Master Of The Two Left Feet

An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory. The exhibition “Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered” at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, curated by the author and developed as an extension of the book, is on view from September 22, 2022 to January 27, 2023. A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings of female figures, often nude, animals, and landscapes became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surrealists, his peak moment of visibility occurred in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of his work. The exhibition was widely reviewed—though mostly reviled—by the press, who jeeringly crowned Hirshfield “Master of the Two Left Feet” for his tendency to display the female body in that unorthodox fashion. After the artist’s death in 1946, his work was largely forgotten, but in Master of the Two Left Feet, art historian Richard Meyer rediscovers Hirshfield for twenty-first-century audiences, offering full-color reproductions that capture the vibrant imagination and sheer visual pleasure of Hirshfield’s paintings. The book also features a catalog of works compiled by curator Susan Davidson which provides the most comprehensive documentation of the artist’s work ever assembled. Ten years in the making, Master of the Two Left Feet presents Hirshfield’s unlikely career as a painter not only as a missing episode in the history of twentieth-century art but as a case study of the ways in which artists go missing from historical knowledge and public memory. By looking closely at Hirshfield and his milieu in 1940s Brooklyn, Meyer demonstrates how much we have yet to learn, and to see, of the visual past.

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The Man With Two Left Feet, and Other Stories by P. G. Wodehouse - This collection of short stories is a good example of early Wodehouse. It is here that Jeeves makes his first appearance with these unremarkable words: "Mrs. Gregson to see you, sir." Years later, when Jeeves became a household name, Wodehouse said he blushed to think of the off-hand way he had treated the man at their first encounter...In the story "Extricating Young Gussie," we find Bertie Wooster's redoubtable Aunt Agatha "who had an eye like a man-eating fish and had got amoral suasion down to a fine point." The other stories are also fine vintage Wodehouse: the romance between a lovely girl and a would-be playwright, the rivalry between the ugly policeman and Alf the romeo milkman, and the plight of Henry in the title piece, The Man with Two Left Feet, who fell in love with a dance hostess. Plot: Henry Pitfield Rice, a young man employed in a detective bureau, falls in love with chorus girl Alice Weston and proposes to her, but she refuses. She is fond of him but wants to marry someone in her profession. Henry tries to get a job on the stage but fails since he cannot sing or dance. Henry is sent by his employer to follow the touring company performing The Girl from Brighton, which Alice is part of, since a woman wants her husband shadowed and he is an actor in the show. Henry follows the company from town to town, using different disguises. Though it bothers Henry not to be able to talk to Alice, he enjoys travel and admires the company's performers, including Sidney Crane, who plays the hero, and the company's star actor, amiable comedian Walter Jelliffe. Henry chats with Jelliffe in multiple towns in different disguises. Eventually, Jelliffe asks Henry who he is following. The company realized that Henry is a detective and call him Bill the Bloodhound. They are holding a sweepstake on who he is investigating. The show has been successful, so Jelliffe thinks Henry is lucky and asks him to join them as a mascot. Henry agrees, but refuses to reveal who he is following. During the next show, Henry proposes to Alice just before she goes on stage. He tries to follow her and trips onto the stage, delighting the crowd and interrupting a song by Clarice Weaver, who is unpopular in the company. Later, Jelliffe assures Henry that the company is glad about Henry's interruption, because it compelled Clarice Weaver to quit and Sidney Crane's wife will replace her as the show's heroine. Henry will soon have to go back to London (US version: New York), because he was hired by Mrs Crane. Jelliffe, who is glad he won the sweepstake, urges him to join the troupe. Jelliffe is certain that Henry will be a successful actor and mascot for the company because he is lucky. Henry gladly joins the company, and is now in the same profession as Alice.

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The book is in the voice of an eleven-year-old girl (referencing ages ten to twelve) living in 1963 Brooklyn. She details her Italian/Sicilian family, their language customs, as well as the crazy cast of characters on her beloved block and schoolmates. It references the events and music of the day and focuses on her vivid imagination, dreaming that a brand-new pair of Red PF Flyers sneakers will give her the ability and superpower of flying.

After World War I, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. At the center of this fundamental reevaluation of who could be an artist in America were John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. The stories of these three artists not only intertwine with the major critical debates of their period but also prefigure the call for inclusion in representations of American art today. In Gatecrashers, Katherine Jentleson offers a valuable corrective to the history of twentieth-century art by expanding narratives of interwar American modernism and providing an origin story for contemporary fascination with self-taught artists.