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METAMORPHOSIS #1105_1/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Paintings: Landscape | | Medium: | "iron rust" on non-stretched canvas | | Size (inches): | 43 x 32 | | Size (mm): | 1092 x 813 | | Catalog #: | PA_090 | | Description: | Signed, titled, date, copyright in magic ink on the reverse.
Iron + oxygen + water = Iron rust.
New York, May 28th, 1867.
"ACADEMY OF DESIGN" by Mark Twain.
EDITORS ALTA: I am thankful that the good God creates us all ignorant. I am glad that when we change His plans in this regard, we have to do it at our own risk. It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art, and ignorant also of surgery. Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes, and surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The very point in a picture that fascinates me with its beauty, is to the cultured artist a monstrous crime against the laws of coloring; and the very flush that charms me in a lovely face, is, to the critical surgeon, nothing but a sign hung out to advertise a decaying lung. Accursed be all such knowledge. I want none of it.
The art critics have been so diligently abusing everything in and about the Academy of Design, for weeks past, that I was satisfied that a visit there could produce nothing but unhappiness. I wandered into the place by accident to-day, how ever, and staid there three hours. I could have staid a week. I was not cultivated enough to see the dreadful faults that were so glaring to others' eyes. There were some three hundred pictures on exhibition, and, to me, about thirty or forty were very beautiful. I liked all the sea views, and the mountain views, and the quiet woodland scenes, with shadow-tinted lakes in the fore ground, and I just revelled in the storms.
There was a dreamy tropical scene - a wooded island in the centre of a glassy lake bordered by an impenetrable jungle of trees all woven together with vines and hung with drooping garlands of flowers - the still lake pictured all over with the reflected beauty of the shores - two lonely birds winging their way to the further side, where grassy lawns, and mossy rocks, and a wilderness of tinted foliage, were sleeping in a purple mist. I thought it was beautiful, but I suppose it wasn't. I suppose if I were not so ignorant I would have observed that one of the birds' hind legs was out of line, and that the coloring was shaky in places, and that some of the "effects" were criminal transgressions of the laws of art.
And I know I ought to have admired that picture, by one of the old masters, where six bearded faces without any bodies to them were glaring out of Egyptian darkness and glowering upon a naked infant that was not built like any infant that ever I saw, nor colored like it, either. I am glad the old masters are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner.
There were two pictures that suited me, but they were so small and so modest that I was ashamed to let the other visitors see me looking at them so much, so I gazed at them side wise, and "let on" to be worshipping the "old master" rascalities. I had no catalogue, and did not want any - because, if a picture cannot tell its own story to us uncultivated vagrants, we scorn to read it out of a book. One of these pictures represented two libertines of quality teasing and jesting with a distressed young peasant girl, while her homely brother, (or sweetheart, may be,) sat by with thesigns of a coming row overshadowing his face. The other was racy. In a little nook in a forest, a splendid gray squirrel, brimful of frisky action, had found a basket-covered brandy flask upset, and was sipping the spilled liquor from the ground. His face told that he was delighted. Close by, a corpulent old fox-squirrel was stretched prone upon his back, and the jolly grin on his two front teeth, and the drunken leer of his half-closed eye told that he was happy, and that the anxious solicitude in the face of the black squirrel that was bending over him and feeling his pulse was all uncalled for by the circumstances of the case.
More than half the paintings in the Academy are devoted to the usual harmless subjects, of course. You find the same old pile of cats asleep in the corner; and the same old party of kittens skylarking with a cotton ball; and the same old excited puppy looking out of a window; and the same old detachment of cows wading across a branch at sunset; and the same old naked libels marked "Eve ;" and the same old stupid looking wenches marked "Autumn," and "Summer," etc., loafing around in the woods, or toting flowers, and all of them out of shirts, in the same old way; and there were the everlasting farmers, gathering their eternal squashes; and a "Girl Swinging on a Gate;" and a "Girl Reading;" and girls performing all sorts of similar prodigies; and most numerous and most worn-out of all, there was the usual endless array of vases and dishes full of grapes and peaches and slices of watermelon, and such stuff; and the same tiresome old tom cat "laying" for a gold-fish. However, I ought to be circumspect in the matter of these fruit-pictures, because those are the first things the young ladies look at when they come in, and the last they examine before they go out.
Now, after four or five years of terrible warfare, there is only one historical picture in the Academy - Lincoln's entry into Richmond - and that is execrable. There isn't a single battle piece. What do you suppose is the reason?
There is one fine piece of statuary - Eve - but she had three apples - two in her left hand, and one in her right, which she was getting ready to bite. I thought our common mother only plucked one apple. When this sculptor makes another Eve he had better get her a basket.
Now, I suppose I have gone and done the very same thing the art critics do - left unmentioned the works I liked, and mentioned only those I did not like. However, let it go. I must abuse the building these things are in, though. Outside, it is barred, and cross-barred, and streaked, and striped, and spotted, and speckled, and gilded, and defiled from top to bottom, with in famous flummery and filagreed gingerbread, to that degree that the first glance a stranger casts upon it unsettles his mind for a week. First, he thinks it is a church - but then it flashes upon him that no God-fearing Christian would worship in such a church; then he thinks it is a hotel - and forthwith it occurs to him, that no man that has got sense enough to keep a hotel has got more sense than to build such a house as that; next, he thinks it is a huge dwelling house - but he acknowledges in a moment that no man could keep his brains straight who tried to live in such an architectural nightmare of a mansion as this; then he thinks it may be a lunatic asylum, built upon plans furnished by the inmates - but immediately he is ashamed of this mean insinuation against the helpless and unfortunate; at least he concludes that it is a preposterous stable, invented by some vulgar sporting man who has grown suddenly rich - but never, never, never, does he be come so lost to all honorable feeling as to conceive that that wretched pile of marble, paint and gold-leaf was created for the National Academy of Design. No man could fall so low as that. I speak only the truth when I say that the architecture of this Academy of Design is more atrocious than that of young Dr. Tyng's new church, and several other new churches that have sprung up here, and somehow are left undestroyed by the lightnings of heaven. The Academy people call their costly stack of architectural deviltry "the Moorish style" - as if the atmosphere of antiquity and poetry and romance, that cast a charm around that style in its ancient home beyond the seas, could be reproduced here in the midst of railroads and steamboats, and business rush and clamor, and acres of brownstone fronts - and as if it could be anything but clownish and repulsive without that atmosphere! They might as well have put up a wigwam there, and expected it to be romantic and picturesque without its natural surroundings of flowers and grass and brooks, and the solemn silence of dim old forests.
-From "San Francisco Alta California", July 28, 1867/ www.twainquotes.com
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