Face your fears and the clowns

It’s easier to offer a definitive statement on clown painting at the Andy Warhol Museum than… It’s easier to offer a definitive statement on clown painting at the Andy Warhol Museum than it is to place clown painting in the context of high art.

At Saturday’s opening of “Clown Paintings: From the Collection of Diane Keaton and Others,” one viewer remained skeptical, saying, “I don’t know if this would be at the Warhol if it weren’t for Diane Keaton.”

Another viewer, perhaps someone more enthusiastic for the big-top ambiance, enjoying the popcorn and snow cone cocktails, said, “Clown paintings are an amplification of an amplification. A clown is an actor in makeup portraying an exaggeration of a human emotion. A painting of a clown exaggerates it even further.”

The kitsch of clown painting – an exceptionally garish form – is at home at the Warhol, particularly as the last exhibit of “Summer of Andy,” a series of programs in celebration of Andy Warhol’s 75th birthday. By considering low art – what’s cheaply manufactured, tacky, and, more importantly, in demand – Andy Warhol contributed to a more complete picture of modern American culture. Legend also has it that, at the beginning of his celebrity, Warhol would sometimes ask staffers at the Factory to stand in at his appearances – even a university lecture – in an Andy Warhol costume: a white wig, glasses and makeup.

But both Diane Keaton, who owns 300 clown paintings, and gallery owner Robert Berman, who owns more than 1,000 clown paintings himself, have lofty aspirations for clown art. After realizing that their competition to own clown paintings had driven up prices in the Los Angeles market, Keaton and Berman met, discovered their shared passion for clown art, and organized an exhibition of their prized paintings at Berman’s gallery in Santa Monica. Keaton assembled a book, “Clown Paintings,” of clown painting reproductions and essays from famous, funny people who mostly don’t like clowns.

In “Clown Paintings,” Berman writes, “Even the most awful clown paintings can convey depth and value.” And, according to Keaton, “These rank amateurs’ [the painters’] dogged attempts to put a stamp of personal expression on the map links us to them.”

This is sympathy art. It’s not good art because it’s popular; it’s not bad art because it’s popular. It’s bad art because it’s not linked to us. The painted emotions in the portraits are exaggerated and sentimental, not unlike the “more-is-more” effect of reality television. A man who comes home after losing his job at the circus does not offer his loved ones a Big Frowny. Because we are complicated and subtle beings, carrying many simultaneous emotions, we can relate to an artist’s representation of quiet desperation.

Clowns aren’t linked to us. That’s probably why many people are afraid of them. They are people removed from us, covered in a disguise. In his essay from “Clown Paintings,” Chevy Chase notes the “disparity between that huge, painted grimace covering the lower half of his face, and the small, inexpressive mouth lost in the grease – but not lost on the confused child who, at a glance, duly notices this inhumanity. ‘Who is this guy? What does he want? … Is he really happy or is he angry and unbalanced? … Where are the real people?'”

So, why the fondness for clown paintings – which are now sold as collector’s items on eBay – in previous decades? Many of the works in the exhibit were painted in the late 1940s and 1950s, a time of rampant conformity. The clown is a duality of repression and emotion – an image of a mask of joy or sorrow, or an actor who paints his “true face” on as a release.

In conservative times like the 1950s, an image of a clown, cavorting or crying behind a mask, could have appealed to the modern woman living behind her own happy-housewife mask. Plastic proxy emotions in hyper clown colors hanging on the parlor wall expressed otherwise unfashionable nonconformity in a plastic era; crying when she must smile, laughing when she must be demure.

Clowns remain important characters of popular culture. Sometimes they act for good, such as Jesus in “Godspell,” or for evil, as in the case of the Joker from “Batman.” And then there’s the ambivalent Ronald McDonald, who invites us to have a burger and some fries.

Clown Paintings, housed between political cartoons and an exhibit examining the “projection” of Farrah Fawcett, is undoubtedly worth seeing at the Warhol for the pop culture the paintings represent.