Alec Soth "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and Minnesota Marine Art Museum

"Sleeping by the Mississippi" is an exhibition of about 15 large pictures made by Minneapolis-based photographer, Alec Soth.  Soth uses a large format camera to make his images.  He works effectively in several styles:  many of his picture are full-frontal confrontations with eccentric people -- in this vein, his work looks like Diane Arbus; but Soth also has an excellent eye for landscapes and color-saturated interiors making bright, disturbing pictures that show the influence of William Eggleston.  The landscapes and the interiors, generally garishly decorated, are wonderful, if always seeming a bit derivative.  Those pictures don't raise the moral conundrums implicit in Soth's portrait photographs.  For some reasons these images make me a bit queasy -- I'm not sure to what extent Soth is patronizing or exploiting the subjects of these photographs.  He is a good-looking, youthful-seeming man, undoubtedly born to the modest privileges of White middle or upper class (he attended Sarah Lawrence) and one wonders a bit about the exchange of power on display in these portraits.  Soth gets rich and famous and inspires rapturous reviews and receives funding from State arts organizations as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship; but he finds his subjects poor, disenfranchised and half crazy and he leaves them that way as well.  Two photographs exemplify the uneasy transaction between cameraman and his subjects.  In one picture, we see a very handsome, red-headed girl -- she is startlingly pale and throws her head back like a pre-Raphaelite Madonna or martyr; there is a big soot cross on her forehead.  The caption to the picture tells us that the woman, someone living on the streets in Louisiana, made the cross on her forehead for Ash Wednesday with soot from a cigarette that she had just smoked.  The girl's eyes have a dull, medicated look.  Of course, we don't know what she really looks like -- we don't know what the other images of her taken by Soth show.  He has instead opted for to print a four-foot by four-foot picture in which the woman is posed as a preternaturally light-skinned red-haired saint  shown against a nondescript, glowing void-- in other words, he makes her into something unwordly.  But I wonder if this is exactly fair -- and, if the intent is to show the woman as a sort Dante Gabriel Rossetti saint, then, why tell us that she's not really a believer and has marked herself with soot from her cigarette?.  Did she do this herself?  Why? Or did Soth encourage her make the mark on her forehead?  An aggressive image of a mother and daughter said to be taken in Dubuque, Iowa is similarly troubling.  The two women are reasonably attractive and Soth has posed them with their long, naked legs crossed and touching one another -- even though everyone is decent it remains a highly sexualized photograph.  Much of the image is occupied by the women's bare legs -- they have almost identical and hardened-looking faces under identical canopies of black hair and their little heads appear as an after-thought:  the big legs make them look like the strutting stylized harlots in some of Steinberg's  sketches.  (The picture is also similar to a obscene picture of a mother and daughter in the collection of John Waters illustrated in his book, Art, a Sex Book.)  Again, the picture seems somehow condescending and unduly harsh and confrontational -- the clinical approach to these women seems to dehumanize them and the label which indicates something like the daughter wants to go into "nursing" but the mother "has no dreams left anymore" doesn't really help things.  With these reservations, moral but not  necessarily esthetic, the show is excellent.  Soth has some spooky still lives, a mattress drowned in a slough and a chain gang working the absolutely flat and barren cotton fields near Angola Prison in Louisiana.  One image is particularly both memorable and strangely appalling -- it's a photograph of Charles Lindbergh's cot on the front porch of his parents' home near Little Falls, the old mansion only a stone's throw from the Mississippi River.  (Indeed, I suspect that this strangely indelible picture gives the exhibition and the book from which it is drawn its name).  I saw this cot about 15 years ago when I took a tour of the Lindbergh house and I was also struck by the abject aspect of that little bachelor bed on the house's unheated porch.  Lindbergh's childhood seems to have been unhappy and his parents were miserable in their marriage -- misery that seems to have been inherited by Charley and imported into his own marriage with Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  The impression that I had was that Lindbergh fled the perpetual strife in the home by sleeping on the porch -- maybe, this impression is wrong, but the little cot with its white blankets and sheets, the refuge of the hapless teenage boy who was to become the most famous person in the world, is strangely mournful, dejected, even, pathetic.  Soth has a brilliant eye -- he  has caught the uncanny atmosphere around the bed on the porch and made a picture with real presence which somehow communicates this sense to the viewer.

It costs seven dollars to get into the Minnesota Museum of Marine Art and the admission is a real bargain. From the outside, the gallery looks a bit like a nautical-themed restaurant near an airport or the outskirts of a mall, something like a larger and more elegant Red Lobster.  But, in fact, the interior consists of five large exhibition rooms, well-lit by skylights, and filled with beautiful and interesting things.  Two of the exhibition spaces were occupied by temporary shows -- the Soth photographs and twenty canvases by Dutch artist, Maarten Platje.  Three of the galleries display paintings from the permanent collection.  Ostensibly all of these paintings are thematically related to water -- oceans, lakes, and rivers.  The collector, Bob Kierlin one of the founders of Fastenal, however, seems to have purchased noteworthy works on the basis of their availability and about a quarter of the pictures, although intrinsically interesting, have little or nothing to do with the aquatic theme.  (For instance, there's a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, a bit sketchy and, perhaps, incomplete, that shows a young man and what seems to be a Labrador retriever.  One might interpret the young man as wearing a sailor's suit and, of course, Labradors are bred to swim -- but I don't recall any water being in sight in the picture.  Similarly, the museum owns a reasonably good Millet -- the artist's trademark field workers are stooping to the harvest, but the image is mostly dusty-looking and dry.)  The museum is small, but has a plenty of luminaries on its walls -- Picasso, a bright expressionist landscape by Max Beckmann, all the Impressionists, and, even, a half-scale, but still impressive "Washington crossing the Delaware", kitsch but inspired kitsch.  The recent paintings in the collection are mostly commissions for the museum:  a 2012 canvas of  New York's East River waterfront circa about 1632 done in a limpid style that combines Luminist influence and American primitive folk painting (Tarantillo), a blue and foamy Marteen Platje painting of a mighty 19th century war ship sailing the high seas, and various other commissions that seem to have been made to document the appearance of the rigging and other accoutrements of martial "Tall ships" -- these things are picturesque, particularly in the way that the artists have managed the choppy, turbulent seas, but, otherwise dull, unless you are a specialist in nautical history -- and, apparently, there are enough Master and Commander fans in the world, enough, it seems, to support an entire accredited academy, the American Society of Marine Artists.  Otherwise, the most recent paintings in the collection are a Marsden Hartley landscape that looks like a bleeding wound, a painting of dunes by Georgia O'Keefe, and some snazzy if light-weight, Stewart Davis paintings.  The strength of the collection is its array of 19th century Luminists on display -- there is a gorgeous, sultry-looking canvas by an artist named Alfred Bricher showing a solitary grain elevator perched next to the still and vacant expanse of the Mississippi River at Dubuque and two heroically sized paintings by Martin John Heade, a botanically exact wall-sized canvas called "View from Fern Walk, Florida" showing a jungle that would have delighted Douanier Rousseau and the spectacular pink flamingo-colored "Great Florida Sunset", an explosion of neon color that has to be seen to be believed.  (There are many other fine Luminist works in the collection including paintings by Fitz Henry Lane and Francis Silva).  The Hudson River School is well-represented, particularly in a series of paintings by various artists that show Indian Summer, the trees all gone yellow and brown and a pale golden haze softening all edges and forms.  The museum has a good Constable, a painting by Turner, a typically windy and silver-toned Corot, some vigorously painted horseman by Degas, and a dark and green-shadowed Courbet from 1864 showing a glimmer of limestone cliffs around a spring -- "The Source of the Lison."  Just about every painting displayed as part of the permanent collection is well worth your attention.  Even the duds and misfires have their pleasures:  one painting ("On the Beach, Julius LeBlanc Steward 1880) showing a bourgeois family stiffly enjoying a seaside beach is noteworthy for the almost surrealist hideousness of the people depicted -- the painter was inept and couldn't managing foreshortening with the effect that some of the portraits are like images of pale shrunken heads.  It's an awful painting but also a genuine curiosity.

When I toured the museum, the other traveling show featured about 20 window-sized paintings by Marteen Platje showing "United States Naval battles during the first 20 years of the 19th century."  Plaatje was a sailor with the Royal Netherlands Navy and his pictures are microscopically detailed.  He seems to have researched the precise rigging, caliber of the cannons, the weather conditions at the time of the encounter, and details relating to the location of rocks, shrubs, and trees on the shoreline if the affray took place near land.  The vessels swarm with tiny, realistically depicted figure -- there are explosions and haze of drifting smoke, timbers floating in the foaming seas, little life-boats, flags unfurled and so on.  The fantastic detail lavished on all details is surreal and the pictures can best be described as photo-realist.  Plaatje works fast -- I think all of these impressive canvases were made in 2016 to 2018.  The pictures resemble some sort of conceptual art joke -- they are pretty much devoid of interest, all look more or less alike, and, so, pedantically painted that one suspects that there is some kind deceitful, even, malign program underlying these things.  But this would be to give the painter and his paintings too much credit -- there is apparently a big market for hyper-realistic depictions of old-time sea-battles and I suspect Plaatje had these paintings sold to someone or some several before the pigments were even dry

A bonus of going to the museum on Sunday morning is that you might encounter Mr. Kierlin himself patrolling his galleries.  On both occasions when I was in the museum, he was on hand to interact with visitors and show his favorite pictures to them.