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Night Baseball
September 13, 2007
Top: Morris Kantor, Baseball at Night from SAAM's collection. Middle: my photograph of an Oriole’s game. Bottom: Phillips, Marjorie, Night Baseball, 1951, Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 36 in.; 61.595 x 91.44 cm., Gift of the artist 1951 or 1952, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Last summer we blogged about how Morris Kantor played with perspective to fit a ballpark drama into his painting Baseball at Night, so I was fascinated to see Marjorie Phillips' painting Night Baseball on a recent trip to the Phillips Collection.
The essay on the Phillips site says that Mrs. Phillips went to Washington Senators games with her husband, museum founder Duncan Phillips, and often brought artist's materials to sketch with. This painting is of a particular game between the Senators and the New York Yankees in the summer of 1951. Joe DiMaggio is at bat and though I'm not a big baseball fan, even I recognize his lanky stance at the plate.
I can imagine Mrs. Phillips sitting in the stands with a beer and hot dog, enjoying a pleasant summer evening, casually working out the lines and forms of the game on a sketch pad. Even though the cropping and perspective are different, her painting is very much like the photograph I took at the Orioles' game last year, and it's different than Kantor's painting, but not as different as I thought when I started writing this post. My eye keeps comparing the paintings and finding pleasure in the similarities—the lights, the diamond, the crouches of the players, and the coiled energy of the moment before the pitch. I wonder what the paintings would have been like if the artists had been able to switch places: Marjorie Phillips watching a game in a rural ballpark in 1934 and Morris Kantor in the stands in the nation's capital in 1951.
Follow up: There's some speculation about whether nor not Marjorie Phillips was a beer-and-hot-dog kind of gal. Though it would be easy to guess no, something about her paintings make me think she might have enjoyed a few simple pleasures. And as Humphrey Bogart said "A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz."
Posted by Mike on September 13, 2007 in American Art Elsewhere, American Art Here
Comments
I have not read the previous conversation on how Kantor played with the perspective, but looking upon both paintings I wonder how much the perspective of the moment influenced Kantor's perspective he used in his painting.
Though there are regulations in baseball governing the distance from home plate to first base, a small ballpark still has a small feel to it, regardless if the diamond is the same size as a larger ballpark.
Kantor has certainly imbued a close knit feeling within his painting. Additionally, he seems to have a tendency toward enhancing the drama of his subject that translates very well to the viewer, in my opinion.
Other elements within the painting portray a sky which hangs like a dense black curtain barely containing even the slightest hint of light or life. Yet a gloomy cloud looms overhead all the while the trees are vibrant with life as the lights boldly emit their own highlights claiming the night against the darkness.
Within Kantor's painting (though I don't know when night games first came to be) seems to be a feeling of exuberance about this event intruding on the night.
In contrast to how Kantor translates what he saw, and perhaps felt, Phillips' painting seems to more capture a moment, than a night.
Her perspective frames the painting much like a photograph. The lights are cut off at the very top while intruding into the bottom of the frame is, well, something; I'm not too certain what it is. For all I know, she may have taken a photograph at the game and worked from there.
Both provide an interesting look at a game from the artist's perspective. Both also provide a look back at different times and different moods.
Thank you for sharing.
Posted by: Zhorkow | Sep 29, 2007
I agree with the first comments, personally I like the painting style of the second painting by Marjorie, although I think she loses some of the power and intimacy of the first painting.
Of course as has been mentioned the second painting is of a larger game, and so by it's nature it won't have the same feel to it.
I do feel that Marjorie's painting could have been enhanced by using some cropping of the subject, but I think its something I would want to "play" with.
Posted by: Trev Goodwin | Oct 4, 2007
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