The Two Mona Lisas

This morning I spent some time looking at the website of The Mona Lisa Foundation, proponents of the "Earlier Mona Lisa" theory. I have never thought much of the Mona Lisa as a painting, but there are features to this thing that I found interesting enough to think a little about and to have an uneducated opinion about.  Here are the two Mona Lisas:

 

These are just details of the face - there is a lot more to each picture that bears looking into. The assertion of The Mona Lisa Foundation is that the picture on the left was painted by Leonardo eleven years earlier than the picture on the right, and that he painted both pictures.  They seem to have a lot of evidence which they say supports this; far more than I care to dig through.  That is why my opinion must remain uneducated.  However I live in the Kooks Museum and our shelves are full of books by people with something to prove and the one thing they all have in common is that whatever it is they have to prove, whether it is perfectly sensible or completely crazy, they all prove it, at least to their own satisfaction. I am also a painter and I have found that people who set out to prove things with lots of supporting evidence usually think in a very different way from the way a painter thinks, as I have pointed out in the past.

Here is what my opinion is. It is my opinion that this is not necessarily a person painted by same artist eleven years apart.  One painting is copied from the other painting.  I am an artist and I am going to paint the same person eleven years after I first painted her.  I have painted a really good portrait of a cute little gal and eleven years later I say I want to paint you again as a kind of stodgy matron only everything else will be EXACTLY the same except for the background. I will even give you the same hands and not paint the hands you have now which are eleven years older. And she and her husband are going to say okay that sounds good.  What gets me is the line of her hair on the left side.  I might be able to cajole a woman into wearing the same costume and same hairstyle and into striking the same pose eleven years later - which itself does not make much sense except in a 'conceptual art' context which I don't think even existed then - but her hair is not going to do the exact same thing as it did eleven years before.  It isn't even going to be the same hair.  Her hands are not going to be in exactly the same position, the folds in the sleeves are not going to be exactly the same.  Or maybe I would just have a couple of assistants copy the previous painting and I will just step in and do the face and make her look kind of flabby and grumpy compared to the peppy little doll in the old painting.  Then I have to make sure they don't see the first painting so they don't go what the hell you made her look like her own mom, that's not what we are paying you for.

One of those pictures is copied from the other one, so side by side comparisons of the proportions of the two paintings don't prove anything because all you need to do is use any one of three simple mechanical devices to copy the forms and proportions exactly, which any apprentice could do.  They both seem to be painted with a great degree of skill and they both look pretty old.  As I said I have never been able to grasp the romantic ideal of the Mona Lisa so I don't really get what a great painting it is, but it seems to be well executed.  Both of them.  I am not qualified to make any statements on how much of Leonardo's paintings were done by assistants, how often he used what kind of pigment on what kind of board or canvas, etc. but I will tell you this as an artist - I am not the only person on earth who has looked at that painting and said, "That would be a pretty good picture if you fixed up her face a little, because frankly she is not that great looking a gal."  I think that is what we have got here.   But what do I know.

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Brief and Anonymous

Film careers for a woman of color in the mid-20th century were often brief and anonymous.  For a pretty young woman like Anita Turner, it may be that her film career ended when she entered what was then considered a woman's "real" career - marriage.  In any case, she was only in three movies, and we see her here as Esther in the Technicolor logging melodrama, River Woman (1948). 

In the late 1940s and into the '50s a sassy maid was rare, but like many maids Esther is slightly subversive, an encourager of forbidden romance, and sometimes bearer of startling news.

The name of the tall, slim young woman who played Ellen, the maid in The Moth (1934), is unknown.  The protagonist Diane, played by Sally O'Neil, is rebellious and unconventional, and she treats Ellen more as a friend and confidante than a servant, and even gives her money to help Ellen's needy family members.

It should be noted that, while white people sometimes touch a maid in a friendly or affectionate manner, a maid rarely, if ever, forgets her station. She touches white persons only when dressing or assisting them. 

67th and Foster

When we moved into this part of Southeast Portland umpteen years ago the corner of 67th and Foster Road, like most of the surrounding area, was a bit outdated.  On the southeast corner was a Keinow's Market, the Phoenix Pharmacy and a laundromat.  The Keinow's was the neighborhood market and you could actually see your neighbors there.  There was an old fashioned American style bakery on the premises and it was great to have a place within walking distance to get a fresh-baked cherry danish.  On other corners of the intersection were a furniture store and the old Rexall Drugstore building, come down in the world to become called Allen Video, really sort of a junk store selling VHS tapes and used telephones - the kind with a wire you plugged into the wall.  Its distinctive feature was the one-armed robot gorilla in overalls eternally pivoting and waving out front.  It was great to be able to tell people to "go out Foster until you see the one armed robot gorilla in overalls."  I went through my old photos a few weeks ago and found to my dismay I somehow neglected to take a single picture of the one armed robot gorilla in overalls.  Eventually it lost even that one arm and its ability to pivot, but a gorilla in overalls is still a great landmark.  At last it too went the way of the landline telephone, and Allen Video itself - gone in the mists of memory.

It is the opposite corner of which I wish to write today, of the Kienow's Market and Phoenix Pharmacy.  It was saddening to have the Kienow's close, for me mostly because of the bakery.  It was soon replaced by a Dollar Tree store, a national chain purveying shoddy goods for the lowest price.  Saddening, too, was the fact that the Phoenix Pharmacy, rather than promoting its unique services - pharmacy, post office, newsstand, etc., tried to compete with the Dollar Tree on its own turf, bringing in markdown items and shoddy goods of its own.  Of course it was doomed to fail, and be replaced by a store which raised our hopes but shortly dashed them in the manner I shall soon describe.  Behold the Save-A-Lot.

We walked over one Saturday afternoon to attend the gala grand opening of the Save-A-Lot.  There was a live band inside playing sixties hits, and out on the corner a union protest with a huge banner proclaiming the unfairness of the corporation.  We went in with fond memories of Kienow's and hopes for a neighborhood grocery store to take its place, but found instead a strange alternate universe.  The Savings of Save-A-Lot apparently came from carrying its own proprietary brands, found nowhere else.  Everything had strange names like Mrs. Freshly's and Bubba Cola, Bramley's and Coburn Farms.  Everything also had a kind of cheapness to it which did not inspire confidence.  The problem with shopping at Save-A-Lot was that it made me feel POOR.  It was a store for poor people and when I stepped through that door into the bleak interior and wandered the aisles looking at hillbilly food, I felt poor too.  When I go into the Dollar Tree to buy disposable razors I feel like I am entering the normal world.  When I went into the Save-A-Lot I was entering the hillbilly world, the po' folks universe, the place a cut below WalMart.  A flimsy, cheap-jack bargain world of unappealing crap - rubbery cinnamon buns, off brand soda, and ten pound bags of frozen fish sticks.

Note that I have been writing of Save-A-Lot in the past tense.  I walked over to the Dollar Tree yesterday to get another pack of ten Persona disposable razors to keep my George Brent mustache trim and fit - not because I really needed them but just to get out of the damn house and out into the even more damned blinding glare of hideous late summer sun.  Since I was there I thought I would go in and see if there was even one single thing in the Save-A-Lot I could possibly buy.  I found it semi-chaotic and nearly empty of products as it was in the process of closing, selling off the nearly inedible cheap grub for even more deeply discounted prices.  The type of folks who shopped there found it much to their liking and were resting armloads of bargain semi-foods upon their distended abdomens preparatory to dumping it into the cart.  I actually saw that.  The store manager seemed to be having quite a time, shouting almost continuously about the great deals to be had on that repulsive imitation nutriment.  I did a little search when I got home and found a statement from a corporate spokesperson saying their intention in closing 60 Save-A-Lot, Albertsons, and Acme stores was to cut costs and increase stockholder dividends.  Not to improve the company or provide better service; certainly not to sell better products.  It was truly a fitting culmination to my Save-A-Lot experience.

I rode over today and took a couple of pictures with my crummiest camera, also getting a few shots of this car entirely filled with crap except for a small space for the driver:

They were probably stocking up on pudding cups, canned sausages, barbecue flavor potato chips, and other items appropriate for ingestion while sitting in an automobile entirely filled with useless junk. What will become of the place is unknown - the laundromat was already closed, but there was no sign of the Dollar Tree closing unless they are keeping it a secret until the last minute.  Maybe instead of trying to peddle more cheap crap to poor people, trying to get a dollar each from a hundred people, somebody ought to try selling something good and get ten dollars from twenty people instead.  The next few years hold hints of vague promise for 67th and Foster, but we shall see.

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Katherine Jackson

 Katherine Jackson was only in two movies, and she played Glory Bell the maid in the nautical adventure Mutiny Ahead (1935). Here she is looking skeptically upon the advances of Sassafrass the cook, played by Ray Cook with his distinctively toothy grin.

 Glory Bell is a sassy maid, and Miss Jackson has a bright personality that adds a lot to the proceedings.  The film treats both of them pretty well with Sass cleaning out the entire crew with his extensive knowledge of those rolling bones, and Glory Bell getting the last word with everyone.