MADE WITH PASSION: THE HEMPHILL FOLK ART COLLECTION IN THE NATIONAL MUSEUMOF AMERICAN ART by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan; Andrew L. Connors; Elizabeth TisdelHolmstead; Tonia L. HortonReview by: Joan BenedettiArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 10, No. 2(Summer 1991), pp. 114-115Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948345 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 09:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press and Art Libraries Society of North America are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmerica.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:02:17 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

114 Art Documentation, Summer, 1991

ARTISTS' BOOKS ONLY MAKE BELIEVE / Joey Morgan.?[Vancouver, BC]: s.n., distr. by Printed Matter bookstore at Dia, New York, 1990.? (23 18.5 cm.)? [28] p.:ill.?ISBN 0-9693099-2-9: $25.00.

When does reality end and make-believe begin? How does one separate life from art or art from life, especially in the illusionary world of cinema? The contemporary Canadian artist Joey Morgan brings these questions to mind in her recent book Only Make Believe. It is a fragmentary glance at film presented through a combination of narrative and visual references.

Morgan's varied interest in cinema is evident in the several conversations that run through the text: a reworking of "Showboat" as a film script; an advice section on "How to

Write for the Movies"; and a private, stream-of-conscious ness rumination on acting, psychiatry, and make-believe. In terspersed with the text are film stills of actors, a scene from an urban carnival, and a solitary still of a showboat at the end of the book.

The variety of text and images is further emphasized by the book's format. Each text appears on alternating paper stock with changing typefaces which imparts a circular struc ture to the book. The various papers?heavy stock, news

print, several weights of vellum?correlate to the different approaches Morgan takes in interweaving fact and fantasy. In the same way the text draws the reader in, so does its ele gant binding; the stock used in the beginning of the book appears again at the end so that the reader leaves it the way s/he entered it?drawn in, only to be let go.

There are no easy answers to the questions that divide fantasy from fact. Morgan successfully presents the often blurred boundaries that exist between life and art and real and make-believe in Only Make Believe, while at the same time instructing the reader more than once to "Remember/ Don't confuse art and life/Art is not Life/They're different." Morgan's interest in reality and fantasy, being and nonbeing, can be found in her previous work, particularly in her 1988 exhibition and catalogue Have You EVER Loved Me? from the Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver. American-born, she has been a Canadian resident since the 1970s, working in Vancouver on projects, installations, drawings, and exhibi tions.

Hikmet Dogu Metropolitan Museum of Art

FOLK ART MADE WITH PASSION: THE HEMPHILL FOLK ART COLLEC TION IN THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART / Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, with contributions by Andrew L. Connors, Elizabeth Tisdel Holmstead, and Tonia L. Horton.? Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.?240 p.: ill.?ISBN 0-87474-293-5 (cl., alk. paper); LC 90-9622: $50.00.

In 1986 and 1987, the National Museum of American Art began acquiring over 400 works from the collection of Her bert Waide Hemphill, Jr. Made with Passion is the catalogue of a special exhibition of 199 objects from that collection, mounted in the fall of 1990. It is also an homage to Bert Hemphill, the first curator and one of the founders of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, a man called "Mr. American Folk Art," by Connoisseur.

Bert Hemphill is best known for his championing of con temporary folk art, especially that of the self-taught, idio syncratic artist, such as Howard Finster or Miles Carpenter. As represented in this publication, however, at least half of his collection is made up of traditional items such as 19th

century paintings by itinerant artists, decoys, tramp art, canes, whirligigs, and quilts. But Hemphill's collecting taste evolved over the years, and the shy man's growing interest in objects "made with passion" has influenced a generation of collectors, has had a profound effect on the folk art market, and has set off a new round of debates about folk art definitions.

Fully one-third of the book (80 pages) is devoted to a bio graphical essay (including extensive footnotes) by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the National Museum of American Art, that also serves as a chronicle of folk art collecting in the 20th century. Hartigan, who curated "Made with Passion," was largely responsible for the Hemphill acquisition, which trebled the museum's folk art holdings.

The sculptor Michael Hall, who recently sold to the Mil waukee Art Museum (for a reported $1.6 million) a large part of the folk art collection he and his former wife, Julie, put together over 20 years, was also instrumental in securing the Hemphill collection for the National Museum. The Halls hap pened to visit the Museum of American Folk Art in 1968 (en route to the Museum of Modern Art?the same way MAFA

was discovered by many others when it was located across the street from MoMA). They were converted on the spot: "Wham! It just came out of the sky." Hemphill happened to be in the galleries. He shyly asked if they'd like to see more.

When they said yes, he "did not bother to explain as he closed the museum for the day and hailed a cab. The three struck out for his apartment literally as strangers."

That chance encounter blossomed into a rare friendship that changed the direction of all their lives. The Halls had already discovered Edgar Toison in Kentucky, though they were not at the time collecting in any organized sense. They introduced Toison to Hemphill, who had never encountered a living folk artist:

As Hemphill and the Halls drove down from Campion's mountains, Hemphill said that meeting Toison was the equivalent of meeting the artists, all dead and often nameless, who had made the works in his collection . . . Talking to Toison where he worked had literally

made his collection come alive and initiated the direc tion that it subsequently took. . . . Hemphill struck a bargain, offering to educate them about "the old folk art," in return for their access to "this other folk art." ... An outgrowth of their "double amazement," the trio became reciprocal mentors, (p. 37)

Hartigan takes time in her essay to place Hemphill's aes thetic development within the context of the changing main stream contemporary art world of the '60s, which was begin ning to show deep discontent with abstraction. Not only imagery but humor was evident in the new art. Artists out side of New York, like Robert Arneson and Edward Kienholz in California and Jim Nutt in Chicago, were attracting atten tion. "The Art of Assemblage," organized by William Seitz at MoMA in 1961, was influential as was Calvin Trillin's 50-page profile of Simon Rodia and his Towers, published in The New Yorker in 1965. Artists like H.C. Westermann and others were collecting ephemera and other "cheap, offcast 'things.'

" It

was into this milieu that Hemphill presented his first exhibi tion of 20th-century folk art at MAFA in 1970.

By 1974, when Hemphill and Julia Weissman published Twentieth-Century Folk Art and Artists (New York: Dutton), several other publications and two major exhibitions were redefining folk art territory. "The Flowering of American Folk Art" (with accompanying publication by Jean Lipman and Alice Winchester) was a mammoth survey of early folk art that attracted tremendous critical and public attention when the exhibition opened at the Whitney and then commenced a national tour. Also in 1974, a watershed show of "this other folk art" opened at the Walker Art Center: "Naives and Vi sionaries" was curated by Gregg Blasdel. And in 1974, Hemp hill's personal collection debuted at the Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, Massachusetts. The collection was also exhibited by the Milwaukee Art Museum and toured nationally be tween 1981 and 1984.

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:02:17 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Art Documentation, Summer, 1991 115

The fascinating biographical essay is illustrated throughout with black-and-white photos, many of them snapshots?of Bert as a baby, of his mother riding in one of the famous Atlantic City wicker chairs (an icon of the city, produced by the Shill Rolling Chair Company, and owned and operated by Hemphill's father and half-brother until the late 1950s), of the elegant duck decoy bought by Bert when he was seven years old on one of many collecting forays with his mother that preoccupied his early years, of Bert with other famous and not-so-famous dealers and collectors in New York and else where (Warhol and he were the same age and grazed in the same Second Avenue collecting pastures in New York, but seem not to have influenced one another?though the Mu seum of American Folk Art exhibited Warhol's collection in 1977). There are many photos of Hemphill's apartment?the

same one to which the Halls were taken 23 years ago. In one section, Hartigan takes the reader on an archaeological dig of the rooms in the New York brownstone that Hemphill has occupied since 1956. A photo of the living room, taken in the early 1960s, shows a relatively unremarkable living space with "folk art, furniture, and accessories placed in careful counterpoint." A hardwood floor, complete with tigerskin rug, is clearly visible. In later photos (some including Hemphill looking somewhat dazed) the floor is visible only in narrow pathways.

The casual visitor... is not likely to discern much beyond abundance and variety. . . . Later, it becomes clear that regions exist in the apartment and have been staked out according to their role or contents. . . . Fur niture is lost amidst objects densely packed about the room from floor level to midair, where whirligigs or

weathervanes are often suspended on poles, (p. 65)

Three pages are required to map our way.

Set in a small space, the dynamic contrasts and extrav agant (some might say bizarre) array of almost three thousand objects give the collection a baroque fla vor. .. . Designer. . . Kenneth Fadeley has described the collection's dense variety as testimony to Hemphill's "360-degree eye." What has that remarkable eye taken in? Readily discernible even in the setting of the apart

ment is an encyclopaedia of categories, ranging from traditional?portraits, weathervanes, mourning pic tures, and trade signs?to the unexpecteci?objects used by fraternal organizations, carnivals, and tattoo parlors, (p. 68)

This beautifully designed publication is in many ways a model of what the exhibition catalogue of an important mu seum collection should be. Layout of text and illustrations is

pleasing and well integrated. This latter is quite a feat, es pecially in the catalogue section itself, as text entries are fairly lengthy. The catalogue entries were written by a team of curators, each credited with their initials at the end of each entry. They include good solid information on each item that places it in its historic and cultural context. Unknown artists are not "anonymous"; they are, clearly, "unidentified artist."

The bibliography is extensive?one of the catalogue's best features?although, as with most bibliographies, there are a few unaccountable omissions: Simon Bronner's American Folk Art: A Guide to Resources (New York: Garland, 1984) most notably. There is a very good index, marked with as terisks and daggers for all collectors and dealers mentioned.

Expense does not seem to have been spared in the book's production and $50.00 is a modest price for what is an intel lectually and aesthetically outstanding product. The quality of the reproductions is excellent; images are rendered dra matically, but not at the cost of clarity. The book's size (31.5 23 cm) is suitable for any coffee table, but not too large for one's lap. Its inside and outside margins are generous, its alkaline paper feels like thick cream in the hand, and its bind ing permits the pages to lie flat easily throughout. Illustra tions and catalogue entries are clearly numbered and almost always contiguous.

Made with Passion is highly recommended for all but the most specialized library collections. It is especially relevant not only to folk art study but to modern and contemporary art and collecting history.

Joan Benedetti Craft and Folk Art Museum

WOMEN ARTISTS AMERICAN WOMEN SCULPTORS: A HISTORY OF WOMEN WORKING IN THREE DIMENSIONS / Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein?Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.?638 p.: ill.?ISBN 0-8161-8732-0 (cl., alk. paper); LC 89-26846: $49.95.

Many ARLIS/NA members have been awaiting publication of this survey since the 1985 conference in Los Angeles when Ms. Rubenstein described the research in progress. Her ac count of her travels through darkest mid-America with cam era and notecards was fascinating, and its peripatetic nature explained by the happy fact that a considerable body of work by women sculptors still exists in the United States. Much of it is tucked away in parks or public buildings of small cities and towns far from the major art centers, and Ms. Ruben stein has performed an invaluable service just in tracking it down. As she states in her introduction, "constant vigilance is the price of equality"; it is also necessary for preservation.

One of the saddest recurring themes in the book is the num ber of works that have been lost or destroyed due to lack of funds available to cast a piece in bronze, or changes in art historical fashion that have allowed significant works to slide into obscurity. American Women Sculptors is a work which follows femi

nist principles of art history in its inclusive and pluralistic nature. Sculpture is quite broadly defined, for example, and includes ceramics, furniture, woven forms, and performance art. It is refreshing to note that American art history is not defined as beginning with the work of the European colo nizers of the continent. The first chapter covers "The Three Dimensional Art of the Early Native Americans," briefly touching on baskets, ceramics, and leather objects. Unfor tunately, "American" is never really defined explicitly, although it seems to mean "United States of America."

Women born abroad are included if they worked in the United States, as are women born in the United States who spent much of their working lives abroad. Many African American, Asian-American, Latina and contemporary Native American artists are included.

This is not really a reference book, except in the sense that any book can be a reference book for the creative and tena cious librarian. It might, however, tempt the casual user to view it as one, since it consists largely of entries on individual artists. However, it is not arranged by artist, nor is it orga nized strictly by chronology. In what must surely be a statis tically significant percentage of cases, a career as a woman sculptor is apparently a prescription for remarkable longevity. The number of women who lived into their 90s, and in at least one case exceeded 100, may be gratifying but presents some problems of organization, since such women tended to overlap neat categories of chronology or style. The 11 chap ters, particularly the earlier ones, are primarily chronological in their arrangement and provide a general introduction to the period and its important art movements and institutions, followed by entries for individual women. However, after the pace picks up in the latter part of the 19th century, organiza tion becomes more complicated. For example, two chapters cover the same period of 1905-1929; one is devoted to tradi tional sculptors and the other to the avant-garde (without denigrating the former or canonizing the latter). Each chapter is further subdivided into movements, schools, or genres. For example, traditional sculptors are discussed in such catego ries as garden sculptors, animal sculptors, monument sculp tors; the chapter on the avant-garde has sections on the Ash

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:02:17 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions