouquet for us out of what’s growing—white violets and purple violets, cherry blossoms, forsythia, wild grape hyacinth--  and here it is.

 In 1977, when the children were all small (the youngest was one month old) we moved from New York City to a suburb of Athens, Greece, courtesy of The New York Times, which had made my husband a foreign correspondent there.  In Greece, even today, whether in the country or the city, on May 1 you make a May wreath of the flowers in the garden.  Roses are in full bloom by then in Greece, along with all sorts of wild flowers. You hang the May wreath on your door.  It dies and dries and withers until, on June 24th, St. John the Baptist’s Birthday, the dried May wreath is thrown into a bonfire.  The boys of the town leap over the flames first. In the end everyone leaps over the fading fire saying things like  “I leave the bad year  behind in order to enter a better year.”

Here is daughter Eleni in 1980 wearing the wreath that was about to go on the door. Next to her is her sister Marina.

 In Greece, even today, you’ll find May wreaths hanging on the front doors of homes and businesses, although I don’t know if anyone still throws them into a St John’s fire.  In Massachusetts, the tulips and forsythia are out, the bleeding hearts are starting to bloom, and soon the lilacs will open, filling the air with their beauty and perfume.  But today I gathered a small bouquet of May flowers and remembered the years gone by.

Found Art: A Walk to Central Park

I’m just back home from a week spent babysitting the adorable #1 granddaughter in Manhattan, and once again I’m reminded why New York is my favorite city in the world (especially in Spring).  Every block  holds surprise glimpses of beauty and art, if you just look.  (Look up for sculptural and architectural surprises that might be missed.

Below are some of the sights I passed every day on the Upper East Side while pushing the stroller the three short cross-town blocks to Central Park, where three playgrounds, all a stone’s throw from the Metropolitan Museum, awaited. You may not count all of these as found art, but I do.  This is why I heart New York (now more than ever.)

 Cookies at Eli’s on Third Ave.

 Flowers outside our front door.

 Pansies in a restaurant window.

Tulips on Park Avenue. (Now they’ve finished. )

Window boxes & a sculpted head next to the garbage pails of a brownstone.

Artists selling their work outside the Metropolitan Museum.

“Woman on Horseback” on 79th  Street

Terra Cotta Warriors—All the way from China to Times Square.

A dry fountain in one playground.

Three bears outside a second playground, on the south side of the Metropolitan Museum.

The bears are irresistible to young and old. Everyone wants to climb and take a photo.

Okay, this rat, slightly larger than the ones in Central Park, is not really art.  He turns up whenever union members want to complain that a store is not hiring union labor.  While the rat could not be called artistic, he always makes me smile, because he’s a true New Yorker.

Men Looking Silly: Favorite Photos Friday

During photography’s infancy – from 1839 up to the Civil War – having your photograph taken was a serious matter that probably occurred only once in your lifetime  You would put on your best clothes, go to the photographer’s studio on a sunny day, sit very still for the long exposure time, often with your head in a brace to keep from moving.  No wonder so many early subjects look terrified.

 But toward the end of the 19^th century, exposure times were shorter, photographer’s studios were everywhere and the cost was lower, so people started joking in their photos.  Victorians thought it was hilarious to cross-dress for the photographer—men wearing large flowered hats, women in derbys and cutaways.

A while back I did a series of tinted cards called “Vintage Fashion Victims” and "More Vintage Fashion Victims",  based on photos of Victorian women in outrageous or funny garb.  But men could look even more ridiculous for the photographer, as you can see here.

 The four men above are, I think, all actors recreating their best roles.    The two cabinet cards by W. L. Shoemaker, of Phoenixville, Pa. showing men dressed as royalty? or courtiers? , were probably used to advertise the thespians, the way headshots are today, or they were collected by their fans. In pencil on the back of the guy with the mustache is “George Leister.”   The man without the mustache is identified in pencil on the back as “Walter Shoemaker” –which I realized is also the last name of the photographer. Could it be a photograph he took of himself in fancy dress?

The “clown” photo, taken by “The Popular Studio” in Haverhill, MA., has no ID on the back, but his ragged clothes suggest he is playing a hobo/clown role—probably in vaudeville.

The long, skinny cabinet card of a man dressed in velvet clothing, big lace collar, flower over his ear, lost in a book—is the cliché of a poet, undoubtedly another theatrical role.

 While the men above are dressed for the theater, I think this skater, photographed in Boston, may be seriously trying to commemorate his skill on the ice.  (Remember that all these photos are taken inside a photographer’s studio,  with props and painted background to suggest they’re outdoors.)

This carefully posed gentleman, with his rifle and faithful dog, photographed in Dresden by a photographer named Otto Mayer, is definitely not being funny.  With his cigar in his mouth and his hunting clothes, he knows he is the picture of the intrepid hunter.

 Now this guy, whom I call “The Leaning Man” is definitely trying to be funny with the props he found in the photographer’s studio.  This is a “real photo” post card, which may be later-- into the 1900’s-- than the cabinet cards. 

The leaning man looks a lot to me like this fellow,  jauntily wearing a lady’s hat for his calling-card-sized tintype.   They’re probably not the same person, but  they have a similar sense of humor, and probably both could be counted on to be the life of the party, even if it meant wearing a lampshade on their head. 

Lost Bird: Survivor of Wounded Knee, Betrayed by the White Man

The Story Behind the Photograph

This antique photo is the most expensive and I think the most interesting one in my collection.  It’s an Imperial—which means a giant version of the cabinet card-- and measures  about 7 by 10 inches;  an albumen print mounted on decorative board.  It was taken in Beatrice, Nebraska by a photographer named Taylor.

As you can see, the photograph shows a handsome, stern-looking military officer in a general’s uniform holding an adorable Native American baby.  The officer is Gen. Leonard Colby who adopted this baby and had the photograph taken—as a public relations gesture.

This baby girl was found alive beneath the frozen body of her mother four days after the killing of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on Dec. 29, 1890, in what came to be known as the Massacre of Wounded Knee.

She was named “Zintkala Nuni” -- “The Lost Bird” by the tribe’s survivors, who tried to get custody of her, but she was adopted –also as a public relations move -- by  Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby, whose men came to the killing field after the massacre was over.

Over the protests of the Lakotas, he adopted the child, claiming that he was a full-blooded Seneca Indian.  He promised to bring food to the surviving tribe members if they’d give him this living souvenir of Wounded Knee. Then he had this photograph taken.  On the back Colby wrote in lead pencil on the black cardboard, words which are now nearly indecipherable:   “…..baby girl found on the field of Wounded Knee…mother’s back on the fourth day after the battle, was found by me.  She was about 4 or 5 months old and was frozen on her head and feet, but entirely recovered.  The battle occurred Dec. 29, 1890, about fifteen miles walking from Pine Ridge, South Dakota.” 

Gen. Colby adopted the baby without even consulting his wife, Clara Bewick Colby, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, working as a suffragette activist, lecturer, publisher and writer.   The well-meaning adoptive mother brought the infant to Washington where Zintka, as they called her, grew up, buffeted by all the current social trends of the time—women’s suffrage, rejection by her own people, exploitation of her background by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, early silent films and vaudeville. 

As an adolescent, longing to return to the West to learn more about her origins.  Zintka went to Beatrice, Neb., to live with Colby, who by then had left his wife and daughter and married her former nanny.  The girl may have been sexually abused by her adoptive father, because she became pregnant under his care and was shipped off to a prison-like home for pregnant women.  Her infant son was stillborn but the girl was confined to the reformatory for another year.

Zintka returned eventually to her mother in Washington, then married a man who infected her with syphilis.  She tried different careers, including working with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which exploited her Native American background.    She tried to work in vaudeville and the early movie business—dressed as an Indian, of course-- and reportedly may have worked as a prostitute as well.

Zintka had two more children—one died and she gave the other to an Indian woman who, she felt, could take care of him better, because she and her ailing husband were desperately poor.

She fell ill in February of 1920 during an influenza epidemic, and on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, “Lost Bird” died at the age of 29 of the Spanish flu complicated by syphilis.  She was buried in a pauper’s grave in California.

The only bright light in Zintka’s story is that her bones were exhumed in 1991, seventy-one years after her death, by the Wounded Knee Survivor’s Association, to be returned to the battlefield and buried with great ceremony while news media and hundreds of Native American descendents watched.  A Lakota woman said, “Lost Bird has returned today to the same place she was taken from.  This means a new beginning, a process of healing is completed.  We can be proud to be a Lakota.  To our sacred children, this means a beginning.”

The story of Lost Bird is so steeped in irony that it reads as a fable of the exploitation and torture of the Native Americans by the white invaders.  On her own trail of tears, during her short life, Zintka was robbed of her name and her mother and any opportunity to learn about her own culture.  Despite her adoptive mother’s love and good intentions, she was terribly unhappy—prevented from going back to the West to find her kin and then sexually abused when she did return to the West. She was exploited and stereotyped by the film and entertainment world, eventually to die before she reached 30.

Lost Bird’s story has been told by Renee Sansom Flood in the 1998 book “Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota”, and Ms. Flood also spurred the effort to find Zintka’s grave and bring her home.  The author was a social worker in South Dakota when a colleague showed her a faded photograph that set her out on her years of research and writing.  That photo, found by the woman working with Renee Flood in an old trunk in her late father’s attic, was the same photo I own today—with Colby’s writing on the back.  Renee Flood became so obsessed with telling Lost Bird’s story and bringing her home to be buried with her people that she had recurring dreams of the little girl until she fulfilled her obsession.

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I know that owning this historic photograph is a serious responsibility. I, too,  would like to  spread the story of Zintka’s  sad life.  The story of Lost Bird is a vivid illustration of how a faded old photograph, over a century old, can have the power to move people to make discoveries long after the subject and the photographer are dead.

Found Art: Angels Beneath the Volcano

 Last week, when I read that the volcano of Popocatepetl, known fondly in Mexico as “El Popo”, was producing fire, smoke, lava, ash and loud underground groans, 40 miles southeast of Mexico City, I began to worry about the angels in the churches of Cholula, right below the volcano.

The alert level near the volcano is now at the fifth step on a seven-level warning scale.  The area is closed to visitors and the next stage of alert would prompt evacuations.  I’m sure the populace would be evacuated in time, but what will happen to the churches, the most stunning display of religious art that I’ve ever seen? For someone who loves folk art, and especially angels, the two churches I visited in Cholula two years ago, decorated by the local indigenous people, seemed as close to heaven as I would get in this life.

 Cholula is famous for its views of the volcanoes, especially from Nuestra Senora de los Remedios—the imposing church perched atop the Great Pyramid of Cholula, the largest in Mexico. The décor in Remedios is typical of the Spanish baroque style seen everywhere.

But the next church I visited, lower down the hill—San Martin Texmelucan—blew my mind--both the exterior, covered with the famous Talavera tiles of the region (which were being cleaned by workmen with no safety belts), but even more so the interior, where the local Indians had incorporated so much of their culture into the portrayal of angels that fill the dome and every inch of space; some holding ears of corn or wearing feathered headdresses.  This style is what they call indigenous baroque, and baroque it was.

Another native-designed church, Santa Maria Tonantzintla, also covered with tiles, is even more of a whirlwind of angels everywhere.  You weren’t supposed to take photos inside, but I took these anyway.

 Tonantzintla, which means “place of our little mother” in the Nahuatl language, comes from the Aztec earth mother who evolved into the Virgin Mary when the Spaniards conquered the area.  So perhaps this church is protected by both Christian and pagan spirits.

 I hope that the wrath of “El Popo” does not fall on these exquisite churches, so expressive of the religious fervor of the people of Cholula, but these angels have survived earthquakes in the past and hopefully will be shielded by their divine protectors from “El Popo” as well.

Favorite Photos—Behind the Wheel of the Great Race

When I scanned these two vintage photos from my collection for my “Favorite Photo Friday” post, I thought they were just two amusing scenes of Victorians posing proudly in photographers’ studios behind the wheel of one of those those new-fangled horseless carriages.

That’s pretty much the story of these two ladies.  Don’t you love their elaborately flowered hats?  They are in front of a painted background, which is meant to give the impression that they are traveling down a country road, but in fact these ladies probably never actually had the opportunity to drive a car in their lifetimes.

Their photo is a small tintype, 2 ½ by 3 ½ inches in size that was enclosed in a paper folder with an oval opening.  Tintypes first became popular during the Civil War and continued into the 1900’s—usually, in the later years, sold as a souvenir of an outing to somewhere like Coney Island or the Boardwalk at Atlantic City.

 But this photo of two rather foreign-looking men in hats turned out to have a much more interesting story once I started looking at the clues within the photo.

First of all, this is a “real photo” postcard.  It was a process created by Kodak in the early 1900’s that allowed a photograph to be printed on a postcard backing.

These men are sitting in an impressive-looking automobile against a painted background which includes two signs saying “San Francisco 24 miles.”

If you turn the card over, you see that it was postmarked “San Francisco, Nov. 24, 3:30 p.m. 1908” and mailed to  Maria Bruner at 12 Denison , New London Connecticut.  The message part—written in a very pale and faded green pencil, cannot be deciphered but it’s clearly in Italian.  Also written on the back is the price I paid for the card: $7.50.

You can see that the driver’s steering wheel is on the right and that just below it is the name “ZUST.”

Since I know less than nothing about automobiles, I thought this might be part of an automotive brand name, but when I googled those four letters I learned a whole lot:  Zust was an Italian car manufacturing company operating from 1905 to 1917, and the most famous Zust car was the red 1906 Zust which took third place in the 1908 Race Around the World, also called The Great Race.

Now I never saw the 1965 comedy "The Great Race" starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Natalie Wood, but I found the description of the Great Race of 1908 absolutely fascinating.  The plan was to drive from New York City, USA to Paris France with a 150-mile ship passage from Nome across the Bering Strait to East Cape, Siberia.  It began on Feb. 12, 1908 in Times Square. The six cars represented four nations:  Germany, France, Italy and the United States.  The Zust represented Italy.  The American Thomas Flyer car, in the lead, crossed the United States, arriving in San Francisco in 41 days, 8 hours and 15 minutes.

Only three of six competitors completed the race: and the Italian Zust came in third.  The Germans got to Paris four days ahead, but they were penalized a total of 30 days for not going to Alaska and for shipping their car part of the way by rail car, so the Americans, namely George Schuster, won by 26 days.  The Italians arrived in September 1908. (Throughout much of the race there were no roads, and  “Often,” according to Wikipedia, “the teams resorted to straddling the locomotive rails with their cars riding tie to tie on balloon tires for hundreds of miles when no roads could be found….The race was of international interest with daily front page coverage by the New York Times.”)

No wonder these two Italian men look so proud to be photographed sitting in an automobile which bears the name of the famous winning Italian car, the Zust.  This is clearly not the exact car that participated in the race, (photo below) but it seems to be an authentic model. This  souvenir real-photo postcard was mailed only two months after the Italian car arrived triumphantly in Paris, so this little postcard was no doubt a treasured souvenir of patriotic pride.

(P.S. I’m a day late in this “Friday” post because yesterday I drove back to Massachusetts after a week in New York hanging out with number-one granddaughter Amalía.  Good times!)