Art and the Homeless

When the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses almost immediately after its publication, I sensed a publicity stunt. It might have looked legitimate if the book had been published either before the Iranian Revolution, or after a change in rulership. Instead, it looked like calculated exploitation of a volatile political-diplomatic situation.   A touchy egomaniac like the Ayatollah made for an easy target. It appeared that Rushdie couldn't let the opportunity pass. I would not be surprised if, under polygraph questioning, Rushdie admitted writing The Satanic Verses with that intention. Intentional or not, the ensuing uproar made Rushdie a  cause célèbre  which, otherwise, he would not have been. Rushdie was not a hostage, or otherwise personally exposed to execution of the fatwa's penalty, which gave publication of The Satanic Verses the appearance of a calculated risk. I said to myself, wait and see before passing judgment. After ...

Every Liberal Arts college of art "History of Modern Art" curriculum cites Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe as the prototypical Modernist painting. The scandal surrounding it builds educational interest, as it drove favorable interest in the new art of the 19th Century. Nobody sleeps through a controversy. Controversy is the defining feature of Modern Art, as everyone knows. What everyone doesn't already know, which the analysis of the famous painting reveals, is that which makes  Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe  controversial. The precipitating cause of viewer disturbance is the female figure, foreground, which stares at the viewer. You were admonished as a child not to stare. You were not told how to be stared-at.  The female in the foreground not only stares, but stares brazenly, stares provocatively at the viewer. At once scandalized and fascinated by the scene before you, the unwavering stare challenges. You were not invited to the soiree in the painting. It is a privat...

The 1863 Salon des Refusés , in Paris, was the turning point in modern art. Forever after—to this day—art would be a political matter. When onlookers say they don't understand contemporary art, what they mean is, they don't know which side to take. The original  Salon des Refusés was authorized by Napoleon III, when 2,218 submissions to the official Salon were rejected. That number represented a sizable body of citizens, many of whom were resentful because of arbitrary rejection by a State magistrate. Wary of social unrest, the Emperor decreed a separate exhibition where the rejected artists' submissions might be shown. The official Salon was founded in 1648 by Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France, to display the work of recent graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts . The Salon, and École, were as symbolic of the ancien régime as anything. It is amazing the institution survived the French Revolution. By 1863 reform was due. By his policy of tolerance social upheaval ...

Ivan Albright had a warm heart and a cold head. He was stationed at a U.S. Army field hospital during the first World War. Albright made pencil sketches of the wounds of casualties of battle, tinted with watercolor. It's not always certain what the viewer is looking at with anatomical explanation, which is lacking in these drawings. All that is obvious is that the subject is an open wound. The sketches are second-rate medical illustrations. They are, more importantly, a first-rate testament to the horrors of war. Albright's deficient artistic objectivity was more than compensated for by his sensitivity -a weakness, which he discovered, for the suffering of others. His line shakes. He is nervous. It's art. Ivan, no doubt, thought his father, who was a successful commercial artist, would approve of his anatomical studies. When Albright returned to the United States after the war, he brought with him first impressions of mangled bodies -and his own nightmares. He attended the...