John Alexander at the Smithsonian American Art Museum , Washington, DC

What makes a really great artist? Talent, skills, passion, prolific output as well as the proven ability to get oneself “out there”? Obviously, all that will get you quite far on the way, but something must be still missing – or Thomas Kinkade would hang in museums, too. Now, don’t get me wrong: I do not compare John Alexander with Thomas Kinkade. He is a processed square burger patty against Alexander's home-grilled, juicy red steak.

I had seen an article about the southern artist John Alexander in the January issue of Art in America and I received an invite to the simultaneous exhibition at Hemphill Gallery on 14th street but, reduced to small picture format, the work seemed like storybook illustrations. In conversations with friends I didn’t find any incentives to go see his show either. So I gave both shows a pass. But here I was in the museum anyway, for the “Recognize!” hip hop art exhibit (see the previous blog entry), and I figured I might as well walk through.

This retrospective was a strange, layered experience. The rooms where it can be found (until March 16, so better run) are lit sparingly, with floodlights on intense and often HUGE works punctuating the darkness. My first impression was: “Wow! Was I ever wrong not to go see this show!”

But then something happened. It began with the titles and the descriptions – and it ended there too. (I am determined to clean up my website after seeing the John Alexander exhibit in the American Art Museum. Bare bones! Intellectual rigor! Let the work speak, not the artist!) One could write a doctoral thesis, probably several, on the issue of artwork titles. Titles can be passion killers. In response to what I saw I am now feverishly in favor of “Untitled IV”. Alexander’s titles were so ... clear. They were telling you everything about the work, compounded by his descriptions, to the point of Too Much Information. They beat all mystique out of the artwork and made it into, well, just pictures. Gorgeous ones, beautiful ones, dazzling ones - but still, just pictures. 

So what is lacking that makes Alexander a good but not a great artist (who am I to say something like that)? Is it a certain brand of creativity? What kind of creativity makes art great? I could get in trouble on that one (but it would be an interesting subject for another blog entry), so for now I’ll settle on his WYSIWIG factor. He is so transparent. He seems to set out with a preconceived idea in his head and then he paints it. And then he explains the rest. And then you see it. And then you go home. Alexander may, at times in his life, have been a tortured person, but he is not a tortured artist.

What to think of two skeletons dancing in a brooding semi-abstract bayou landscape, brandishing scythes – I thought it was a terrific, haunting, mysterious painting until I read the title: “Dancing on the Water Lilies of Life”. The spell was gone, the dark spookiness evaporated and I felt like someone had just splashed water from the bayou in my face. The skeletons now looked hokey, a bit like a Halloween joke.

And so it went on. Alexander is a very skilled artist and draftsman, but maybe it is that his outsize personality competes with his work? Because these titles and descriptions are his and through them, something creeps into your experience that spoils it and makes you think: “Eh ... not quite.” Even when I did not read the titles and the descriptions I still heard Alexander yakking into my ear when I contemplated the initially very impressive “Glory Bound” (see picture): “Have you seen that LOCOMOTIVE! Awesome! How it comes out of that TUNNEL! And look how I PAINTED it. Isn’t it INTENSE? You can almost HEAR the whistle! WOW! Coolness!!!!”

Also, the exhibit feels like a group show, representing his entire range, and while that range is very impressive, the effect is also confusing. Here are portraits of clansmen (they’re terrific, no reservations), there are his crazy frenetic bayou voodoo African paintings, there is a superb alligator rendered life-size and life-like in watercolor, there are his birds (why does everybody seem to so like the lone cardinal? I really don’t get it. It’s like an Ann Craven bird and I don’t know what to think of her bird paintings either), there are his, again terrific, landscapes and nature-inspired paintings - I really liked “High Cotton” and “The Mighty Bog”. And then there are his enormous abstracts.

Alexander’s realistic work is great but not all the pieces are equally good, and while it is alright for any artist to produce lesser pieces it is not alright to hang those in a museum (but that is not the artist's, but the curator's fault). I could have done without one of the great white herons and also without the baboon picture “Mother and Child” – both were below par. There was a great drawing of a weird bird - Was it a marabou? A vulture on stilts? A spooky stork on speed? Regrettably, it was entitled “Aging Rock Star”.

There were also some what I would call, probably a bit arrogantly, “superficial” paintings, painted one-liners, like the cartoonesque Casa de los Locos, or the Venus and Adonis, KKK-birdmasked in their bed, about to make passionate love, so passionate that it their hair is on fire, which is of course a refreshing change from burning crosses. But I was wrong. The article in Art and America mentions that it references his marital problems - more TMI.

An impressive painting is “I’ve Been Living In A Hydrogen Bomb”, which is a phenomenally huge abstract on three panels, in total measuring at least 30 by 12 feet, or maybe it was 300 by 120 feet - I wouldn’t be surprised if it were even larger than that. It is good - its derivativeness (Pollock, Basquiat, who was then already very well known and dating Madonna) can be overlooked. One wonders indeed and in awe how it was executed, and why he made it – but wait! Alexander tells us conveniently that he painted it after he divorced (remember the marital problems?) and moved from Texas to New York City in 1979 (the painting is from 1982): “the trauma associated with all this upheaval took a tremendous toll ... I guess [this painting] was a form of exorcism that kept me from becoming an ax murderer.” Seems like a wise move.

And so it remains throughout the show. The viewer initially falls for the seduction and impact of many of the works, then is put off by the titles and the descriptions, looks again at the paintings but by then cracks have begun to form in the veneer. I felt a bit sad – I really wanted to appreciate the total but in the end I could not. I did leave with a few images firmly engraved in my mind – the frenetic voodoo Adrican bayou paintings (although also a bit Basquiatesque), the clansmen, the landscapes and the Hydrogen Bomb. But I didn’t buy the catalogue. I bought a book on the tortured artist Basquiat.