Splendid

"The prefabricated Main Street had yet to make its appearance," is the declaration under the picture called "Last Trolley- Gloucester," done in the year of 1917. It's in a book about the paintings of a favorite of mine I visit in the museum and read about. I think what it means is the car had yet to clobber us with its clog, noise, smog, smells and the like. The view of Stan Chilson's world was not come yet. Stuart Davis, painter,one who watched tv in the '50's as he worked. With the sound off.

Look at the pictures of the culture he so loved and championed. He had the sheer courage to see a thing and get it down. It was a vibrancy that characterized us Americans of the first fifty years of the century. Davis was gonna capture it and if you go to the Museum of Fine Arts, as I did to look on three later, seeming abstract paintings you come away with the knowledge he got us down pretty well in his own quirky way.

I am drawn to the early and middle phase of Davis's work. Along with his work I consider Ferdinand Leger who had an impact on the American. Later Davis veers off in the stratosphere with his shapes, objects,his attempt to put music, jazz, to the canvas. I understand that he was expected to lead American art of his day into the bold future. He was responsive to the challenge issued by critics, news and magazine people, academics of the art world. In short the establishment around the artists, galleries, museums and the like would dictate what we should like, what artists should paint, and most important they determined what would sell. We got the Pollocks, the Kleins, the Rothkos, the Gorkis and on. We went past Hopper and the great George Bellows.
I want a pretty picture, I am ashamed to admit. I visit the abstract trio of Davis pictures at the museum and claim to say "Davis, ain't you weird! I admire his attempt to make a painting sing of jazz and car horns. I know he had a terrible burden placed on him by the establishment to respond to the fecundity of the art going on in France and to come up with an American idiom. And Davis managed that. He succeeded. He is a father of abstract-like art in America. Oh, that he had stayed with his buildings , trolleys and street scenes of Gloucester and Paris! That is a silly thing to feel but Stuart Davis is such a nice painter who can make you feel so good and happy with his early and middle works. It is not that he paints reality straight. His work is odd, colorful, distorted according to how his spirit feels.

Whatever. It happened and I can't change it. I guess he was not impervious to the swells and demands of the art world. Any artist wants to be noticed and seen as having a signature, that is recognizable and ultimately marketable. Most folk don't want to work in a vacuum. It is just too lonely and sad to try to do so. And you go nuts.

Charles Birchfield paints these great scenes of streets, houses, trains of upstate NY, and then for the ending phase of life, dives into trees with bugs that shimmer, seeming to move. Hopper does the sad city scenes, can show alienation as a way to describe city life and he too is cooked. His signature makes him famous, rich but not very happy. When he was poor and young, he did commercial painings for a variety of trade magazines that were stunning. He did not value them.
What counts is the inner light brought out to view. An inspiration or vision gets altered fast. That happened to Davis, Burchfield, Hopper. Davis was one kind of painter when you could see what he was up to. Trees, buildings, ships, matchbox covers. His abstract art is another thing entirely; for me, another Davis. Hopper's magazine illustrations, Burchfield's houses and street scenes are one kind of thing. Their later work that made them famous is something else entirely.

The treasures in the big room at the Museum of Fine arts are always in my head. I saw the Gorky there move. I told a few folks I had an epiphany when I saw his picture there. Gorky and I are both immigrants. The horrors of the Armenian experience are not known to me as he knew them, but I have a sympathetic spirit. His painting, a group of lines, shapes and images moved me greatly. I guess I can handle the new, after a fashion.

The dollar rules too much and corrupts our best minds some. Not that it has much effect on David Hockney, a terrific painter. Not that I dislike Jeff Koontz's large commercial-like figures. Somehow though, a thing is often lost when people look out for guidance, rather than in, and I suspect most professionals do that when they work. They fight the fear that their work will be overlooked as not innovative or not able to make a statement. They are made to represent American art or some such thing when what they need is time and money to follow their bent and not what is imposed from the outside. In a sense, then, it is much better to be unknown in order to follow one's very own star. Stan Chilson is common, benign. We forget about him as he goes about his business shooting pictures on what he sees. His aim is to get it down and that is why I like the amateur better than the professional. Amateur means lover of, and that says it all for me.

I don't care about the art market a damn. I wanna know what is peculiar and special about us Americans. What we feel down deep. That's why I spend countless hours in the library reading on American art to understand who these great ones are and why I get a chill when I go to the museum and see a FitzHugh Lane, a Sargeant, a Mount, any Bellows, a Hopper, a Sloan. What a country.

Stan Chilson has a handle on Main Street and the town of Franklin like To me what counts is what makes a person special from within and not from the outside. A special light or vision can get messed up pretty fast and that is what is happening to Davis, Burchfield, Hopper. Seems to me Davis was a great artist when you could see what he was up to. Trees and buildings, match box covers, things you could get a handle on. His abstract art is some other thing entirely. It could be a whole different person doing it. Another so few artists do on their place. Because he is naive, inclusive, charmed and charming. Love carries us a long way. He is like Atget who just shot pictures in Paris to document his environ. It was a shot, not an attempt to make a point that would leave you sympathetic, grateful, awed, proud. Just a picture of Paris you could use as a postcard.
On the surface Stan is such a noncommercial innocent. Like the great Atget. The latter never gave a damn about the art swirl around him. It just didn't intersect a lot with his life or habits. He was set in his ways and got out every day like any good workman does, to do his work. Well, Chilson is a lot like that, in that he too does his work without much fuss or expectation. His audience is, who will see his movies, for free I suspect. His characters are the neighbors, the uniforms, the police, the paraders, the ones driving by in the funny cars. It is life as usual he gets down.

I live for the externalization of an artist's feelings. The world is inner and lovely. The poet, Elyty hits it right. "When will we, all of us, feel how deep, serious charming the world really is?" Well, Stan figures that out. We don't do as well in our world of visual images today. We sell too many guns, smiling faces, breasts, tight clothes, machines, violent gestures, bragging words. Our stories are contorted, grotesque, neurotic, sad, sick etc. What happens to the inner joy and happiness we are entitled to know? Well, we flail about and call it fashion or new art. I want to know why artists produce what they do. I hunch that the best ones think a good deal less about what the market may sell than what they feel inside that has to be phrased somehow.
Davis said his work was an American souvenir. Ok. Over fifty years his paintings are a chronicle of our desire, excitement, achievement as a people. He had to represent the nation. It affected what he produced.
Stan Chilson, photographer in Franklin, is true to his vision. His movies are hard to access but that is minor. The pictures are vague, grainy, fleeting across the tv plain, but, boy are they beautiful.

It is a matter of feeling American. What it means to feel American. This hit me when I saw a scene of high schoolers playing football in a big game and I could feel the pows and blows, as I experienced them over forty years ago myself. Oh electric shock to be an American. What a wonderful thing to be an American. I feel it in any postoffice that is more than twenty years old. What a wondrous thing, the thing we call the postoffice. I get in the car and try Millis, Needham, the marvelous ones in Waltham. I stay away from the new one in Medfield, remembering the old one I would go in, go up to the counter and seek "four stamps please.. Do you have something pretty?" The guy would look at me funny and then proceed to show me samples of his wares that never failed to wow me. That is the America I love so, its color, vitality, funkiness, feeling of fun. I get it in the postoffice and it is also in the works of Stan. More for me than in the tv or the movies I rent from Blockbuster.

Stan's miracle is an every day one, as beautiful as my left hand. Not more. The ones come just before us, are slower, more interested in you as a human. More inviting, more involved, nicer, more human.
Chilson is not better than Stuart Davis. The latter is not less true to what his art demanded. It is only that Davis would have pleased me more had he remained anonymous, less known, near-forgotten except to me and a few other such persons.
An artist I know had the skill to be both innerly and commercial at the same time.
William Merit Chase has a young woman pose for one of his great portraits, are they representational or non representational? Well, they have definitely got Chase's special mark and scent on them and they are unlike any other human on the planet that we inhabit. I mean who can say what liberties he take with what he sees? But he says he goes for the personality of the sitter before him, the essence of the person and that is what a great portrait painter always does.

Chase is just magnificent, before the turn of the century, working in an America that had barely bloomed much in the art sense. Personal, quirky, courageous, ideosyncratic, funky, delicious.
He knows that the essence is the thing, not commercial value. He makes a personality glow and speak on the canvas. But he adds a magic dust, something in addition to what just an average portrait artist would.
Sunday past, Leo at the dump gave me a large host of old Southeby and Christy's auction house catalogues. Filled with modern art. I freaked. These pictures are incredibly beautiful. I cut them out, own them, will use them to color my vids.
I don't know whether they represent the spirit or the dollar. At this point I just don't care.