Dans la Nuit (Lovers)

Semi-fresh on the heels of Floating Figure (last month's rather stale public art post), here are a few photos of Dans la Nuit (Lovers), also by French-American sculptor Gaston Lachaise. It used to be outside the Portland Art Museum, on the right side of the main entrance, across from Floating Figure, having replaced Auguste Maillol's La Montagne around 2014 in conjunction with a temporary Lachaise exhibit. The two sculptures quietly went off exhibit or maybe left town sometime in 2020-21 while everyone was focused on the pandemic, and protesters were busy toppling statues of various dead presidents right next door in the South Park Blocks.

This post and its companion are another reminder that this humble blog does not aspire to be anyone's hub for breaking news: I took most of these photos back around 2014, shortly after the big Maillol-Lachaise swap-out, before the little nameplates were installed. Obviously I couldn't hit the big orange Publish button at that point, since I didn't actually know anything about the newly arrived art, so I saved a couple of draft posts with placeholder titles and moved on. A year or so later I was in the area and noticed the nameplates and duly took photos of them, but by then I'd moved on to other projects and just left it at that: I knew the photos were saved somewhere in either iPhoto or Flickr and I could probably find them again if I was in the mood to finish these posts, and I could always go back and take new photos if I genuinely couldn't find the older ones. Meanwhile fresh sedimentary layers of draft posts kept accumulating on top of this leftover art stuff from 2014, and eventually the art (and the nameplates) weren't there anymore, and Google was (as usual) pretty useless without already knowing the titles, or at minimum the artist. Then a few months ago I stumbled across the 'lost' nameplate photos during a brief, yet tedious, photo-organizing bender and remembered I'd been looking for them. So I added those photos to the appropriate photosets, updated everything with the actual names, did the usual internet research, even got some words in place... and then saved the posts as updated drafts, to languish for a few more months. Because, as it generally is with these things, taking the photos and researching and writing is ninety percent of the work, while editing is the second ninety percent of the work.

Floating Figure

Next up we've got a few photos of Floating Figure, a sculpture by French-American artist Gaston Lachaise that used to be outside the Portland Art Museum, to the left of the main entrance. (Another Lachaise, Dans le Nuit (Lovers), sat on the right side of the entrance.) It replaced Auguste Maillol's La Riviere sometime around 2013-2014, and went off exhibit sometime during the recent pandemic; Floating Figure is clearly visible on Google Street View imagery dated June 2019, and absent in Microsoft's Bing Streetside View dated September 2021, so that gives us a rough time window for when they were removed.

What I don't know is whether the removal was pre-planned, or happened because of the recent bout of civic iconoclasm that resulted in toppling the dead president statues along the Park Blocks and elsewhere around town, as well as Harvey Scott on Mt. Tabor, the gun-n-bible-totin' pioneers in Chapman Square, and even the Thompson Elk that used to be in the middle of SW Main St. So maybe the museum figured they'd be targeted eventually, once the supply of slaveholding aristocrats and other canceled white guys ran out. Which, I dunno, I don't recall that anyone was toppling statues over cis- and hetero-normativity or excessive Pepe-le-Peu Frenchness at the time, but who knows.

Madison Street Plaza mural

Ok, here are some photos of yet another painted intersection, once again in downtown Portland. If you aren't familiar with this mildly weird local thing, the previous one of these that I covered back in January tries to explain a bit. The current one we've visiting is another twist on the usual theme in that it's an official city government project by the Bureau of Transportation and painted by hired artists, not at all a community volunteer thing. Madison St. Plaza here (which is just across from the Portland Art Museum) is one of at least four new 'plazas', all painted as part of a wider effort the city calls "The Green Loop", which is a bit hard to explain. It's sort of an official bike loop around the central city -- that's downtown plus the central eastside -- enhanced with things that are either trendy here right now, or were trendy before Covid, or at least were cool sometime in the last 15 years or so. So, occasional "everybody ride the Green Loop today" events, complete with obscure local bands you probably haven't heard of playing along the route; food cart pods; street paintings like the one here; that sort of thing. I was all ready to snark about this; I figured the city was trying to create a Disney-fied version of the real things, aimed at tourists and rich developers and conveniently close to upscale hotels downtown and around the Convention Center, and routed past the front doors of sponsoring businesses.

Eventually I realized what the city was really up to. Despite our heavily cultivated reputation around being the perfect bike & pedestrian city, we still have a really high rate of traffic fatalities and serious injuries here, and the numbers keep increasing, which leads to people asking the city how they're going to fix it. The city seems to think that one quick and easy, if partial, mitigation would be if people would stick to side streets more and avoid riding in heavy traffic and darting around 18-wheelers and gigantic SUVs from the 'burbs. You can even put together a network of these safer routes around town and give out maps. The city's done that for years now, and some people pay attention to that sort of thing religiously and others... don't. A lot of other people respond badly to safety-based appeals; they see it as victim blaming, or at least being told to eat their vegetables instead of just gobbling glucose gel packs all the time. So the plan, as I understand it, is to take the existing safer routes and make them look cool and trendy, so people will sort of gravitate to them of their own accord without any safety lectures. At least I think that's what the plan is, unless I'm giving them too much credit.

Whether the execution on the street murals and the curation of food carts and so forth is good enough to pull this off is a whole other question, obviously. And of course there will be cynics out there who see right through what the city's trying to do and reject it out of hand, and if too many people start thinking that way the city will have to come up with an alternative (but still safe) route that isn't 'corporate', but without anyone clueing in that it's another safety campaign. But hey, that's why city bureaucrats make the big bucks. Or at least why they have a good pension plan. I mean, I assume they still have a good pension plan, I dunno.

La Montagne

The next sculpture outside the Portland Art Museum (and I think the last one, until they add more) is La Montagne, the other Aristide Maillol nude of the pair flanking the Portland Art Museum entrance. I discussed Maillol and Dina Vierny, the model for the two sculptures, in an earlier post about La Rivière, and mentioned their surprising connection with Vera Katz, former Mayor of Portland. So go read that post first if you haven't yet.

There's one other local connection to Maillol I came across that didn't fit in the previous post. Pioneering local sculptor Frederic Littman was influenced by Maillol early in his career. (The linked article discusses Littmans's Abraham Lincoln for the newly relocated Lincoln High School). In fact, before he arrived at Reed College in 1941, Littman taught at a French art academy headed by Maillol. Littman went on to teach at the museum-linked Pacific Northwest College of Art, and taught many of the Northwest's prominent artists of the mid-20th Century.

It's hard to point at any stylistic resemblances; Littman mostly did human figures, but in an odd lumpy sort of style I've never been fond of, while the generation he taught tended toward pure abstract stuff instead. Still, if anyone's putting together a "professional genealogy" tracking who influenced whom, Maillol would be another data point on the big family tree.

La Rivière

A few months ago I had a series of post about the art outside the Portland Art Museum. I actually still have a couple of those left to do. Our next installment is La Rivière (1943) by the French sculptor Aristide Maillol, one of a pair of giant bronze Maillol nudes flanking the museum's main entrance. Their presence here is a fairly new development, both sculptures having arrived in the last decade or so. It strikes me as a little odd and retro to do this in the early 21st Century. I don't know whether it necessarily rises to the dreaded "problematic" or "reactionary", but the two Maillols do make it pretty clear that the visitor isn't entering a museum of contemporary art.

So the museum context is kind of weird, but taken by themselves I rather like the two Maillols, the dynamic La Rivière and the placid, posed La Montagne. Even better, from a blog standpoint, there's some rather fascinating history to relate about them.

As with many of Maillol's best-known works, the model for La Rivière was Dina Vierny, who also modeled for Henri Matisse and other prominent French artists, although she worked primarily with Maillol until his death in 1944. Matisse and others encouraged her to get into the business side of the art world, and after World War II she became a prominent art dealer and collector, eventually opening a museum dedicated to Maillol and his work. NPR had an entertaining interview with her in December 2008, in which (among other things) she explained that the nude modeling was originally her idea, and she had to persuade the shy (and elderly) Maillol to do it. When Vierny died in 2009, media outlets including the New York Times and The Guardian published lengthy obits. The NYT piece noted that during World War II (and while modeling for La Rivière) Vierny worked with the French Resistance, guiding refugees over mountain paths in the Pyrenees and helping them escape into neutral Spain. She was captured twice, was acquitted once, and was released the second time after Maillol somehow persuaded Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor, to intercede on her behalf.

La Rivière is one of Maillol's most famous works, and naturally this is not the only copy of it in existence. New York's Museum of Modern Art has one, as does the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Other copies are located in Zurich; St. Louis, MO; and Pasadena, CA. In 2013, a copy from Vierny's collection sold for $8.2M. The MoMA page about La Rivière has a couple of paragraphs about it, originally excerpted from a book of museum highlights:

The daring instability and torsion of The River are rare in Maillol's sculpture. Instead of trying to emulate the dynamism of twentieth-century life, as did so many artists of his time, Maillol usually sought an art of serenity and stillness, of classical nobility and simplicity. As late as 1937, in fact, he remarked, "For my taste, there should be as little movement as possible in sculpture." Yet within a year or so afterward he had conceived The River, a work in which the movement is almost reckless.

Commissioned to create a monument to a notable pacifist, the French writer Henri Barbusse, Maillol conceived the sculpture as a work on the theme of war: a woman stabbed in the back, and falling. When the commission fell through, he transformed the idea into The River. In a departure from the usual conventions of monumental sculpture, the figure lies low to the ground and rests apparently precariously on the pedestal, even hanging below its edge. Twisting and turning, her raised arms suggesting the pressure of some powerful current, this woman is the personification of moving water.

I haven't come across anyone mentioning this, but I have to wonder whether the precarious pose is a reference to Vierny's dangerous Resistance work. It just seems like it would be difficult to work on something like this and not see the obvious analogy.

Curiously, the Portland Art Museum's website doesn't mention anything about the statues out front, and I have yet to figure out exactly how they came by the Maillol duo, whether they were purchased, donated, or loaned, or from whom, or when. (The museum's online catalog lists six other Maillol sculptures & drawings, but nothing about the giant ones outside.) I did find a couple of old Oregonian articles that pass along a remarkable historical anecdote, though. Among the many people Vierny helped to escape the Nazis was a young girl named Vera Pistrak, who grew up to be Vera Katz, Oregon House Speaker and three-term Mayor of Portland.

Desert Harvest

The next sculpture from outside the Portland Art Museum (since we still have a few of them left) is Desert Harvest by Native American artist Allan Houser. His Wikipedia bio claims he was influenced by Henry Moore (Upright Motive #9 & Reclining Connected Forms ) and Barbara Hepworth (Parent I & Young Girl) among other people. The Oklahoma History Center, Phoenix's Heard Museum, and the Oklahoma Museums Association have online exhibits about Houser's life and work.

Desert Harvest sits next to Coyote VI in the museum's sculpture court, forming a small Southwestern-ish section. I think this arrangement is the museum's doing, though, not one intended by the pieces' creators.

Strip Stake

You might recall that one of the many ongoing projects here at this humble blog is writing about the public art outside the Portland Art Museum. I haven't done one of these posts for a while, but there are still a few left to cover; today's item is Strip Stake by Anthony Caro is located on 10th outside the old Masonic Temple building. It's easy to overlook since it sort of looks like it might be an abandoned bit of gear left behind by carpenters or window washers. I'll try to be objective and not snark about it, but I admit this really isn't one of my favorites. Caro also created Gulf Stream just around the corner, which I'm a bit more fond of.

Caro's website includes a gallery photo of Strip Stake. The same photos shows up in a PORT review of someone's local gallery show; one of the pieces is compared to Strip Stake toward the end of the review:

It reminds me somewhat of Sir Anthony Caro's Strip Stake at the Portland Art Museum, but differs in that Reflexion isn't terribly invested in being an object… but as a project completed.

A Portland Monthly review of the same show made a similar comparison:

Remove this piece from its context in Tractor, and it becomes a crisp sculpture of scale, a Donald Judd take on Anthony Caro’s “Strip Stake” at the Portland Art Museum (find it outside on SW 10th).

Strip Stake arrived in Portland circa 2001 as part of the estate of Clement Greenberg, the prominent art critic. The museum hosted a show then to show off their new acquisitions; an SFGate review of the show praised a number of the pieces but suggested it had been inadequately curated. Strip Stake got a brief mention:

Several large pieces by sculptor Anthony Caro make him look overdue for reappraisal. His great "Strip Stake" (1971-74), all legs, and not all of them reaching the floor, is the philosophical contemporary of Richard Serra's best work.

These mentions are clearly meant as compliments, if only I was a little better at deciphering them. I gather Strip Stake possesses, or is believed to possess, deep and arcane artistic merits that I'm entirely failing to grasp. I like to think I'm a reasonably intelligent and sophisticated person, but I may have to just throw up my hands and say "I don't get it" this time around. Sigh.

Coyote VI

Today's item from outside the Portland Art Museum is Coyote VI by Gwynn Murrill. As the name indicates, it's part of a series of coyote designs: Coyotes V and VII are in Jackson, WY, and the latter once was (or another copy of it now is) in Venice, CA. Coyote III, made of koa wood, remains in the artist's collection. Where the others are is left as an exercise for the reader. A post at Fifty Two Pieces has more about Coyote VI, as well as a cute real coyote that managed to sneak onto a MAX train a few years ago.

The collar isn't part of the sculpture, by the way. Some joker must have added that. Wasn't me. Honest.

Here's an article by the artist describing a recent exhibition of her work in Century City, CA. The city took the unusual step of designating the median strip of a major road as a rotating sculpture garden, and it hosted a collection of Murrill's animal and bird sculptures from November 2012 to January of this year, for the enjoyment of passing drivers. That is an extremely Californian idea. Not only would it not happen her; the idea it wouldn't even occur to anyone here. Which is fine, I mean, we aren't really a city of grand boulevards anyway, and I'm not sure where you'd put something like this. Probably out in the 'burbs somewhere, and then nobody would notice except metal-thieving tweakers. I can see how this would work in Southern California though.

Dance Horse

Today's spooky item from outside the Portland Art Museum is Dance Horse by Deborah Butterfield, who has specialized in abstracted horse designs like this.

I admit this thing kind of creeps me out. There's something sort of primordial about it, like a horse from a Lascaux cave painting. But it also looks like a skeleton, or maybe a horse golem made of driftwood.

I like horses, but they can be kind of creepy even in the best of circumstances. They can kill you umpteen different ways, but they usually just a sugar cube. And when you give a horse a sugar cube, you have to hold it just so, because a horse has an enormous mouth full of nightmare teeth, and it could easily bite your fingers off without even noticing. And that's when they aren't casually trampling you, kicking you to death accidentally, bucking you off, or rolling over on you.

I'm reminded of this one time at Boy Scout summer camp. I was trying for Horsemanship merit badge, one of the highlights of summer camp (especially for those of us who weren't really into swimming or target shooting). The main event involved a big group trail ride out away from the camp. I'm not sure how far; it felt like forever but it was probably just a couple of miles tops. By luck of the draw, I'd ended up with a horse that was highly intelligent and held an abiding hatred for all humanity. It kept ducking under low tree branches, trying to knock me off its back. It would even weave off the trail when it saw a promising tree branch off to the side, despite anything I futilely tried to do with the reins. I think I earned my merit badge that day just by staying on.

I'm also reminded of another time at the Oregon coast, years ago, renting horses to ride on the beach. I realize that's a cliche torn from the cover of a bodice-ripping romance novel; it seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, that time was actually fine, with a perfectly docile, non-homicidal horse. Except for the flatulence. Equine flatulence is a force of nature, and not one of the more pleasant ones. All the recycling and walking to work and environmental do-gooding I've ever done probably still hasn't made up for the horse methane from that one day at the coast.

Rhododendrons

Today's object from outside the Portland Art Museum is the smallest of the lot, unless there's an even smaller one I haven't noticed yet. Marie Louise Feldenheimer's Rhododendrons is a small bronze panel on a wall in the museum's outdoor sculpture court. I hadn't noticed it before, but it's been outside the art museum since at least 1978, which tells you something about my powers of observation, or lack thereof.

I wasn't familiar with the artist so I did a bit of digging. It seems she was a local heiress, born in 1894, whose father and uncle owned a Portland jewelry business. Her name first appeared in the paper in the society pages, and then she moved to New York City to study art, before eventually returning to Portland. A 1925 article showcased some Egyptian-influenced granite sculptures she'd recently created, Egyptian being all the rage at the time. These were purchased by "American Museum of New York", whichever one that is. The Smithsonian art database is no help in this case, since the only work of hers it lists is Rhododendrons. The RACC database also lists a Bust of Willem van Hoogstraten, conductor of the Oregon Symphony from 1925 to 1938, now located at the Performing Arts Center. Her work was the subject of a 1985 retrospective at the museum, in honor of her 90th birthday.

On the Oregon coast, south of Seaside, is popular Ecola State Park. Adjacent to the state park is the densely forested Elmer Feldenheimer State Natural Area, named for Marie Louise Feldenheimer's brother. A 1990 Oregonian profile of her explains that she'd donated the land in his memory. This was one of a number of philanthropic conservation efforts she was involved in, including Nature Conservancy projects at Tillamook Head, near Ecola State Park, and preservation work on the Olympic Peninsula with the guy who later started Ecotrust (the group behind the renovated Ecotrust Building in the Pearl District). Feldenheimer passed on in 1993 and left a large bequest to the state park system.

I'm not really in the business of praising rich people. If they're going to exist, though -- and I'm not entirely sold on that point -- they could do a lot worse than creating some art and doing a bit of philanthropy. I'm fairly sure this was the exception to the rule back in the mid-20th century, and it's certainly not very widespread now either. Some of our present-day oligarchs really and truly want to be Bond villains (and I won't list the guys I"m thinking of, because they have lawyers and worse), while others just want their own reality shows (and usually get them).

In the unlikely event that you're a real-life rich person and you're reading this, you've already passed the first test. The fact that you're here means you're far more sophisticated and discerning than most of your peers. So consider sending the kids to art school. Maybe donate to a museum or the state park system, or a local university. They'll happily put your name on something; you'd barely even need to ask. Any one of these things lasts longer than a family fortune does, even with today's crazy-low inheritance taxes. People will speak fondly of your wise and generous nature, and not ask impertinent questions about how you got all that money in the first place. Sorry, that slipped out. I mean, it helps you put your best foot forward, in the eyes of future historians, as well as random internet people of the future who have whatever replaces blogs fifty years from now. I can't really explain why that would be important, but I'm pretty sure it is.

Composition

The next object outside the Portland Art Museum is Michihiro Kosuge's Composition. The museum's page about it gives the date as 1960-1974; I'm not sure what the 14 year time span means: Designed in 1960 and fabricated in 1974? Slowly constructed in fits and starts over a decade and a half? The page does't explain. Kosuge also created Continuation for the circa-2009 MAX Green Line project, created from recycled bits of an old fountain from the original transit mall. Given how much time elapsed between the two, I suppose it's no surprise that they don't closely resemble each other.

Composition was in the personal collection of sculptor Tom Hardy (best known for various animal sculptures, & the series of Oregon Landscape panels at PSU). He donated it to the art museum in 1982.

I've mentioned before that I walked in to the museum's outdoor sculpture court and was able to guess the artist for a surprising number of the pieces. This wasn't one of them. I saw the Cor-Ten steel and the size and immediately assumed it was a Lee Kelly, a companion to his Arlie on the other side of the plaza. I was thinking it was one of his better efforts, somehow more elegant and mathematical than the others, and then I realized it wasn't his at all. So yeah, I do kind of like it, aside from my usual grumbling about Cor-Ten as a medium. Portland Public Art didn't like it, although that's sort of par for the course at that erstwhile blog. Kosuge was recently profiled in a February 2013 Oregon Art Beat segment, in connection with a PICA show last spring featuring his work.

Gulf Stream

The next item from outside the Art Museum is Gulf Stream by the British sculptor Anthony Caro. Apparently he also co-designed the Millennium Bridge in London, among other things. I admit to being unfamiliar with his work, but as I've never claimed to be an art critic or any other sort of art expert, I wouldn't consider that an interesting or valuable data point. An NYT article from 2007 called out Gulf Stream as a highlight of the museum's outdoor sculpture plaza, along with Roy Lichtenstein's Brushstrokes, though it's possible these two were named just because readers in New York were unlikely to have heard of most of the Pacific Northwest artists represented here.

I'm fairly certain that the canopy over the top is not part of the art, and it's just there to protect Gulf Stream from the elements. You could potentially read this as some sort of artistic commentary about whether Serious International Art is suitable to this part of the world. I doubt that was intentional though; sometimes a canopy is just a canopy. Still, I think it's legitimately "found art". I'm fairly certain a real art museum in a real city would understand this, and let me go and sign my name to the combo and sell it back to them for an astonishingly large sum. Here, though, they'd probably just taser me or something.

Winter Column

Today's object from outside the art museum is Winter Column, by Hilda Morris, who also created Ring of Time, the "Guardian of Forever"-like ring outside one of the Standard Insurance buildings.

I realize it's abstract midcentury art, and speculating about what it's supposed to "look like" is the mark of an uncultured barbarian. But it does look a lot like an inverted tree root, torn out of the ground, like something you'd see in a clear cut, or floating down the Willamette after a winter storm. Ring of Time has the same rough organic look to it; it's easy to forget these are metal objects. Morris wasn't the only midcentury Portland artist to do this, and I've said once or twice that Frederic Littman's look just isn't my cup of tea. Somehow Morris's rough organic look works, where Littman's doesn't, at least to my barbarian eyes.

Brushstrokes

Today's installment in the ongoing "art outside the Portland Museum" series is the largest and probably newest of the lot. Brushstrokes is the enormous, brightly colored Roy Lichtenstein sculpture outside the museum's north building (the old Masonic temple). It's right on the Park Blocks in front of the building, it's painted in bright primary colors, and it's about 30 feet tall. You can't miss it.

Brushstrokes is part of a larger series of paintings and sculptures made beginning in the mid-1960s. Portland's Brushstrokes was created in 1996, making it one of Lichtenstein's last works. The series began with paintings in LIchtenstein's unique style, like the ones at the Tate in London, and at MoMA in NYC. The sculptures came later, starting in the 1980s, and were inspired by the earlier paintings. An art museum in the Hamptons has a pair of Tokyo Brushstrokes sculptures on display. The Getty has Three Brushstrokes, and the New Orleans Museum of Art recently acquired a Five Brushstrokes. Brown University appears to have another copy of the same Brushstrokes that Portland has. There was even a Brushstrokes chair and ottoman, circa 1986-88. The New Orleans story has a good explanation of what motivated the Brushstrokes series:

Roy Lichtenstein, who was born in 1923, made his mark on art history in the rock 'n' roll era. At the time, highly emotional paintings by abstractionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were the rage. Lichtenstein’s approach couldn’t have been more different. He imitated the lowbrow illustrations in comic books with a meticulous, passionless painting style. The impersonal, melodramatic comic book cells that he reproduced seemed to mock the earnest emotionalism of the self-involved abstract painters that came before him.

To put an even finer point on his dryly humorous commentary, Lichtenstein created deadpan close-up paintings of drippy action-packed brush strokes – just the sort of fevered brush strokes that Pollock and De Koonig had made famous. Lichtenstein re-imagined some of those satirical brush strokes in three dimensions – “Five Brushstrokes” is an example.

Piedra Negra

Today's object from outside the Portland Art Museum is Piedra Negra by Manuel Neri. Neri also created Ventana al Pacifico at the Gus Solomon Courthouse, to which Piedra Negra bears a certain resemblance. A passage from Neri's Wikipedia bio seems applicable here:

He is noted for his life-size sculptures, which though clearly figurative in nature, are abstracted figures rather than realist representations. His sculptures primarily focus on the gesture, and the surfaces of his sculptures are often, sanded, chipped, or painted to emphasize textures.

Piedra Negra previously exhibited in The Essential Gesture a 1994 show at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, CA. The show was curated by Bruce Guenther, who in 2000 went on to become Chief Curator at the Portland Art Museum. Piedra Negra followed him in 2002 when it was donated for the museum's 110th birthday. Because arranging that sort of thing is what curators do.

Garden Gate

Here's another object from outside the art museum: Garden Gate by longtime Portland sculptor Mel Katz. His work has appeared here a couple of times before, namely Daddy Long Legs on the transit mall, and Red, Yellow, Blue at the 200 Market building. The museum doesn't have an online collection page for Garden Gate for some reason. It might be because it's a relatively recent acquisition; it was at Portland's Laura Russo Gallery as recently as 2002. This newness means I also can't find much of anything to share about it; many search results are actually for an entirely different Katz Garden Gate located in Bend. (I was just complaining about reused titles the other day and already here's another example How annoying.)

Based on a sample size of 3 I've seen, and a few others I've seen photos of, I think I generally like his work. This clean, colorful style was apparently uncommon in Portland's mid-20th-Century art world, which generally preferred lumpy bronzes and rusty cor-ten steel whatzits. (Alhough as far as I've been able to tell, said art world consisted of at most a dozen people at any given time, so having a niche to oneself isn't really that surprising.) The Portland Public Art blog liked Garden Gate too, and that blog's anonymous author was hard to please. I suppose the takeaway here is that while I may have uninformed opinions about art, they aren't always unusual opinions. Take that however you will.

If I ever wanted to sound more informed and insider-ish, I suppose I could start adapting text from the Arty Bollocks artist's statement generator. I'm also tempted to adapt the Git manpage generator for documentation in my day job. In both cases I'm not sure anyone would notice. I'm occasionally tempted to throw together a Markov chain generator that consumes the last 8+ years of this humble blog, and see what it spits out. I'm kind of afraid to see the results of that, to be honest. An auto-generated blog post would probably start with "Here are some photos of..." and ramble on for 2-to-5 unmemorable paragraphs before ending rather abruptly. And now that I've mentioned Markov chains, I'm kind of afraid of the generator becoming self-aware, or at least of it simulating self-awareness as well as I do. Heck, as far as you know this may have happened already.

Naga Stand

Here's today's item from outside the Portland art museum, Naga Stand by James Lee Hansen, which is part of a larger series titled Guardian. If Naga Stand looks oddly familiar, you might be thinking of Hansen's Talos No. 2 and Winter Rider No. 2, both on Portland's downtown transit mall. Hansen's website includes a 1970 article about his work up to that point, with a brief and opaque description of the Guardian series:

Here we find that the first “Guardian” image--in which evolved organic masses create a cohesive environment around a vertical axis, the whole suggesting a ceremonial watchfulness recalling mythological soldiery. Craft-object and organic relationships fuse to create a language of form.

Transcending the visual aesthetic, the ‘Guardian” series exhibits the “intensity of feeling compressed into rigid form” that Herbert Read labels “iconographic.” Behind the polished surface of sculptural technique is an indicator pointing to the archetypal realm.

In any case, I imagine Talos No. 2 is part of this series too, since frankly I can't tell it and Naga Stand apart. Call me an uncultured philistine if you like.

As for the name, "Naga" could mean any number of things; the Wikipedia disambiguation page is one of the larger ones I've seen. The 1970-1971 date means it's too early to be inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons monster (which is in turn inspired by a Sanskrit deity). Apparently there's a circa-1969 comic book villain named "Naga" though, and that's exactly the right time period. So in lieu of any further information or research, I'm going to assume this thing's named after the evil merman-turned-serpent-god king of the Lemurians. The true story is almost certainly far less interesting.

Picador

Here's a slideshow about Picador, the second Manuel Izquierdo sculpture outside the Portland Art Museum, on the Jefferson St. side of the building near Split Ring. Unlike Eye of Orion (the other Izquierdo), it doesn't appear that anyone's started a Doomsday cult about Picador yet, but then it's a relatively new acquisition and doesn't show up in a lot of Portland art guides, so it's possible any prospective cultists simply haven't found it yet. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what this was, actually. There doesn't seem to be a museum sign for it anywhere nearby. I ended up just guessing it was one of his and rifling through the museum's online collection to see if they had any photos that looked right.

Once I knew the title I still couldn't dig up a lot of info to share about this one. The search results are swamped with Spanish-language bullfighting links. Apparently there's another unrelated Manuel Izquierdo out there who has something to do with bullfights, though I'm not sure whether he's an actual picador or not. And no, I'm not going to link to any bullfighting websites, because this is a civilized blog, for the most part.

You might recall I did a "Hey, I know who did that" with the museum's Mistral No. 2 as well; this sounds like an impressive skill until you realize that Portland's official arts world (i.e. people who made a living creating "serious" art, whatever that is) was about twelve people (nearly 100% of them old white men) from WWII through 1990 or so. Their work is found all over Portland and around the Northwest, so in a way they're important in the "Who created that?" sense. But if they were really so amazing and talented, what were they doing in a podunk Republican timber town like 1950s Portland, instead of Manhattan where all the serious action was? (Or at least where all the serious money was?) That's a question I can never seem to get a straight answer to.

Madrina

The next item on our random walk outside the art museum is Mark Calderon's Madrina. Like his smaller Floribunda on Portland's transit mall, it takes inspiration from elaborate hairstyles. Madrina appears to be a full human figure, and seen from any angle it looks like you're seeing the statue from behind. Until you realize it's an identical hairstyle all the way around, and the joke's on you. I don't know if that makes it great art for the ages or not, but it has entertainment value, I guess.

A Seattle gallery website mentions that this is one of a series of five (another is at the art museum in Bellevue, WA), and the page offers a brief description:

Each work in this edition will be hand finished with a unique patina. A rich reddish brown appears in the crevices of this work.

The image is a reflection on the female figure. Her mystery is evident in the realization that, as the viewer moves around her, a face never appears. Instead, she is shrouded in 360 degrees with long tendrils of curled hair and a gown that is fluted with a scalloped bottom edge. She can be viewed as an abstraction of a Madonna figure but her curls also suggest the Buddhas of the Far East with their pin curls or topknots, and Grecian caryatids with their plaited hair.

"Madrina" is the Spanish word for godmother.

Lions

Our wander around the outdoor part of the Portland Art Museum (i.e the free part) continues with Alexander Phimister Proctor's Lions, a large bronze plaque mounted on an exterior wall. Proctor also created the Theodore Roosevelt equestrian statue in the South Park Blocks nearby.

A 2003 paper in the Oregon Historical Quarterly about Proctor's work in Oregon explains the winding history of Lions. It was originally commissioned for the home of Wilson B. Ayer, a museum trustee, circa 1911, where it hung over a fireplace for many years. Ayers willed Lions to the museum in 1935. Aesthetic tastes changed, and the museum eventually lost interest in Lions, and loaned it to the Oregon Zoo in May 1962 (the same week the zoo train opened for business, as it turns out). The zoo mounted it on a wall in the big cat section, in an awkward location where it was hard to see; sometimes it even had bushes growing in front of it. It eventually fell into neglect and disrepair. I remember seeing it there as a kid and thinking it was a strange thing to find lurking behind a stand of bamboo. The museum finally took it back in 1998, restored it, and put it on display in its current location.

Proctor's 1950 obit in the Oregonian referred to him as a "famed western sculptor" and continued with a rather disturbing bit: "An enthusiastic hunter as well as an artist, he often boasted he had killed every species of wildlife in North America 'except a buffalo and an Indian.'" If you ever want to know what 1950 America was like, it was a place where it was ok to say that as a boast, and ok to print it in the newspaper as a heartwarming anecdote. Yeesh.