The Painter of San Quentin
"There is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams”― Hugh Walpole
In 2010, right before becoming a father (making these kind of dalliances a little more difficult to execute), I decided to do a daily reading the San Francisco newspaper The Call. Available online, I read the paper from one hundred years ago plus one day so I could get a glimpse of what has happening a century ago in the city where I was born. It was an amazing practice, experiencing both international news phenomenons that I had learned about in school but had not “witnessed” unfolding day-by-day, as well as reading about small news stories that happened in neighborhoods I grew up in…sometimes houses still there that I past all the time. Post-earthquake San Francisco was a mad place, with opium wars in China Town, fishery wars in North Beach, and corrupt policemen who managed brothels blocks away from City Hall. The city was phoenixing from the fire that destroyed it, rebuilding…comissioning sculptures and murals as new buildings were constructed…sending delegations to DC to land the right of hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to show the world that it refused to be stopped by the 1906 disaster.
Here is a great smaller story that stayed with me long after I read about it…of course dealing with the love of art.
TODAY, 100 years ago, a man walked into the Golden Gate Park Museum (now called The DeYoung) and walked out with Jean Francois Millet’s The Shepard and His Flock. He had literally cut it our of its frame when no one was looking and supposedly did not even try to conceal his actions…he just left the building holding it. It would have been the perfect crime, except that the man told a friend what he had done…not boasting, but more professing his love (more on that later) and the friend immediately told the authorities. So when the police came knocking on the door of artist William Kunze, they found him sitting in his apartment, gazing at the painting. He had been trying to paint a copy of it, and was more than happy to give it to the police who had shown up, without really displaying guilt for what he had done, or fear for what was coming next.
Kunze had only been in San Francisco for a short time. He was an immigrant to this country from Germany and had grown up loving paintings he saw at museums, especially pastoral paintings. He had long ago committed himself to an artist’s life. Coming to America, he had bounced around the country, trying to make a career as a painter, ending up in San Francisco at an apartment on 18th and Sanchez where he starting going to the museum in the park…every day…where he became enraptured by Millet’s painting. The Call from the day after his arrest tells the tale better than I could ever:
He but eloped with his sweetheart, Art. He fell in love with the painting, visited it day after day, drawn to the museum by the irresistible charm of its beauty, and at last, unable to resist the desire to take it to himself, to have it with him as continual inspiration, he slashed it from the frame, burning with the exultation that he himself could not describe, hugged it to his heart and slipped away to his room
See why I read The Call everyday?
The police took Kunze into custody where the judge let him free on parole because he saw Kunze as someone who just wanted to copy a painting he loved (San Francisco was a crazy place in 1910). Kunze went on to try and make it as an artist, focusing on pastoral paintings…forests, fields…funneling any money that he earned back into his work. When he found himself broke and starving, he impetuously attempted to steal some clothes and tools from a construction site, was immediately apprehended and sentenced to San Quentin for two years.
However, when Kunze was incarcerated, the warden, upon hearing his life story and seeing some of his art, allowed Kunze to not only have paints and canvases in his cell in San Quentin, but to paint the backdrop for the annual inmate Christmas production as well as paint murals in his, the warden’s home. Which begs the question: is any of the art still on-site?
Kunze’s San Quentin story made it back into the press, bringing him semi-fame. Unfortunately for him, his release from prison was also his re-emergence into obscurity. I could not find anything written about him after becoming a free man…only a few paintings of his that have sold for pittance on-line over the years, including a painting that is selling on ebay today for less that $300 dollars. My guess is he spent the rest of his life deeply loving art, living a life of a lover of art…consumed with making art and finding inspiration in the art of others. He reminds me of Chance The Gardner, obliviously walking through reality with his own Truths that no one could shudder. Truths that might have something for us to learn from if we stopped to listen for a while.
All for the love of art.
Peabody Records Flies Again Selvidge family boutique imprint is back on the scene.
It looks like the label that brought Alex Chilton’s screwed up mess of a masterpiece Like Flies On Sherbet is back in action. That record to the right (above) that Steve Selvidge is holding, a solo outing from his father produced by Jim Dickinson featuring a rare black and white picture by William Eggleston—is an unknown Memphis classic.
Robbie Williams and Jimmy Page are terrible neighbors
Jimmy Page and Robbie Williams are in court! To put it wayyyy to simply, Page wants his neighbor to turn his music down. Bummer: you buy a castle and still have a loud and invasive neighbor. Page’s place does look incredible, as toured in this article about his Tower House published a few years ago. Page is saying the noise could damage his incredible collection of old art…having not worried about damaging the hearing of his fans for years (ED NOTE: more of a joke than a real criticism). YOU NEED TO USE A TRANSLATION EXTENSION TO READ THIS ARTICLE
How should we be 'Living'? Kurosawa and Ishiguro tackle the question, 70 years apart
Ishiguro was nominated for an Oscar for his work…I cannot wait to see it. This is a nice piece about it via NPR.
Toni Morrison Exhibit at Princeton Honors a Lifetime of Work, Down to Her Post-Its
“In 2014, eight years after she left the lecture halls, she gave its library 400 boxes of material…In those boxes were typewritten manuscript pages from books including “Jazz,” legal pads covered in the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s handwriting, outlines, exchanges with editors about drafts of her novels, datebooks and, yes, Post-its that she scrawled on when she had only moments to get down a thought.”
“One of the things the show does is it allows people to ruminate on their own kinds of creative practice. It gets you thinking about how one gets to a finished product.”—Jennifer Garcon
Denial
By: Giorgos Seferis
On the secret seashore
white like a pigeon
we thirsted at noon;
but the water was brackish.
On the golden sand
we wrote her name;
but the sea-breeze blew
and the writing vanished.
With what spirit, what heart,
what desire and passion
we lived our life: a mistake!
So we changed our life.
