“The Blue Boy“, one of Thomas Gainsborough’s most famous works, has returned to England for the first time in 100 years, and is on display at the National Gallery in London from 25 January to 15 May 2022.

Shirley Temple as
The Blue Boy

The fame of “The Blue Boy” led the American magnate Henry E. Huntington to pay $728,800 for the painting in 1921, one of the highest sums paid for a painting at the time. The sale of the work and its subsequent departure from England provoked a wave of widespread indignation against Sir Joseph Duveen, the broker who handled the deal.

Now owned by the Huntington Library Art Museum in California, the painting has now returned across the prairies and Atlantic for the first time in a century, as we said earlier. Further information on the exhibition may be obtained here.

Cole Porter

The sale to Henry Huntington inspired Cole Porter to write a slow, forgettable song for the 1922 London theatrical revue, Mayfair and Montmartre, entitled “The Blue Boy Blues,” in which a young soubrette named Nelly Taylor portrayed The Blue Boy, pantomime-style, to what must have been polite applause.

Other drag portrayals of the Blue Boy have been performed by such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Shirley Temple.

The Cole Porter lyrics run, in part,

Marlene Dietrich as
The Blue Boy

For I’m the Blue Boy,
The beautiful Blue Boy,
And I’m forced to admit
I’m feeling a bit depressed.
A silver dollar took me and my collar
To show the slow cowboys
Just how boys
In England used to be dressed.

I don’t know what I shall do
So far from Mayfair
If Mister Gainsborough knew
I know he’d frown…

At the age of 97, veteran showman Art Linkletter has a lot of triumphs and tragedies to look back upon.

As a young man of 27 in 1919, he felt adrift. “My mother wanted me to go to work for the Woodmen of the World insurance underwriters, which her father, the great J. Clayton Woodmen III, founded. But I could see I wasn’t cut out to be an insurance man.”

Kids DO say the darnedest things!

Instead, Art became social director for the Withy-Furness Line. He was very popular with the passengers, less so with the crew.

“One day, just to spite me, they sailed south to the Equator instead of to Southampton, just so they could paint me with sheep entrails and call me Pollywog. It’s an old nautical custom. Well, I had enough of that.”

Most people don’t know that Art made his fortune not in television and radio, but in fizzy drinks. Millions of bottles of Art’s RC Cola are still sold every day. As an elder of the Western Tabernacle Church, Art kicks back ten percent of his profits on every hundred thousand cases sold.

Vincent Price Left Painting

One of his most prized possessions is Vincent Van Gogh’s last painting, “Water Lilies in the Old Mill Stream,” which Art’s best friend Vincent Price left him in his will and which now hangs in his billiards room.

In addition, Art now owns a Manet, a Monet, and a sketchbook that once belonged to Walter Sickert.

“That’s why they call me ‘Art’!” Art Linkletter laughs.

Miriam Cahn, watercolor on paper, at Kunstmuseum, Bern

“I no longer want to be represented in ‘this’ art museum in Zurich,” says Miriam Cahn, a septuagenarian Jewish artist. “I wish to remove all my works from the Zurich Art Museum. I will buy them back at the original sale price.”

The tempest appears to have arisen after Kunsthaus Zurich built a new wing to display the Bührle Collection, a mainly Impressionist trove amassed by industrialist Emil Georg Bührle.

Allegedly Bührle made his fortune selling weapons to Nazi Germany and benefited from Nazi-supplied slave labor.

Sold Materiél to British and French

However, according to the website for the Bührle Collection, Emil Bührle was a German-born manufacturer and Swiss citizen who initially supplied war materiel to the British and French armies in the Second World War, only later providing armaments to the Germans at the behest of the Swiss Government.

Emil and Charlotte Bührle visiting America in 1947.

Diversified Production

After the war, Emil Bührle’s business expanded into a diversified corporation with holdings in companies in Germany, Italy, India, Liechtenstein, and Chile. Anti-aircraft systems manufactured in Italy and Sweden by a subsidiary were deployed by NATO member states. The Pilatus aircraft factory in Stans developed a series of training aircraft for the Swiss Army.

The business  also had success with the manufacture of civilian products. Among these were braking systems, office equipment, textile machines and plastics.

According to ArtNews:

A feminist figurative artist, Cahn’s paintings are held in collections all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, among others. This is not the first time Cahn has withdrawn works in protest. In 1982, Cahn pulled her paintings from Documenta 7 because she felt she had been mistreated by Documenta’s artistic director at the time, Rudi Fuchs.

This is an old blog post from an old blog. I don’t want to point the common herd to the sensitive matters therein, so I’ll copypasta this whole thing instead.

May 4th, 2006

Monday night I was flying to JFK from Heathrow and exhausted my reading material before we passed Newfoundland. I found Caddyshack listed on the in-flight movie menu, but everytime I looked for it on the assigned channel I got a mid-80s Molly Ringwald turkey instead. And I’d already seen the Narnia movie and the documentary about the German submarine. So I idly scrolled through the channels and came to rest at I Love Lucy.

It was an old episode. No, I mean really old, one of the early ones from the first (1951-52) season…Lucy and Ricky (and Fred and Ethel) as the broadest of broad comic characters, before they got backstory and nuance and visited Hollywood and Europe.

In fact, it was THE classic episode, the first one that pops into your mind, the one where the men and women “switch jobs.” They don’t literally switch jobs (Ricky was the only character who had real employment anyway), rather they switch breadwinner-homemaker roles. Ricky and Fred cook in the kitchen while Lucy and Ethel get assembly-line jobs in a candy factory. I’d seen this a million times–well, a dozen–but this time was utterly fascinated by all the details and subtexts and social propaganda.

1. The appliances in the Ricardos’ kitchen are bright and obtrusive. They aren’t just mute background furniture (like the succession of Macintosh computers you see in Jerry Seinfeld’s place). There’s a matched washer-dryer pair, and neither looks ever to have been used. There’s the distinct air of a TV commercial for Maytag or RCA Whirlpool. Message: “If your kitchen doesn’t look like this, well for heaven’s sake make it so. You can buy them now, you know. War production’s been over for six or seven years.”

2. Elsewhere there’s a real postwar look to the whole thing. Everybody’s fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and they’re all over-upholstered. Wide lapels, big shoulders and skirts. Showing off one’s bounty, you know. Now that the war’s over we can do that.

3. The effects of war on social roles are much in evidence. A man wears a suit and brings home the bacon, a woman wears frilly clothes and hangs out at home. Anything else is eccentric and laughable.

4. Women getting jobs means putting on waitress uniforms (like Mildred Pierce) and working on an assembly line (like Rosie the Riveter). Roz Russell career girls? Never heard of ‘em. If Ethel and Lucy got decent jobs, that would undercut the premise of the humor, which is that women in the workplace are pitiable fish out of water.

David Hockney, Bob Ross, and Jasper Johns!

But wait, that’s not all. You can still vote for someone else. Grace Slick and Yoko Ono are in the running! So’s Tom Kinkade!

Just go to the 21st Century Painters site, and vote someone up! They don’t have to paint for you to vote!

From ArtNews:

Two years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York said it would stop taking donations from the Sacklers,  the institution announced plans to remove the family’s name from galleries within its walls. Among those galleries is the massive, airy space containing the Temple of Dendur, which has long bore the Sackler name.

The Sackler family is famous for popularizing OxyContin, a synthetic opiate, through its Purdue Pharma outfit. OxyContin has been responsible for millions and millions of deaths and ruined lives.

Serpentine Sackler Gallery

In recent years, both the Louvre and the Serpentine Gallery have concealed or avoided the Sackler name.

A suggestion that Met members receive a free vial of OxyContin with their membership packet, was mooted by someone about ten years ago, but the Met did not follow up on it and it is unclear who proposed the idea.

In Qatar, of all places.

“The exhibition title is borrowed from a 1985 American satirical comedy film of the same name directed by Albert Brooks, about a 1980s yuppie couple in Los Angeles who are disgruntled by their bourgeois lifestyle. Koons wants viewers to draw their own interpretations of that title, as well as the intention or meaning of the works.”

As seen in Forbes.

(Originally published June 29, 2014)

Odd doings at the Voorhees-Rohr Mansion!

Our very own Mr. Ian Stuart Dowdy of the Art Students League likes to tell the tale of how he was responsible for the death of an old lady he was supposed to be taking care of. Old Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr was often bedridden with a prolapsed colon and needed round-the-clock care. As no nurse or home-care-giver was available on a live-in basis (this was during the War), and the live-in maid did not wish to do this sort of work, Mrs. V-R had her attorney look for a young man or woman who could move into the spare bedroom down the hall.

A day or two later our own Ian Stuart Dowdy appeared and you can guess the rest.

A willowy, good-hearted young bit of artsy flotsam, Dowdy was very much an urban “type” of the era. Too snooty to be ribbon clerks at Bonwit Teller, young fellows of this breed very frequently found sinecures as caretakers of enfeebled old ladies and gentlemen or even the odd congenital idiot with a monied family who did not wish to shut him up in an institution.

The Voorhees-Rohr mansion on West End Avenue, one of the original houses in the neighborhood, was in a parlous state. Electricity had not been “laid on” until the mid-1920s, and that had been done so quickly and amateurishly, by the son of an Italian cobbler (who has now inherited his father’s shoe-repair shop on Amsterdam Avenue), that the fuses blew whenever you tried to run more than two appliances at once. Our Mr. Dowdy learned this the hard way.

A shocking circumstance

He was bathing old Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr’s feet in the new electric footbath her sister had given her for Christmas 1933 (but which she had never opened), and thought some music might be pleasant. So he started up a Lawrence Tibbett recording on the plug-in Victrola, forgetting first to switch off the big Atwater-Kent radio because its volume had been turned down. Immediately the house was in darkness.

“The gas! The gas!” shouted old Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr. It took a while for Ian Stuart Dowdy to figure out that she meant the gaslight sconces that hung on the walls and still functioned, most of them. Soon the room was bathed in that soft, ethereal glow that only gas can provide; and Mr. Dowdy headed for the stairwell to find the fusebox.

This was nearly a weekly routine at the Voorhees-Rohr residence, and helps to explain why old Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr had never had the gas lighting removed. There was the ever-present danger that gas would leak from an unlit, broken fixture; and indeed, one could detect a bit of gassy smell in some parts of the mansion; but Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr had finessed that problem by leaving a window open in every room of the house. Mr. Dowdy did not understand this, and shut all the windows one cool night in October. Livid and hysterical the way only the old and disabled can be, Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr screamed at the top of her lungs that Dowdy was trying to kill her. People in the neighboring houses heard this and sent the police over to remonstrate with the confused and by now very frightened young caregiver.

Nevertheless, when Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr met her extremely timely end, it was not because of a gas leak. Mr. Dowdy was forbearing and meticulous, and taught himself to disconnect all electrical devices that were not being used. A full month went by without blowing a fuse. Then one day when Mr. Dowdy was briefly out of the room, Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr herself turned on the radio while running both the electric footbath and the plug-in Victrola. Patient as Job, Ian Stuart Dowdy headed on down to the under-stairs to check the fuses. While he did so, Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr helpfully attempted to disconnect the footbath, the radio, and the Victrola. But her grasp of the plugs was uncertain. Just as Dowdy was screwing in a new fuse, she electrocuted herself.

Tragedy and controversy

“She should never have had electricity put in in the first place,” was the opinion of old Mr. Burnington, the sexton from Blessed Sacrament Church on West 71st St. He had an old carriage house on the other side of Amsterdam that would remain the last non-electric holdout in the neighborhood until he passed on in 1959.

Regardless, most people believed that Ian Stuart Dowdy was somewhat to blame for Mrs. Voorhees-Rohr’s death. Neighbors rejoiced when it was reported in the Herald-Tribune that the dowager had left her caregiver absolutely nothing in her will.

It was 1950 before the Voorhees-Rohr heirs were able to evict Mr. Dowdy from the mansion with the help of a $10,000 bribe. By this time they were so sick of the old house that they decided to have it torn down and replaced with one of those ugly brick apartment buildings that were just coming into vogue. Mr. Dowdy meanwhile embellished his tale through many retellings, so that today he himself half-believes that he killed the old lady, and that it was a clear case of justifiable euthanasia.

Dr. Molmar

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Q. My youngest child, now 13, still wets his bed and I would like to cure him before he goes off to boarding school. I remember many years ago when you used to appear on the old Today Show with Jack Lescoulie and you demonstrated a sort of harness that could be used to cure bed-wetting, by strapping the children in at night. Do they still make this, or do you still use this?

A. To be honest, I have no idea what you are talking about. After the passage of many decades, even the great Jack Lescoulie is but a dim memory. As for the harness contraption you mention, I recall a restraining device that was popular at the time, for the prevention of self-abuse. It pinned the child’s arms to his sides so wayward young hands would not inadvertently find their way to the genital area.

Lescoulie

I cannot imagine this would be of much use in curing enuresis—the official name for bed-wetting—although if you can find one it might be worth a try. Bed-wetting and self-abuse are a deadly combination in a young person and should be eliminated as early as possible, as they often lead to sex perversion. Incidentally I don’t remember demonstrating such a device on the Today Show. You may be thinking of Cleveland Amory.

Q. My wife and I have long debated the pros and cons of getting our children vaccinated. As you know, vaccination of newborns is a leading cause of autism. However, I have also read on one of the online doctor websites that children who are vaccinated as infants are much less likely to wet the bed. So there seems to be a trade-off here, between having an autistic child or one who wets the bed. Do you have any opinions on the matter?

A. You really should not read those “online doctor websites” as they are compost heaps of misinformation. They are the number-one cause of hypochondria and medical conspiracy theories. This anti-vaccination kookery, for example. I don’t know where that started, but as the old saying goes, a conspiracy theory can go around the world before an honest physician has time to put his galoshes on.

Even if vaccination did cause autism, I don’t see that as such a big deal. So what if 1 out of 20 or even 1 out of ten children become autistic? I’d rather have an autistic child than a homosexual.