Czech Puppets and Their Tradition, at the Columbus Museum of Art

Seeing Strings Attached: The Living Tradition of Czech Puppets at the Columbus Museum of Art (on display through August 25) makes the viewer feel the anguish of the prince who stumbled upon the room where Sleeping Beauty lay encased in crystal. Three galleries full of high-strung individuals in suspended animation! Each face so individualized; every figure shaped not only by anatomy, but by symbolism and its position in a condensed moral

Artist unknown. Devil, 19th century

narrative. With the exception of some video, the show leaves all the beautiful puppets hanging along the walls or posed in groups under vitrines, sometimes in decorated settings. The show is at once disappointing and achingly tantalizing: Let the action begin! We want the show! The introduction to the show acknowledges this inherent difficulty: "Accept the invitation to this enchanting landscape that will draw you close by its strings to a world of fantastic stories and heroes...You, the spectator, are invited to bring the puppets to life..."

The show is a collaboration between the Museum (Carole Genshaft, adjunct curator), the Ohio State University (Joe Brandesky, guest curator), and the Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague (Nina Malikova, curator). Private collectors have loaned most of the materials. The many historical notes provide the narrative illustrated by the abundant, fascinating puppets themselves. The story is about puppetry that has been, since the 17th century, a way to maintain ethnic identity in an area of Europe claimed throughout history by an uninterrupted succession of authoritarian political entities: Bohemia, the Hapsburg Empire, Germany, and the Soviets. Though it has integrated puppetry traditions from all over Europe, one constant of the Czech puppet tradition was preservation of the local language, which was always secondary to the reigning power's.

Karel Kobrle, Faustus, Kaspar and two devils on an Ales's Family
Theater stage, manufactured in 1913.

Puppetry in the Czech Republic has never been simply a form of children's amusement, but has been story-telling for all ages and for many purposes. Its subjects have included fairy and folk tales; plays based on the world's great literature; operas; and topical, politically subversive works. Contemporary Czech puppetry mingles with traditional theater and is integrated into live-action film. It has emerged from the nineteenth-century work of itinerants, to domestic parlor entertainment, to become housed in dedicated, state-of-the-art theaters that now exist exclusively for this art form.

Strings Attached offers both the pleasure of seeing many instances of stock puppet characters and singular figures clearly intended as high art objects for high art settings. In the pictures above, we see a truly fearsome devil with one hoof and one foot; in the other, devils lurk behind Faustus and his red-capped servant, Kaspar. Kaspar is the Czech version of the English Punch, appearing in all sorts of settings. He's introduced here even into a homemade version of tragedy, bringing the absurd and earthy with him. 

The show's other Kaspars are a wonderful bunch, each with his own personality, his own physique and expression. A 19th century hand-puppet by Jan Flaschs, Jr., (right) has the carved expression of the philosopher fool, a sage in motley, all the sadder for its drooping lack of animation. But the early, crude see-saw- motion Kaspar is a peasant all the way: No introspection here, just work and low comedy to ease the movement through life.

Another hand puppet, a stunned-looking Kaspar (left), appeared in film, not on stage: in Punch and Judy, a 1966 film by Jan Svankmajer. The film features two Kapers (Punches) who engage in a tradition of their character: They fight—in this case to the death—over a live guinea pig. The exhibit offers only a tiny photo out-take from the film, but it certainly whetted my appetite for the whole. A tradition of red puppet clowns responding to the motions of a live guinea pig? The comic possibilities in the very concept are tremendous on the face of it!

Still shot from Punch and Judy, 1966 by Jan Svankmajer.

Devils are also well represented in Strings Attached. A note mentions that the story of Dr. Faustus has always been popular in Czech puppet theater, as death and the grotesque have been native aspects of the culture and folk traditions. The devils shown in this show are convincingly particularized. They are all black, not red, though this seems to suggest soot—the result of flame rather than the flame itself. They are clearly not racially black; if anything, they are bestial, having the cloven hoof, horns, and even fur-covered bodies. They go unclothed. 

The faces of these two unattributed nineteenth century devils demonstrate something I found fascinating about all the puppets: Their faces are carved not into neutral expressions that I would have assumed the choice for flexibility. They are carved, rather, into striking, definitive attitudes. It made me stop and think how much what we see is affected by the context--how the fixed, fierce face of a devil will in fact assume in motion any number of expressions as it is introduced among other characters in different settings; through the course of a drama; and against different backdrops designed or imagined.

Petr Matasek, Devil, 2001

Petr Matasek is at the pinnacle of contemporary Czech theatre design; his puppets for a production of the Faust legend demonstrate how far puppet-making has moved into the realm of fine art. His Devil is carved in such baroque detail, with fur affixed, strategic use of red, and such fixity of limbs that we are as impressed and amazed by his strangeness as we were by the human features of the earlier devils. The artifice is so beautiful and wrong; does his awkwardness make him terrifying or sympathetic? Perhaps there's more to fear from a devil we try to understand.

Petr Matasek, Devilyn, 2001

Matasek's three figures from the 2001 Johan Doctor Faustus are among the high points of the show. In addition to the puppet above, are Faustus himself and, most remarkable of all, the femme fatale, brilliant in concept and execution. Tall and drawn out, Devilyn has every trait of irresistible feminine sexuality on display and available. Her uncovered breasts are like torpedoes. Her face is brightly painted. She's wearing a satiny red skirt, pulled back even, to reveal her bush—but it's a beard. In fact, it's the devil's beard, for his inverted head forms her legs and sexual parts. It is a stunning idea, realized so boldly: I'm dumbfounded by the idea of a show with this figure in action.

Olivia, 1995 execution of 1925 drawings by
Anna Suchardova-Brichova.

There are many exceptional artists presented; people whose breathtaking skill in carving is put to the service of great fancy and insight. In the 20th century puppets, we see a great variety of forms bursting from a veritable garden of performance ideas, ranging from the rusting and rough-hewn to very polished and refined. A set of puppets for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night were executed in 1995, but designed in 1925 along the lines of the simple, clean lines of the Bauhaus aesthetic. Viola is a doll, onto whom the iconic role of the chaste, love-beleaguered mourner can be thrust.

Stylized, but in a more comical vein, are the 2005 puppets for an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's children's story, The Happy Prince. These puppets wear fabric costumes atop upholstered bodies. This gives them a warmth beyond any available to their kin made entirely of wood, or even to the hand puppets which affix wooden heads to loosely draped cloth costumes. Warmth, in general, is not a feature of the puppets in this show; few have any reassuring or inviting presence. Whether their dramas generate comforting emotions is a question I'd like to know more about. Because they are nearly all carved of wood and

Zdenek Hajduch, puppets for The Happy Prince, 2005.

stylized to varying degrees, they seem indeed to be material for a medium of ambiguity, absurdity, irresolution; for hard edges and dark subjects.

But Olivia is an exceptional wooden puppet. Most of the carvers take the wood in less highly refined directions, though without being any less self-conscious in its use. Robert Smolik's rough-hewn figures for the fairy tale, The Seven Ravens, retain every mark of the chisel. In the story, a mother's curse transforms her sons into ravens, who are redeemed by their sister's persistence and love. The roots of such a story in folklore and archetype make such raw handling of the material seem particularly right—compared especially to the high art Shakespeare Olivia, painted and polished, above.

Robert Smolik, figures from Seven Ravens, 2001.

Another artist in 2003 made a revolving stage with figures for performances of the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel. Again, the artistry is great and the carving is beautiful. It is rhythmical and precise, by the manner is rough. The handling of the material itself "sets the stage" for the beloved story of innocence and power claimed.

Strings Attached is an art show giddy with an abundance of beautiful material, but it is also a show about stagecraft. While one misses the action and longs to sit and laugh or cry over the multitude of stories inherent in the three galleries, the compensation is the fascinating opportunity to glimpse playmakers' decisions about styling, costuming, and even about set design. It's a rare, multifaceted, and absorbing show. It's wonderful: full of wonders.

Vignette from 2009 film Toys in the Attic. Stop-action animation, drawn animation, and live action.
Features voices of Forest Whittaker, Joan Cusak, and Cary Elwes.

 All photography by the author.

Stephen Sabo: Dinosaurs, Desert Owls, and Impossible Bottles

Ohio has a phenomenal legacy of folk and outsider artists who have been received with honor in our state. Duff Lindsay, the owner of the Lindsay Gallery in Columbus, has been chief among those who cultivate the public's knowledge and appreciation of our unschooled masters.

Stephen Sabo, owls from Desert Creatures.

During April and May, Lindsay is presenting the work of such an artist who has only recently come to light. Stephen Sabo worked on our city's south side until his death in 2002 at the age of 99. His early years were spent in Murray City in southeastern Ohio. His formal education ended at age 14 when he was sent, like many a child, to work in the coal mines. Over the years he was able to leave the mines, move to Columbus and marry, working variously as a line man, machinist, self-taught taxidermist, father—and as perpetual autodidact. He loved simple pleasures of country masculinity to the end: hunting and fishing; whittling and carving in the peace and quiet of his basement at home.

Lindsay acquired Sabo's oeuvre last year. Sabo never promoted his own work beyond a local seniors' gift shop (the Golden Hobby Shop), so he was known to a limited community. Lindsay has recently shown the work at the New York Outsider Art Fair, where it was singled out for praise by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. It has also been presented in a solo show at the Springfield (Ohio) Art Museum.

This show is remarkable on the face of it for including work that spans at least eighty years.

Stephen Sabo, Fish and Crayfish,
14 x 16 x 8."

Sabo never quit carving. Some of the pieces shown, then, are very fine and detailed, both in terms of the carving itself and its painting. His fish, mounted in the manner of taxidermic specimens, are exquisite—even beyond taxidermy's possibilities for eternal freshness, I suspect—as are his birds, which are sometimes worthy of display in natural history  museums. They are prepared not only in natural positions, but in positions that best display their identifying markings. The birds are self-illustrating, like birds by Audubon or Roger Torey Peterson. Again, this may be a result of taxidermy, which would provide the perfect opportunity for close-up study.

 Stephen Sabo, Two birds, 15 x 10.5."
 Wood mounted on panel.

 On the other hand, Sabo couldn't have known natural postures without having spent considerable time observing live animals. I was fascinated by Sabo's footed, two-sided panel representing Birds North America on one side, with Animals of North America on the other. The creatures are carved in bas-relief in carefully planned designs that fit elegantly onto the panels. Birds, raccoons, and bison are all painted in true colors; the backgrounds are uniformly a creamy white with the exception of the blue around the mountain goats. Blue creates the sense that we are looking up at them, standing on a peak. That passage of blue sky clinches our sense of Sabo's sophisticated awareness, which lifts the work out of naive vision.

Stephen Sabo, Animals of North America, 
23 x 13 x 2." (Two-sided, Birds verso)

Stephen Sabo, Birds of North America.
23 x 13 x 2." (Two-sided, Animals verso)

The background painting on these panels is rough and must have been applied at the end of the project, for it obtrudes up the edges of the animal forms and even onto a few of them. Its uneven application grants a liveliness in the background, but there's a crude, uneven outlining that dulls the acuity of the nature perceptions.

Yet it's the carving finesse that carries the day. The attitudes of the animals are completely engaging. The snippety cant of the blue jay on its branch; the little confrontation between mother and child squirrel posited in the positions of legs and tails; the pan-species maternal gesture in the doe with her nursing fawn. This work lacks the perfection of the fish tableau, but we find that there is technical latitude in Sabo's expressive powers.

The range of Sabo's subjects is broad enough and so free of outright eccentricity that I fancy him a member in good standing of a time-honored fraternity of American carvers and whittlers bent over their solitary work in basements, garages and huts while womenfolks occupy themselves elsewhere more gregariously. In Sabo's work we encounter a rural, folkloric man's world undisturbed by communications. Only the automotive and athletic aspects are missing from an other wise full plate of classic male folk subjects: Nature; Christian stories and subjects of narrative rather than passionate importance; tableaux of daily life—miners, farmers, Western characters, exotic peoples; circuses; raptors and dinosaurs. There are lots of dinosaurs.      

Stephen Sabo, Deer Trophy, wood and antlers.

Because Sabo's career was so long, Lindsay sensibly speculates that deteriorating manual skill accounts for the big differences in the looks of his works. While he produced iridescent, life-like mounted trophy fish at one point (see above), at another he made a trophy head of a deer that looked like it what it is: a block head with small antlers roughly attached. Is this the difference between ages 25 and 85; between nimble fingers and arthritic ones; of prime vision and failing?
                         

Stephen Sabo, Dinosaur

Stephen Sabo, Dinosaur, view 2

Even the more crudely fashioned work is not without its liveliness and charm, however. I found this unspecified dinosaur very endearing in its puppy-like stance and uncertain gesture toward ferocity. Most of Sabo's subjects have some quality of the observed, even when it's only through photographs. I enjoy works like this, in which I suspect that the artist called on vague, inspecific clusters of memory, supplemented by snippets of whole cloth. The results have a life of their own.

While some of Sabo's work—presumably later—is blockish and carved without the finesse that so marks the wildlife figures above, it seems to be invested with the carver's sense of curiosity and engagement nevertheless. One of the most delightful works in the show is Circus Horses, his presentation of a familiar inspiration for artists in every medium. Six horses and two ponies perform for a trainer who directs while a child performs a handstand on a pony's back. We've seen above that Sabo was once able virtually to breathe life into animal carvings. In this case, he cannot. The tableau abstractly represents the moment at the circus; none of the figures, equine or human, is naturalistically rendered. 

Stephen Sabo, Circus Horses, 10 x 24 x 21. Courtesy of the Lindsay Gallery.

The scene is far from dull, though, for it offers the delight of its stylization, the rhythm and symmetry that are essential to such circus acts. The unity of purpose between horses and people is emphasized by both the dissimilarity of sizes (big horses; tiny acrobat) and the similarity of their costumes. The abstract delights of order, fantasy, and power controlled for a beautiful design are all captured in carving technique that need not be polished for effective and convincing expression.

Steven Sabo, Indian Village, impossible bottle, 20 x 12 x 12."
Courtesy, Lindsay Gallery.

This show includes two wonderful "impossible bottles." The well-known ship-in-a-bottle in a sub-genre of this form of puzzle, in which something apparently too large to insert into a bottle is nevertheless put there. (For an enormous on-line gallery of work by Sabo's peers in this genre, see Folk Art in Bottles.) Sabo's impossible bottles are tour de force, vastly detailed dioramas of village life. One shows pioneer life, and the other is life in an Indian village. In the latter, a man cuts open a hanging carcass of an animal. The animal's head lies on the ground, miraculously unmolested by two dogs. The tiny scene contains a pony, another man,  and three woman, one with a papoose. 

There's a tipi, and a large log that lies to one side.

Stephen Sabo, Indian Village, impossible bottle, detail

The painted background places the scene in a mid-autumn landscape. The outside measurement for this busy and peaceful environment: 20 x 12 x 12." It certainly seems impossible.




Stephen Sabo:Whittler, Tinkerer...Artist provides a particular opportunity to see a lifetime retrospective of the most condensed sort. That the work is undated is not the distraction one would at first think. I found myself thinking of the artist as an embodied human with aging faculties and body. He will either allow these to remove carving from his life; or he will adjust his carving to his changed abilities. With age's trembling of hands and fogging of vision, perception, awareness, and knowledge can continue to grow. 

For anyone who ever wonders how people come to be artists or how they develop and what inspires them, this show is a wide-open door into just such a story of unusual accessibility. Sabo had a lot of simple interests, it seems, and he thought best when his hands were busy. In this show, it's not hard to see where artists come from, and that it's persistence and continuity of desire that make the difference.

Stephen Sabo, Circus Horses, detail

All photography by the author unless otherwise specified.

Elijah Pierce, Sanctuary in the 1960s

Columbus, Ohio lays claim to its share of famous artists: George Bellows was born and raised here, as was James Thurber. Roy Lichtenstein studied and taught at Ohio State during the '40s. Currently living and working among us are the pioneer of computer art, Charles Csuri; photographer Tony Mendoza; Ann Hamilton, and Aminah Robinson. 

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Christ with Rose of Sharon, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving,17 1/2 x 17 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Robinson is a direct heir—personal and artistic—of the artist I believe closest to our city's civic identity, woodcarver Elijah Pierce. Pierce, a barber by trade, came to Columbus in 1916 when he was 24. He died here in 1984, at age 92. The son of a former slave, he grew up in rural Mississippi where he studied through the eighth grade and learned to carve with a pocketknife.

In Columbus, Pierce was famous not only as a carver, but also as the spiritual center of a community. He was the man without whom a large and prolific generation of the city's Black artists might have missed their calling. Art, religious devotion, and rock-solid principles for righteous living were strongly allied in him, as both his oeuvre and the living memory of him attest.

During his lifetime, Pierce became famous beyond Columbus. In 1973, he won first prize in the  International Exhibition of Primitive Art in Yugoslavia. In 1975, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, as a master traditional artist.

Among the many to whom Pierce was a mentor and inspiration is Kojo Kamau, Columbus's eminent photographer. Some of Kamau's photos of Pierce and his shop can be found online here. Although the photos show what we know to be an urban workshop in the late 20th century, Pierce himself looks like a man from an earlier place and era. His famously stick-like figure—his expression adding to the sense of a cigar-store Indian in the view of him at his table, formally dressed in his unimproved setting—certainly reinforces the stories about the man himself: unpretentious, plain, a believer with his eyes on the right course. Nothing about him suggests that he felt any need to appear sophisticated or urbane.

Amish, Holmes Co., Ohio Variable Star Crib Quilt, c. 1890's Pieced cotton chambray, 41 x 33 1/2 inches Private collection Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

The Keny Galleries in Columbus are currently showing Two Visions of Spirituality: Elijah Pierce's Woodcarvings and Historical Amish Quilts, a beautiful show. Pierce's carvings make a natural visual pairing with the quilts. Together they evoke the warmth of personal, direct expression from a rural past. Ohio is home to substantial and still growing Amish communities that preserve traditional ways, down to continuing use of horse and buggy transportation and eschewal of electrification. Even though the patterns and sewing methods of the quilts displayed can be found today, the antique quilts in this show  (ranging from the 1890s through 1937) do indeed have the softness that age imparts textiles. Time has enriched their inherent beauty.

Amish, Holmes Co., Ohio Probably made by Naomi Hershberger (wife of Daniel, married 1907) Nine Patch/Diamond in the Square Variation Quilt, c. 1915-25 Pieced cotton and cotton sateen, 78 x 76 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

It finally struck me, though, as I surveyed Pierce's boldly colored, folkloric carvings of Jesus, angels, and biblical stories, that most of his work in this show—hanging so comfortably among the antique quilts—actually dates from the 1960s and '70s. His carvings, so simple in appearance and convinced in moral vision, are the work of an urban Black man—one who remained a starched community elder, sitting downtown in his rocker, plying folk art during the civil rights era of fiery social and racial unrest.

Burning buildings during Watts riots, August 1965. New York World-Telegram photo.

In 1965, when many of the pieces at Keny are dated, I was a high school student in small-town Ohio, unable to escape the network news my parents watched every evening. In memory, it's all scenes of shattered windows and fires at night in cities wracked by race riots. The people of my homogenous town had strongly worded and freely expressed opinions about Negroes in general. My skin was always crawling with generalized foreboding. Heroes and hopes were assassinated as if we were supposed to get used to it. The world felt to me wholly public and political, a world of causes, not individuals. For an introspective, cloistered girl it was an appalling time. While I was engaged by the cause of civil rights, I was overpowered by the intensity of the public world. I lacked knowing that it could be legitimate to insist on growing up as a clear-headed individual with some solid ideas about her place in the world.

My memories of the intense anxiety of the '60s make the Keny selection of Pierce's work feel almost shockingly immediate and new. These carvings, so focused on the spiritual life, picture havens of the personal in a world that we know was overtaken by virtual public warfare and urgent social movements. Art has to come from a strong, concentrated self—even art that responds directly to the affairs of the world or proposes changes in them. 

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Angel (with Ruby Brown's Family), 1966 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 27 3/4 x 17 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Pierce was hardly oblivious to society: His work covered civil rights themes and heroes. The work in the Keny show is only a tiny selection of his spiritual oeuvre. But even here we see in one of his many portrayals of angels, an Angel (with Ruby Brown's Family) from 1966, his concern with issues of race. Ruby Brown is the title subject of a poem by Langston Hughes:

She was young and beautiful
And golden like the sunshine
That warmed her body.
And because she was colored
Mayville had no place to offer her,
Nor fuel for the clean flame of joy
That tried to burn within her soul.

In Hughes' poem, Ruby, the scullery maid, is corrupted into prostitution by men who take advantage of her entirely normal wishes for a life with a little money and incident. "The good church folk do not mention/ Her name any more." But Pierce depicts an angel before a cross with the sacred heart, and a rose of Sharon, protecting Ruby's family from any taunts by churchgoing neighbors. Not only are they protected, they are totally removed from others.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Angel with Mother and Child in the Garden, 1966 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 25 3/4 x 15 1/2 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

In Angel with Mother and Child, too, a mother and her son appear to stand in a garden with an angel watching over them. Part of their blessed status seems to be their self-contained separation from anyone else.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 The Good Samaritan, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 13 x 22 inches Private collection Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Even in The Good Samaritan, the most complex and detailed composition here, the special, protective relationship is celebrated. The priest and the Levite—dominant in their size, posture, and colors—pass the robbers' victim, but the Samaritan—small and brown—bows over to assist him. Their relationship appears, like the angelic ones we've seen, to be placed in a garden, away from the open space the others traverse.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Sermon on the Mount, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 15 3/4 x 15 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

The most interesting removal of all, I think, is the portrayal of Jesus in Sermon on the Mount. He sits with his hands folded on his knees, alone on a hill under a sky with three-dimensional clouds. The yellow orb has beams that signify sun, although the darkness of the upper sky gives the feeling of night rolling in, with either the sun setting or the moon rising.

For a depiction of the Sermon on the Mount this is unusual, for there is no congregation even suggested, only Jesus with his upward-looking, far-away gaze. He's not preaching: He's thinking, or introspecting. Under a dramatic sky, with flowers growing at his feet, Jesus looks so contented! This is a moment of quiet happiness that the human writing this entirely relates to. It's a contentment that seems achievable, even without a halo.

While my observations about the carvings in Keny's beautiful show may add nothing to the knowledge of Pierce's work, my point in writing is about my own satisfaction to discover in this folk artist a fellow traveler through an era so disconcerting and painful to me, one in which I felt so keen a need for a quiet shelter. I wish I had discovered him then. 

I've never had religious convictions; Jesus is a metaphor for me. But the habit of cultivating strength from the inside out, through wise solitude, is one I've learned to value highly. It's a form of spirituality characteristic not only of religion, but of artistic visions as well. While the 1960s flamed, Pierce maintained his religious faith and expressed it through art-making too. Whatever his legacy in the church, his legacy among practicing artists is deep. To inspire seekers of freedom for the inner life amidst a clamorous world of mass concerns strikes me as a great legacy.