American Dream

#77033     50″ X 72 ”      ac

• Giorgione: “Sleeping Venus”, 1905
• Cezanne: “Apples and Oranges”, 1900 – 05

Vasari wrote “Giorgione began to give his works more softness and greater relief, in a beautiful manner. He was accustomed to take live and natural thing as models, to imitate them as best he could with colors, and to shade them with harsh and sweet tints according to what the live thing showed.”

When Giorgione was carried off by the plague, the background landscape of “Sleeping Venus” had not been painted. This was executed by Titian. Thirty years later Titian painted his own version, “Venus of Urbino”, with identical pose and some change in details. Since that day the painting has been copied by bumblers and old masters alike. Ingres sought in nude studies forms of great perfection, and his copy of the Giorgione /Titian hangs in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. Reclining nudes pepper the works of Luini, Cranach, Velasquez, Fragonard, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Modigliani, and many others.

Chen has placed his Venus on a couch before a huge picture window revealing the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. In the foreground there is a Cezanne-like still life of multicolored apples. The rigid angle of the window, the horizontal thrust of the roadbed on the bridge, and the vertical skyscrapers suggest Chen’s sign of the Western cross: mathematics and getting ahead. The curves of the sun, the bridge support cables, the drapery, and bedclothes, the fruit all harmonize with the soft cadences of the Venus figures.

Her world is one of comfort, property, and privacy. America, the most developed country, has achieved them most. “Everyone dreams of these,” Chen says, “and why not!” Science and technology are laudable and can help lead to spiritual maturity if pursued in wisdom.

In the sky above Manhattan a helicopter flies. This may also be an anopheles mosquito – a threat to so much unguarded flesh and dreams which become too worldly.

– Lawrance Jeppson