A dream of the ‘Three Graces’ taught me about the power of art — and the golden apples of democracy
The golden apples of democracy confer knowledge and a kind of civic immortality to our endeavors, writes our columnist. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
When’s the last time you stood transfixed by art?
The experience commonly happens in art museums, of which we have a few here in the populous eastern third of Kansas. My favorite painting within a day’s drive is “The Homesteader” by N.C. Wyeth, at the Wichita Art Museum. Wyeth’s work was created in 1930 as an illustration for a magazine short story, but it transcends the forgettable tale it accompanied.
I can’t visit the Wichita museum without becoming lost in the Wyeth painting. Perhaps it’s the struggle of the young farm woman, the cottonwood stave beside her, the fresh grave at her feet. The wind whips her auburn hair, the hill is green with new grass, the stave has sprouted branches, and the blue prairie sky arches above her.
Each time, I am not only transfixed by the painting but somehow transformed. The experience is something like the epiphany portrayed in John Hughes’ “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off,” in which Cameron is overwhelmed by introspection while viewing, at the Chicago Art Museum, Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting of a Sunday in a park. I’m no art critic, so you’ll have to excuse my reliance on 1980s pop culture as a touchstone.
It’s been too long since I was captured by the Wyeth painting — or any painting.
The past year has been so filled with political and cultural chaos that it seems like nobody has the attention to spare for art in real life. The last month has been even worse, as a new American war in the Middle East and the skyrocketing price of gasoline and just about everything else have kept our eyes locked to our screens.
We all need art in our lives, and unlike sports stadiums, it’s a sound investment. The federal government spends just a fraction of a percent of its budgets on the National Endowment for the Arts, but the organization and its state equivalents are easy targets for politicians wishing to make populist hay. The arts, and the humanities in general, have been under attack for decades, but the battle has become pitched during the second term of the Trump administration.
The arts have had it tough in Kansas since about forever.
Kansans sometimes complain that artists aren’t portraying the state positively enough (see John Steuart Curry, below) and majority politicians often mark for extermination state funding for the arts (see Sam Brownback or the Kansas Senate). The argument is that the private sector, and not the government, should be responsible for funding. But art is too important to be left to corporate interests. Art is a civic good that fosters creativity, encourages community, and advances democracy.
What I’m seeing now is something different. We’re not just fighting a culture war over public funding but also a war within ourselves for the will to seek art amid the chaos. Among the things we’ve collectively lost in this period of political chaos is not just the time but the attention required to cultivate that bit of our souls that responds to art.
It’s a part of our humanity that is being dampened.
For me, this need for art manifested itself in a strange way the other night.
I was wracked by the damage done to a painting in a dream.
The dream had this ridiculous backstory, in which I was being forced to pack up my personal belongings in my office in some institutional setting. The building didn’t resemble anything exactly, but was part school and part museum, and while I tried to gather my things in cardboard boxes a steady torrent of party-goers kept interfering. They were like something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. You know, dressed to the nines, smoking cigarettes, and sucking down champagne from crystal flutes. The people were utterly absorbed in their revelry and gave not a damn about my personal troubles. The only time any of them spoke to me was when one young woman with bobbed hair came to me and said she had spilled some wine on “that painting.”
What painting?
“You know,” she said. “The Raphael. You know, the only one in Kansas.”
I wasn’t aware of any Raphaels in Kansas. What’s it called?
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, turning back to her drink. “It’s No. 303. Go look for yourself.”
So I went down the hall and stared at the painting.
I recognized it. It’s a painting in the real world, but in my dream I didn’t know what it was called.
The painting depicts three women, nude or nearly so, with hands intertwined on shoulders, and each holding an apple in her other hand. They appear to be on an earthy hilltop. The sky above them and the hills in the distance are a washed-out blue. The women might be sisters and their braided hair is auburn.
The painting is “The Three Graces,” one of Raphael’s best-known works, from about 1503. I had to look that up. Their names are Aglaea, Euphrosyne and Thalia.
But in my dream, splashed across the bottom third of the painting, was a red stain. It was still wet, and the ankles and feet of the Graces were softening and running into the dirt. I wanted to stop the damage, but I dared not touch the painting.
Alarmed, I ran to the artistic administrator in his cubicle on the other side of the building. I blurted out that something had to be done to stop the damage. The administrator, a man in dark slacks and a narrow tie, was unmoved and told me everything would be all right.
Some of the dream was immediately understandable — yes, I had been among 33 professors, mostly from the humanities, who were purged from a state university a few years back. Other things revealed themselves with study. I had never given much thought to Raphael’s work, being bored with his representations of cherubs and idealized Renaissance beauty, but his “Graces” are of a different sort.
In mythology, the Graces are daughters of Zeus and in general represent virtue and purity. But like many goddess figures, they serve different functions in different contexts, and they are found in many Greek and Roman stories. Collectively known as the Charities, their primary role is to attend the other gods, as messengers or queens or sometimes guardians. They have inspired artists for centuries.
But Raphael chose to give his Graces apples, a reference to the golden apples of classical mythology, which grant knowledge or immortality. There’s also a resonance with the fruit of the Biblical tree of knowledge and the loss of Paradise. Of course my subconscious would choose a work that included knowledge, immortality and original sin.
The Raphael painting and the Wyeth have the same weird flatness and a distortion of earth and sky as if peering at the world through a fisheye lens. The careless damage to the painting, and my panic over whether it could be repaired, almost certainly represents my anxiety about current events, and perhaps some guilt.
The rest of the dream? Who knows.
Obviously, I wasn’t getting enough art in real life, so my dreams manufactured it. No art takes place in a vacuum, so my mind also spun a weird narrative for context.
There hasn’t been a lot of Kansas art I like, as much of what is popular tends to be a kind of booster prairie pastoral. If that’s your kind of stuff, no problem, whatever helps you sleep.
You can’t talk about art in the Sunflower State without first acknowledging the Indigenous peoples who made the rock art and geoglyphs. The mystery of who made them just adds to their appeal.
In the 165 years since statehood, we’ve had several distinct movements and a few mavericks. Among the mavericks are folk art iconoclasts like Samuel P. Dinsmoor, who in 1907 built a “log cabin” made of limestone and a history of the world in concrete at tiny Lucas. He called it “The Garden of Eden” and it’s long been a famous Kansas tourist attraction, with Dinsmoor himself — in his glass-lidded coffin — becoming part of the show.
Among the movements there were the Prairie Printmakers, which began in 1904 when Carl Smalley began selling art from his father’s seed business at McPherson. Smalley would buy art from Kansas City and St. Louis and bring it back home to sell to the farmers. He also formed a collective of regional artists, including Birger Sandzén, a Swedish-American lithographer and painter who specialized in landscapes. In 2018, the Salina Journal published a good piece on how the residents of McPherson were estimated, a century ago, to have “more art per capita than anywhere else in the world.”
No artist is more connected to Kansas history and politics than John Steuart Curry, who produced murals for the Capitol, including one featuring a larger-than-life John Brown for a 1942 panel, “Tragic Prelude.” That image of Brown is now a state icon, but at the time the state lawmakers were so unhappy with his work for failing to be boosterish enough that they took a vote to keep it from being displayed.
Another one of the mavericks was Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton, who at 68 began producing whimsical self-portraits with plenty of social commentary. She was famous until the day she died, in 1993, at age 85. I have grown to like her stuff more now than I did then.
The story of art in Kansas is not a history, but an unfolding drama. New chapters are written every year as new art fills exhibitions like the current one at the Beach Museum at Kansas State University. But the attention demanded of us to survive the political windstorm around us diminishes our ability to engage.
Consequently, we search our screens for clues to how it’s all going to turn out. We may also protest, if we have the time and the health, or engage in other forms of activism. We make livings, we raise families, we go about our never-ending chores and pay never-ending bills.
Standing in front of a painting?
Few of us have the capacity for that anymore.
But we should make time for it.
Whether you like Wyeth or Frederic Remington, or the western sunsets painted by the old cowgirl at the end of your block, take the time to stand in person in front of some art. I like the Wichita Art Museum, but there are other good museums and arts centers scattered across the state. I’ve talked about paintings here because my dream was about a painting, but there are artists in other mediums who deserve your attention — sculptors and photographers and lithographers and potters.
Go find them.
Look at Lindsborg, Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, and the NOTO Arts and Entertainment District in Topeka. These are among the “artistic havens” described by the Kansas Department of Commerce. There are others, perhaps even on the main street in your home town.
My subconscious gave me Raphael’s “Three Graces” because I hadn’t fed that part of my soul in a while. The Graces also have become a meme, reproduced in Instagram photo shoots and Etsy brooches and much more daring modern art, as my wife Kim points out. They aren’t always naked, and the Nelson-Atkins at Kansas City, Missouri, has the 1535 Lucas Cranach the Elder interpretation, which is more sexual than Raphael’s.
But as I have sat thinking about it for the time it took me to write this column — longer than it should have taken, as usual — it has occurred to me the painting might also represent the value of art to civic life. Abraham Lincoln once described the Declaration of Independence, in a note to himself before his famous speech at Gettysburg, as an “apple of gold.” The Declaration, along with other golden apples of democracy, including the Bill of Rights, confer knowledge and a kind of civic immortality to our endeavors. Some also carry the bruise of the original American sin of slavery, something that has not yet fully healed.
I have an evolving sense of what I’ve come to think of as the civic sacred, those public places that allow us a shared experience of America. I tend to think of the civic sacred on Memorial Day or when I’m at federal courthouses on journalistic business or when visiting monuments of special gravity, especially the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. To that list I now add publicly funded institutions like the Wichita Art Museum.
This turbulent time of transition will end.
Should democracy survive, it will require us to direct our attention to how we express our Americanism. We should plan now for a reinvigoration of our sacred civic places. For too long we’ve been exhausted by the tyranny of events, pummeled by the political, and sickened by the self-aggrandizement of national leaders. Nothing will remove the stain that has damaged this age of American history, but we can prepare for a restoration.
If Democracy has Graces, their names are Art, Compassion and Humility.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.