Dorar la píldora

"Las paredes hablan en Argentina gracias a los grafitis
Stephanie Garlow | GlobalPost

Buenos Aires se ha convertido en la meca de los grafiteros por su permisividad para pintar en cualquier sitio. Nacido de las protestas por el caos de su colapso económico de 2001, el arte callejero argentino se ha alejado ahora de la política para convertirse en toda una tendencia cultural. Aunque a veces, las paredes de Argentina siguen sirviendo para denunciar(...)"

Este es el título y encabezado de un artículo que publicó el diario digital lainformación.com. Describe de manera capciosa una Argentina que nació al lenguaje visual público a través de la producción graffitti, que a su vez, éste, nace durante la crisis social del 2001; y reduce la actividad de arte público del país a Buenos Aires, "vendiendo" a la "rarísima" ciudad porteña como heredera de una Barcelona en crisis  y como zona liberada a los graffitteros mundiales que son limitados por sus leyes restrictivas locales.

La autora del artículo por un lado trata de dar una descripción errónea de la historia del arte urbano y el graffitti en Argentina, sin aclarar que si se permite esta producción estética es por decisión política de un gobierno de derecha que, justamente, permite la realización de obras vaciadas de contenido, prohibiendo so pena de "contravención" toda manifestación con contenido político social. O sea, si a un vecino se le ocurre pintar en su barrio un mural, puede ser denunciado y penalizado por pintar sin la debida autorización; pero si lo que hace está en uno de los barrios "liberados" queda como un hecho artístico alternativo. Asimismo, si lo que hace en estas zonas "molesta" o "critica" el establishment, le sucede lo mismo que en su barrio. Con la excepción de que pintando la imagen de "Néstor" te exime de ser penalizado (pero esta es otra discusión).

En síntesis, Buenos Aires es una rara ciudad en la que la derecha mas inútil gano por segunda vez reafirmando la voluntad de que en la ciudad solo se hará un arte inútil.

¡¡Graffitteros del mundo veníos a esta ciudad!! Pero no hagan pendejadas. M.C.

More Walter H. Everett Illustrations Appear

Based on the surviving fraction of his work that he himself mostly destroyed, I judge Walter H. Everett to be one of the very finest painter-illustrators of 20th century. I last wrote about him here.

Until fairly recently little could be found on the Internet. But Leif Peng recently posted some Everetts that I hadn't encountered before. Peng found them on Greg Newbold's blog, and Newbold mentioned that he had been trading Everett scans with Kev Ferrara. The illustration at the top of this post is from the group of "new" Everetts just mentioned.

Clearly I've been well out of the Everett image loop, so I hope that Kev or Greg Newbold will drop a hint as to where those images were found. Regardless, the images solidify my initial judgment regarding Everett.

Henry C. Pitz in his book The Brandywine Tradition characterized Everett as follows:

Everett was cocky and confident, short but broad and deep-chested, with knotted arms like a wrestler. He had a strongly modeled, dark-skinned, rather handsome and pugnacious face that seemed to threaten bad temper. All this left one unprepared for the eventual discovery that behind this manner was a vein of poetry. Although he possessed all the outward signs of a brusque man of incessant action, he was in his heart a dreamer -- a daydreamer, incorrigibly lazy....

All his best pictures, even those of banal subject matter, had some flavor of an imagined world. His people were believable but not ordinary. Most pictures had a secret place; a tantalizing area where nothing was explicit, but where the eye was coaxed to muse and speculate. He preferred tonal subtleties, close values, edges that were lost and then found again....

Yet he was difficult, for he hated deadlines. Things were put off until the last moment or beyond it. He loved the long indolent hours of dreaming about pictures he would paint and when the day for delivery arrived he would go fishing to avoid the insistent telephone calls. Editors, wise in his ways, planned to spend the last twenty-four or forty-eight hours before deadline in his studio while he painted furiously and surely... For once galvanized into action, he was amazingly rapid and certain -- a true temperamental virtuoso.

Everett was a student of immensely influential Howard Pyle who is best known for illustrations featuring pirates and Revolutionary War themes.

So the illustration above from the May 1897 Ladies Home Journal strikes me as unusual. Moreover, compare it to the Everett below:

If the Pyle illustration had been painted around the time Everett was his student, I'd be wondering if the work was partly done by Everett, many of whose works are similar in spirit and also include blossoms. As things stand, it's possible that Everett was aware of that illustration even though he was 16 or 17 at the time it appeared in a women's magazine. Or perhaps Pyle has similar material to show his students while Everett was there.

(My source for the the Pyle publication date is Arpi Ermoyan's Famous American Illustrators, page 64.)