If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Insanity.... is repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.
WELCOME, TOURIST, TO EDEN
The burglar who broke into our house paid no attention at all to our collection of Girard paintings and sculpture. Naturally, this led to a bout of depression. My naturopath subsequently instructed me to treat this and all life issues with the balm of gratitude. She would undoubtedly be pleased to know that the burglary has taught me to be grateful for boors.
In the fine art game, the highest compliment - aside from an offer to buy -is theft. Private and public art collections around the country and the world are full of fabulous pieces of work that are "on indefinite loan."
I recently read about a legal wrangle over the ownership of a group of Gustav Klimt paintings now in the collection of the Republic of Austria. After due consideration, our Supreme Court allowed that the surviving heir of the original owners, now a naturalized American citizen, has the right to sue for ownership in U.S. courts some 60 years after the paintings were "borrowed" by the Nazis. These spoils of war passed, in turn, to the disinterred and newly democratic Austria we know and love today. (Author's note: Ownership of those paintings was ultimately tranferred to litigious heir.)
If Klimt weren't already famous, this would surely make his reputation.
Thus, in certain circles of neo-cynical aesthetes, my burglar's apparent disinterest in the Girard paintings might be construed as an insult.
Happily, at least one of the two investigating police officers could scarcely drag his eyes away from the large Girard painting, Fauvel. This made me feel sooo much better. At least some of our public servants aren't immune to the seduction of fine art.
Fauvel - completed in the late 1970s - is just the sort of painting you might expect to catch the eye of a policeman. The composition is part whimsy, part trompe l'oeil, but wholly frank in its depiction of our sad propensity to fall into unholy depravity. It is a depiction of chaos run riot. A city burns. The world seethes. Center stage, one sees a fat-faced, fool of a king seated on a throne, holding a pinwheel, attended by a clearly malevolent donkey.
Notice the nasty cartoon characters scurrying around the King's feet. There's a busy Oliver North (of Iran-Contra scandal infamy) with an armful of missiles for our good friends in Iran. A mitered Pope appears in the guise of a marionetteer, controlling a skeleton with one hand, and with other manipulating a priest with a devil puppet on one hand and a Jesus puppet on the other. There's a nearly skeletal cowboy (John Wayne, per Girard) gesturing with his six-shooter; a bulging, newborn anti-Christ complete with halo; not to mention a rapist and his prey. The backdrop is a conflagration of cadmium orange matched with various shades of cerulean blue and a multitude of grays and blacks.
Sound grim? Well, maybe. But it's funny: a dark moment in a commedia dell'arte!
What's more, the paint itself is wonderful. The white ruff around the neck of the "king," is delightful. It is sketched in knots of thick, loopy paint, reminiscent of a late Rembrandt crossed with painterly élan of a Franz Hals. The king's stockings and especially the buttons that hold the hose to the stockings are so 3-D, that viewers almost invariably touch them. The jowly, mottled face of the king describes depravity in mordant living color that would do Disney proud. The glowing eyes of the donkey (Fauvel) braying in the king's ear put exclamation marks on the vices it represents.
The painting is based on a popular 13th century poem, Le Roman de Fauvel. It is both an allegory and a satire about the effects of political and societal corruption by a notary in the chancellery of the French King Philippe IV. For reasons probably having to do with wretched prisons and the death penalty for libel of the King, it was published anonymously. Chances are, those same reasons helped propel it to the top of the period's literary hit parade. It was put to music a few years later. Wonder of wonders, Fauvel is still performed and recorded today, some 700 years later.
Fauvel, it turns out, is both the name of the zoomorphic antihero - a donkey ("équidé" also translates as "horse") - and a French acronym for the seven (most alluring) vices: flattery, avarice, villainy, fickleness, envy, and cowardice/laziness (two for one, so to speak). The conceit of the narrative is that a donkey is an advisor to a king. In short, Fauvel is a political ass whose counsel unleashes the forces of evil on an unprepared world. (Sounds rather familiar, doesn't it?) In the end, of course, good conquers evil, the ass is turned out to pasture, and the world is returned to peace and goodwill. Or so I'm told.
Girard's Fauvel is a pointed reminder of what can happen when decision-makers (you know: us) listen to donkeys (us, again). Being less than saintly myself, I can always use a good reminder of the potential impact of my weaker self. Or maybe the painting simply appeals to the teenager in me who once identified both with comic book super heroes and their redoubtable opponents, the super villains.
Not all burglars are as impervious to the charms of Bill Girard's paintings as was mine. Recently, Bill told me that a more aesthetically acute burglar in Michigan had illicitly "borrowed" four of his paintings from a gallery in the early '70s. Not the smallest paintings, either. Just like in the movies, the burglar cut two of the larger paintings right out of their frames!
Later Bill had a dream in which he was driving by a high-rise apartment complex in Palmer Park (a Detroit community, not far from where he lives) during the evening. Turning his head, he could actually see his paintings on the wall of an anonymous apartment as he drove by. "The dream was so vivid," said Bill, "that I wasn't sure whether I had had a dream or it had actually occurred. I thought that it meant my paintings would come back to me. But they never did."
Poor Bill. Those paintings probably represented hundreds of hours of work, not to mention a badly needed financial boost. On the other hand, it's possible that this burglar is one of the sharpest, most discerning critics ever to express an opinion about the work of Bill Girard. (To paraphrase Thoreau, "Critics vote with their walls.") How can you not respect the opinion of someone who finds a work of art so compelling that he or she absolutely has to have it - even at the risk of a jail sentence? (This is not to be construed as a suggestion or encouragement to pilfer art.)
As you may have gathered, over the last 40 years other artists and critics have been considerably less appreciative of Bill Girard's work than the aforementioned culture vulture. From a cultural standpoint, Bill simply couldn't have picked a worse time to be active. On the other hand, you could argue that the most interesting artists almost never fit comfortably into prevailing cultural norms.
Perhaps it isn't surprising that the reigning collectors and critics in Bill's hometown haven't discovered the delights of his painting and sculpture. After all, he lives in metropolitan Detroit, home of the automobile and the production line. While there is plenty of room there for the occasional quirky artist, one wouldn't expect either the hoi polloi of car shows or captains of industry to recognize themselves in the art of Bill Girard. Those who lionize glossy paint on steel carriages and the rumble of gleaming V-something engines are, apparently, less moved by immobile canvas covered with irreverent visions described with thickly textured paint.
To be fair, while Bill's studio is chock full of work, it's also true that hundreds of pieces have found their way into the hands of those less cognizant of or concerned with the prevailing norms for collectable contemporary fine art. For many years, Bill found it convenient to let Alan Abramson, a friendly Detroit-based art dealer, trade on his connections to the well to do. With minimal muss and fuss, Bill's paintings and sculpture were simply sucked out his studio into the wide, wide world sans all documentation, when he was willing to let them go. While the method was sanitary ─ it obviated the need for gallery shows and endless glad-handing ─ it also meant that Bill's work was virtually invisible to any who didn't know him personally. One doesn't build a critical reputation by sidestepping opinion makers.
"It always seemed to me that Bill didn't really want to part with his paintings," Marc Doubleday told me. Marc is a retired educator now working as an educational consultant who started collecting Bill's work in the 1960s. "It was always difficult to get a painting from Bill, unless he needed the money.
"I got Titania from Bill at a point when he just couldn't complete the painting. I saw it and loved it," said Doubleday. "Titania was a dark, erotic painting. Titania herself has the face of Bonnie, Bill's ex. Bill said that I could take the painting and live with it, but that someday he would want it back so he could complete it. 'If you like it,' he said, 'you can buy it.'
"Originally Titania was set against a stormy background. The painting hung in my house that way for years. Finally, Bill called and asked to have it back. It took so long to complete that I thought I wouldn't get it back. But when Bill was done, it was an absolutely new painting. The wild painting had become serene. It was quite a shock to me, initially. But I grew to love the painting. Titania has hung over my fireplace ever since, the centerpiece of my living room." (Titania appears in the gallery of Bill's images shown elsewhere in this site.)
Abramson, the art dealer, once explicitly warned me against allowing Bill to get his hands on an unfinished painting Girard had allowed me to purchase in a moment of weakness. "You won't even recognize it when you get it back," he said.
Obsessive perfectionism was actually one of the lesser hurdles separating Bill from fame and fortune. As fate would have it, he inadvertently found himself in the middle of an artistic race to glory. Unfortunately for his career, Bill doesn't like to run. In fact, he hates to travel anywhere, except in his imagination.
You see, for at least a century and perhaps much longer, leading artists and critics wanted to see themselves as standard-bearers of PROGRESS, along with scientists, engineers and architects. (In the parlance of marketing, it's called the "bandwagon" effect.) The cult of progress teaches that new and different is almost always better. Cubism was better than impressionism, because it was newer. Impressionism was better than neo-classicism because it was fresher (newer). Abstract expressionism was way better than impressionism and cubism because it was "contemporary" and, besides, it was a genuinely American art form, like jazz!
"Ism" has since followed "ism" at an increasingly dizzying speed. Pity the poor artists trying to keep up. Staying ahead of the curve was even tougher.
As anyone who has raced will tell you, to move faster you must travel lighter. Ambitious artists took this lesson to heart.
In their hurry to barrel into the future-to be first-20th century artists and critics stripped away the lessons of a thousand years of art technology as efficiently as strip miners in Appalachia. Anatomy was jettisoned. Perspective was dumped. Draughtmanship went into the garbage (but garbage became fine art). Imagery and design were simplified repeatedly until they virtually vanished. For some artists, even brushes became a hindrance. (Why brush when you can pour or even heave the paint? I have even read about an artist who filled his lower intestine with paint and evacuated it on canvas.) Craftsmanship was simultaneously adjudged archaic, bourgeois, elitist and effete. One by one, the tools of the artist's trade were traded in. For what? History will be the ultimate judge. Me, I'm thinking it was the Emperor's new art.
In the hands of the visionaries who lead the flight into the future, these new approaches sometimes produced work of almost hallucinatory simplicity and beauty. But hard on the heels of the artists with a unique personal vision came hordes of artist-codifiers. The codifiers observed the achievements of the inspired and transmogrified them into - rules. Such is the fate of visionaries: epiphanies become strictures. In no time at all, strictures petrify into belief systems that ultimately suffocate the very creative forces that generated them. But that's another (all too common) story.
As I was saying, into the midst of this race to future artistic glory stumbled one Bill Girard.
Fresh out of high school at the end of the 1950s, this already balding kid from a blue-collar family enrolled in the Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts, in Detroit. The school, directed by the sainted artist, Sarkis Sarkisian, was a local manifestation of an international movement that reflected the increasing relevance of aesthetics to the growing middle class.
Although forgotten now by all but a few, Sarkis, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, was a Detroit-based painter with a national reputation. (He once turned down the opportunity to be featured in Life magazine. Too much attention would, he said at the time, interfere with the development of his art. His integrity ensured that Detroit would continue to be seen as a cultural backwater by local residents and the rest of the country. Naturally, Bill took his example to heart.)
Needless to say, Bill's father was not pleased. Girard Sr. had seen his son as a future architect. No matter. Bill, like Odysseus, he had heard the sirens call. Unlike Odysseus, he refused to be dragged away. He had found his calling.
Still, he had chops. Betty Cook, his eighth grade art teacher, told him that he made the nicest pencil drawings she had ever seen. Another of his early influences, Don Stephan, also an art teacher, made a huge impression on Bill. Apparently, Don was a giant of sorts, standing some 6'7". He was also a painter who took an interest in helping the young artist. He introduced Bill to one of the finer art museums in the country, the Detroit Institute of Art, as well as to a noted Detroit-area gallery owner and artist, Anna Werbe. (Anna is the subject of a wonderful Sarkis portrait now stored somewhere in the eternal shade of the fine art dungeon beneath the Detroit Institute of Arts.)
A semester and a half into his course of study at the Art School, Bill was forced to leave. Impending fatherhood will do that to a responsible but otherwise naive young man. Perhaps because he never again had the opportunity to be a student in an institute of higher learning, he never stopped studying. Ever resourceful, Bill worked for a time as a hospital orderly, and later as a model maker for a local car manufacturer. He continued painting. In 1968, the art school that Bill Girard couldn't afford to attend decided it couldn't afford to let him go. As one of his last acts before retiring, Sarkis instigated the hiring of Bill Girard as a drawing instructor.
Over time, the Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts grew into an expensive, private art college, the Center for Creative Studies (CCS), whose primary purpose was the cultivation of young artisans for the advertising, industrial design and photographic trades. The fine arts were gradually marginalized in their own home, becoming little more than unruly stepchildren best used as window dressing. In 1980, Bill Girard became Professor Girard.
Within CCS's Fine Arts Department, as without, coteries of codifiers rose to prominence. (Internecine warfare among artists is both a particularly ugly and time-honored tradition.) As an instructor, Girard was exiled to the tenements of the art education fiefdom. His assignments were invariably limited to first year students and Saturday extension courses. Beginning drawing. Painting 101.
The eager, would-be artists who found they had so much to learn about materials and techniques in Bill's classes were easily convinced to take a more contemporary-and less demanding-approach to art by hipper academicians in subsequent courses and years. The system was a wonder: a meritocracy designed to generate mediocrity. Under the direction of an artist whose renown was chiefly buttressed by his association with better-known New York artists, the Fine Art Department of CCS sank into professional and national obscurity.
The Fine Art Department chairman, Aris Koutroulis, boasted to students that he couldn't draw and didn't need to. Drawing, Koutroulis explained, had nothing to do with art. His work exemplified this wisdom. Aris Koutroulis paintings were strips of canvas glued together with acrylic paint in such a way that the dripping paint formed a great cascade of color. (Students in his seminar classes were required to attend his openings and write papers about the experience and the work.) As I recall, Koutroulis's Detroit gallery priced his paintings in the $20,000 plus range back in 1981.
Despite the denigration of his more fashion conscious colleagues, Bill refused to be budged from his chosen path. For decades, Bill was derided as a mere illustrator. His work was described as derivative and damned as "narrative." You can't imagine how odd a Girard painting looked amid the best efforts of his colleagues in faculty shows. Carefully glazed, beautifully drawn, attentive to light, his paintings looked, at first glance, like the work of a Renaissance artist. And so they were.
The tools of the trade that so many other artists abandoned found a new home in the hands of Bill Girard. Slowly, patiently, he remastered the techniques of the "old masters" and applied them to his own work. His oeuvre includes fresco techniques, egg tempera, silverpoint, as well as figurative oil painting and sculpture. But Bill was an explorer, right from the get-go. Untutored, Bill made his first oil painting using household cooking oil as a medium. (It took months to dry.) The path of the autodidact is generally filled with potholes. Bill filled his with hard-won insights.
Ultimately, Bill's solitary search for techniques and tools turned him into a unique resource, a living treasury of technical information and tips. Perhaps because all too few of his students actually cared, he is always delighted to share his wealth of knowledge with serious students and artists. Do you want your plaster to be more workable, more clay-like? Add one part flour to three parts plaster, mix well, and add water while kneading. If you simply want to slow the rate at which plaster dries, add beer or vinegar to the formula. Whether the question is about repairing the cracks in a drying terra cotta sculpture or preparing a wall for a fresco, Bill Girard knows the answer.
The motifs that run though the work of Bill Girard are literally the stuff of legend, story and myth. He draws, as is the case with Fauvel, from the whole history of human imagination. His sources are manifold: Egyptian art, Etruscan sculpture, Greek and Roman myths, Shakespeare, the Old Testament, Oriental art, cubism, and mannerism are only some of them.
Bill is something of a miner, plumbing the depths of our historical sub-conscious via the stories we have used to explain ourselves to each other. Chipping away first at this myth, and then at another, he brings us gems of art and design that are also compelling and lively reanimations of our rich human chronicle.
Of course, you've heard this sort of thing before, haven't you? Isn't it all just hype? Many artists are now exploring this material. What makes the work of Bill Girard any different or more interesting than all the others?
Take another look at a Girard painting. Ask yourself what is missing and what isn't? What is it that you expect from a painting, from a serious artist of classical themes and means? You needn't be a particularly acute observer to notice that the common denominator behind most every piece is something akin to humor. Bill's later paintings and sculpture are light as titanium and just as strong. They are filled with whimsy. Even the most serious subjects, clothed in the most earnest paint, giggle like naughty children.
"Today," says Bill, "a lot of my 'story' paintings are tongue-in-cheek. After 30 years (as an art instructor), you get tired of pomposity. Now, as I'm older, I think that silliness is one of our saving graces."
Bill's best paintings dance! They are charming depictions constructed of sweet, fluid lines and mellifluous paint. Glaze upon glaze, stroke after measured stroke, you can feel the rhythm inherent in the structure of a Girard.
"I found that I preferred ancient Etruscan and archaic Greek sculpture," Bill explains, "as well as Chow and Han dynasty sculpture.
"They share a stylistic energy: a dance of sweeps and angles, stylization and geometric dance. In Han art, there are sweeping angular cloud and dragon shapes. In both archaic Greek and Etruscan sculpture this characteristic is also pronounced. Etruscan pixy eyes and a V-shaped smile. These are characteristics that make me happy."
They live on in the work of Bill Girard.
Too, his paintings make wonderful theater, and as is always true when stories are told, you are its most important participant. You're always in the picture, so to speak, because the paintings are literally performances, intended for an audience. This is work a world apart from the massive, heroic paintings and sculpture that proclaim their own immortality to evanescent tourists in the temples of the state.
Nope. A Girard painting isn't an ennobling icon. His art is less likely to grace the ante-chambers of the powerful than the homes of grown-up children who have noticed that the human condition is - ouch! Laughable. The halcyon days of yore aren't his kitsch.
How many art museums and galleries have you visited? How many paintings have you seen that tell a story with a moral and dance, too? That laugh at themselves? That bring a smile to your face because they are intended to; not because you recognize them as this or that or the other? Myself, I've visited most of the major museums in the United States, and many, many more across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France. Few indeed have anything to compare to the work of Bill Girard.
Over the years, art has occasionally brought me to tears, or induced other symptoms associated with the Stendhal syndrome. Often enough, it has taken my breath away. But rare indeed is the feeling of sheer amazement and overwhelming exhilaration that I felt on the day I was lucky enough to stand in an apartment filled with Bill's work. I just wish you could have been there, too.
What makes a Girard? I don't know the recipe, but I can taste the ingredients. Joy. Humor. Theatricality. Dance. And a gentle sense of concern, too. All in nearly perfect balance. There's a snappy line that can crack like a whip and color that's as alluring as a hussy.
In the hallway by our bedroom hangs a small Garden of Eden, painted by Bill. It's wonderful.
If you've visited museums and browsed art books and catalogs, chances are you've seen bunches of "Garden of Eden" drawings and paintings. If you studied Western art history, you may even recall Masaccio's dramatic (fresco) rendering of Adam and Eve being driven from the garden. Or perhaps you recollect Albrecht Durer's highly naturalistic (and utterly unrealistic) engraving of the first couple (Adam's "fig leaf" isn't. Notice that it was apparently glued in place: Look Lord! No hands.) If so, you can forget about it. You're about to enter an entirely different garden.
Girard's Adam, whose back is turned to us, is looking up at a tree. He's unclothed, with impossibly small buttocks and an extended waist. The serpent looks like a long, skinny caterpillar with a baboon's face. The angels sweeping into the painting from the right have schnozzes to rival Jimmy Durante. And where is Eve? There she is, up in the Tree of Knowledge. She's climbed right up in chase of that elusive fruit.
I ask you, when have you ever seen an Eve sitting on a tree branch? Is this a social climber or what? There she is, a cutie-pie if I've ever seen one, looking down at Adam. He turns to the left, a dove in his outstretched left hand. She leans to her left, holding a piece of fruit with her left hand. There is balance and tension. But she is the mover and shaker. This isn't your classical, trembling Eve. This is a liberated woman.
That's another thing that makes a work by Bill Girard so special. It's liberating. You're always free to smile. Welcome, tourist, to Eden.
