Koons, Ghiberti, Wood: Railroad into the Ground.
From Masterpiece to Corporate Product.
Brochure with illustration of Grant Wood’s Stone City to promote Wood’s artist colony at Stone City, Iowa.
“You would be sitting there looking at it and you may start to notice that the light is kind of flickering off the firebox, and maybe you would see a little steam coming from the valve. And then the pistons would start to fire and the wheels would start to turn and it would go “choo-choo, choo-choo . . .”1
Which is only fitting, because it would have been a seventy-foot-long steam train, and “choo-choo, choo-choo” is what they usually say. What is unusual about Jeff Koons’s steam engine, conceived in the early 2000s for Francois Pinault’s museum in Paris, is that the choo-choo would be suspended vertically from a crane, dangling thirty feet above spectators while rendering its dread appeal.
It would have, Jeff Koons recounts, because it never came to be. Pinault’s museum site was moved from crane-friendly Paris to dangerously-unstable Venice2; LACMA “envision[ed] the train as LA’s Eiffel Tower,” and it never came to fruition. We’re left with Jeff’s “choo-choo, choo-choo” embellishments.
It feels like an especially contemporary problem—a feature of the artworld as spectacle, a corporate product of an experiential industry—and the steam engine is a great metaphor for that business model. Railroads require the organization of many municipalities, commodities, and teams of designers and engineers, long before you drive a golden spike and start to go “choo-choo.” There’s a reason the best squares in Monopoly and half of America’s robber barons were railroaders—it is the corporate project par excellence. And if it seems that Koons is trying to mimic or even move into that space, it’s actually not out of line with Big Picture-making generally.
This is obscured by the notion of the garretted lonely romantic, toiling away at indecipherable expressions of an inner soul—but we’re surrounded by real examples that made it all the way to the choo-choo stage. The galleries of Madame X-related works in the Met’s Sargent and Paris exhibition3 hint at what Stephanie Herdrich’s essay makes clear: Sargent’s painting was conceived in cahoots with Madame Gautreau, elaborately staged, and cunningly devised over months of work and hundreds of studies—more work than Sargent ever put into a portrait. That it comes off as fresh and spontaneous, with Sargent’s natural bravura in ample supply is the miracle of its execution. But don’t mistake vivacity for haste: this was a planned conception.
This collaboration between sitter and artist is the least of it: the Masterpiece has been understood as a studio project since the very beginning. When Lorenzo Ghiberti was hired to decorate the doors of the Florence Baptistery, the Arte di Calimala that commissioned him was so attentive to studio craft that they specified in the contract that Ghiberti had to handle certain details personally. (Arte di Calimala was a cloth-importing guild, and Ghiberti was hired in part on the basis of his apprenticeship to the goldsmith Bartolo di Michele: It’s guild-in, guild-out with these people.) That contract anticipated the reality: Ghiberti set up a studio with a dozen craftsmen banging away—the doors were a hit, arguably sparking the most important parts of the Italian Renaissance.4 For the studio assistants beneath Ghiberti, the Baptistry door job was work-for-hire, but most went on to nice careers, including a young Donatello. This atelier model was a norm for big public-facing works—what’s more public facing than a door?—and with success like this, it’s not surprising that it remained a dominant mode for centuries.
II. The Iowa Atelier.
“Art isn’t worth a damn if you can’t make these people around here appreciate it.”5
This was Grant Wood’s standard for success: a painting needs to meet its audience, and for the artists he was instructing in 1932 in a summer-time artists community in Stone City, Iowa, that meant the literal community of Stone City. Wood was on a hot streak: he painted American Gothic in 1930 and sold it to the Art Institute of Chicago later that same year, in the process becoming one of the most recognized painters in America. Stone City was painted in a depressed quarry town and became the literal poster for his summer school in 1932. The colony charged a dime for weekly open-houses on the grounds of the makeshift school, and the local community flocked to see what America’s most famous painter was up to; student paintings sold readily.
Sales weren’t the only barometer of success, as Lauren Kroiz notes in Cultivating Citizens: “Wood, however, saw commercial success not as a measure of capitalist profit but as an index of art’s social integration into the rural community”—the artist as a “healthy member of their community (instead of an oddity and a playboy) practicing a useful and productive profession.”6 Maybe Wood himself was a one-hit wonder, but getting the farmers of Jones County to snatch up student works meant something.
The summer school lasted two years before Wood found himself too busy to keep it up. He was commissioned to execute murals at Iowa State University, and he was shortly thereafter offered a teaching position at the University of Iowa. It wasn’t exactly the glare of the limelight that complicated Wood’s decade—overnight success got him these jobs—but refusing to sacrifice standards in his artwork, he found that he couldn’t work fast enough to meet the demand for new work. He turned to print-making, handing over the stones to master printmakers to pull the edition; he hired photographers to take reference photos for his paintings; and he instituted something like Ghiberti’s craft-guild system to complete his Iowa State murals.
None of these were novel in and of themselves. Artists from Thomas Eakins to Norman Rockwell had used photographs for reference; and studio assistants on masterpieces was a centuries-old practice. But for Wood, a closeted gay man scrambling to prove he was worthy of the massive reputation he had stumbled into, these were his undoing.
The scandal brewed when Time magazine sent a reporter to determine whether it was true: Wood was a charlatan, exploiting his unpaid students to trace photographs onto a mural for which he was privately paid, in university studios, etc.
Whatever the reporter found, the article never saw the light of day. But a reporter poking around found a slate of faculty members ready to trash talk their famous colleague, and now the university administration had to find a way to pacify an angry department. Wood’s use of student labor and cameras (true to some degree) ignited a long-simmering conflict in Iowa’s fine art department about how to teach art. The administration cleared him of wrong doing, pronouncing that he had “too much camera” in his painting,7 but Wood ultimately failed a higher standard than commercial success: Grant Wood couldn’t withstand peer review. (Kroiz, p. 63).
He’d sown the wind, and in 1940, he reaped the whirlwind. Following Time’s investigation and the university’s investigation, he took a leave of absence, ostensibly to work on his own artwork. He filed for divorce. Two years later, he died.8
There was one positive resolution to the student labor problem. His major foe in the faculty, Lester Longman, considered that it was inappropriate, maybe unethical, to pay students to work for a teacher from whom they were also receiving class credit. He urged a work around: a new MFA in studio painting that could be arranged as an atelier model, entirely under Wood’s control. While Wood’s own influence over the program waned, Longman’s MFA in studio art became the new standard credential for artists in the twentieth century.
III. Elided.
None of these other names make it to the wall text: not Madame Gautreau, famously known on the nameplate simply as “—” or “X”; not Wood’s students; not Michael Govan at LACMA or Lester Longman at Iowa. It’s a common elision, but there’s something about the museum experience that fails to capture this, what with splatters by Pollock cheek-and-jowl with mockups by Christo and Jean-Claude. One isn’t harder or better than the other, and when even the most elaborate, collaborative work comes off, it looks easy. It goes “choo-choo”—without even trying.
Thanks for reading. There’s another antagonist in this story, and it is to his part that we turn next week in Janson’s History of Art and its Discontents, in seven short days.
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
As quoted by Matthew Israel in A Year in the Artworld, 2020, p. 159.
Overview of the Pinault Collection here.
Paul Robert Walker makes the argument in The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World (2002), a diverting and insightful recounting of the details.
Grant Wood, as quoted in Lauren Kroiz, Cultivating Citizens: The Regionalist Work of Art in the New Deal Era, 2018, p. 43.
Kroiz, p. 44.
Kroiz, p. 73.
Kroiz, p. 58.