Liberal Arts Blog — Three Portraits In The Fogg Museum: Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (David), John Adams (Copley), Max Beckmann (Self Portrait)
Liberal Arts Blog: Friday is the Joy of Art, Architecture, Design, Film, Fashion, and All Things Visual Day
Today’s Topic: Three Portraits in the Fogg Museum: Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (David), John Adams (Copley), Max Beckmann (Self portrait)
Last time, in the third of a three-part series on the most iconic libraries in the world, I discussed the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard’s Widener, and Baltimore’s George Peabody. Today, three portraits from the Fogg Museum, just a stone’s throw from Widener. If you have not been, treasures await. If you have been, perhaps countless times, please share the masterpieces that have brought you the most exhilaration over the years.
The Fogg is full of stunning portraits. Next time: Napoleon, George Washington, Vincent Van Gogh.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID (1748–1825) “Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes” — the Thomas Paine of the French Revolution, the Godfather of the Modern Age, coiner of the term “sociology”
1. In January 1776, Thomas Paine took the American Revolution forward with his best-selling pamphlet, “Common Sense.” Sieyes did something similar for France in January of 1789 with his manifesto “Qu’est-ce le Tiers Etat?” (What is the Third Estate?”) His answer was “Everything” (tout) but it had been “nothing” (rien) and it just wanted to be become something.”
2. David was a friend of the French revolutionary Robespierre and became “effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release: that of Napoleon. the First Consul of France …After Napoleon’s fall from Imperial power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels, then in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, where he remained until his death.”
3. Sieyes was an ordained clergyman who “also held offices in the governments of the French Consulate (1799–1804) and the First Empire (1804–1815)….Sieyes was among the instigators of the Coup of 18 Brumaire which installed Napoleon Bonaparte in power.”
NB: “In addition to his political and clerical life, Sieyès coined the term “sociologie”, and contributed to the nascent social sciences.”
JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY (1738–1815) “John Adams” (1735–1826) Copley was born in Boston but moved to England in 1774 never to return. John Adams (the second president of the United States serving from 1797 to 1801) and his son John Quincey Adams (the sixth president in office from 1825–1829) were the only 2 of the first 12 US presidents not to own slaves. The older Adams died on the same day as his once arch-enemy, Thomas Jefferson — on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826).
1. “Painted in London soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, this grand portrait commemorates Adams’s role in securing American independence.”
2. “The dipolomat and future president gestures toward a map and globe that display the new lands he claimed for his government.”
3. “In the background, in a gesture of peace, a classical stature extends an olive branch and lowers a torch.”
NB: “Though Copley planned to publicly display the painting in London, it proved too celebratory for British audiences, who were still reeling from their loss to the colonists. It remained in Copley’s studio until 1706, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Nineteen years later, the work was dispatched from London to the Adams estate in Quincy, Massachusetts.”
“Although Adams’s wife Abigail praised the portrait as “a very good likeness,” the second president himself disparaged it as “A Piece of Vanity.”
MAX BECKMANN (1884–1950) — “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo” — “He is known for the self-portraits painted throughout his life, their number and intensity rivaled only by those of Rembrandt and Picasso” — what is your favorite self-portrait of all time?
1. “Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism.”
2. “Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By the 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and social criticism, coinciding with the rise of nazism in Germany.”
3. “In 1933, the Nazi government called Beckmann a “cultural Bolshevik”[ and dismissed him from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt. In 1937, the government confiscated more than 500 of his works from German museums, putting several on display in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. The day after Hitler’s radio speech about degenerate art in 1937, Beckmann left Germany with his second wife, Quappi, for the Netherlands. For ten years, Beckmann lived in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam, failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the United States. In 1944, the Germans attempted to draft him into the army, although the sixty-year-old artist had suffered a heart attack.”
NB: “In 1947, Beckmann took a position at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University.”
He died three years later in New York City of a heart attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Louis_David
Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès — Wikipedia
What Is the Third Estate? — Wikipedia
Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État ? — Wikipédia
https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/person/34735
John Adams (1735–1826) | Harvard Art Museums
John Singleton Copley — Wikipedia
Self-Portrait in Tuxedo | Harvard Art Museums
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/84241/self-portrait
Falling Man (Beckmann) — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
Updating PDFs: 2023 — Google Drive
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned recently or ever related to art, sculpture, design, architecture, film, or anything visual.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. And to cement in your own memory something cool or important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that is close to your heart.
