The following is a virtual tour of art and literature. If able, please visit the Georgia Museum of Art to fully experience the works in person. This museum is located on the campus of the University of Georgia and offers free admission to everyone. Its extensive collection of American art was gifted by the museum's founder, Alfred Holbrook, to the people of the state. GMOA is a place dear to me and I hope you enjoy the story of the artists and art work within the galleries as much as I do.
F. Luis Mora, A Tale of Cinderella, 1941
“The wife of a rich man fell sick, and as she felt that her end was drawing near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, “Dear child, be good and pious, and then the good God will always protect thee, and I will look down on thee from heaven and be near thee.” Thereupon she closed her eyes and departed. Every day the maiden went out to her mother’s grave, and wept, and she remained pious and good. When winter came the snow spread a white sheet over the grave, and when the spring sun had drawn it off again, the man had taken another wife.
The woman had brought two daughters into the house with her, who were beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart. Now began a bad time for the poor step-child.”
F. Luis Mora was born in 1874 in Uruguay but moved to America as a young boy. His father was a Spanish sculptor and his mother, from France, highly respected art. Both urged Mora to study art as a young man in Boston and New York which sparked a lifelong career as an artist. Throughout his career he worked as an educator, illustrator, and muralist. He won many awards and was able to travel frequently to Europe as a student. His professional career started with illustrations in America and lead to a variety of other work including commissioned murals and portraits.
In 1900 he married his childhood sweetheart Sophia (Sonia), pictured here, and in July 22, 1918 their daughter Rosemary was born. Mora was dearly attached to Rosemary, an affection that is evident in the great number of his works in which she appears. Tragically, Sonia died from food poisoning in 1931, when Rosemary was thirteen (Baron, 2008).
A year after his wife’s death, Mora married again to a wealthy widow (and former portrait sitter) May Safford who did not get along with Rosemary and as a result the child was sent away to expensive boarding schools. After the loss of her mother Rosemary acquired a nasty stepmother and as a result of this union lost most contact with her father. The Great Depression devastated Mora’s commissioned art business and he could no longer support himself. He moved in with May, whose wealth was not as effected, then died six weeks before his 65th birthday in May’s elegant New York apartment. Rosemary did not marry and had no children to carry the family name (Baron, 2008).
Baron, L. P. (2008). F. Luis Mora: America's first hispanic master. New York: Falk Art Reference.
Grimm. (1812). Translated by Jack Zipes. (1987). The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. New York: Bantum Books. (p.93).
Mervin Jules, Bare Statement, 1941
“...they were on 66-the great western road, and the sun was sinking on the line of the road. The windshield was bright with dust. Tom pulled his cap lower over his eyes, so low that he had to tilt his head back to see out at all.
Tom said, ‘We stay on this road right straight through.’
Ma had been silent for a long time. ‘Maybe we better fin’ a place to stop ‘fore sunset,’ she said. ‘I got to get some pork a-boilin’ an’ some bread made. That takes time.’
...In a ditch, where a culvert went under the road, an old touring car was pulled off the highway and a little tent was pitched beside it, and smoke came out of a stove pipe through the tent. Tom pointed ahead. ‘There’s some folks campin’. Looks like as a good place as we seen.’ He slowed his motor and pulled to a stop beside the road. The hood of the old touring car was up, and a middle-aged man stood looking down at the motor. He wore a cheap straw sombrero, a blue shirt, and a black, spotted vest, and his jeans were stiff and shiny with dirt. His face was lean, the deep cheek-lines great furrows down his face so that his cheek bones and chin stood out sharply. He looked up at the Joad truck and his eyes were puzzled and angry.
Tom leaned out of the window. ‘Any law ‘gainst folks stoppin’ here for the night?’
The man had seen only the truck. His eyes focused down on Tom. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘We on’y stopped here ‘cause we couldn’t git no further.’
‘Any water here?’
The man pointed to a service -station shack about a quarter of a mile ahead. ‘They’s water there they’ll let ya take a bucket of.’
Tom hesitated. ‘Well, ya ‘spose we could camp down ‘longside?’
The lean man looked puzzled. ‘We don’t own it,’ he said.
...Tom insisted. ‘Anyways you’re here an’ we ain’t. You got a right to say if you wan’ neighbors or not.’
The appeal to hospitality had an instant effect. The lean face broke into a smile. ‘Why, sure, come on off the road. Proud to have ya.’ ”
Mervin Jules was known to, ‘use his brush as a weapon with which to fight social wrongs of our times (Rasmussen, 1994).’ One goal of American art at this time was to show difficult times through the strength of common men and women. Is there a connection between the creative work of Jules and Steinbeck?
The Dust Bowl coincided with the stock market crash of 1929 that caused the Great Depression. A drought in the Midwestern United States and Canada caused a stunt in crop production was exacerbated by ineffective agricultural techniques uprooted grass lands resulting in a dry, depleted soil. Plows upturned dry soil in hopes of boosting growth but dried out the poor soil further and left the land sandy. Strong winds caused devastating dust storms driving hundreds of families from their homes to seek jobs halfway across the country (Burns, 2012).
Burns, K. (Director) (2012). The Dust Bowl [TV].
Rasmussen, F. (1994, August 7). Artist Mervin M. Jules, Work Nationally Known. The Baltimore Sun.
Jack Levine, Beatnik Girl, n.d.
Jack Levine was a social realist painter working during and after the 1930s as a part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, stemming from Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to stimulate job opportunities after the Great Depression (Baskind, 2011). Levine admittedly felt like an outsider in the artistic community at a time when abstraction was a popular. On the subject Levine commented, “[Abstraction] is part of the downfall of our time” (Baskind, 2011). Levine was honest about his opinions and this showed through his work as satire, by highlighting negative attributes he exposes and ridicules the modern man.
Another Jack, writing at the same time Levine was painting, is best known for his novel On the Road. Jack Kerouac became famous for epitomizing the beat generation in this work of fiction. Beatniks, coined by Kerouac himself, were a youthful group of Americans that roamed a country in recovery after a devastating decade (Spanger, 2008). The migration of the main character Sal mimics the movement of the Joad family of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. This connection can be made and evaluated to Levine’s Beatnik Girl where the viewer watches a lone figure. Many times, in fact, characters find the open road in Kerouac’s novel to be a rather lonely journey. However, for the characters of Jules’ painting and Steinbeck’s book the journey was with family. While the Joad family met great strife, they were never alone. Kerouac’s story is based on people and events he encountered, by remarking on the thoughts conveyed on the expression of the Beatnik Girl in Levine’s painting we are able to understand the human conflict of youth at the time after the Great Depression.
Examining the differences of these two novels can point out that the refugees of the Dust Bowl were weighted down with responsibilities to find work and support a family. The irresponsibility and drive for freedom in On the Road was a lasting stereotype that defined the beat generation. This was especially true for men, as many male characters in the novel are noncommittal. Could this be seen in Levine’s young girl’s gaze?
Baskind, S. (2011). Jack levine (1915–2010) A Real Human Guy. American Art, 25(2).
Kerouac, J. (1959). On the Road. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc. (p. 156).
Spangler, J. (2008). We're on a Road to Nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac, and the Legacy of the Great Depression. Studies in the Novel, 40(3).
Romare Bearden, Siren's Song, 1977
“...the Odyssey in which I interpret it as a myth happening, possibly, in Africa.”
“‘So far so good,’ said she, when I had ended my story, ‘and now pay attention to what I am about to tell you- heaven itself, indeed, will recall it to your recollection. First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.”
Visit this exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University