The Procession by Paul Moore 

 

                                                    Part III - A Meditation

 

Paul Moore is certainly among the greatest sculptors of his generation, not only with collectors and admirers of American Western art, but anywhere, including numerous commissions for portraits of his contemporaries, public monuments, including the colossal Oklahoma Centennial Land Run Monument in Oklahoma City, a 365 foot epic consisting of 45 human figures and numerous horses and wagons--all life sized, to smaller compositions many of which depict scrupulously researched Native Americans of many different tribes.  In addition, he is a Professor of Sculpture at the University of Oklahoma and has passed his craft down to his sons. He is also a prolific collector of objects and artifacts and has a profound knowledge of the history of American sculpture.  There are two full-length interviews, one produced by the National Sculpture Society (2021) and the other (2017) in the Gallery of America series produced by PBS.  A grand selection of his varied works is available to see on his own website Crown Arts, Inc.  I give you links to all three below. So much has been written and videotaped about him and his body of work by so many who know him, that I urge anyone who is interested to seek expert information from the abovementioned sources.

 

Here, I write only about two small pieces. I have never met Paul Moore, and my only direct experience of his work is The Procession, now in the collection of the Briscoe Museum, which was in the 2020 Night of ArtistsShow and a James Bowie Sculpture prize that year, (this work had also won the prestigious Prix de West the previous year), and another of his works Suspension To The Sun which was featured in the 2021 Night of Artists; I include a photo of it here with some trepidation since I do not know where it is now and who holds the copyright for the reproduction (I hope I will be forgiven).

 

Paul Moore - Suspension to the Sun

Both these works were done around the same period, during the time of Covid, and are part of a group of mixed media pieces that examine the fusion of Native American with Christian beliefs. Some are like altarpieces, and unlike The Profession, these images are confined to their European Gothic frames (except for a Bison head that rides outwards like a cuckoo clock when its doors are opened). Suspension to the Sunshows a single figure centered in front of a plain rectangular frame.  The figure is suspended above the ground by means of ropes (here invisible) tied to wooden pegs that pierce his shoulder muscles.

 

The inspiration for this, as Moore explains on his website, is the Mandan ceremony, called the O-Kee-pa, held in spring when young men of the tribe endured an initiation ceremony that lasted four days.  Part of it consisted of the young men having similar piercing of their shoulder and back muscles as well as by darts and suspended from the ceiling of the Mandan Medicine

George Catlin - Okee-pa Ceremony: The Cutting

Lodge by ropes.  This was only the beginning, for the suspension was not to kill, but an ordeal to achieve visions in a state of trance.  They then went through other ordeals.  George Catlin had been present at the ceremony in 1832 and recorded four episodes from it with broad brushstrokes. Catlin's rapidly-painted initiates look slender and ragged, and they are seen from the distance within the lodge.

 

Moore presents the man, but in a very different way.  The figure is presented frontally, his pierced shoulder muscles looking almost like straps.  His spread-out arms and hand gestures suggest endurance, and also part of his self-offering.  For Catholics, the frontal suspended figure, including the slightly joined feet, may evoke Jesus on the Cross, but his head, tilted backwards to the light, implies an ecstatic experience emphasized by the gold leaf behind him that reflects the studio lighting above it.  The closest thing I can think of is Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul, but that light-encompassing figure lies foreshortened away from the

Caravaggio -St. Paul

viewer on the ground, and he's struck blind by his vision. And the heroic nature of Moore's young man with a rope crown, which from the viewer's angle resembles a laurel wreath, tilts towards, and receives the light--an ecstatic vision that climaxes his ordeal. It's a depiction of the crowning moment of a vision quest, part of an age-old and universal initiation. This is a living hero--but all the muscular tension makes it hard to contemplate for long.

 

This work has a similar spiritual power to The Procession, but the effect on the viewer is different.  I as a viewer can receive a powerful spiritual jolt from Suspension, but its upward-gazing intensity can only inspire the onlooker for a short time, and we can never share it. The wooden block, placed in front of the picture with its label, is also a distancing mechanism. The viewer is not invited to participate in this ritual, but to experience it in their own inner thoughts.   The Procession is just the opposite: it appears to move towards you, soon you will be embraced by its spirituality--drawing you in.

___________________________________________

 

Paul Moore's Suspension in the Sun can be seen on his website: https://crownartsinc.com/art-gallery/ols/products/xn-suspension-to-the-sun-ol9lnb

Others in this same series can be accessed at the same website; click on the years 2019 and 2020.

 

George Catlin's Okee-pa scenes (1832) consist of four paintings.  Three are in the Anschutz Western Art Museum, Denver.  The fourth ("The Cutting Scene") is in the Denver Art Museum https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/edu/object/cutting-scene-mandan-o-kee-pa-ceremony.  These scenes were reissued under Catlin's supervision as lithographs, starting in 1841, and he lectured on them too.  See also George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, Washington, Smithsonian Institution, 2002, pp. 48, 210-215.

                                         The Procession by Paul Moore:  

 

                                            Part II - Other Assorted Processions

 

Both composers and visual artists have had their hand in evoking processions in their respective media.  A lot of narrative musical compositions conjure them up as aural narratives, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Since music moves through time, it's easy to conjure up the auditory experience of a passing parade, soft in the distance, getting louder as it passes by, and then diminishing in volume as it moves away--continuity being established by a repeated cadence, so a person could imagine a passing caravan in Alexander Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880), or a more dynamic one in Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome  (1924) where a ghost army of Roman Legionnaires emerges faintly from shadows along the Appian Way to stop very loudly in front of you.).  Even more relevant to Moore's work is Isaac's Albéniz' El Corpus en Sevilla (1906), for its similar theme and its cadence, though on a far more elaborate and theatrical scale.

 

To understand how singular Paul Moore's The Procession is in its visual impact and emotional charisma is, it's also worth doing a bit of classical art historical comparisons.  There are many works of visual art that have processions and parades as their principal subject.  The problem here is to show movement through static media. I am restricting my examples to religious processions, which offers examples going as far back as far as we have organized societies and artists to commemorate them.

 

A famous procession in Egypt, the feast of Opet was celebrated in Luxor from the New Kingdom right up to the introduction of Christianity.  It commemorated the season when the Nile flooded, bringing the time of farming, and was extended to fertility in general.  The parade was the grand finale, when images of the city's greatest gods, Amon-Ra, his wife Mut and their son Khons were ceremoniously carried on boat-like floats from Karnak to Luxor. This journey was depicted in a relief from the Red Temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Karnak, with marchers bearing the boat

Feast of Ophet Temple of Amon-Ra

containing the shrine of Amun-Ra.  Following Egyptian conventions at the time, the shallowly carved representation of marchers, bark and shrine is in a single visual plane, along with accompanying hieroglyphics in the same two-dimensional space.  The bearers are in identical poses, suggesting a cadenced stride of a military cohort.  Movement? Yes, but in two dimensions and not in your own viewing space. It's something you can read rather than taking in in with one glance.

 

Over many centuries, religious processions were generally shown with the participants moving along a horizontal plane, shown with far more three dimensionality, but always parallel to the onlookers, not intruding into their space. The original, brightly painted frieze of the Parthenon is a nice example: a horseman might twist on his mount, but neither he nor his gaze is directed out of his plane.

 

Gentile Bellini - Procession in St. Mark's Square

The same can be said of the marchers in Gentile Bellini's Procession in St Mark's Square (Venice, Accademia) : in spite of the deep perspective of the square behind them, the marchers are still seen marching parallel to the picture's viewer, but not deviating from their confined zone.

 

It's when we get to 19th and early 20th centuries that romantic narratives of religious processions really get going, the painted equivalents of Borodin, Sorolla and Respighi.  But how parades and their progress is conveyed has to be done statically, unless it is things like Chinese hand scrolls, where the time of a journey is sequenced by rolling through it, achieved by only unrolling and then rerolling a portion of it to reveal a moment of progress.

 

Solomon A. Hart -Simhat Torah at Livorno Synagogue

An example of a narrative of a procession in a single painting is Simchat Torah at Livorno Synagogue by the British-Jewish academician Solomon Alexander Hart in the New York Jewish Museum (1850).  It commemorates the annual celebration of the Torah.  In this scene all of the torah scrolls are being processed through this Italian synagogue by the leading members of the congregation, led by the Rabbi.  As in Moore's sculpture, the marchers of various ages wind from the ark where they are kept, behind the reader and some singers on the elevated bimah or
reading platform.  They are draped in prayer shawls as they carry the scrolls, covered richly colored cases and polished silver staves or crowns.  Unlike Moore, the action stays within the setting, and appears to be passing towards the right, where an elderly congregant walks to meet them so that he can touch the scrolls with his own shawl.  Other male figures, to the left and right, watch the scene in reverence. Maybe Livornese Jewish males dressed in such oriental robes for festivals back then.  Hart had visited the old synagogue in Livorno and this is an accurate recording of the building.  It is beautiful and sumptuous, but presumed spectators in front of the canvas are viewers only to a passing spectacle; they are not invited to participate. 

 

Ilya Repin Religious Procession in the Kursk Governate

Marchers and witnesses alike in Ilya Repin's Religious Procession in the Kursk Governate (1880-1883) (Tretyakov Museum) are also a passing spectacle, but on a much grander and more chaotic scale. A lot has been written about this painting and its societal commentary, and I give you references to the best of these analyses available online below.  The main point here is that like Hart's painting, the vast procession and its spectators are all conceived on a diagonal that passes to the right of the viewer, but not into his or her space and part of its purpose is to focus on varying individuals and the diverse roles they play.  The viewer is emphatically not a participant in the event nor is invited to be.

 

Closest in the shared tradition of Catholic holy religious processions to Moore's work is Joaquín Sorolla's Los Nazarinos (1914) showing a Holy Week Procession (which is close to Albéniz' musical procession too).  A group of hooded figures parade with a crucifix and a paso image of  the Virgin under a canopy, down an urban street in Seville--identified as so by the iconic tower of the city's cathedral in the background.  It has been observed, though, that there is no street in the city that offers this particular view of the tower; the black caparotes of the marchers, and the image of the Virgin are not specific to a particular confraternity or church. Though processing generally forwards, the figures are directed slightly to the left, as is the gaze of the left hooded

Joaquin Sorolla -Los Nazarenos

foreground figure, and the crowd of spectators hems the marchers in.  And there is a further difference: the Nazarinos painting is part of a large series of murals commissioned by Archer Huntington for the Hispanic Society in New York and carried out by Sorolla between 1911 and 1919.  The Nazarinos are located in a corner, with a much larger painting of bulls being wrangled to transportation at its left (El Encierro)at its left, and a painting of Toreros in Seville's bullfight to its right, and is therefore an incident within a much larger entity depicting various regions of Spain and their typical activities.

 

It can be said that the church in Moore's Procession is generic too.  He did small works of acrylic paint and gold leaf of various southwest mission facades, but the isolated one in The Procession appears more generic.  And none of these painted or sculpted comparisons discussed above have the same jolt of movement outwards, and the almost magic realism of the procession leader, at once someone identifiable and yet Everyman. Coming at you.

 

______________________________________________________________________________

Recordings of Borodin's Steppes exist in several versions in YouTube, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4tlQxaHetI.  Those Legionnaires really march in a  remastered recording of Fritz Reiner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9El5Hzh3jM, while Gustavo Díaz-Jerez rendition of Corpus is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_55-4CpCro.  But there are many versions of each piece to choose from online. Have fun and close your eyes!

 

Feast of Opet relief shown is from the Red Temple of Opet.  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/ancient-egypt-royal-feast

 

An Explanation of the Parthenon frieze and its participants by Paulina Wegrzyn can be found at "The Parthenon Friezes: Their Story Explained" TheCollector.com, August 2, 2020, https://www.thecollector.com/parthenon-frieze/.

 

For Bellini's painting, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procession_in_St._Mark%27s_Square

 

Chinese hand scrolls: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chhs/hd_chhs.htm

 

Old photos of Livorno's synagogue before its destruction can be seen at https://livornodailyphoto.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-old-synagogue.html

 

For two of the best accessible analysis of Repin's monumental work, see the article by Ben Pollit for the Kahn Academy at https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/x4910f52e:eastern-europe-1800-1900/wanderers/a/ilya-repin-krestny-khod-religious-procession-in-kursk-gubernia

 And also the analysis by David, the author of a blog on Russian icons at  https://russianicons.wordpress.com/tag/ilya-repin/

 

On Sorolla see Wikipedia for information and a complete list of the Visions of Spain

paintings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_of_Spain

A specific discussion of Sorolla's Nazarinos, its context and meaning is available at:

Dr. César Lopez Gomez- Joaquin Sorolla "Los Nazarenos," 1914. Nueva York, Hispanic Society of America -- https://cesarlopezgomez.com/joaquin-sorolla-los-nazarenos-1914-nueva-york-hispanic-society-of-america/

 

 

                                            The Procession by Paul Moore

 

I've written about this work for the Briscoe Museum catalogue, but it continues to move me every time I see it.  I wanted think and write more about it, so here goes (this will be a 3- parter)

 

                                               Part I - The Work itself

 

A religious procession winds towards us, apparently coming from the adobe church off to the right, its earthy color the same as the landscape around it.  Leading it is a middle-aged man, very much a portrait-like person with individualized features right down to his receding hairline and grayish braids, holding a processional crucifix of what appears to be polychromed wood.  Behind him is an orderly file of participants, those closest to him carrying an image of the Virgin Mary, her face in shadow under a makeshift canopy of what appears to be wood and canvas.  Everyone but the leader and one man to the left holding a sombrero, is dressed in blankets or shawls of browns and whites, draped over their hair as well as their bodies, muffling their faces so that their genders are unclear, and in many cases their facial features too. Most are of similar height, except for one child near the church.

 

Aside from white in the blankets and shoes and some clouds to the left rear, the only other color beyond shades of brown allowed is a light blue in the shirt of the procession leader, the cloak of the image of the Virgin and a strip of sky. Silver is also present on the halo of Christ on the processional cross, and the smaller crucifix carried the by marcher to the viewer's right of the leader.

 

The barrenness of the landscape with its few scattered shrubs (sagebrush?), the adobe church which seems part of the earth and rising from it, the generic features of the marchers and their blanket-mantles emerging, it seems, from behind the church, suggests the pueblo culture of New Mexico and Arizona, and the isolated location of the building out in the desert is deliberately non-specific.

 

The work is primarily bronze casting including its gilded "frame" and the reclining "ornamental" figures at the top, except for the pale green wooden table on which the framed scene rests, but this too is part of the sculpture, so I guess it's really mixed media. Several features make it wonderfully deceptive. In the composition proper, the relief ranges from low to completely in the round for the leader, his crucifix, and the two figures behind him.  But the church towers also project beyond the "frame," and the canopy over the Virgin image casts a shadow.  The ground slopes outwards so that the foreground figures literally enter the viewer's space, and the bottom of the frame is no longer an ornamental boundary as the sloping ground continues outwards.  

The varying levels of relief and projecting figures and plants also cast real shadows, which ca vary with the way the work is lit, though the patinated shadow cast by a crucifix that appears at an angle behind the leader and over the carriers of the image of the Virgin, made of brownish and blackish tones seems to suggest a different cross altogether--but where is it?. The gilded frame itself with its classical brackets and dentils, as well as the reclining figures on top, evoke a traditional Renaissance-Baroque altar, but the two figures have features and hairstyles of native Americans, as does the pot by the one to the left.  

Traditional Christian altarpieces in the semicircle they flank would have the space there occupied by a Christian icon (Trinity, God the Father, etc.) but here it is a rayed sun. The only additional Christian symbol is the roughly painted red Sacred Heart painted on the real but worn-appearing wooden table below--all of this constructed and decorated too by Moore himself.

 

The bronze composition achieves its earthily multicolored effects by the application of subtly colored patinas. and by making the areas beyond the central plaque of the composition and the "frame" neutral, further enhances the aura of processional theater.

 

            

If a person stands far enough away from the sculpture (in the Briscoe Museum this is possible), they could almost believe that the figures are human, and that they are coming from the church or from behind it, and really moving slowly, stepping into your space and will soon reach you, and then they will be life-sized.

 

Paul Moore's artist's statement about this work pretty much sums it up:

 

            "The Procession" was made to honor the religious aspect of the various Pueblos where     90% of the Pueblo people are Catholic with a blending of their ancient culture intertwined with Christianity. Throughout the year various processions are performed to   honor Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and the lives of various Saints. I created this piece to look like an alter is coming to life and walking out from the bonds of the frame like the believers do in taking their faith to the masses.

 

To this writer, the key to this profoundly emotional work is the figure of the leader with his individualized facial features and his dignified demeanor.  He is both conscious of his role but also totally absorbed in his own spiritual experience as he turns his head slightly to the right, though he walks straight on.  As he appears to walk forward, the position of his feet and his posture suggest the slow dignified cadence of the procession he leads and how he defines this

rhythm.  The people he leads coalesce behind him into a complete spiritual entity.  Not only does the terrain physically sloping outwards help suggest this (the foreground plants project too), but the artist manipulates the perspective of the figures behind him and the foreshortening of the church and combines this with actual shadows cast by those elements in highest relief and full three dimensionality. It's hard to determine where two dimensionality becomes three.

 

From an art historian's point of view, Moore combines the literally rendered with suggestive abstraction, and blurs the line between art and life; when you look at the desert setting and it multiple dimensions, the flat area behind the composition proper and the projecting elements of the frame suddenly pulls the viewers up short to remind them it's just a bronze plaque.

 

He also subtly combines some artistic conventions of a framed altarpiece in Catholic, European based tradition, and then changes and modifies this tradition both by the reclining figures and sun symbol of indigenous belief, and the deconstruction of the frame at the bottom, which then is seen to be resting on a rough, aging table, reminding us that the whole bronze composition above really is just an altarpiece.

 

            But is it?

            (to be continued).

 

____________________________________________________________________________

Paul Moore's Artist Statement can be found at: https://crownartsinc.com/art-gallery/ols/products/the-procession

 

Carmen Tafolla, San Antonio's Poet Laureate of 2015, penned a piece of ekphrastic poetry in response to Moore's piece.  You can watch and hear her reading it aloud in the Briscoe's sculpture garden at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1136575313578044