Rockwell Kent's World Famous Paintings: Art's Remarkable Afterlife

 "Begone purity!" cries Woolf in Orlando.  When Woolf's Purity speaks she says:

With my robes I cover the speckled hen’s eggs and the brindled sea shell; I cover vice and poverty. On all things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore, speak not, reveal not. Spare, O spare!

Or as the captain reminds Crusoe in Tournier's Friday, before the ships sinks:

“Crusoe,” he said sternly, take heed of what I say. Beware of purity. It is the acid of the soul.”

As a child, I lived in a state of innocence. This is never total, and I was well enough aware of seeing poverty in Baltimore and witnessing unhappiness in adult lives that seeped into my own. Nevertheless, my experience of looking at paintings in an art book was innocent and unmediated.

As a child who liked to swing on swings, for example, I was fascinated with the fantasy quality and wretched excess--the extraordinary sensuality, as I would now see it--of Fragonard's "The Swing," especially the voluminous gown and the shoe flinging off. As a child, I thought losing the shoe was an unfortunate accident that would mean the woman would have to get off the swing (!) and retrieve it, not the flirtatious device it probably is with two lovers hiding in the bushes. I thought, too, because of the lost shoe and what looked to me like a ball gown (though it is not) that the painting had something to do with Cinderella, a story I had listened to on a record many times with rococo Swan Lake as the background music.

Rococo excess 

In my years of experience, I know something of the cost to others of maintaining this idyllic world.  We remember innocence, but overlay it with experience, bypassing  purity that clings to a false reality.

Kent writes of "The Swing: with the words "From Swing to Guillotine," causing  me wonder to if these very words inspired Yinka Shonibare's headless version below. That is a fanciful idea, but hardly impossible.

The excess of beheading in a story retold

Shonibare, the Tate's page tells us--https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/shonibare-the-swing-after-fragonard-t07952--is British Nigerian and dressed his darker skinned woman in bright African print fabric. This 2001 version leaves out the men hiding in the bushes, and allows us to walk around it and view it from all angles. One can take on the voyeuristic pose of the men below and look up the woman's skirt: she is dressed in knickers beneath her dress. Is the installation showing the bad end of frivolity in the decapitated swinger? Or is it showing that her life was mindless from the start. Why dress her in African prints: to universalize her or to show the Deleuzian flows of colonialism that supported French excess--though in the eighteenth century these would not have been the main support?

"Hope" by George Watts

The painting above used to appall me and confuse me as a child. Why was the woman blindfolded? Why did the blindfold seem to be attached to a strange, tortuous instrument? Why was such an odd image in this book? I sometimes would stare at it and sometimes flip quickly past it. I remembered this painting being called "Justice," thinking, in later life, that it represented justice as blind, but I now see it is called "Hope." Rockwell Kent shows his dislike of this nineteenth century painting by quoting Hazlitt: 

"Indifferent pictures, like dull people, must absolutely be moral." 

Kent calls it "pure allegory" and goes on to say that this picture has "probably appeared more often than any other on illustrated calendars." How times have changed: I have never seen this image on an illustrated calendar. I suppose it makes sense that hope is blind? Is the woman playing a lyre?  Is she attached to it, as I thought as child? (Probably not.) 

I did some research on it. This "research" meant a trip to Wikipedia, where I found useful information. I am currently be reading Tocarczuk's Flights in a online group and enjoy her words on Wikipedia: "Mankind's [sic] most honest cognitive project ... it will hold everything! Let's get to work." The Wikipedia entry says:

Radically different from previous treatments of the subject, it shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre that has only a single string remaining. The background is almost blank, its only visible feature a single star. Watts intentionally used symbolism not traditionally associated with hope to make the painting's meaning ambiguous. While his use of colour in Hope was greatly admired, at the time of its exhibition many critics disliked the painting. .... 

Despite the decline in Watts's popularity, Hope remained influential. Martin Luther King Jr. based a 1959 sermon, now known as Shattered Dreams, on the theme of the painting, as did Jeremiah Wright in Chicago in 1990. Among the congregation for the latter was the young Barack Obama, who was deeply moved. Obama took "The Audacity of Hope" as the theme of his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, and as the title of his 2006 book; he based his successful 2008 presidential campaign around the theme of "Hope".

 I am fascinated by the idea of life as circular journey, and so it is satisfying to circle back and revisit images from early childhood, seeing them through the double lens of childhood response and adult knowledge. My own life trajectory from innocence to experience (or awareness) is reflected in the unexpected ways very conservative pieces of art have been redeployed to make a commentary on oppressed peoples.  My pleasure in these paintings spikes as I understand they have grown with me: they are not dead art but have been enlivened with new meaning based on new political realities.

My aware self can look at the original of  "The Swing" with the unadulterated pleasure of viewing a fantasy scene, but I experience pleasure, too, in knowing that justice fell on the class depicted--and that a new version of this work exists that shows that. Likewise, I feel affirmed that initial critics were sometimes repelled by "Hope" just as I was. I feel buoyed too, that this painting by a privileged British artist fascinated by Greek sculpture, with all that implies, found a home as an inspiration for the American Civil Rights movement and inspired our first black president. I imagine Kent would be happy too--happier than he could have anticipated.

A labyrinth. Circling to the same center, knowing it will always be different when you arrive. 

Returning to Woolf, she too was drawn to time's circularity, such as in the return of more experienced and aware Lily Briscoe to a site of love and (adult) origin as journeys back to Isle of Skye to finish her painting in To The Lighthouse. Circularity can bring a sense of completion as we bring a new consciousness to bear on what has gone before.