Painting Baseball

Painting Baseball Joseph Stanton (bio) Baseball paintings fall into most of the same categories as other sorts of paintings, but the baseball ingredient makes itself felt in distinctive ways. What happens to such traditional categories as the portrait, the genre scene, the landscape, the history painting, and the still life, when put into the service of baseball subjects? Furthermore, to what baseball uses have painters employed such modern-isms as photorealism, surrealism, cubism, futurism, and pop art? My study can only be a rough characterization of the possibilities of baseball painting; in practice, the categories and styles under discussion will inevitably be found to overlap and intersect in complicated ways. Although one would expect a conservative, storytelling tendency would predominate in baseball art and that avant-garde experimentation would be in short supply, that assumption is, by and large, not born out. Baseball-inspired art can be radical if the artist wants it to be. Because of the enormity of this topic my essay can only be a brief and partial introduction. For each of the categories I will discuss a few examples of interesting works that fit fairly well into that category. At various points, I will also discuss works that do not fit neatly into any one category. categories of painting and how they play out for baseball Portraits Baseball portraits inevitably incline towards two overlapping influences, the journalistic sports photograph and the baseball card. Both these influences might seem, to the fine art aesthete, to be limiting in problematic ways, but, in fact, the opposite is true. For the baseball fan, attentions to baseball stars in newspapers and magazines enforce the importance these people have in culture generally. “Newsworthy” in the sports context translates into a kind of glamour. Baseball cards, furthermore, constitute a kind of pantheon for all boys who have grown into men while dreaming of seeing themselves on such cards. Baseball cards are icons of the religion of baseball. The cards are, in a [End Page 1] sense, representations of the saints of the game. That the majority of these saints prove to be minor and, in fact, largely unsuccessful does not reduce the basic magic of the cards. Despite the profane interests of these players in their personal lives, a baseline of sacred stardom of at least a partial sort adheres to even the cards of the most obscure players.1 An example of an excellent portrait that is often on display in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is Smokey Joe Williams by Deryl Mackie.2 This 1985 painting derives from an often-reproduced family photo of Williams, who was one of the greatest of Negro League pitchers.3 The photo shows the great fast-baller standing in the uniform of the New York Lincoln Giants. He is posed in almost complete profile against the drab background of an unidentifiable ballpark. He looks to be about ready to go into his windup. His right hand with the ball loosely held in his fingers rests comfortably against his right hip. Mackie transformed his source with a vivid painterly treatment that features vigorous strokes of bright colors. The electric brightness of the non-naturalistic colors and the use of many squiggly strokes gives the painting the look of an early-modernist fauve painting. Mackie adds nuance, suggestive of the Smokey Joe legend, through his insertion of a row of palm trees along the horizon line behind the shoulders of the pitcher. The presence of palm trees asserts that Williams is at play in a Caribbean context, and, indeed, Smokey Joe is known to have played in the Caribbean leagues in the winter months, as did many other Negro League players. Migrating south to tropical islands during the North American off-season enabled these poorly-paid athletes to keep themselves and their families in food and clothes.4 By setting the portrait in the tropics and adopting a fauvist strategy to accentuate the colorful picturesqueness of that place, Mackie has given himself the means to a magical depiction of one of the most legendary of Negro League players. To make his depiction all the more resplendent, the artist has painted the sky above the palm...

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