‘Freemasonry and the Visual Arts’

     
“Freemasonry is a beautiful system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols….”

That snippet of ritual language differs from place to place; it sometimes goes “a peculiar system,” but the larger point about allegory and symbol is what matters. A study of Masonic thought vis-à-vis visual arts is a natural path to blaze, and fortunately a book was published last November that imparts the findings of more than a dozen scholars who examined the fine arts and material culture brought to fruition by and for Freemasonry around the world these past three centuries.

I’m embarrassed to admit I completely missed a roundtable discussion of this very book hosted last Friday at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, but you and I can profit from hearing from one of this book’s editors in three weeks when the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library will host Professor Reva Wolf for a lecture. From the publicity:

Symbols, Trade Cards, Portraits

and Figurines: Case Studies

at the Intersection of Freemasonry

and the Visual Arts

Thursday, February 27

6 to 8 p.m.

Masonic Hall

71 West 23rd Street, Manhattan

RSVP here

With the dramatic rise of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century, art played a fundamental role in its practice, rhetoric, and global dissemination, while Freemasonry, in turn, directly influenced developments in art. Professor Reva Wolf’s lecture provides an overview of diverse approaches to the study of Freemasonry and art, the wide range of art and places that its history encompasses, and some challenges inherent to the subject.

Prof. Reva Wolf

Reva Wolf is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she teaches courses on art of the eighteenth century to the present and on methods and history of art history. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is the author of Goya and the Satirical Print (Godine, 1991), Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and numerous articles and essays. Her co-edited book, Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives, was recently published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Professor Wolf has been awarded an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, and an NEH Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, among other fellowships, to support her research. She is a recipient of a State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.


And about that book! Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives is edited by Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg, and published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts. It’s an academic text, which is a nice way of saying it retails for more than a hundred bucks, so shop around.

It unites scholars, some of whom you’ve read about previously on The Magpie Mason—David Bjelajac, William Moore—to lead the reader on a tour of Europe, the New World, Near East, and beyond to document how art and architecture have been inspired by the Masonic mind.

“The enormously rich visual culture generated by Freemasonry has not received the attention it deserves from art historians,” says Professor Andrew Prescott of the University of Glasgow, no stranger to the educated Mason. “This pioneering collection of essays provides fascinating and tantalizing illustrations of the rich artistic legacy of Freemasonry in many different countries ranging from Europe and America to Haiti, Iran and India across media, including paintings, prints, metalwork, jewelry, ceramics, and architecture.”

The book’s contents include:


Freemasonry in Eighteenth-Century Portugal and the Architectural Projects of the Marquis of Pombal by David Martín López

The Order of the Pug and Meissen Porcelain: Myth and History by Cordula Bischoff

Goya and Freemasonry: Travels, Letters, Friends by Reva Wolf

Freemasonry’s “Living Stones” and the Boston Portraiture of John Singleton Copley by David Bjelajac

The Visual Arts of Freemasonry as Practiced “Within the Compass of Good Citizens” by Paul Revere by Nan Wolverton

Building Codes for Masonic Viewers in Baron Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France by Alisa Luxenberg

Freemasonry and the Architecture of the Persian Revival, 1843-1933 by Talinn Grigor

Solomon’s Temple in America: Masonic Architecture, Biblical Imagery, and Popular Culture, 1865-1930 by William D. Moore

Freemasonry and the Art Workers Guild: The Arts Lodge No. 2751, 1899-1935 by Martin Cherry

Picturing Black Freemasons from Emancipation to the 1990s by Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis

Saint Jean Baptiste, Haitian Vodou, and the Masonic Imaginary by Katherine Smith


This lecture hosted by the Livingston Library will take place inside the Jacobean Room on the eighth floor of Masonic Hall—I guess in anticipation of a large crowd. Photo ID is required to enter the building. See you there.

Evidently, our library is in great hands! Congratulations to the Trustees and to Director Alex Vastola.
     

‘Cole mining’

    
Way back a long time ago, when I was a junior in high school, my teacher of U.S. history sadistically assigned his class, as requisite to passing the course, what seemed like impossibly obscure topics for research papers. Obscurity is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and to a 16-year-old underachiever, the prospect of delving into the life and work of one Thomas Cole, father of the Hudson River School in the fine arts, was akin to being sentenced to a gulag to mine coal, barehanded. This was far before the internet, Google, and the rest; it was merely the dawn of the PC age itself. Research meant legwork at the library, and my subject Thomas Cole required travel to the public libraries of neighboring towns which, to me, was as unheard of as Cole himself. It was a good thing my friend Tim had access to a car – would have been even better if one of us had a driver’s license – so to foreign libraries we went to achieve our respective advancements in knowledge.

If you had tried to tell me then that decades later I would happily drive 250 miles to enjoy lectures on topics ranging from our Mr. Cole to the KKK, I would have smacked you, but there I was at the Scottish Rite’s National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Massachusetts last April being impressed by David Bjelajac’s talk, augmented by PowerPoint graphics of Cole’s work.

It’s funny what happens when you get a little culture in you.

Turns out Thomas Cole was a Freemason who made symbols familiar to the initiated eye key components in some of his work. Professor Bjelajac will appear at Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, on Sunday, March 6 to present his lecture Thomas Cole, Freemasonry and the American Hercules.

Cedar Grove

Thomas Cole National Historic Site

218 Spring Street

Catskill, New York

The lecture will begin at 2 p.m., and tickets, at $8 each, will be available on a first come, first served basis.

From the Cedar Grove website:

Thomas Cole, Freemasonry and the American Hercules

Thomas Cole became a Freemason in Zanesville, Ohio, during the summer of 1822, and soon composed sublime mountainous views that drew upon Masonry’s mysterious emblems. First publicized in New York newspapers by William Dunlap, a brother Mason, Cole’s paintings captured the patronage of the Empire State’s Masonic elite. David Bjelajac, Professor of Art and Human Sciences at George Washington University, reinterprets Cole’s The Titan’s Goblet (1833), which honored New York Governor De Witt Clinton, Erie Canal builder, art academician and leading Freemason. This small, enigmatic painting draws upon Masonic ritual and Herculean myth, and looks forward to Cole’s famed Course of Empire and Voyage of Life series.



The Titan's Goblet is on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life series
is on view at the National Gallery of Art.
This is Childhood.



The Voyage of Life: Youth.



The Voyage of Life: Manhood.



The Voyage of Life: Old Age.

Please pardon these low resolution images. Reproductions of these oil-on-canvas works are available in various media if you shop around.

From the National Gallery’s website:

Cole’s renowned four-part series traces the journey of an archetypal hero along the “River of Life.” Confidently assuming control of his destiny and oblivious to the dangers that await him, the voyager boldly strives to reach an aerial castle, emblematic of the daydreams of “Youth” and its aspirations for glory and fame. As the traveler approaches his goal, the ever-more-turbulent stream deviates from its course and relentlessly carries him toward the next picture in the series, where nature’s fury, evil demons, and self-doubt will threaten his very existence. Only prayer, Cole suggests, can save the voyager from a dark and tragic fate.

From the innocence of childhood, to the flush of youthful overconfidence, through the trials and tribulations of middle age, to the hero’s triumphant salvation, The Voyage of Life seems intrinsically linked to the Christian doctrine of death and resurrection. Cole’s intrepid voyager also may be read as a personification of America, itself at an adolescent stage of development. The artist may have been issuing a dire warning to those caught up in the feverish quest for Manifest Destiny: that unbridled westward expansion and industrialization would have tragic consequences for both man and nature.

The name Bjelajac is uncommon, so if it rings a bell for you, it may be because the professor is related to Bro. Michael Bjelajac, Past Master of Gate City Lodge No. 2 in Atlanta.