One of the perks of assistant professorship is free, easy access to JSTOR. For those of you who are not familiar with the sausage making of academic research, JSTOR is to documents what a velvet rope is to a bouncer - or something like that.
Anyway, the other day while I was desperately searching for the original French text of American expatriate artist Faun Roberts' book length unpublished narrative poem The Air That Only Partially Drips In Blood (L'Air qui coule est partiellement sanglante) I stumbled upon something entirely unexpected.
In a 1929 letter Roberts wrote to Sonia Delaunay (inviting her to participate in a forthcoming exhibition at the Trocadero) she uncharacteristically inventoried a comprehensive accounting of all her personal art world grudges.
Picasso was "a prick with a brush" (un pénis avec un pinceau).
André Breton was a "sniveling bolshevik with short-man's disease."
Gertrude Stein was "a clubby, chubby Jewess" (une juive clanique et graisse).
Diaghilev was "a pimp disguised as a patron."
And the list goes on and on for about 13 juicy pages!
Anti-Semite, sure, but who knew Roberts was such a petty little bitch?
Who knew she was even funny?!
Anyway, it suddenly dawned on me that the date of the letter (March 14th, 1929) was the very same date that she completed her epic oil on burlap visual manifesto Why I Hate America!
It has long been assumed that the figures depicted in this major work were powerful metaphors for the United States and Canada - as if a painting this complex could be reduced to a hockey game. I now suspect that instead of thinking of the work as a parable - an understandable misdirection considering its ponderous title - it may be more useful to think of the work as a literal depiction and critique of the stage and screen actress Mary Pickford.
The uncanny similarities of Pourquoi je hais l'Amérique's subtle compositional deviations and G. W. Bitzer's cineamtograhy in D. W. Griffith's The Mender of Nets leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Amérique in question refers to none other than Miss Pickford who was referred to at the time as "America's Sweetheart."
Even the initials G.W.D.W. can be seen as an encoded clue to the work's ultimate significance.
"Great Works Don't Win" was a frequent rallying cry of the Parisian avant-garde at that time. The reference is to the near impossibilty of truly important art ever being accepted by an intellectually atrophied critical and curatorial class. Then as now a prevailing ethos of fear and greed tended to bury whatever art deemed too complicated and hermetic.
And speaking of burying - engraved on Roberts' tombstone in Père-Lachaise underneath the epigraph by Jarry that reads "Les vieillards, il faudrait les tuer jeunes," are the very initials in question, G.W.D.W!
Mon dieu!!
In a 1929 letter Roberts wrote to Sonia Delaunay (inviting her to participate in a forthcoming exhibition at the Trocadero) she uncharacteristically inventoried a comprehensive accounting of all her personal art world grudges.
Picasso was "a prick with a brush" (un pénis avec un pinceau).
André Breton was a "sniveling bolshevik with short-man's disease."
Gertrude Stein was "a clubby, chubby Jewess" (une juive clanique et graisse).
Diaghilev was "a pimp disguised as a patron."
And the list goes on and on for about 13 juicy pages!
Anti-Semite, sure, but who knew Roberts was such a petty little bitch?
Who knew she was even funny?!
Anyway, it suddenly dawned on me that the date of the letter (March 14th, 1929) was the very same date that she completed her epic oil on burlap visual manifesto Why I Hate America!
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| Pourquoi je hais l'Amérique, oil on burlap, 121 x 115 cm. Faun Roberts, 1929 |
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| Still from The Mender of Nets, 1912. Mary Pickford is on the left. |
The uncanny similarities of Pourquoi je hais l'Amérique's subtle compositional deviations and G. W. Bitzer's cineamtograhy in D. W. Griffith's The Mender of Nets leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Amérique in question refers to none other than Miss Pickford who was referred to at the time as "America's Sweetheart."
Even the initials G.W.D.W. can be seen as an encoded clue to the work's ultimate significance.
"Great Works Don't Win" was a frequent rallying cry of the Parisian avant-garde at that time. The reference is to the near impossibilty of truly important art ever being accepted by an intellectually atrophied critical and curatorial class. Then as now a prevailing ethos of fear and greed tended to bury whatever art deemed too complicated and hermetic.
And speaking of burying - engraved on Roberts' tombstone in Père-Lachaise underneath the epigraph by Jarry that reads "Les vieillards, il faudrait les tuer jeunes," are the very initials in question, G.W.D.W!
Mon dieu!!
