Two Paintings, Two Stories of Washington Crossing the Delaware

Boston’s Art in the Americas Wing Offers a New Look at History

BOSTON—“Where is the Washington at the Delaware painting?” a recent visitor asked a guard at the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s sleek new Art of the Americas wing.

            “Right in there,” the guard said. “You can’t miss it.”
            Even though the painting is bigger than a dump truck, it can easily be missed, since the picture is not what some visitors expect. For years, Americans have had one particular “Delaware crossing” painting in mind—with General George Washington in a rowboat with a flag. Recently, however, the Boston museum unveiled a competitor image, and it will become known as the one with Washington on a horse by a tree.
            The more famous crossing of the Delaware painting has been known to American school children for years in their history textbooks. The less famous painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, “The Passage of the Delaware,” has been around just as long, but had been in storage for more than a century.
            In November, with the opening of the Art of the Americas wing, “Passage of the Delaware" finally was put on public display. It is a major centerpiece of the exhibit of American art. Over time, visitors will surely be sorting out the fact that the country now has two great paintings on this one great subject.
            The Boston painting is so large—17 feet by 12 feet—that it took a new wing to offer the necessary space. The painting was completed by the English immigrant Thomas Sully in 1819. It was commissioned by the North Carolina legislature but was too large to fit a government building. The canvas passed into the hands of a private Boston collector and, in 1903, was rolled up in storage at the Boston Museum of Art.
            Now it dominates an entire high-ceilinged room. “I thought ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’ shows him in a rowboat,” said another visitor at the Boston venue. “Where is that one?”
            That one, the far better known “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It was done by the German immigrant painter Emanuel Leutze in 1851. Though it is the most colorful and dramatic painting of the two, this Met treasure is more poetry than history. Most of the painting is factually wrong: neither the flag nor the boat is correct. In fact, Washington sat during the crossing in a homely horse barge.
            This is where the relatively unknown Sully painting in Boston makes its mark. As a history painter, Sully reconnoitered the actual location of the December 26, 1776 crossing, which took place on the Delaware River outside Philadelphia. After the crossing, Washington’s troops surprised the British mercenaries and reversed the fortunes of the war. Sully also interviewed a living participant.
            Sully’s vast painting, darkened by age but still dominated by Washington on a white horse, puts its historical details in the distant landscape: barges with 2,400 men and 18 pieces of artillery traverse the icy river. Up on a hill, Washington is ready to also make the crossing. He is surrounded by his three generals and servant.
            Eventually, Sully moved on to portrait painting. He did more than 2,600 portraits of the famous and the plebian, in effect the photographer of his era. His gigantic “Passage of the Delaware” (1819) came at the end of the craze for history paintings that recalled the great patriotic era of the Revolution. Other American painters, such as John Trumbull, also gave up history painting as the U.S. Congress tired of giant canvases about past glory. Trumbull’s last great history painting was his 1819 “Declaration of Independence” (18 feet by 12 feet), which adorns the back of the $2 bill and hangs in the U.S. Capitol.
            In 2004, the Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer opened his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Washington’s Crossing, with the story of a museum visitor puzzling over the Met version of the 1776 event in the rowboat: “‘Washington’s Crossing!’ the stranger said with a bright smile of recognition. Then a dark frown passed across his face. ‘Was it like the painting?’ he said. ‘Did it really happen that way?’ The image he had in mind is one of the folk-memories that most Americans share.”
            Fischer’s book goes on to tell exactly what did happen that particular day.
            Today, photography and C-prints gives us all the history painting fit to print, though history painting on a smaller scale always is trying to make a comeback. When it comes to history painting, once the queen of the visual arts, the choices today are still about the same as those made by Sully and Leutze: to paint factually, or imaginatively?
            We now have two iconic examples of these choices. One is in New York and one in Boston, with Boston’s image of George Washington "about to cross" the Delaware rising in public consciousness, visit by visit.

Calder Mobile on Google Hailed as a “Doodle” Breakthrough

A Powerful New Computer Language Poses New Challenges to Fine Art

As an art gallery, the Google search page—with its “doodle” images based on the company name—is the most-visited art venue in the world. Not a few art students, especially illustrators, dream of the day they land a job as a Google “doodler” and have their drawings seen by millions of people.

            On Friday, the Google art gallery changed dramatically. The doodle was an image of a famous Alexander Calder mobile from 1960 titled “The Star.” This time, however, if you had the right browser (the more advanced version, from Chrome to Firefox), you could drag your mouse on the Calder mobile and make it move around.
            Even Google declared this new feature to be a milestone in technology and art. “This is Google’s first doodle made entirely using HTML5 canvas,” software engineer Jered Wierzbicki explained on the company blog. As computer aficionados know (and the general public is slow to learn), HTML has long been the shared software language used by computers on the Internet. As time passes, however, the language is improved to do more, which moved it up to HTML4 in recent years.
            Now comes HTML5. With its additional power, it can do far more with motion graphics, from video to effects such as the Calder mobile, which moves around so naturally under the pointer of a mouse. For Internet users who don’t yet have the ability to “read” HTML5, the Calder image just sits there—pretty, but nothing surprising,
            Fittingly, Google has posted the Calder mobile to mark his 113th birthday. “I like to think Calder would have appreciated today’s doodle, since we’re setting up shapes and abstractions and letting them act on their own,” Wierzbicki writes. He also explains how the idea came to fruition: “I coded up a very basic demo of a mobile and showed it to a friend, who showed it to one of our doodlers—and then this amazing thing happened: talented artists and engineers who liked the idea just started to help!”
            The stunner in all of this is how the new HTML5 gives ordinary computers using the Internet a new level of power with motion graphics, a power and versatility once unheard of in the simple context of the browser itself.  For the art world, there are other stunning things now to consider. In a new way, Google has crossed a Rubicon with the fine arts.
            In this episode, as Wierzbicki explains, “talented artists and engineers” cooperated to pull it off. Some day, however, that cooperation may not be necessary. For instance, will the computer engineers soon be able to do this alone, no longer needing “artists” to hand them a picture of a Calder mobile? Or, as an alternative, will artists need to put down their brushes and chisels to devote all their time to learning computer coding skills?
            Today, you can find advocates of both sides. Meanwhile, more traditional artists who are not interested in computer engineering may be shaking in their paint-splattered shoes. Increasingly, the leaders of art schools—even their presidents—are arguing that everything in art must now go digital. In many galleries, digital is hot, mobiles are not.
            As with the revolution in e-books, which has sent the print-publishing industry into a tailspin of uncertainty, the future of fine art seems to be hanging by a frayed computer cable. On the other hand, the application of HTML5 to Google’s daily art gallery may not be the proverbial writing on the wall. The human desire to read books made of paper will never die. By analogy, the taste for art work done on real “canvas” with paint, not by computer code, also will surely survive in a big way.
            Still, the Google event makes us wonder. The company, which has done so much for artists and writers to get their work onto the Internet, naturally believes that Calder on his 113th birthday would be pleased at this digital milestone. After all, Calder was one of the most good-natured artists of the 20th century.
            However, what if he was told that making drawings, applying paint, and cutting sheet metal by hand and trying to balance it in a greasy workshop was about to be banished from the face of the earth—by software code? No doubt he would turn in his grave, much like a Google mobile.

The Spanish Invasion—“El Greco to Dali”—Arrives in California

How Dali Helped Spain’s Realistic Painting Capture Our 1970s Minds

Back in 1970, many of us California art students were surrounded by a blaze of colors. To the left of us were the psychedelic album covers and neo-Art Nouveau rock concert posters. Behind us were the surferboard and hot-rod color stripes and enamels. And to our right were the hard-edged acrylics and black lights on fluorescent paints.
            Once our eyes cleared, however, we saw an equally colorful blast from the past: the Surrealist art of Salvador Dali.
            As art youngsters, we knew nothing about Dali in art history. Nor did we read the news magazines that featured the modern-day Spanish artist as a scandalous, jet-setting, art celebrity with a bizarre mustache. We only noticed Dali’s immaculate painting skill, what some call “magic realism.” His weird and detailed landscapes required close visual study.
            For some of us, Dali was the standard of how we wanted to draw and paint. Once you could do that, you could take your viewer—and your imagination—just about anywhere. It was this, and not Abstract Expressionism or assemblages of detritus, that sparked our ambitions.
            Eventually in art history class more of the scales would drop from our young eyes. We learned that Dali’s classic Surrealist paintings—melting clocks, eerie dry landscapes, and human figures that turned into chests-of-drawers—came from a bygone era, the 1920s and 1930s. He was part of a Freudian-type movement, whatever that was. It was enough to know he was trying to paint dreams. Later in life he was the rare artist to do anything interesting with religious themes.
            Today in California, Dali may not be what he was to a few of us back in the 1970s. But for the rest of this year he’ll be receiving renewed attention. From July to November, the San Diego Museum of Art is the exclusive U.S. stopover for the exhibition, “El Greco to Dali: The Great Spanish Masters.” The exhibit features 64 works stretching from El Greco, Ribera, and Murillo to Picasso, Miró, and Dali. The works come from the private collection of one of Mexico wealthiest businessmen, Perez Simon, a native of Spain.
            Since the Renaissance, the classic tradition of realistic painting had been claimed by the academy in Italy, and then France, when the academy in effect moved to Paris. Nevertheless, in its own dark tones—since Spanish painting downplayed color—Spanish realism has offered a striking alternative.
            By the time a young Picasso came on the scene in the 1890s, he was competing with the realism of Murillo, Goya, and Velazquez (the one artist absent from the San Diego exhibit). Later, he came under the spell of El Greco and probably borrowed from his twilight blues and elongated figures.
            Nothing in Spanish art, however, anticipated what Picasso, and later Juan Gris, would do with Cubism, or what the abstract painter Joan Miró would do with a precision world of tiny colorful objects, like so many amoeba under a microscope. With Dali, however, there came a full return to Spanish realism (and if the late Picasso was a bit more Greco-Roman in his revived realism, he always felt haunted by Velazquez).
            The San Diego exhibit has an obvious resonance with southern California’s growing Latino population. In art today, many Hispanics are finding pride in their European roots. A major 2010 Picasso exhibition in Philadelphia, for example, drew an unprecedented Latino attendance.
            For us young California art students around 1970, however, it was Dali (not Picasso) who was the draftsman and painter par excellence. His empty landscapes, distant cliffs, and boats on phantasmagoric waters seemed timeless (though not place-less, since his native region around the Barcelona coastline was a lifelong influence).
            According to some psychological theories of how people learn to appreciate art, the teenage years are attracted to realism in art skills. The fact remains that, in high school, students who can draw and paint realistically are the ones who most predictably think about studying art in college. In developmental theory, however, teenage tastes can change with age. Not a few art kids give up drawing, for instance, to join the avant-garde, which these days ranges from installation and conceptual art to video.
            Following this developmental path further, the instinct of late youth often is revived in old age. When people get old they tend, once again, to appreciate more traditional art. After a long weary ride through life, senior citizens view artistic skill as trumping most other claims to artistic creativity. In the past century, not a few famous artists who gave up tradition for wild experiments have, in the end, returned to “figurative” painting.
            As teens in art school, we saw Dali’s magic realism as having both show-off skill and a bizarreness that suited California after the 1960s. At that age, it was probably best that we did not know too much about Dali’s own bizarre life, or his politics. It was enough to know that, with Spanish roots in old Europe, he seemed way ahead of Grateful Dead posters, photo-silk-screens, plaster body casting, and hard-edge surfboard design. 

Art Heist of the Century: Will it Ever Be Solved?

The FBI’s Nabbing of Boston Mobster “Whitey” Bulger May Offer Clues

In the past two weeks, the FBI has been going down a list of crimes to pin on the Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, who was apprehended on June 22 after a 16-year manhunt. On Wednesday in federal court, Bulger pleaded “not guilty” to a 32-count indictment that included 19 murders. Though it did not come up in court, one other item may also be on the FBI’s list: solving the largest art theft in the world.

            In spring of 1990, when Bulger and his Irish-American mafia reigned supreme among the rackets in Boston, two men posing as Boston policemen entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with 19 paintings, valued today at $500 million. The cache included a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, a Manet, and five drawings by Degas.

            As art theft cases go, this one did not lend to the routine tracking of leads and following-up on tips for the $5 million reward. The case became a great maze of dead ends and a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: the Gardner Museum theft not only holds the record for stolen goods, it also has become the world’s largest unsolved case.

            When the leads dried up, the theory arose that the paintings were stolen by hoodlums working for the Irish Republican Army, which in 1974 had pulled off a major art theft near Dublin. They used the paintings in an attempt to bargain for the release of four IRA members in prison. In Boston, the IRA theory pointed to Bulger, who was central to the army’s transactions in New England. Just about that time also, as federal agents prepared to arrest Bulger on murder charges, he disappeared.

            Now that Bulger, 81, is in custody, the theories about his ability to help solve the Gardner Museum theft have taken a few directions. The most direct scenario is that Bulger was behind the theft. He may simply have the paintings stashed away as his own bargaining chip.

            On the other extreme, analysts who have followed Bulger’s career say that art theft was not his style. His forte was extortion: collecting “protection” money from every other crime operation that worked around Boston.

             A third option is that, while Bulger may not have engineered the theft, there was little he did not know about in Boston’s crime life. He might know who took the paintings. This last outcome seems the best the FBI can hope for, since a good deal of skepticism surrounds the IRA theory. On the announcement of Bulger’s arrest in Santa Monica, Calif., where he had been living incognito with his mistress, the Gardner Museum had no comment except: “Until a recovery is made, our work continues.”

            According to Robert K. Wittman, the FBI agent who founded the agency’s Art Crime Team, some of the paintings—the Rembrandts in particular—were nearly recovered in a 2006 sting operation targeting French-Corsican mobsters in Florida. The case was botched, as Wittman’s 2010 bestseller, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, recounts in disheartening detail.

            Wittman’s recollections of the early days of the Gardner Museum case may be replayed as the capture of Bulger stirs new interest: “Hundreds of FBI agents and police officers investigated the Gardner theft, and as the years passed, the mystique and mystery of the heist only grew. Investigators navigated a growing thicket of speculation, one fueled by a cast of characters featuring con men, private detectives, investigative journalists, and wiseguys.”

            The Gardner theft was an object lesson for museums as well. On the day it happened in 1990, the Gardner Museum was a somewhat casual affair. A security review was still underway and the few security guards on after-hours duty were quickly overcome. In hindsight it almost reminds us of the story, in 1911, when a Belgian crook walked into the Louvre in Paris and walked out with the Mona Lisa under his coat.

            If there is a Bulger connection, the case may still be more complicated than art lovers can imagine, given the tortuous local history of Boston. In his early career, Bulger was an informant for the FBI as the feds took down the Italian Cosa Nostra. That left Bulger, head of the Winter Hill Gang in south Boston, as the top crime boss. He also ended up having a few police and federal agents (who later saw jail time) on his payroll. Depending on whom you asked, Bulger was either an Irish-American Robin Hood for the downtrodden of Boston or just another brutal mafia don.

            Either way, convicting Bulger of crimes and recovering the masterpieces—and maintaining the FBI’s reputation—will be a complex task. Ulrich Boser, who has written the best book on the topic, The Gardner Heist (2009), may be prophetic for several more years in his account's subtitle: “the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft.”