Have Yourself a Very Retro Christmas
Cristmas has a high built-in nostalgia factor. There is no Christmas like Christmas Past--you know, the one where the snow gently fell, the tree stood straight and twinkly, and voices were raised only in song. And if it didn’t happen for you, well, heck, it happened to someone, right? That’s why, in general, we like our images of Christmas nice and retro--Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell, the Italian Renaissance. And no one did Christmas like pre-WWII America. Harper’s Weekly invented Santa Claus, for heaven’s sake, and Montgomery Ward created Rudolph.
These are just two little facts you will glean from “When What to My Wondering Eyes,†a cavalcade of art, literature and Yule ephemera on display at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica through Jan. 4. Drawn from the extensive collections of George Meredith, this Christmastide celebration strings together more than 300 seasonal sugarplums: magazine art by Thomas Nast, Maxfield Parrish and Rockwell; photos by Weegee, William Wegman, Cindy Sherman and, yes, that St. Nick-est of all, Robert Mapplethorpe; drawings great and small; and some festive Art Nouveau posters. No matter that many of these images were purely commercial art--the Campbell Soup Kids cherubim, the New Yorker-blurry Claus--the images are lovely and quaint and, most of all, evocative. Of velvet bows and sleigh rides and brimming stockings. (And if you’re looking for that last-minute special something, much of it is for sale, from $250 to $10,000.)
The usual literary suspects are also present (and absolutely not for sale)--manuscripts and signed copies by Dickens, Frost, Capote and Berryman--as well as a few unexpected visitors: Katherine Anne Porter, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams. From Collier’s to Bauhaus, the exhibit conjures the Christmases we loved the very best, if only in our dreams.
