HENRY CLAY FRICK'S TROUBLESOME TROPHY
FRANCISCO DE GOYA, THE FORGE, ca.1815-20
(Frick Collection, New York)
Who invited these guys to Henry Clay Frick’s fancy-dress ball? Over there, the Polish Rider sits nattily dressed astride his mount; across the room Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi is all decked out in splendid silks and an exaggerated Renaissance codpiece; in Velasquez’s portrait, Philip of Spain manages to look almost regal; even that fat old joker Rembrandt has assumed kingly raiment for the occasion. So who let in these proletarian party-crashers with their torn clothes and bowed bodies and intense expressions? The guards must be sleeping. Somebody check the door.
Goya’s The Forge, a large, dark painting from late in his career showing three men working at an anvil, looks so out of place in Frick’s large gallery, so incongruous among all these images of conspicuous wealth, that we are forced to ask a question the Frick Collection has been designed to avoid: Why is it here? Indeed, why are any of these paintings here? How did a few of the greatest works of the European Old Masters, paintings executed for Dutch businessmen and Polish aristocrats and English dukes, end up on the walls of a fake Renaissance palazzo on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park?
The answer lies in the Pennsylvania coal fields. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Henry Frick, the grandson of a wealthy whiskey distiller, began buying the land that contained Pennsylvania’s rich reserves of the bituminous coal which, after being processed into coke, was used in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills. Matthew Josephson, in his 1934 history The Robber Barons, memorably evokes the early years of the Frick Coke Company from the workers’ point of view:
It was a particularly brutal business: the exhausting, laborious mining of coal, with its giant laborers, stripped to the waist, toiling, sweating before the fiery coke ovens... A terrific explosion because of a faulty excavation, burying thirty miners alive, frightened one of [Frick’s] uncles. Nothing deterred by such misfortunes to his laborers, Frick used early profits or promissory notes to buy out the other partners, and increase his own share.1
Frick’s success and ruthlessness naturally captured the attention of Carnegie, and the two men entered into partnership, with Frick eventually becoming Chairman of the Board of Carnegie Brothers. "Efficiency was [Frick’s] idol," writes Josephson, "and all that was weakly human was to be stripped and flung aside."2 Together, Frick and Carnegie conspired to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, an organization labor historian Jeremy Brecher calls "the strongest trade union the country had ever seen."3 The site of the showdown was Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill.
The July 1892 Homestead Strike earned Frick a richly deserved reputation as one of the worst villains in American labor history. His idea of negotiating with the union was to build a twelve foot-high, barbed wire-topped wall around the plant (workers quickly renamed the place "Fort Frick"4) and announce that the union could either accept his unacceptable terms or be forced out of the mill. Unsurprisingly, the workers voted to strike. They then organized into a paramilitary force and took over the company town. Frick responded by sending in hired guns from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, American management’s private army. When the Pinkerton men arrived by boat, thousands of workers met them at the dock, and a battle ensued that left nine strikers and seven Pinkertons dead and many more on both sides wounded. Ultimately, the outnumbered mercenaries surrendered and the workers forced them to run a horrendous gauntlet from which none escaped uninjured. A few days later, the state militia arrived and essentially ended Frick’s security problem; now he could bring in strikebreakers and keep the plant operating while waiting out the union. By November, the bloody mess was over and Frick had decisively won; the union was broken. "The defeat kept unionization from the Carnegie plants well into the twentieth century," writes historian Howard Zinn, "and the workers took wage cuts and increases in hours without organized resistance."5 As for Frick’s attitude toward the Homestead workers, he summed it up in a letter to Carnegie at the end of the strike: "We had to teach our employees a lesson, and we have taught them one that they will never forget."6 Not exactly the sentiments of a man who felt many qualms about all the blood–spilled by both sides–on his hands.
A few years later, after the turn of the century, Frick began pouring his money into the acquisition of European art. Acquiring art was almost de rigueur for American millionaires of his generation (one thinks of the Morgan, Gardner, Havemeyer and Taft collections), and every collector had different motives, all hopelessly mixed. Philanthropy was part of it, of course: the desire to bring cultural light to the benighted American continent (which, incidentally, wasn’t all that dark, as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Walt Whitman might have testified). There was also the simple, almost childish thrill of the hunt (usually done by intermediaries), the acquisition, the trophy on the wall. In Frick’s case, I suspect a personal motive was more important: he wished to be remembered not as a ruthless son of a bitch but as a cultured collector of fine art. For whatever reasons, in the last fifteen years of his life he amassed the most exquisite small collection of Old Master paintings in the world. In 1914, the year Europe marched off to die in Flanders fields, Frick acquired–among much else–a great portrait by Hogarth, two large, magnificent harbor views by Turner, and Goya’s The Forge.
The three men in Goya’s great painting are workers. That is the most important thing about them. Indeed, aside from the fact that they are Spanish, it’s the only thing we know about them. In what must be art’s cleanest and least cluttered blacksmith shop, they go about their obscure work (obscure to us, that is; they know exactly what they’re doing). One man holds a glowing piece of hot metal on an anvil with tongs while another raises his hammer to strike it; between them, a third, older man watches intently. Art historians relate this scene to "traditional depictions of the forge of Vulcan,"7 but Goya’s approach is so stripped-down, so devoid of the mythically significant objects and characters that fill even Velasquez’s Forge of Vulcan, that any mythological element in this work seems unimportant. Goya wants us to focus on the action. Accordingly, he composes his painting along a great diagonal that holds the potential energy of a cocked revolver. Beginning at the knee of the far man, this diagonal travels up through his body to the raised arm of the hammerer and then continues on to the very top of his hammer. A split-second from now, the hammer will come down and metal will ring against metal.
Goya captures this moment of greatest potential energy at the expense of pictorial clarity. Where an earlier, Neoclassical artist might have conceived the scene as a frieze and taken a viewpoint opposite the old man, so that all three workers and their tools would be fully visible, Goya chooses an oblique angle from which the most powerful man has his back to us. We cannot see his face, nor do we need to. His stance and gesture–his actions–are communicative enough. The power of that raised hammer is all we need to know. In this work from the late 1810's, Neoclassical clarity has been rotated about sixty degrees and transformed into a vision of dark Romantic energy.
And all of this energy is being expended upon what, exactly? What are they making? Goya doesn’t explicitly tell us. Like the hammerman’s hidden face, the final product of their labor remains unknown, but the intensity with which the other two men stare down at the workpiece suggests that it is very important. Robert Hughes, in his recent book on Goya, associates this painting with two earlier works showing Spanish guerillas manufacturing gunpowder and shot and argues that The Forge, as well as two other late paintings of proletarian subjects, The Water Carrier and The Knife Grinder, are "locked into the imagery of resistance,"8 that they reflect the recently completed struggles of the Spanish people against Napoleon’s army. Hughes describes the three men as "representatives of the pueblo, hammering out Spain’s future–to use a common phrase of the day, which may have supplied Goya with the allegorical dimension of his painting–on the anvil of its history."9 If we accept that the work is an allegory of the Spanish peoples’ resistance to oppression, the next question we should ask is, Which oppressor does Goya have in mind? We should ask if this work, painted during the reign of the ultra-reactionary restored Bourbon king Fernando VII, looks back to the recent past or forward to the future, to a time when the pueblo have realized their own power and have risen up to throw off all of Spain’s tyrants, foreign and domestic. While I find the forward-looking interpretation more attractive, I think Goya plays it a bit safe by keeping their work obscure. The painting can be read both as a resistance memorial and as a call to arms, a call to the Spanish people to rise up and forge their own future. And all the while Goya realizes that making the future is hard work, full of unexpected developments, discouraging setbacks, revolutions followed by reaction. It is obscure work, and no one can tell exactly what is being made until it’s finished.
Forging the future, then, is rather like painting. Goya’s emphasis on energy and action is not restricted to the content of The Forge. His late style is a dramatic, almost unprecedented, revelation of painterly work. Around the far man’s collar and on the old man’s face, forms are defined with broad, drippy brushstrokes suggesting that one thing being forged on this canvas is what the twentieth-century would call Expressionism. A smooth, Ingresque finish doesn’t concern Goya; in fact it would be inimical to the thrust of this work as an image of human energy. The painter wants us to see how he slaps paint on canvas and brushes forms into being. The hammering man’s bunched left sock is a mass of gray brushstrokes. On his shirt, the brightest part of the painting, Goya’s loose brushwork both mimics the texture (a texture that now makes us think of Goya’s descendants Manet and Sargent and seems a bit too fine, too silky for a workman) and also models the powerful workman’s back underneath. The large white diamond shape on the man’s thigh is like the artist’s signature, a few strokes of paint that, more than describing anything, say in Goya’s voice: I made this (the entire painting) out of this (bare streaks of paint).
This painting is about the act of building. Not ‘creation,’ with its mystical, magical overtones, but plain, steady, utilitarian building. Goya was perfectly capable of going surreal–he was, as is well-known, a master of the nightmarish and darkly supernatural–but here he insists on the human. He keeps it real. A painter builds a painting out of pigment and oil; three men build a useful object from a hunk of metal; the people together build a nation.
The idea that nations and governments should be formed by citizens rather than dictated by monarchs was a new and revolutionary concept in the early nineteenth century, and it was especially subversive in the post-Napoleonic reactionary years when The Forge was painted. But it is important not to see this work as a too-emphatic, uncomplicated call to revolution. The Goya who recorded the barbarity of both the French army and the Spanish peasants in the Disasters of War is not singing an optimistic, proto-Marxist hymn to the proletariat. The painting is too obscure, too oblique to be useful propaganda. It is as if even as Goya paints he asks himself: What kind of nation can these people build, these workmen with faces, as Hughes writes, "coarse to the point of peasant brutishness."10 Would there be any place in such a nation for artists and intellectuals? for painters like Goya with troubling histories as royal propagandists? How many people would be sacrificed on the altar of this revolution, burned and beaten to death like the metal on the anvil? After the French Revolution and the occupation of Spain, during the years of reaction, Goya is knowledgeable enough to look beyond the euphoria of revolution to the reality of retaliation. He realizes that the future these men are building is unknown and unpredictable.
Unpredictable to Goya, that is, but not to us. The descendants of these workers will try to escape Spanish poverty by immigrating to America. Once settled in the New World, they will be exploited by Henry Clay Frick, and he will use the profits to buy this painting and hang it among his other, more regal trophies. Goya’s image of revolution is destined for commodification, a spot on a millionaire’s wall. And not just any millionaire but one with blood on his hands, a killer of workers, the worst kind of counter-revolutionary. Truth be told, however, worse fates have befallen even greater works of art, and the works have survived unscathed. The great Vienna Vermeer, The Artist’s Studio, spent part of World War Two in the ‘collection’ of Adolf Hitler. This fact does not diminish its beauty or lessen its effect on us. Likewise, Goya’s The Forge, though it has become one of Frick’s trophies, has not been tamed. The painting’s power remains, and it is fantastically subversive.
These three men are the ghosts who haunt the Frick Collection, and no number of glorious Old Masters can exorcise them. Hanging at one end of the grand gallery at the back of Frick’s house, they are a constant goad to deconstruction. They remind us of the underside of the millionaire’s life, of the brutal, thuggish S.O.B. behind the Medici mask. Frick’s attempt to obscure his actions and motives comes to shipwreck here. The workers who are the basis of his wealth send a dissonant, metallic note into his self-congratulatory symphony. Their act of building is now one of deconstruction. The hammer comes down on Henry Clay Frick. Murder will out.
NOTES
1. Josephson, Robber Barons, 261.
2. Ibid., 263.
3. Brecher, Strike!, 53.
4. Ibid., 54.
5. Zinn, People’s History, 271.
6. Josephson, op. cit., 371.
7. Ryscamp, Paintings, entry on Goya, The Forge.
8. Hughes, Goya, 284.
9. Ibid., 285.
10. Ibid., 284-85.