The problem started with Mnemosyne.
The Greek titaness who stayed for nine nights with the supreme deity Zeus bore him nine daughters known as the Muses. Each Muse inspired and guided a single creative endeavor, such as epic poetry, tragedy or dance. But because the sisters naturally shared certain traits, they passed them on through the forms of several of the arts, and generations of mortal creators seemed to inherit them by way of Mnemosyne’s chief attribute, memory.
Rhythm, for example, occurs in music, dance, poetry and all types of visual art. That’s incontrovertible. But the recurrence of the same element in different artistic guises has in our own time led to a myth more powerful than any of the ancient Greeks’. It has to do with creative versatility or, as cultural historian Walter Sorell wrote, “duality of vision.”
People often believe that artists who are distinguished in one field inevitably are as distinguished in other fields. History supports the belief with geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who excelled in just about every field they set their minds to. But, by their very nature, geniuses are exceptions. And when it comes to the arts, exceptions do not prove the rule.
Yet the myth persists. Ironically, it persists with special strength in a realm not known for longevity, the entertainment world. There we find actors, singers, comedians and rock stars whom a large segment of the public also accepts as painters or photographers. No logic connects the two. In the popular mind, the duality of vision that stems from Mnemosyne is more an article of faith.
Let’s chip away at it: However great their achievements as entertainers, Tony Bennett, David Byrne, Diane Keaton, John Lennon, Anthony Quinn, Red Skelton, Elke Sommer, Frank Sinatra, Sylvester Stallone and Jonathan Winters were never serious visual artists. At best, they are (or were) hobbyists who thanks to their pop-culture reputations enjoy (or enjoyed) a degree of name recognition that in their lifetimes far exceeded any master of the Renaissance.
Fans seek such work as they would an autograph. They want to own a part of their idol or, perhaps, a part of history. But that history is not art history. It is a slice of time that has been fixed by a television appearance, hit record or boffo role in a movie.
The situation with Lennon is rather more complicated. He attended art school in Liverpool before becoming a latter-day Orpheus. And like his mythic predecessor — who sang and played the lyre so magically that even trees uprooted themselves to follow him — Lennon had a single-minded love for his wife and died violently. After Orpheus’ death, his severed head delivered oracles. After Lennon’s death, his widow issued artworks as relics.
That Yoko Ono was herself a visual artist might have seemed to promise some merit. After all, her involvement in the early ’60s with the international group of avant-gardists known as Fluxus had achieved several exhibitions and a niche in art history. But Ono did not function in relation to her husband’s memory as an artist; she was Keeper of the Flame — which is something different.
“John had a lot of interest in expressing his artistic side as well as his musical side,” Ono said recently in an interview. “And after he passed away, I was thinking we should show his works in galleries because that probably would have been something he would have wanted. But I had the most difficult time to make galleries want his work to exhibit. They had their own kind of artistic pride, saying, `Well, we don’t do that sort of thing.’ “
Such pride came, of course, from a skepticism regarding duality of vision. Composers Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Felix Mendelssohn, Ferruccio Busoni, George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg were all amateur draftsmen and painters. But only Schoenberg achieved something in painting that had an artistic validity comparable to his music. The others produced curiosities attracting specialists like the historians fascinated by the visual art of Winston Churchill or Adolf Hitler.
How Ono chose to represent Lennon was even more curious. Because he once had worked with a printer on a portfolio of some of his drawings, she followed a similar practice after his death, divining Lennon’s intentions every step of the way from the selection of drawings to the large size of the editions (200 to 300 lithographs) and the quality of their reproduction.
Each year Ono releases two or three drawings for translation, adding them to a collection of prints Lennon had no voice in forming. Thus does she make public the content of drawings that, considering their treacly slightness, the creator may well have kept private. In response to queries, she said: “Being his partner and an artist myself, I would hope that I had approved the results he would have wanted me to.”
Ono brought in “a professional organizer” who gets galleries to exhibit the pieces. A few years ago, some of them appeared in Chicago at a showplace where employees referred to whatever they sold as “units.” This weekend an expanded collection will appear in what Ono says is “a different situation” — the Inland Meeting & Exposition Center in Westmont.
The enterprise has more in common with a glamorcon than a museum or gallery exhibition. And there’s little wrong with it as long as visitors accept that the units available for purchase are about as significant to 20th Century drawing and printmaking as autographed pinups by former Playboy Bunnies.
Lennon’s drawings and prints are — like Bennett’s landscapes or Skelton’s clown paintings or Winters’ macabre caricatures — unconcerned with the formal or ideological issues of visual art in their time. Instead, they mainly attempt to communicate the personality that shines more strongly through the entertainers’ primary areas of distinction. Which is why they have the character of souvenirs, things that remind the owner of the “star” who created them.
Fifty years ago, stars of entertainment were said to be America’s royalty, kings and queens whose professional achievements seemed to blend with their lives, providing beholders with innumerable fantasies. Now they’re more like figures of fun, but audiences still like to think they go beyond the giving of momentary pleasure to something more permanent and serious.
Be prepared: The day is coming for expositions of video art by Kate Winslet and sculpture by Leonardo DiCaprio.
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“The Artwork of John Lennon” will continue at the Inland Meeting & Exposition Center, 400 E. Odgen Ave., Westmont, 5 to 10 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. 888-278-1969.
