By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Woody Guthrie: ART WORKS Edited by Steven Brower and Nora guthrie Rizzoli. 300 pages. $45. In her management of the Woody Guthrie Archives, Nora Guthrie has seemed determined to make a Renaissance man out of her famous folksinger father. On paper, the projects that have come out of the archives during the last decade are often head-scratchers (Woody Guthrie's klezmer music?). But each one has proven not merely illuminating but also wholly inspiring in subtle, powerful ways. By lighting the shadowy corners of her dad's life, she not only broadens his legacy — she widens the scope of human possibility. Woody, it seems, could and did do anything, not because he had inherent skills but because he was possessed with an unshakable "Why not?" kind of confidence. Such examples fill us ordinary folks with hope and that, more than anything he ever specifically sang about, was Woody's persistent goal. The best thing to emerge from the archives is the handsome Woody Guthrie: Art Works (Rizzoli, $45). It's an exploration of Guthrie's visual art, most of which has been unpublished and unseen for decades. In light of his status as a musical icon ("This Land Is Your Land," etc.) and the fountainhead of Bob Dylan, this thorough visual examination is worthwhile because of the startling fact on which it's founded: Woody almost didn't become a songwriter at all. "Contrary to popular mythology, it was with paintbrushes in hand, not a guitar, that Woody Guthrie hit the road for California," Nora Guthrie writes in her introduction. She then recounts an episode from that first westward journey from Oklahoma that, she argues, decided exactly which legacy he would leave. Woody was hitchhiking with several other young men when the car ran out of gas. Woody headed into town to drum up food and gas money by painting signs, as he'd done for years in Pampa, Texas. He was successful, but when he went back to the car to retrieve his supplies — the guys, the car and his brushes were gone. That week, he discovered he could feed himself much better by playing old folk tunes for misty-eyed migrants. "Had fortune and destiny worked a slight shift of the hand," Nora writes, "it's very possible that Woody Guthrie might have become a visual artist. And this book might just as easily have been an episode uncovering the unknown songs of Woody Guthrie, rather than his unknown art." As such, this dignified romp through Woody's sketches, cartoons, paintings and illustrations (alas, the signs throughout the Southwest are long gone) is interesting to Guthrie acolytes and tone-deaf art lovers alike. Steven Brower's insightful — and, thankfully, concise — analysis of the works provides both historical and biographical context for each phase of Woody's expression, from the early line drawings (most of which are infinitely more inventive than, say, John Lennon's) to later abstract swaths and dabs (often smeared right over typed lyrics). Brower even notes the slight importance of Woody's visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1944 as contributing to his knowledge of art history. The day after that visit, Woody wrote home to his wife of the whirlwind experience and how it reminded him of his first passion (in a letter from my own research at the archives, not from the book): "We saw the original of the Guitar Player [by Picasso] you liked so well. ... It was in the same room as Van Gogh, Cezanne, and some others. I always feel like a painter when I come out of a gallery. When I'm inside one, I feel like a sniffing dog." Aside from the esthetic of its subject, the book itself is beautiful. The reproductions are excellent — worthy of note, given that most of these "works" are doodles from daily calendar books and personal journals (one of Woody's pocket notebooks is cleverly re-created, actual size, in the back pages) — and the design is clever. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World The first words displayed at the trailhead of "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie," the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibit on the Oklahoman songwriter's life and work, are, "I don't know how far I'm going to have to go to see my own self or to hear my own voice." In Guthrie's life, which ended in 1967 from complication's of Huntington's disease, that route was a long one. Guthrie was a virtual vagabond, criss-crossing the country in search of that voice — an echo of his own, a metaphor of the American commoner — and transcribing that voice into thousands of songs, some of which made him famous. In the exhibit, fortunately, the curious have a shorter road to travel, simply the length of one small showroom in which is neatly encapsulated the life of one of America's greatest artists. I will call him an artist, too, instead of the more specific word by which he is usually referred — songwriter. "This Land Is Your Land" is the physical history of an artist, a novelist, a painter, a tunesmith and a philosopher (which has a substantial footing in art, surely). If this exhibit does nothing else, it broadens our understanding of Guthrie, not only of his biographical details and overall social significance but of his creative mind and the multitudes of outlets he found for his ideas -- beyond words. In addition to the requisite manuscripts, the exhibit hall is a riot of scrawls, photos, sketches, artifacts, drawings and paintings. What's astonishing — and empowering -- is the unity of expression throughout every medium. It's all the same voice, speaking different languages. The unifying text in the display is Guthrie's landmark poem, "Voice," from which those initial lines come from. It's a poem in which Guthrie explores America's cultural diversity and lays claim to the unspoken threads tying together our expression. At the end of the poem, it boils down to a more nebulous sensory assurance — the "voice" has become a "feeling." The Smithsonian show, designed by Jim Simms, re-creates that sense of commonality in all the blurts of Guthrie's artistic voice. Even on opening day, visitors voiced their surprise at the volume of imagery in the show. They had come to see the works of an old-timey wordsmith — and there are many examples of his writing — and were confronted with the less frequently discussed and surprisingly colorful visual aspect of Guthrie's expression. Watching his visual art develop as one winds through the snaking canyons of the display is interesting, too. We start with the simple, comic cartoon "Boom Town," a pen-and-ink depiction of rollicking Okemah, the central Oklahoma oil boom town where Guthrie grew up. Next, we move with Guthrie to Pampa, Texas, where his first solitary wages were earned as a sign painter. On display in the exhibit is Guthrie's 1937 oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln, a simple copy of a picture but one that already illustrates a distinct style — bold curves and an overtly geometric understanding of form. Jump to 1942 — another line drawing, cartoonish, of an Okie grabbing the rails of a passing truck, entitled "Move." That same year, though, Guthrie drew "Rounded Up in Tracy, California," a depiction of Okies fleeing bullish cops in the misadvertised "garden of Eden." The clear, simple lines of the police car in the background give way to a more fluid foreground — a nebulous crowd dominated by one man silhouetted in the police headlights, the only details being the buttons and collar of his work shirt and his white, angelic hands. From this point on, the crisp lines of Guthrie's drawings bleed into wider, bolder strokes of ink and paint, and the forms of his subjects relax into more nebulous, ghostly figures. "Starvation Disease," undated, features a face — barely — in muted watercolors and only three lines of facial features to communicate an oceanic depth of melancholy. Along one wall is a series of half a dozen prints from April 1946, each panel a depiction of a woman from behind in different modes of physical labor. She is faceless each time, allowing the viewer to more easily enter the scene and feel her weary but unyielding determination. "Hootenanny," from the same month, is a virtual stick figure, a curly-headed guitar player assembled completely from lines and circles. It looks like the kind of image that accompanied ancient Oriental calligraphy — few strokes, but big, sweeping ones — or the work of a more carefree (or harried) Leroy Neiman. "Figures in Embrace" is a swirl of only 17 strokes, but they're in there, that couple -- hugging, maybe even dancing. It's no coincidence that Guthrie's visual art became more pliable — and more prolific — as he grew older. The immovable convictions of his younger days and older songs softened in a broader understanding of the world. More significantly, the onset of Huntington's disease began making detail work more difficult. With shaky hands, he could more easily sweep a fat brush across a large sketch pad than trace the intricate lines of a wooden Okemah sidewalk with a fine-pointed pen. It's also no coincidence that the panel in this exhibition depicting Guthrie's deteriorated state prior to entering the hospital in the early '50s returns again to the words of "Voice." Over an enlarged photo of a bedraggled, bearded, hollow-eyed Guthrie playing guitar in New York's Washington Square Park, we read, "And I thought as I saw a drunken streetwalking man mutter and spit and curse into the wind out of the cafe's plate glass, that maybe, if I looked close enough, I might hear some more of my voice." At this stage, Guthrie was that drunken streetwalking man, finishing his interminable expedition for that common sound, that absolute feeling, that universal voice. It's too bad that a couple of things inhibit our reception of Guthrie's voice throughout the exhibit. A show that's designed to be displayed in 3,400 square feet has been crammed into about 1,300. In several places, the lighting has all the candlepower of a dashboard, which makes reading Guthrie's all-important words especially trying. Noisy humidifiers rage throughout the tour, too, drowning out many of the speakers broadcasting various snippets of Guthrie's singing and speaking voice. It's annoying, but Guthrie's signal still gets through. The show also features numerous interesting tidbits beyond the visual aspect focused here: these include his copy of Omar Khayyam's "Rubaiyat," several of Guthrie's notebooks and datebooks open to interesting pages, his shipboard fiddle (which also had carved upon it the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists"), a few watermark original song lyrics, one of his business cards from KFVD in Los Angeles, his address book (open to Pete Seeger's address and phone number in Greenwich Village) and the "yes" and "no" cards with which he communicated in the hospital once his voice was gone. At the end of the show, we are left with the ultimate Guthrie send-off. From his bed in the Brooklyn State Hospital, Guthrie scrawled with a brush the chorus of his signature tune, "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You." Each panel advances the line a few words, with a little doodle in that broad-brush style to accompany it. It's the convergence of his languages, visual and written expressions coming together in a more refined voice, a voice still echoing from the redwood forests to the Gulfstream waters. The exhibit continues at the Oklahoma Museum of History, 2100 N. Lincoln Boulevard in Oklahoma City, near the state Capitol. For information, call (405) 522-5248. |
Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
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