Ormond museum features art from the war in France and the war at home

(Continued from Jan. 13)

I spend a lot of time at Malcolm Fraser’s “The Soul Escaping Death” painting flanked by a framed spread of many medals earned in World War 1. He served in the French Blue Devils unit and was wounded five times. He also was an officer with the Red Cross on the frontlines.

Chris wanders off. She knows that I may be awhile. 

That’s what you do at a museum, right? Wander. Or roll, depending on your mobility.

If you look up Fraser at New York City’s Salmagundi Club web site, you find that Fraser was a member. I had to search for him and the screen listed 56 items in the file. But the link does not go to the artwork but you can see some in person at the Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens, 78 E. Granada, Blvd. The Salmagundi club is dedicated to representational art so it’s natural that it drew Fraser who painted portraits of the living and the dead, angels, soldiers, and John the Baptist among them.

“The Soul Escaping Death” shows a dead soldier on the ground in front of blasted battlements. He is wrapped in a U.S. flag that he apparently was carrying on the staff he grips in his dead hands. An angel has one hand on the body and another on a robe stripped from what’s supposed to be the soldier’s soul rising into the gilded heavens. The spirit looks free and happy, the vestments looking as if they are morphing into angel’s wings. The soul’s naked body looks female with long curly hair and the possibility of breasts and any genitals hidden under a triangle of pubic hair. It could be that this is Fraser’s vision of the angelic form, one that is human but intersexual, one that represents a brand-new being that we become after death. The exposed flesh of the dead soldier and the angel is rough and brown as if they were connected to the ground like old oak trees. The soul’s flesh is the pink of life, a representation of new life in the soul.

I looked at this painting a long time. I couldn’t decide if it was a work of hope in the face of death or a memoir of an artist who has witnessed slaughter on a grand scale. He was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Verdun Medal. “Verdun” was symbolic of the war for the French, a battle cry and also a memory of defeat. Verdun was the longest battle of the war, lasting 11 months. Casualties were enormous for the French and Germans, with 700,000 dead, missing, and wounded. The site’s towering Douaumont Ossuary contains the bones of more than 100,000 soldiers never identified, French and German dead intermingled. You can view them through little windows.

Fraser was an accomplished artist. Not sure he took many risks. The 20^th century was about to explode and the explosion was captured by poets and writers. The so-called “Lost Generation” gave us exciting and troubling masterpieces.

Charles Humes Jr. is a living artist from Miami who has much in common with this creative breed. Humes lives in the present and creates in the present. As an African-American, he has an endless array of subjects, many taken from daily newspapers. Lest we miss his messages, he uses newspaper clippings in his mixed media work.  The museum’s handout for the new year shows Humes’ “Gentrified” on the cover.

“Gentrified” is a loaded word in the black community. It often means that a black neighborhood is being turned over to developers and the mostly-white gentry who will inhabit the condos/townhouses that will replace independent businesses. Artists figure in this, too. They often are the first to occupy rundown urban neighborhoods because they can afford them. Then the city (I’m looking at you, Denver) becomes known as an arts hub and young people swarm in and then smart developers who saw this coming and bought rundown buildings kick out the artists and renovate them into condos and before long you have ranks of techies wandering the streets looking for art for their walls by artists who once lived in their building but now can only afford the prairie exurbs or some quaint rural village in the foothills that soon will swarm with newcomers seeking real estate in artsy quaint rural villages.

It's not the fault of artists. Hey, I just wanted a place to paint! It’s life in America. Not sure what it’s going to look like in Trumplandia.

Oh yes I do. I truly do.

Humes’ work will be on exhibit through Feb. 9. Next up are Colombian sculptor Felipe Lopez and collage artist Staci Swider. Accord to the handout: “Her [Swinder’s] work is a meditation on aging, memory, and the unseen forces that guide us.” Sounds intriguing and timely. Opening reception at the museum gallery is Feb. 20, 6-8 p.m.