Charles Green Shaw, 1892-1974. Harvard Vs. Yale, 1944. Oil on canvasboard. 9 x 12 inches. Signed and dated on verso. Courtesy Lincoln Glenn.
Like smoking, it’s probably bad for everyone involved, but its lingering odor brings fond associative memories. Brass bands blaring; sitting too long on cold metal bleachers; a lonesome celery on the platter when the wings are all gone — Proust had his madeleine, and we have these. Football for me plays a strictly atmospheric role in Thanksgiving — I never watch a game, don’t know the rules, and can’t make the pig-skin spiral, but it feels like I’d miss it if it weren’t lurking somewhere near the turkey.
Less so of the fine art world — I never miss football at the museum. Never have I thought, standing in front of a Mark Rothko: “This needs yard lines. This needs blue-cheese sauce. This needs John Madden.” There are artists who paint sports — there was even an Olympic medal in sports-art in the early history of the modern games1 — but mainly the spheres of gallery and grid-iron have remained cordially distant.
Pleasant surprise then, to come across this Charles Green Shaw painting at Lincoln Glenn Gallery in Larchmont, New York. Charles Green Shaw was committed to abstraction almost immediately as he became an artist. He showed along with Albert Gallatin, George L.K. Morris, and Suzy Frelinghuysen as one of the “Park Avenue Cubists”2 — an epithet the group embraced for its suggestion of refinement and sophistication. Shaw showed with a not-yet-world-famous Alexander Calder at the important Five American Concretionists exhibition in 1936 and shortly thereafter helped found the American Abstract Artists group, the seminal who’s-who of non-objective painters in pre-war USA. In short, Shaw was Mr. Abstract — the last painter you’d turn to for a painting of a football game.
But then, Shaw was also a Yale man, and the annual match between Boston and New Haven holds special significance to the members of that particular club. The rivals have been playing on Thanksgiving weekend since before football even had a name, way back in 1875. Even in Shaw’s day its legend was the oak-hewn stuff that made the Ivy League the Ivy League. The painting is also first and foremost a composition in Shavian abstraction: tilting planes hover nebulously on an ambiguous oval — the delicate lines of uprights defy geometry and the whole thing seems to float. It’s a much smaller canvas — all the AAA painters worked on what would appear miniature scales compared to the abstract painters after the war — but compositionally it looks a lot like Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pelvis series.3 In O’Keeffe as in Shaw, foreground and background exchange places and vibrate; it is “plasticity” at its best.
Beyond the rah-rah elitism of the Yale-Harvard game, there is something more piquant about the work for the date that it was painted. By 1944, Shaw’s college days were long behind him. Yale and Harvard skipped the game that year; their athletics programs had been mothballed during World War II. In a world of carnage and destruction, fascist threat to democracy, and interruption of all our social congresses, Shaw must have thought of the Thanksgiving college football game with simple sweetness and nostalgia.
Floating nebulously and at a great remove, but you feel its absence when it is gone.
Happy Thanksgiving, and thank you for reading. Lincoln Glenn just opened to the public this September, and its proprietors have a knack for thoughtful curiosities like this: paintings you may find yourself tumbling into. Tell them I said hello if you should stop in. If you’re in search of Black Friday deals, Hanging Papers readers can take 10% off works by gallery artists here. For those of you who have been clamoring for prints of Kieran O’Hare’s meticulous map drawings, a small edition of DUMBO, Coney Island, Red Hook and Grand Army Plaza are now available. Inquire for pricing and availability at the email below.
With thanks,
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
More on the Park Avenue Cubists here.
Don’t take my word for it — here’s an overview.