Like a Rock

James Panero reads “Like a Rock,” his Letter from Plymouth in the November 2020 issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2020

Like a rock

On the four-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock.

There is nothing particularly impressive about Plymouth Rock. As far as famous rocks go, the seaside boulder on which the Pilgrims may have first set foot in the New World is notably underwhelming. It has not helped that this ten-ton glacial errant, an Ice Age deposit of granite on the morainal coastline of Cape Cod Bay, has been moved and abused, venerated and desecrated many times since the storied passengers of Mayflower set down roots here four hundred years ago, in December 1620. And yet it is precisely the Rock’s humble appearance that can still evoke the greatest awe. The pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth proved to be the moonshot of the seventeenth century—odds-breaking, death-defying, and ultimately world-shattering. The Rock remains the manifestation of the first step of these spiritual wanderers, not just from ship to shore but also heaven to earth. For the nation’s celestial origins, Plymouth Rock is our moonstone.

It took over a century for the Rock to be recognized for its historical relevance, after a Plymouth elder recalled a folktale of the landing. Its importance then grew alongside a burgeoning sense of the central role of the Pilgrims in our national story. In the War of Independence, the stone came to symbolize the endurance of the Pilgrims’ separatist faith crystallized in the cause of national liberty. In 1775, the people of Plymouth joined Colonel Theophilus Cotton to “consecrate the rock . . . to the shrine of liberty.” In attempting to move the stone from the shoreline, however, the townspeople split it in two, a portent of the coming Revolutionary break. Leaving one half behind in the sand, they relocated the other to “liberty pole square” by the Plymouth meetinghouse. On July 4, 1834, that part of the rock was moved again, this time to the front of Plymouth Hall. Other pieces went farther astray. Two chunks came to reside in Brooklyn, one at the abolitionist Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims and the other at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Smaller fragments went the way of the souvenir hunters. Meanwhile the original seaside stone came to be buried in sand and port development.

Hammat Billings’s baldachin, which housed Plymouth Rock from 1867–1920.

In 1867, an elegant Beaux-Arts baldachin designed by Hammatt Billings resurrected the beach half, which was soon rejoined by the other Plymouth rock of Plymouth Rock as “1620” was etched in the stone. Finally, in 1920, for the tercentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, McKim, Mead & White designed the portico that stands over Plymouth Rock today. The understated design, built into an esplanade and replacing the Billings monument, invites viewers to look down onto the Rock, now again on the sandy beach. At spring tide, through iron grilles in the pavilion’s open foundation, the waters of the cold Atlantic can once again lap over the worn stone.

The present portico over Plymouth Rock, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1920.

The treatment of Plymouth Rock has reflected the ebbs and flows of our own national conscience. In 1820, at the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster proclaimed, “We have come to this Rock to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty.” Pledging “upon the Rock of Plymouth,” he also called on Americans to “extirpate and destroy” the slave trade.

By 1835, Tocqueville came to observe how “this Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic.”

The pilgrims John Alden and Mary Chilton landing at Plymouth.

This year’s quadricentenary of the Pilgrim landing has not been so felicitous for Plymouth or its Rock. The pandemic has destroyed the town’s tourist trade and canceled many festivities on what should have been its most eventful year. A million visitors a year usually come to Plymouth Rock. This year that number may be less than half. Chinese, British, and German tourists, all precluded from international travel, are otherwise particularly drawn to the attraction. As I am told, the Chinese come for the American history, the British for the English, and the Germans for the indigenous. In other years, faith-based visitors are also regulars here, making their own pilgrimage to a site of America’s Christian origins. This year, even at the height of tourist season, the glasses at the Pillory Pub are half empty, the John Alden curio shop is in want of the curious, and the on-street parking is abundant.

Beyond just the closures, the Pilgrims’ progress, like the American project itself, has been cast in doubt. For most of our history, the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving meal of 1621 has represented the Providence of America and the amity of its native peoples—after Samoset, Tisquantum (Squanto), and Massasoit’s tribe of Wampanoag saved the new arrivals from starvation. In giving thanks for their salvation, George Washington codified the Pilgrims’ holiday into civic religion.

Until recently, the story of this first Thanksgiving was central to our civic education, from elementary-school assemblies to Peanuts television specials. Now, a “National Day of Mourning,” a protest march against Thanksgiving first organized by Native American activists, can draw crowds larger than the Mayflower Society’s own Pilgrim Progress procession held in town the same day. The Plymouth Rock monument has also been the site of attacks and desecrations. So far this year, the Rock has been splattered and sprayed with paint on two separate occasions. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims have been castigated along with Christopher Columbus for the usurpation of native lands and the murder of native peoples. If children are now taught anything about the Pilgrims, the settlers are more than likely to be denounced as a colonizing force—one that never really originated Thanksgiving, never conveyed the spirit of liberty as represented in their “Mayflower Compact,” and never even landed at Plymouth Rock.

The evidence at Plymouth suggests a more nuanced understanding. In Europe, the Pilgrims had drifted around as the backwash of the Reformation. Since taxation also meant supporting the ministers to a false faith, the Pilgrims’ separatist beliefs put them at odds with the monarch and the inseparable church of England. “The king is a mortal man, and not God,” declared the Puritan Thomas Helwys in his challenge to King James I, and “therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” Like others, Helwys was imprisoned and died for his beliefs. From England to Amsterdam, and then to Leiden, the Pilgrims attempted to resettle. In Holland, they found the labors unforgiving and the temptations undermining. Here was a faith that knew more what it stood against than for. A group of Pilgrims struck a deal with the London Company to resettle their families around what became New York. They eventually hired Mayflower, a reconfigured merchant ship, for the late fall passage. Their decision to leave the land of Rembrandt—who was then a student just a block from their Leiden church—for lands unknown was propelled by a desperation for religious liberty. “England hath seen her best days,” Thomas Hooker, the Puritan founder of Connecticut, later preached, “and now evil days are befalling us: God is packing up his gospel.”

Plimoth Plantation today.

“Founding a colony was just about the most foolish thing a congregation or any other group of Europeans could do.” So writes John G. Turner in They Knew They Were Pilgrims, his new history of Plymouth.1 What powered these early settlers, especially through the misery of their first winter, was their separatist conviction. “They knew they were pilgrims . . . and quieted their spirits,” explained Plymouth’s Governor William Bradford. Blown off course, and after exploring the area of what became Provincetown (where there is now another Pilgrim monument), the settlers arrived in the protected natural harbor of Plymouth Bay. Regardless of where they took their first actual steps, the Pilgrims “walked into a disaster,” Turner writes. “The poor nutrition during the crossing left their health fragile, and they lacked sufficient food for the months ahead. Exposure to bitter-cold weather and wading in water did not help matters.” Barely half of Mayflower’s passengers survived the crossing and the first winter. “The living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Bradford wrote the next fall.

Just down the road from Plymouth Rock, Plimoth Plantation recreates some of these privations. In the 1940s, the museum’s founder, a gentleman archaeologist named Henry (Harry) Hornblower II, announced that “we had by-passed the era of putting a fence and canopy above a rock or some artifacts in a glass case . . . my idea was to create a living museum.” He tore down his family’s estate and converted it into a life-size diorama of the Pilgrims’ first village. Later on, the staff in period costume began to take on period roles. Now as soon as you set foot out of the reconstructed fort and walk down the village road, the Plantation offers its visitors an immersive experience. This year as you come upon Governor Bradford reading English law in his home with Mistress Winslow, the face masks are the only concessions to our present moment.

Yet even this quaint settlement does not fully convey the true extremis of the Pilgrims’ first year, as husbands lost wives and mothers lost children. The Plantation’s research and reconstruction of historic Patuxet, an equally fascinating section of the living museum, goes further in explaining how these privations were overcome. Then as now, a disease had reduced the population passing through Plymouth. An “extraordinary plague,” Samoset informed the new arrivals, had recently killed the people who had lived there. The Pilgrims arrived in the land of the Wampanoag just as the weakened tribe faced off against the neighboring and untouched Narragansetts. By the 1620s, Europeans were no strangers to American Indians. Traders had been sailing the New England waters for a century. What was new was the arrival of European families. In the early years, the Pilgrim and native populations gave thanks together for their mutual support. Twice as many Wampanoags as Pilgrims joined the first Thanksgiving dinner. Recent excavations have also suggested that the two peoples chose to live and trade next to each other.

This summer, after completing a three-year rebuilding at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport, Mayflower II, a faithful 1956 replica of the Pilgrims’ faith-conveying ship, returned to Plymouth under her own sail power. Plimoth Plantation is once again scheduling tours of the ship, tied up within sight of Plymouth Rock. Four hundred years after the original landing, the craft speaks to the hardships, endurance, and desperation of the settlers who have defined America in myth and memory. Entering the open hold of this tiny replica vessel, where 102 passengers would have endured the Atlantic passage together, reveals much about the death and disease they encountered that first winter in Cape Cod Bay.

The Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, completed in 1889.

Just up the hill from Plymouth Rock, now buried among the trees and residential development, the Monument to the Forefathers offers a final statement on the combination of forces that came to the Pilgrims’ salvation. Hammatt Billings began designing this eight-story-tall granite carving in the 1850s. His brother, Joseph, working with local carvers, completed it in 1889. The monumental site, which now also includes scalloped fragments from Billings’s original Plymouth Rock pavilion, might appear grandiloquent did it not commemorate such an extraordinary event. In addition to relief images from Pilgrim history, the monument is buttressed by the personifications of Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty. Rising above them, facing England to the east, is the colossus of Faith. “Erected by a grateful people,” reads the front inscription, “in remembrance of their labors, sacrifices and sufferings for the cause of civil and religious liberty.” Stone by stone, the monument recalls the Providence of Plymouth Rock. Through sacrifices and sufferings, its blessings continue to land on the country the Pilgrims helped define.

1They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, by John G. Turner; Yale University Press, 464 pages, $30.

Struggle Session

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2020

Struggle Session

On “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Where could Jacob Lawrence go after “The Migration Series”? Lawrence’s trailblazing work of sixty paintings, originally called “The Migration of the Negro,” pulled together the story of the Great Migration into a visual American epic. Painted all at once, color by color, the episodic panels present the early twentieth-century movement of black Americans from the rural South to the industrial North as a puzzle of dynamic shapes and vibrant hues. Accompanied by Lawrence’s tightly researched narrative, which supplies the title for each panel, the distilled forms tie the compositions together while connecting the episodes into a unified and abstracted whole.

Sponsored by the Rosenwald Foundation, the series of 1940–41 launched Lawrence from the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, where he conducted his historical research, to national acclaim. After showing at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery—Lawrence was the first black American to be represented by a New York gallery—the series was acquired in its entirety through a joint institutional purchase. The odd numbered panels went to Washington’s Phillips Collection; the evens went to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Lawrence was just twenty-three years old.

The moving power of this dynamic work is revealed every time the series is reunited—most recently in “One-Way Ticket,” the exhibition that was on view at MOMA in 2015. Writing of an earlier reunion, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, Hilton Kramer noted that

into each image, executed in tempera, gouache or watercolor, is distilled a dramatic episode or emotion of great simplicity, yet the crowded succession of such images traces a complex course. . . . Drawing is reduced to the delineation of flat shapes and easily read gestures. Figures are seen as the sum of their actions, never as individualized personalities. Color is generally somber, yet illuminated by moments of gemlike intensity. There is an extraordinary velocity in this style and an extraordinary empathy. It succeeds in creating a world, and it holds us in its grip.

Lawrence was the product of the same Great Migration he depicted. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917, at thirteen he continued the family’s migration north, moving with his mother and sister to Harlem. A child prodigy, he soon apprenticed with Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, and other leading artistic lights of the Harlem Renaissance. By the late 1930s, he was already channeling the cosmopolitan worldview of Alain Locke’s “New Negro” into the easel division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. Inspired by the figures of black history, he created narrative portraits of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Painted in a flurry of activity, spread out all together across his Harlem studio, “The Migration Series” connected Lawrence’s personal subject matter with the wandering and restless spirit of modernism. It was exhibited in the same year he married his fellow Harlem artist Gwendolyn Knight. No other work of such ambitious scope would come quite as easily to Lawrence again. His cycle on “The Legend of John Brown” of 1941, which now exists mainly as a series of twenty-two prints, tells its story more on the surface, without quite the same compositional nuance or absorption.

Now that he was exhibiting beyond “uptown,” the Downtown Gallery (which was, by then, located in midtown on East Fifty-first Street) exposed Lawrence to Halpert’s circle of modernist American painters. These figures included Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, and Charles Sheeler. In such standalone and standout paintings as Pool Parlor of 1942, a prizewinner of an “Artists for Victory” competition and purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art that same year, Lawrence already can be seen building on his expanding modernist horizons. Four years later, an invitation to teach at Black Mountain College further elevated Lawrence into the orbit of Josef Albers and the international modernism of the Bauhaus.

At the same time, in addition to widening his artistic outlook, the 1940s exposed Lawrence to a broadening American landscape. For over two years during World War II, Lawrence served in the United States Coast Guard under the command of Carlton Skinner on USS Sea Cloud. The vessel was the country’s first racially integrated ship in wartime service. It later became a model for the armed services’ post-war integration in 1948, and by extension the country’s federal de-segregationist policies of the 1950s.

Here Lawrence achieved the rank of Specialist Third Class. He served as an official combat artist, creating some seventeen paintings. Most of these paintings were lost in the subsequent demobilization, but at one time they were exhibited alongside his “Migration Series” in an exhibition organized by MOMA and championed by the Coast Guard. As MOMA compared the two bodies of work at the time, “almost imperceptibly his Coast Guard paintings suggest the gradual beginnings of a solution to the problem so movingly portrayed in the Migration Series.”

In Lawrence’s Coast Guard pictures both races face the same fundamental problem—the war. Colored and white men mingle in recreational sports on deck, eat together, work together. Colored and white hands reach out with equal eagerness at mail call. Death and injury play no favorites, and all Uncle Sam’s nephews rate the same pay in their non-racial classifications.

Lawrence’s experience in a fully integrated America, at least as reflected on board this singular ship, helped encourage him to revisit the episodes of American history through a new integrationist perspective. In 1950 he even saw fit to call the Coast Guard “the best democracy I’ve ever known.” During a yearlong period of mental convalescence, which he spent reading Walt Whitman, Lawrence developed a vision for a new and newly ambitious cycle of paintings. “As I read more of the history of the United States,” he wrote in one grant application of 1954, “I gradually began to appreciate not only the struggles and contributions of the Negro people, but also to appreciate the rich and exciting story of America and of all the peoples who emigrated to the ‘New World’ and contributed to the creation of the United States.” Lawrence now sought to capture “man’s constant search for the perfect society in which to live” by visualizing the “struggles, contributions, and ingenuity of the American people.”

“Struggle: From the History of the American People,” Lawrence’s title for this new series, attempted to take the structure of “The Migration Series,” down to its sixty-panel sequence, and apply the artist’s updated modernist idioms to capturing the full scope of American history. The series would again return Lawrence to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library for research, this time commuting from his brownstone in Brooklyn. Again Lawrence applied for foundation support to underwrite the project, and again he hoped a great institution, or two, would purchase the series, keeping it together in sequence.

“Struggle” proved to be an all-too-appropriate title for Lawrence’s epic undertaking of the 1950s. Years in the making, the series was only ever half completed. Lawrence finally cut short its full scope and abandoned the project entirely in the mid-1960s. Foundation supporters also proved to be few and far between. An application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation was denied. And although now represented by the Alan Gallery, an offshoot of Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, Lawrence found no institutional buyers. Eventually the work was dispersed. Today five of the panels have yet to be located.

Jacob Lawrence, In all your intercourse with the natives, treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit . . . —Jefferson to Lewis & Clark, 1803, 1956, Egg tempera on hardboard. Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. Photo: Bob Packert/PEM; © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“Struggle” also speaks to the arrival of this body of work in a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.1 A show that took over six years to assemble, due in no small part to the painstaking task of locating these scattered panels, the exhibition was further delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which shuttered the Metropolitan for nearly six months. Now, finally, for the first time since 1958, this somber and stirring exhibition, organized by Massachusetts’s Peabody Essex Museum and co-curated by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly, reunites this work in the city of its creation.

Compared to the jigsaw pieces of “Migration,” “Struggle” presents an even more complex puzzle of compositional ingenuity. Lines slash and divide narrative elements. Gradated shapes churn the surface of the panels into tumbling abstracted constructions that nearly come apart. Sharpness and edge are defining characteristics as the blood drips and sprays. As with “Migration,” a narrative provides the title for each panel. This time it is often in the first person, with fragments from Patrick Henry through Henry Clay amplifying the immediacy of the American cry.

Lawrence’s particular focus is America’s wartime bravery and sacrifice. One quote, . . . again the rebels rushed furiously on our men—a Hessian soldier, supplies the title for Panel 8 (1954), a riot of clashing cavalry, bayonets, and swords. If we fail, let us fail like men, and expire together in one common struggle. . . —Henry Clay, 1813 forms the caption of Panel 23 (1956), as a solitary sailor bleeds out of his punctured eye in an abstraction of sharply torn sails. I cannot speak sufficiently in praise of the firmness and deliberation with which my whole line received their approach. . . —Andrew Jackson, New Orleans, 1815 describes Panel 25 (1956), as a garrison of bloody and bandaged American soldiers defend Fort St. Philip against a ten-day British bombardment.

Jacob Lawrence, We crossed the River at McKonkey’s Ferry 9 miles above Trenton . . . the night was excessively severe . . . which the men bore without the least murmur . . . —Tench Tilghman, 27 December 1776, 1954, Egg tempera on hardboard. Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. Photo: Bob Packert/PEM; © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“Lawrence was a remarkable artist—as remarkable for his independence as for his pictorial gifts,” Kramer wrote in revisiting an exhibition of the artist in 2001, a year after his death. In “Struggle,” Lawrence takes the images of American history, both well-known and under-known, and strips them of their nostalgia. Rather than the history painting of Emanuel Leutze or even Grant Wood, here is history made present through painting. Rather than regal splendor, Lawrence’s own depiction of Washington’s Crossing, Panel 10 of 1954, refuses to distinguish its citizen soldiers huddled in the abstracted waves of the Delaware River from their general. Here the title comes from a solemn journal entry of Washington’s aide-de-camp: We crossed the River at McKonkey’s Ferry 9 miles above Trenton . . . the night was excessively severe . . . which the men bore without the least murmur . . .—Tench Tilghman, 27 December 1776.

Never at odds, Lawrence unites black struggle with American struggle. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? —Patrick Henry, 1775, Lawrence’s first panel of the series, underscores a shared American fight for liberty and liberation. Massacre in Boston, the next panel, focuses on the death of Crispus Attucks, an American of African and Native descent, who was the first to die in the Boston Massacre, and therefore the first American killed in the cause of the Revolution.

In Lawrence’s telling, the American struggle has always been animated by a common fight for freedom from bondage, from chattel slavery (panel 5) to British impressment (panel 19). Lawrence never abandoned his art of black America. In “Struggle,” he integrates the black experience into the American experience and the other way around. As presented in a large blue exhibition hall at the Metropolitan, the panels form the portholes of a singular ship of state. “Hope has broadened the scene,” Lawrence said in 1957, comparing the series to his earlier work. “The statement is broader, even though it is the same statement.”

1 “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on August 29 and remains on view through November 1, 2020. The exhibition will travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and The Phillips Collection. It was previously on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Rear Window

another look at the art of Varujan Boghosian

I last saw the work of Varujan Boghosian in the closing hours of New York. It was a Thursday afternoon in mid-March when I made my way up to the private showroom of Alexandre Gallery on 57th Street. The small collages and constructions of the ninety-four-year old artist were propped up in the crook between the wall and the floor. Taking half breaths, the city seemed to be in a rush—rushing to where, we did not yet know. As it turns out, like much else, this was the gallery’s last open day for a while, and I was its last visitor. I bent down to see Boghosian’s work and took some comfort in what came into view.

Since the Renaissance, the rectangle of a painting has been likened to an open window. As he describes in his treatise On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti, the fifteenth century artist and theorist, constructed an image by first drawing a “rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.”  Exhibiting since the 1950s, showing at the legendary Stable and Cordier & Ekstrom galleries along the way, Boghosian offers a new perspective on this perspective. His collages and constructions supplement and illuminate Alberti’s window through innovative and intimate points of view that look both forward and back, inside and out, shallow and deep. At those times when you cannot see straight ahead, it helps to have some rear windows. 

Smoking (For Guston), 1989-90, mixed media construction, 17 x 10 3/4 x 1 1/2 inches

One of the ways that Boghosian helps us see anew is by building up the back of old frames into his own constructions. These assemblies are both paintings in reverse and windows onto their own visions. Boghosian works with the subtleties of his fragmentary and found materials to excavate their hidden meanings. A stain on the back of a canvas becomes a puff of cigar smoke in Smoking (For Guston) (1989-90). In The Artist (1982), an equestrian silhouette, held together with tape, rides out across a mysterious landscape created out of the dark wood of the frame backing. Valentine (1986) looks through the back of a frame to a vision of flowers created out of matching pieces of paper. The break across the middle recalls the sash of a window, the spine of a book, and the horizon line of a painting. A heart now appears at the vanishing point of the constructed image, while tiny bells hold the parts together. 

Valentine, 1986, mixed media construction, 15 3/8 x 12 7/8 x 2 5/8 inches

About those bells: symbols and subtleties infuse this work. The mix-and-match-ups of these constructions are not done for easy laughs or simple statements. While much is revealed by turning these old paintings around, just as much is now hidden away. What exactly is on the other side of these frames, after all? The revelations of hidden gems play off the urge to see the overturned paintings front and center. What we lose in single-point perspective we gain in unexpected materials and uncanny points of view. 

Art and books, myth and mystery, history and memory are the raw materials of a body of work that opens a window onto all of these subjects. In Trio (2009) and Currency (c. 2006), the marbled endsheets of antiquarian books form their own abstract designs that play off the portraiture of old money. In James Joyce (2009), the glasses, mouth, and goatee of the famous Dubliner seem to appear out of the cracks, as a fragment of collaged text adds its own wordplay.

Duchamp's Valise, 1990, mixed media construction, 11 1/4 x 15 1/4 x 4 1/2 inches

The history of art is a recurring theme. Through his innovative constructions, Boghosian looks forward by reaching back to the fragments of art history. Artists from Dürer to Duchamp influence and echo across the work. Spinner (2013) combines the image of Duchamp’s “bicycle wheel” with a real spin-and-spark tin toy—a “readymade” now remade. Duchamp’s Valise (1990) turns a picture frame into the straps and handle of a traveling bag, a homage to the artist who turned the history of art upside down and ran away with it.

Boghosian has described himself as a “junk collector. You never have enough, the more you have, the more opportunities you have to do something. It’s not really junk. I use all manner of artifacts, ancient and modern, and I make constructions. I put them together. When you live long enough, you see all of these objects, you relate to them.” 

Boghosian has collected materials for over sixty years, from abandoned fishing boats, uncovered pipes and clay marbles at low tide, and the junk shops and trash bins of the Lower East Side. Through his work, he shows us the life in dead and dying materials. His constructions are more like reconstructions, memories unearthed out of the feel of the unseen made newly apparent. His works are acts of reanimation, the illustration of new beginnings out of old things. 

As I write these words during the closures and quarantines of 2020, I look forward to having another chance to see Boghosian’s work in person. These are visions that reward close and repeated looking. The world may seem framed in, but there is hope on the other side, a new turn, just as Boghosian shows us there will be.

The Artist, 1982, mixed media construction, 13 x 11 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches