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PAFA's 'Happiness, Liberty, Life?' puts politics into art

Political party conventions, we are often told, have become exercises in image-making. Each produces two kinds of pictures: the memorable portrait and the cruel cartoon. The first depicts our party's candidate, the strong leader America needs to guide us through these troubled times. The other exposes the foolishness, nay the malevolence, of the opposition, pigheadedly determined to lead the country toward greater chaos and eventual ruin.

Surviving parts of "Philadelphia Cornucopia" (1982), a Red Grooms "sculpto-pictorama."
Surviving parts of "Philadelphia Cornucopia" (1982), a Red Grooms "sculpto-pictorama."Read more

Political party conventions, we are often told, have become exercises in image-making.

Each produces two kinds of pictures: the memorable portrait and the cruel cartoon. The first depicts our party's candidate, the strong leader America needs to guide us through these troubled times. The other exposes the foolishness, nay the malevolence, of the opposition, pigheadedly determined to lead the country toward greater chaos and eventual ruin.

This same contrast in imagery is visible throughout "Happiness, Liberty, Life? American Art and Politics," at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through Sept. 18. It is an often engaging though intellectually superficial look at more than two centuries of American public life, with 120 works drawn mostly from PAFA's permanent collection. It is a mixture of the extremely familiar, the outrageous, and the obscure selected with an eye toward our country's current predicaments.

There is, for example, something familiar about a political cartoon, undated but apparently from the 1920s, by the Saturday Evening Post's Herbert Johnson. It shows an enormous damlike wall, inscribed with the words "Immigration Restriction." Outside the wall we see a clamoring, unkempt mob labeled "alien undesirables," and, in the foreground, leaning against the wall, is a bomb whose fuse is labeled "modification proposals."

Fortunately, there is a responsible character, a bankerly looking fellow in an overcoat and hat and holding an umbrella, stamping on the fuse and thus saving the church and schoolhouse in the background. He turns out to be, of all things, Congress.

Johnson was one of the most skillful and influential cartoonists of the early 20th century, though his storytelling technique looks a bit primitive by today's standards. But for Johnson, building the wall was a metaphor. Today, it is a policy proposal.

Johnson is one of the few polemicists in the exhibition who comes from the right. Most of the artists in this show who express a clear point of view are several steps to the left of Bernie Sanders. And because there are few outlets for cartoonists today, visual commentary on current events is often presented as fine art.

Kathy Aoki's Small Hands (2016) is a parody of an 1844 etching, also in the show, in which George Washington, looking saintly as a boy, wisely settles a dispute among his playmates. In Aoki's print, Washington's head is from the Gilbert Stuart portrait reproduced on the dollar bill, and his playmates appear to be a youthful Donald Trump and even more youthful Marco Rubio. PAFA has acquired the work for its permanent collection, but will anyone in the future be able to figure out what this picture is about? I hope not.

By contrast, Nancy Chunn's painting Land of the Stupid (2001), a phantasmagoria of the disputed 2000 election, populated with shark-headed lawyers and elephants whose trunks are assault rifles, might be just strange and funny enough to encourage future viewers to learn something about a turning point in recent history.

Emptiness - Portrait of Thich Quang Duc (2006) by C.K. Wilde sent me to Google to confirm that this is a picture of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who set fire to himself in Saigon in 1963 to protest the war. My curiosity was spurred by the oddly compelling nature of the work itself, a collage made of paper currency from various countries.

PAFA, with its portraits by Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and others, has always been a fine place to go look at George Washington. I have always felt that I get a better sense of the man from Peale, who knew him as a soldier, than from Stuart, who moved here intending to be court painter for the new republic. Stuart, though, created the template, on which dozens of others did variations, many of which are in the show. There is even a painting of Washington posing for Stuart.

Washington, as both symbol and cartoon, is also prominent among the surviving elements - with Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - of Red Grooms' "sculpto-pictorama" Philadelphia Cornucopia, made to celebrate the city's 300th anniversary in 1982. Regrettably, as the sculpture has been moved around and stored, it has lost nearly all the paintings and sculptural elements that made it a complex, textured, and delightful meditation on history. As so often happens, we are left with only a few great figures and no real context.

Though most of the exhibition is in PAFA's Hamilton Building, the high point is probably next door in the Washington foyer of the historic 1876 building. The Washington portraits are in their usual places, but they are juxtaposed with some other works, including a bust of Washington cast in clear plastic with a 300-foot string of beads inside the head and coming out of the mouth, on which is written Washington's first inaugural address.

The standout here is Elaine de Kooning's 1963 portrait of John F. Kennedy, on loan from the National Portrait Gallery. This work, filled with big, bold, green and yellow brushstrokes, seeks to capture the dynamism and energy Kennedy brought to the American scene in the 1960s. It may not be a great painting, but it is a great image.

As its title suggests, "Happiness, Liberty, Life?" is a show about questions. And one of the most frequent questions, when you come upon a work like Yufeng Wang's 2013 life-size painting of a school bus, is, "Why is it here?" I understand that school buses have sometimes been involved with major urban struggles over desegregation, and that in some small towns, they are a source of civic pride. But is this colossal yet resolutely neutral work political?

What constitutes a political artwork is, in fact, a moving target. Kara Walker's African/American (1998), a black-on-white silhouette print of a nude woman, might once have been viewed as a purely figural piece. For most of our history, the woman's body, or the black body, has never been viewed, or at least discussed, as a political battlefield. Now it is, and the artist intends for us to see it that way.

For the most part, the works in this exhibition go unexplained and undiscussed. Perhaps, like America itself, "Happiness, Liberty, Life?" is full of provocative images. It is up to you to provide the understanding.

tom@thomashine.com

ART EXHIBIT

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"Happiness, Liberty, Life? American Art and Politics."

Through Sept. 18 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets.

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Closed Mondays and legal holidays.

Admission: Adults $15; seniors (60+) and students $12; youth 13-18 $8; military and 12 and under free.

Information: 215-972-7600, www.pafa.org.EndText