Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Documenting Blakelock

As Larry Rothfield (Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of English Language and Literature) and documentary filmmaker Ric Burns began to delve into the life of artist Ralph Blakelock, they immediately realized that the material offered by both his life and his art was too recalcitrant, too dizzyingly complex, to fit into the standard biographical and aesthetic molds that normally frame documentaries of artists’ lives. So instead of progressing with the work they were engaged in toward a film, they pursued a Mellon Fellowship with the Gray Center to think through the challenges Blakelock’s life and art present.

Unlike figures like Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol (two artists about whom Burns has made documentaries), Blakelock is not a household name whose work has a well-defined, high-profile place in the history of art that would make it easy to situate it for the general public. There is no straightforward art historical narrative in which to locate him. And to pigeonhole him as a prototypical outsider artist whose art they wanted to rescue from undeserved obscurity was an unsatisfactory option as well, even though Blakelock was mostly self-trained and did go mad. For Blakelock was at one point in his life the opposite of an outsider: he was a celebrity whose canvases, considered enchanting, were fetching the highest prices ever for a work by a living American painter. Any option faces one further difficulty: No artist has been faked more than Blakelock (he is the exemplary artist on whom new forensic techniques of authentication are tested).

Blakelock was above all else a painter of darkness visible, of nocturnes out of and into which Native Americans emerge or through which moonlight disperses. To create this palpable darkness, Blakelock invented a new technique, alternating up to thirty layers of paint and his own unique home-made varnish, to trap light within the painting’s surface. How can this materiality and its sensorial effects be effectively translated in the medium of video? Rothfield and Burns sought to work through these questions of identity and oeuvre and of aesthetic and representation.

Portable Gray interview with Ric Burns and Larry Rothfield HERE.

Course

Biography, History, Art: Documenting Blakelock
Spring 2021
ENGL 26522/36522

This Gray Center-sponsored research practicum is tied to a film project with documentary maker and Mellon Collaborative Fellow Ric Burns about outsider artist Ralph Blakelock. America’s Van Gogh, Blakelock created art far ahead of his time, went mad, and spent nearly 20 years in an asylum before emerging into the glare of flashbulbs as the most sought-after painter of the 1910s, only to end his life as victim of a con game. In between, he sojourned with the Sioux, hobnobbed with Gilded Age millionaires, channeled Longfellow and Mendelssohn in his art, struggled in the emergent New York “art world,” played vaudeville piano, and became one of the first major figures in modern celebrity-driven mass media. How best to capture this kaleidoscopic life and Blakelock’s dizzying art in a documentary is the creative challenge of the seminar. Our focus will be on Blakelock’s “Ghost Dance/The Vision of Life.” Art Institute conservators, assisted by Chemistry Department Professor Steven Sibener, will use scientific imaging to see inside the painting, whose provenance and context of production and reception need to be researched.

Fellows

Ric Burns

Ric Burns is an internationally recognized documentary filmmaker and writer, best known for his eight-part series, New York: A Documentary Film, which premiered nationally on PBS to broad public and critical acclaim when broadcast in November 1999, September 2001, and September 2003. Burns has been writing, directing, and producing historical documentaries for over 25 years, since his collaboration on the PBS series The Civil War (1990), which he produced with his brother Ken and co-wrote with Geoffrey C. Ward. Since founding Steeplechase Films in 1989, he has directed some of the most distinguished programs for PBS including Coney Island (1991), The Donner Party (1992), The Way West (1995), Ansel Adams (2002), Eugene O’Neill, Andy Warhol (2006), We Shall Remain: Tecumseh’s Vision (2009), Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World (2010), Death and the Civil War (2012), American Ballet Theatre (2015), Debt of Honor (2015), The Pilgrims (2015), VA: The Human Cost of War (2017), The Chinese Exclusion Act (2018), and Oliver Sacks: His own Life (2019). His work has won numerous film and television awards.

LAWRENCE ROTHFIELD

Larry Rothfield is an associate professor emeritus in the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, and is a research affiliate in the Cultural Policy Center. His research focuses on the way in which literature, criticism, and other cultural activities are caught up within epistemic and political struggles. His most recent book is The Measure of Man: Liberty, Virtue, and Beauty in the Florentine Renaissance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).