Hunter Biden, artist of modern life

The Spectator World Edition, October 2021

Hunter Biden, artist of modern life

Without vision, training or talent, Hunter Biden deigns to glue his crippling jewels onto the back of our society

Why do we keep hearing about Hunter Biden? Why is this disgraced political son and aspiring amateur pornographer now making art? Why must we even contemplate his creations? The reason is that much of our culture — at least its sanctioned, outward-facing elements — now operates ‘against nature’. I refer to that 1884 novel by the Symbolist author Joris-Karl Huysmans. À Rebours, known in English as Against Nature, is the book in which French literature dispensed with naturalism and its common-man struggles, and instead gave voice to the rot of the elite.

Before we dwell on Biden fils, let us briefly revisit Jean des Esseintes, the main character of Against Nature. He is the withered end of a once noble family. ‘Tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future’, des Esseintes retreats from Paris to live a life of aesthetic seclusion. He works best at doing little. He dabbles in perfumes. He grows poisonous flowers. He decorates the shell of a tortoise with so many jewels that the weight kills the animal. All the while, ‘it became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude.’

It’s a Huysmans world out there. Des Esseintes would be right at home in this present moment. Our culture chastises the commoners, but it champions the decadence of our elites. For us, of course, aristocracy means a caste of celebrity, money and power. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi: what is permitted for Jupiter is not allowed for the ox. The noisomeness of the rot serves to remind the rest of us of what we cannot do.

That is precisely why we never stop hearing of Hunter Biden. The president’s 51-year-old son has been fulsome in his decrepitude and finds ever more depraved ways to express it. I cannot claim to have made a study of his decadence, but from what I gather, he luxuriates in foreign-influence money, through which he hires prostitutes, with whom he freebases cocaine in orgies, in which he records himself and them, whereupon he misplaces the files. And that’s just on Monday. The decadence of such a life would put des Esseintes to shame.

I would not mention such peccadilloes were they not central to this story and how Biden chooses to present himself to the world. Biden is an exhibitionist of his own wickedness. For oversharing his debasement, he is rewarded with glossy profiles, a Simon & Schuster book deal memorializing his decay, all that foreign-influence money, and the backing of those institutions, from the Secret Service to Twitter, that surround him. Quod licet Iovi…

The news that Hunter Biden has now taken up the brush aligns with the next chapter of his struggle Against Nature. His art-making has been written up more than once by the New York Times. That is twice more than most artists get and an easy tell of the elite press trolling the rest of us. ‘As an undiscovered artist, he is better situated than most,’ we read. You bet he is. We also learn that Biden lives in the ‘Hollywood Hills off Mulholland Drive, with a Porsche Panamera in the driveway, plenty of natural light and a pool house he has transformed into an art studio’.

Here in this lofty aerie, surrounded by red-tailed hawks, down the hill from David Hockney’s red barn, he creates work ranging from ‘photographic to mixed-media to abstract works on canvas, yupo paper, wood and metal’. His paraphernalia include a metal straw — not for drugs! Why would you think that? — through which he blows pigments across his compositions.

‘For me, painting is much more about kind of trying to bring forth what is, I think, the universal truth,’ he blabbers. The abstractions he creates, like the sentiments he conveys, are the stuff of dorm-room posters. ‘I don’t paint from emotion or feeling, which I think are both very ephemeral,’ he ponders. But of course it is all meant to be emotion and feeling, a look inside the mind of a Biden. Were it not, these creations would be little more than the illustrative tricks of a street artist.

More recently Biden has moved to mixed media and even more explicit images of himself. He starts with a distorted selfie — of which we have already seen plenty — and writes with gold ink around his dog tags and Rolex watch. He dilates on his dead brother Beau, his deceased mother and sister, his own travails: ‘I want to make it clear: I don’t see that tragic moment as necessarily resulting in behaviors that lent themselves to addiction. That would be a cop-out.’ These words are directly reproduced from his book, Beautiful Things, even down to the punctuation. Everything here is a self-portrait, all serving the scripted story of full disclosure. If Hunter Biden’s art belonged to a school, it would be post-exhibitionism.

This fall the Georges Bergès Gallery in New York will exhibit 15 of these masterpieces. I have never heard of the gallery, but the owner was once accused of assaulting a man with a knife. He pleaded no contest to making terrorist threats. ‘I was a kid; we all make mistakes,’ he explained. The gallerist is asking up to $500,000 per Biden. He promises an artist who ‘incorporates oil, acrylic, ink and the written word to create unique experiences that have become his signature’. Sales will be open to foreign nationals, and the gallery will ‘not share information about buyers or prospective buyers, including their identities’, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki — all in the interest of full transparency.

A self-portrait by Hunter Biden. Credit...Hunter Biden and Georges Bergés Gallery

Critics of this White House rightly lambaste these dealings as an invitation to what, in more innocent times, we called ‘collusion’. But frankly, political corruption is de trop. Through his art, Biden promises a far more compelling prospect: cultural corruption. ‘No conflict, no interest’ has long been the mission statement of the art world. Biden has been in the vanguard of our public debauchery for decades. His designs, well illustrating his self-serving self-loathing, now place him squarely in the avant-garde of performative decadence. In a world that places exorbitant value on a floating basketball by Jeff Koons or a spin painting by Damien Hirst — in other words, on nonsense by nonentities — who is to say that Biden’s cloudsmoke effusions are not worth as much or even more?

‘All around him,’ Biden writes in one self-portrait, ‘beautiful things tangled colors cradled mercy made real rose up and he began again to write a new story.’ His turn to art, and the false profundity and faux-redemption he indulges in, are as irredeemable as the rest of this man’s privileged life. If his existence has a point, this is it. ‘His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels,’ Huysmans writes of des Esseintes.

Without vision, training or talent, Hunter Biden deigns to glue his crippling jewels onto the back of our society. We are the ones meant to be crushed under the weight of his self-regard. We may never plumb the depths of that infamous laptop, but we’ll always have Biden’s screensaver art, tinctured in freebase crackle.

Bursting With Color Late in Life

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, September 9, 2021

Bursting With Color Late in Life

A review of ‘Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful’

A traveling show brings together over 150 objects to explore the vibrant abstract work of the Washington painter who developed her iconic style in her 60s

Norfolk, Va.

Alma Thomas developed her unique abstract painting style only after retiring at age 68, in 1960, as a Washington, D.C., junior-high-school teacher. She called her forms “Alma’s Stripes” for their tessellated brushstrokes. Bold, rainbow daubs of paint weave together patterns of stripes and circles on canvas. Colors swirl and shimmer in these dazzling compositions. Vibrant hues react against one another. Active brush marks play off a tension between figure and ground. Suddenly garnering Thomas museum shows in New York and Washington, the paintings turned the unknown artist, a Black woman then in her 70s, into a trailblazer sought after by the country’s major collections. But where did it all come from? “ Alma W. Thomas : Everything Is Beautiful,” a new exhibition co-organized by the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Ga., and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., looks to fill in the background.

Alma Thomas’s ‘Blast Off’ (1970) PHOTO: CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART

Curated by Seth Feman of the Chrysler and Jonathan Frederick Walz of the Columbus, the show adds an abundance of context while exhibiting some of Thomas’s best-known works, such as “Blast Off” (1970) and “Starry Night and the Astronauts” (1972), both inspired by the American space program. With over 150 objects spread across multiple thematic sections, Thomas’s paintings, drawings and early sculptures, ranging from the 1920s until a year before her death in 1978, are presented here alongside her photographs, letters, furniture, examples of the art that influenced her, and even her own handmade dresses and dolls. A 336-page exhibition catalog, featuring 17 essays on topics ranging from Thomas’s graduate studies in marionettes to her passion for gardening, gives extra meaning to the “everything” of the show’s title. Now on view in Virginia, the exhibition will continue on to the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville before finishing in Columbus.

Born in Columbus in 1891, Thomas as a teenager moved with her family north to Washington. She enrolled in Howard University and became its first fine-arts graduate in 1924. She earned a graduate degree in education at Columbia University and remained a student even as she taught, enrolling in courses in abstract painting at American University in the 1950s.

Alma Thomas with two students at the Howard University Art Gallery (1928 or after) PHOTO: THE COLUMBUS MUSEUM/CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART

Thomas contended with arthritis just as she set out on her own abstract course. The condition became so acute she had to soak her hands in hot water before she could paint. Yet she was inspired by the late work of Henri Matisse, another artist who investigated color despite his infirmities. “Watusi (Hard Edge),” Thomas’s transitional painting from 1963, among her first in acrylic and the first to find her working in colorful abstract forms, pays direct homage to “The Snail (L’escargot),” Matisse’s cutout from just a decade before. Thomas pursued similarly distilled abstractions for the rest of her life.

A sculptor, costume designer, puppeteer and painter—in first a realistic and then abstract mode—Thomas ended up reflecting much of her earlier output in her distinctive breakout work starting with “Air View of a Spring Nursery” (1966). Through the show’s photographs of her Italianate townhouse and Washington neighborhood, we might see how the ashlar bricks of St. Luke’s, her local Episcopal church, reappear in the horizontal bands of this composition. Likewise her dress patterns can mirror the pieces and seams of “Orangery” (1973). The paving stones of her backyard garden path echo the sinuous forms of “Grassy Melodic Chant” (1976). The exhibition invites a search for such visual clues.

Alma Thomas, 'Air View of a Spring Nursery,' (1966) PHOTO: CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART

At times the presentation here focuses on the social at the expense of the aesthetic. An abundance of ephemera from the Thomas archive in Columbus leaves the show cluttered. A section meant to show the differences between Thomas and other Washington Color School painters, including Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, better illustrates their affinities. To frame an opening room around a 1971 protest about racial exclusion at the Whitney, in which Thomas took no part, also distracts from the artist’s own achievements.

“I’ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life,” Thomas once observed. “No. I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at. And then, the paintings change on you.” Her activism was pictorial rather than political. She identified as a painter of color chromatically more than racially. When asked if she considered herself a Black artist, she replied, “No, I do not. I am a painter. I am an American.” She read up on the theories of Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten and energized her compositions through the use of complementary colors, such as between the red and blue of “Mars Dust” (1972).

Thomas appealed to the universal promise of modernism even in an age of protest. “Thomas ignored Black Consciousness all the while benefiting from it,” one critic, the retired Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter, claims in an essay for the catalog. Yet “Everything Is Beautiful” cannot help but reveal the transcendence of Thomas’s paintings. Look closely and you can, in fact, see where it comes from. When the Phillips Collection acquired Paul Cézanne’s “The Garden at Les Lauves” in 1955—a seemingly unfinished landscape of colorful blocks included in this exhibition in a section called “The Field”—Thomas internalized the lessons of this work, with its minimum of forms building up into an all-over whole, just half a mile from her home. Cézanne “gave me the idea of using color to structure a painting,” she said. As with modernism itself, the story of Alma Thomas really starts with him.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful

Chrysler Museum of Art
Through Oct. 3

New Worlds

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2021

New worlds

On a discovery of fifteenth-century Venetian glass beads in Alaska.

Venice can be a furnace, as anyone who visits in midsummer will tell you. Beyond the heat of the Adriatic sun, the lagoon city is also a furnace for culture. This is why we still visit: to experience those ingredients of East and West, of Rome and Byzantium, of Europe and Asia and past and present, that melted together and crystallized through art and architecture into islands of faith and fortune.

Out of that heat came many miracles. In the fifteenth century, Venice’s glass factories on the lagoon island of Murano produced a particular miracle that has only now come to light. One day, over five hundred years ago, a guild of Murano glassmakers combined a mixture of silica, plant ash, lime, cobalt, and copper. They fueled their furnace with alder and willow wood. They added their grains of silica made from the sands of Crete and Sicily and the quartz of the local Ticino and Adige rivers. Turned malleable through the ash, strengthened by the lime, the silica melted into molten glass that was lustrously colored like a milky blue cloud, the result of the material’s exposure in heat to the cobalt and copper. The glassmakers then extracted the mixture. They stretched it into a thin cane, or drawn tube, until it was no more than half an inch thick. Then they cut the tube into tiny segments and reheated the pieces in a special rotating furnace. This final process smoothed over the edges, until the glass cuttings became polished and round.

What emerged that day were translucent cerulean globes of a dreamy, oceanic radiance. Then as now they were the coveted creation of that particular Venetian genius for melding art and technology into objects that are unlike anything else in the world. Bisected with tiny holes, the beads were designed to be tied together. Little did the glassmakers of Murano know quite how far those ties would take them.

The glassmaking guilds of Venice developed their proprietary techniques for manufacturing rosary beads—paternostri—of extraordinary beauty. In the markets to the east, beyond Renaissance Christendom, these same glass beads became prized as veriselli—imitation gemstones. Two centuries before, the Venetian Marco Polo had famously opened up the worlds of Asia, returning with paper and stories of the Silk Road. Now it was the glass of Venice, an alchemy of art and artifice, that was making its way to the Orient.

Out of the furnaces of Venice, those blue beads ended up traveling farther than even Marco Polo could have imagined. In the months and years after their creation, a handful of the beads followed the Silk Road routes to the east. Down the Adriatic and around the horn of Greece, past the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas, the beads moved hand over hand into China. Then to the north and east, they passed into aboriginal Asian territories. Eventually they reached the tribal lands along the northern Pacific. Now at the western edge of the Bering Sea, at the outer edge of Asia, the beads went again by boat. This time they were traded along indigenous fishing routes. Now in the hands of prehistoric Eskimos, they crossed the Bering Strait, a journey of over fifty miles by kayak—remarkably, into present-day Alaska.

It wasn’t until 1741 that Vitus Bering, a Danish cartographer in the service of Russian explorers, first made contact with the native peoples of southern Alaska. The sea and strait dividing the Asian and North American continents are named in his honor, and his discoveries ended the region’s prehistoric period by opening the door for Russian traders. The Murano beads, entering North America sometime in the 1400s, predate the arrival of European contact there by centuries.

Venetian beads found in northern Alaska. Image: Kunz & Mills / American Antiquity.

Following native trade routes along the Noatak River, Eskimos carried these beads up from the Chukchi Sea and the Kotzebue Sound. Eventually they reached the crest of the Continental Divide at a place called Punyik Point, a site in the Arctic tundra along the north shore of Etivlik Lake suited for caribou hunting and trout fishing. Here along the western Brooks Range, the Colville River begins its Arctic journey among the shrub-willow patches to the Beaufort Sea to the north east.

Judging by their well-worn appearance, the Venetian beads were prized, rubbed, and held close. The Eskimos likely divided them, now tied with local twine and mixed in with cold-hammered copper jewelry of native manufacture, among a family clan living in different temporary dwellings. One day, they hid the beads along with their local jewelry behind the benches and in the entry tunnels of the temporary winter shelters they had dug into the earth. Then, for reasons we can only imagine for a nomadic people who left no written record, they departed and never returned for their unique possessions. Maybe there was a catastrophe. Maybe they were simply unable to retrieve them. Over the seasons, as the shelters collapsed back into the earth, the beads came to rest among the caribou bones. They were only rediscovered and identified over five centuries on, matching beads found at two other Arctic sites, all connected by the drainages of nearby rivers.

When the archaeologists Michael L. Kunz and Robin O. Mills announced the finding of these Venetian beads in February 2021 in the journal American Antiquity—the result of decades of research and field investigation at three archaeological sites—they speculated that the objects were among the earliest evidence of European culture in the Americas. Through radio-carbon dating of the locally sourced twine discovered among the neighboring jewelry, and what is otherwise now known about the nomadic dwellings in which they were found, they concluded that the beads most likely arrived in their resting place sometime in the middle of the 1400s. The two archaeologists called their discovery the “first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.” That means the beads entered the North American continent many decades before Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies in 1492—an event that also brought Venetian beads to the New World.

It took a leap of faith for those beads to cross the ten-thousand-mile route from the Venetian lagoon to Punyik Point. It also took a leap and many years of research for archaeologists, digging for over half a century around the outlines of what remained of those small nomadic dwellings, to realize quite what they had found. Yet seeing those beads today, as extraordinary as it now seems, it is still possible for us to understand the dynamics that delivered them over such vast distances to be traded among such disparate peoples.

We speak too little of beauty. Yet, time and again, the wealth of culture, and the creativity to embed that culture into things of beauty, has the power to surprise. In the affections of art, of music and dance, even of captivating ideas, humanity extends its reach against the odds. Beauty can draw the lines of culture over vast distances, making the most unexpected connections. It can also be all that remains, not just of value, but of values, long outlasting the people who created, conveyed, and protected it. If only we would recognize culture qua culture, as something to be prized for its richness and coveted for its complexities outside of the diktats of the present moment.

There was a time, even in the lifetime of many readers today, when the arrival of European culture in the Americas was considered a cause for celebration. Perhaps this celebration was too unalloyed and too unchallenged, but American civic identity has long recognized the events around it as world-defining, on the order of the first humans stepping out of Africa, and not unreasonably so. In another time, the discovery of the Venetian beads of Punyik Point might have been heralded along the lines of Columbus’s first landfall, or the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. Beyond Viking outposts in Greenland and Newfoundland, which might date to 1000 A.D., everything that European civilization has touched in the Americas started at Punyik Point, with tiny glass beads seeding the crest of the Continental Divide. The story invites wonder, not at conquest, but at culture and its astonishing powers to connect worlds we otherwise insist are unconnected.

We live at a moment when the historical overlay of European culture onto the Americas has never seemed more tenuous. The regular attacks on its symbols and rituals now feel like concerted acts of extirpation, with energies that seem to burn for nothing less than the annihilation of Western culture down to the roots of the American soil. The culture of the West has not always been here, the arguments go. It is alien, compromised, bringing with it a set of foreign ideals that have not nearly been met. Native peoples have also lived in the Americas for thousands of years—if not since the beginning of time, as oral traditions may teach, then at least for longer than anyone can remember, through the ice age, through periods when even the landscape looked quite different and the continents of America and Asia may have been connected. And these critics are right, at least about the West’s relatively brief presence in the Americas. Six hundred years is but a moment compared to six thousand years, or thirty thousand years.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should, in fact, remind us of this impermanence. It is precisely this impermanence, the bead-like preciousness of culture, that needs care and protection. Western culture often exists as an intervention—a cultivated garden, a voice in the wilderness, a remote settlement. Some of its most lasting moments have been on the margins, where cultures are set in relief and the divisions between settled and unsettled are most deeply felt. Western culture can be best expressed in these extended, exploratory, colonizing forms—as refugees from the Trojan War setting foot on the coast of Italy, or American astronauts touching down on the lunar surface, or Venetian beads adorning a family of Eskimos. This is why the culture of the Americas has been so remarkable in its heterogeneous, modern form. Those Venetian beads signaled the beginning of a moment that has enriched the world of culture.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should also suggest the true complexity of that exchange. Western culture arrived here as an interchange, an import to the Americas as much as an export of Europe. If only we would recognize and protect that culture today as well as its Asian and Mesoamerican custodians did half a millennium ago. The five-hundred-plus-year history of European contact in the Americas may be a blink of the eye, but consider what has been achieved in that short time. No matter how it may end, consider also that the future of the Americas will be buried together—
Native and European jewels mixed among the caribou bones.

For the prehistoric people of northwest Alaska, even if they could not have imagined the Basilica of San Marco with its celestial domes, they knew they had something remarkable in their tiny globes of sky, crystallized in Mediterranean sand. The same goes for the unimaginable chain of hands that connected these people through those beads, from the Arctic tundra of Punyik Point all the way back to the Murano glass guilds of fifteenth-century Venice.