The Dartmouth Review: The Painted Word at Dartmouth: The Hood at Twenty

The Hood Museum, now entering its twentieth year in its present incarnation, is responsible for maintaining and expanding the College's art holdings, and improving both access and interest to art on campus. In recent years, however, it has been woefully negligent in its charge. It has expanded Dartmouth's collections, to be sure, and many people still must visit it, or at least enough to justify expenses for a platoon of security personnel. The Hood's main problem lies in its outlook on art, an approach that one could only characterize as bad gatekeeping. Not only has the Hood shown little inclination to restore or display a notable piece of art on campus, but many of its recent purchases (and at least one full recent exhibition) have been sadly devoid of quality.

The Dartmouth Review

—The College doesn't want anyone to see the Hovey murals in the basement of Thayer Hall.—

Most notably, the Hood has been woefully deficient in displaying and restoring the Hovey murals, located in the basement of Thayer Hall. The murals, painted by Walter B. Humphries '14 in 1937-38, depict the founding of the College as portrayed by Richard Hovey 1885 in his song "Eleazar Wheelock" (Hovey also composed "Men of Dartmouth," since bastardized into "Alma Mater"). They are, to be sure, cartoonish and overdrawn, yet one could say the same of the Orozco murals in the Reserve Corridor in Baker. However, while the Orozco murals are mentioned on every Dartmouth tour, continuously monitored by a battery of devices testing humidity, temperature, and the like, the Hovey murals languish, deteriorating, boarded up with no such protection in Thayer. Few people know they even exist, yet they represent an important piece of College history. The most disturbing part of the whole affair is that the Hood Museum, which controls the rights and the access to the murals, is not merely censoring with plywood and nails, though this too is unacceptable; rather, their attempt at ridding the campus of any memory of the Hovey murals goes much deeper.

Recently, The Dartmouth Review's President Emeritus sought to obtain the right to print pictures of the Hovey murals in our publication. He went through the bureaucratic rigmarole, submitted the requisite paperwork to the museum staff, and was promptly turned down. Recognizing the futility of proceeding, he went to Rauner Special Collections Library, reasoning that if he could not reprint the murals, he could at least obtain copies of the images for personal use. He could not. The Rauner staff could not sell him scans of the images; the Hood had denied access to the student. It is deeply troubling and contrary to the purpose of a liberal arts institution when historically significant art such as the Hovey murals can be arbitrarily hidden from view, censored because they do not avail themselves to modern orthodoxies by displaying Indians in loincloths and a chubby, oaf-like Eleazar Wheelock. Perhaps the Hood staff would do well to learn that we cannot learn from history by destroying it, but only by placing it in the open for all to see.

Yet censorship is only the beginning of the Hood's woes. Many of their recent purchases have been simply lackluster. Though a complete list of such works would doubtless fill volumes, take, as examples, two recent purchases (2002 and 2003), currently on display in the "Marks of Distinction" exhibit showcasing the Hood's American collections. To be fair, the exhibit does show many of the great works in the museum's repertoire, created by some of the giants of American art: works by Sloan, Whistler, Cassatt, Audobon, Copley, Homer, and Benton, to name a few. Nevertheless, some of the "art" currently on display is truly horrific.

Courtesy Outsider.Art.Org

—Another of Bill Traylor's masterpieces, "Untitled (Man Leading Black Dog)."—

The first hideous work inexplicably on display is Bill Traylor's "House with Figures and Animals," a work in colored pencil that just about any first grader could have drawn (and probably even improved upon). Traylor, took up drawing in 1939 at age 85, while homeless in Montgomery, Alabama, and subsequently drew more than 1200 "works" over the next three years. To many modern art critics, these years no doubt represent anni mirabiles; to most other people fortunate enough not to possess Ph.Ds in art history, such an obscenely prolific period shows a sure sign of poor quality art. "House with Figures and Animals," created at the beginning of Traylor's remarkably productive years, is a simplistic work—almost absurdly poorly drawn, colored almost on a whim with all the skill of a preschooler. It is almost physically painful to look at, particularly so when viewed in contrast to the Homers and Copleys that grace adjacent walls. But Traylor is willing to add insult to artistic injury, for he wrote a poem to explain the "action" of his work. The poem reads: "goose grabs little boys [sic] penis through fence/ boy ties himself to the calf who dashes/ through a hole in fence—little boy caught." The drawing combined with the poem creates a work that would be comedic if not for its purchase price. Indeed, though the Hood Museum is loathe to release what it pays for its acquisitions, given other recent auction takes for Traylor's works, it is safe to say the boondoggle that is "House with Figures and Animals" cost around $25,000.

Traylor's "art" is but one half of the current exhibit's dynamic duo of mediocrity. Another work in the exhibit is an untitled painting by Joan Mitchell. The work, essentially a finger-painting, is apparently hailed by some art critics as a great painting. Noted Klaus Kertess, a well-known critic of contemporary art in general and Mitchell's work in particular, "Mitchell was probing a beauty that is the beginning of terror." It's difficult to see from where such criticism could be drawn, as there is precious little of substance in the painting. His critique is sadly representative of the increased lengths to which critics have gone to analyze and maintain the fa�ade of respectability of most modern art. Mitchell's creative misdeeds most likely came to the Hood Museum at a greater cost than Traylor's: most of her other original works of this size sell in the range between $30,000 and $100,000.

The Hood has also displayed many similarly inane works, particularly during 2004, the museum's "Year of Modern Art." Mercifully, however, most of these pieces were on loan from other museums, rather than purchased works which will grace the Hood's collections in perpetuity. There were pictures of Mexican transsexual prostitutes (by the American "artist" James Drake), a triptych of otherwise nude Asian man wearing sides of meat (Zhang Huan), even a passive/aggressive face projected via video onto an orb (Tony Oursler), shouting charming things at passers-by, such as "Don't look at me!" and "You're making me sick!" There were video performances of a one-woman show with puppets, Rothkoesque images with a lone plastic fly attached to the canvas edge, and the like. While curators and critics the world over, and surely Messrs. Drake, Huan, and Oursler, consider such works fine art, one cannot help but despair at the shambled state of modern artistic enterprise. We may hope that the "Year of Modern Art" was a singular event, but I suspect that art has become too saturated with cheapened work (in the artistic, not financial sense), and we can expect many reprises of the theme in upcoming years.

Art once conveyed beauty, with the subtlest teasings that deeper truths about the human experience stood just below the thin veneer of paint or pencil. Permanence, tradition and timelessness were art's most hallowed virtues. Much of modern art (though thankfully not all) has turned on these noble principles and discarded them. This brave new art seeks shock rather than soothing, ephemerality rather than permanence, and is ever pushing the frontiers of "art" further into an avant-garde that rejects artistic traditions in favor of obscurity and denounces as rubbish any truth or meaning. Such moral obscurity pervades art, and though some find beauty in it, many cannot. Perhaps former Professor of English David Lambuth, though an authority on writing rather than visual art, best described the feelings of the latter group: "Obscurity is not profundity. Neither is it art." Yet, as the 2004 "Year of Modern Art" and other recent exhibitions at the Hood have proved, self-proclaimed artists the world over are nearly tripping over themselves to find new, shocking and unorthodox methods to portray obscurity, nihilism and ennui. Meat? Almost passé after Damien Hirst. Dung smeared over an image of the Virgin Mary? It's been done, but it will do in a pinch. Pieces of furniture covered in mirrors and topped with condiments? You're almost guaranteed a blockbuster gallery showing in Greenwich Village. Many times, it seems as though a competition for new sensationalistic and bizarre media has supplanted a traditional competition for painting, drawing or sculpting proficiency. How far one can break with tradition has become the new measure for critical success; indeed, it's a sad state of affairs when such "artists" are considered the rightful heirs to Leonardo, Michelangelo, Renoir, Monet, and Van Gogh. What makes the whole situation more disheartening is that museums and private collectors are quickly snapping up such garbage as "visionary work." And yet, I'm sure most people would rather see the Hood Museum purchase one Van Gogh rather than fifty works of Traylor or Mitchell.

The Hood Museum has several problems, but it has potential. While its collections assuredly contain a good deal of garbage (one hopes it is but transitory), it also contains truly great works from some of the masters. One hopes that the Hood's incoming director, Brian Kennedy from the National Gallery of Australia will bring a new, sensible vision to campus art sometimes absent during present director Derrick Cartwright's tenure. There may be room for optimism, but only if it is guarded. After all, Kennedy did refuse to host the "Sensation" exhibit (which included Chris Ofili's rendition of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung) that disgraced the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999-2000, though his decision was based on ethics rather than aesthetics; indeed, Kennedy had wanted to bring "Sensation" to Australia in the first place. For this hasty backpedaling, some accused him of censorship, while others accused him of good taste. It remains to be seen which characteristic will manifest itself as he takes the reigns of the Hood this July. One can only hope that Dr. Kennedy and the Hood will reject the shock and relativism that pervades so much of the modern artistic scene.