Alexander Nemerov

Meatyard as self-taught visionary: a portrait of the photographer by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov

The legendary, mysterious photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–72) lived in Lexington, Kentucky, working in a close-knit community of artists and writers while making his living as an optician. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic, by esteemed art historian Alexander Nemerov, is a groundbreaking study of Meatyard’s work, creative thinking and sources of inspiration.

Given rare access to the personal library in which Meatyard had tellingly annotated works of fiction, poetry and other pages of personal significance, Nemerov examines the artist’s process of creating characters and staging dreamlike scenes. American Mystic also considers the artists and writers whose work influenced Meatyard, such as William Blake, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Merton.

Meatyard’s celebrated series The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and many of his other photographs cast family members and friends in central roles, often masked and enacting symbolic dramas. Of these mystical works, Nemerov writes, “For Meatyard, a photograph is a careful or casual arrangement meant to produce a feeling it cannot name.”… (meer)

Painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) lived her life in an upper-class bubble, and, her involvement in the New York City art world of the 1950s didn't expand her point of view much beyond that. That's my conclusion having read art historian Alexander Nemerov's admiring biography, which focuses on the years between 1950-59.

Inspired by Jackson Pollock, among others, Frankenthaler devoted her time to creating abstract paintings and single-mindedly pursuing her vision, but there doesn't seem to be evidence that she took interest in anything besides her art, self-promotion, and the occasional love affair. One person who knew her referred to her as a perpetual "big kid." I couldn't relate to her at all.

Still, for those interested in Frankenthaler’s work, Nemerov's volume provides a good introduction.… (meer)

This was extremely difficult. Interesting, but it's been a long time since I read something this theory-heavy (probably not since college) and I had to take it slowly.

Nemerov is an art historian who writes about the impact of art on its contemporary surroundings, and vice versa, and in this he attempts to substitute an 1863 performance of Macbeth for a piece of art. I think he falters slightly in doing so: as he talks about theater it becomes clear that this is not his forte, although he does a good job of explaining that a nineteenth-century performance, with its static set-pieces and tableaux, is far better suited to this than a modern one.

His thesis (I think) is that a piece of art, or a theater performance, in an age of mass communication, is able to become both a "place" and also impact other places. The photographs of actors as their characters which were distributed after every performance, the photographs of the battlefields, and the telegraph connecting a command from Lincoln (who attended the performance in question) to his officers in the field hundreds of miles away, are devices which de-isolated individual places in a way not previously possible.

Nemerov tries to cram his thesis into a discussion of almost everything he finds interesting from the time period, and jumps around a bit much: for two pages he's talking about a painting of an interior and then suddenly he's discussing the death of a Confederate officer in a prisoner-of-war hospital (and I have to confess I entirely missed what the point of that death, as regards art or places, was). It all felt rather hasty at times, and hasty juxtapositions combined with dense theory writing are a tad overwhelming for someone out of practice reading the stuff.

When Nemerov just pulls out his art history chops and talks about a piece of art in its historical context, and its structure, design, impact, I liked this book quite a lot. I had a magnificent art history class my senior year of high school, and honestly thought that was what I was going to do with the rest of my academic career and possibly with my life. The art history department at my college turned out to have needed more people like my high school art history teacher, desperately, and back to the inevitable English major I went. But I still love the subject and its vocabulary.

Nemerov also occasionally describes something as "testicular"seemingly just for the sake of using the word. In no case did I think that what he was describing was actually testicular. One passage, about women on battlefields collecting bullets, which I kid you not included the phrase "goddesses of sterility gathering the balls of dead men, nuts of a landscape serried with earthworks", made me shriek with laughter while the faces of all the theory boys I've known flashed before my eyes.

Overall, an interesting and very challenging read with some flaws. And I definitely had to turn on parts of my brain which I haven't used in a good long time, and that's never a bad thing.… (meer)