Ernest Ferguson

This post is based on a lecture I gave at the Staunton Public Library on March 20, 2025, for the urban sketchers group Sketch Staunton, of which I am a member. 

This all began during the Christmas season of 2021, when I sent a series of postcards to my nieces detailing a road trip my family had taken in the summer of 1976. I hit upon the idea of telling a story through a series of postcards. It was a bicentennial tour, so coming up from South Carolina we went to Williamsburg, Washington, Philadelphia, New York. We didn’t go to Boston. We went to Niagara Falls and came back down through Gettysburg, Harper’s Ferry and Monticello. So I bought vintage postcards of each stop along the way, and on the backs I wrote a microstory about what we had seen at each place.

I got my first postcards at Staunton Antiques on Beverley Street, and most of these postcards were linen postcards. This isn’t really a story about the history of postcards, but I have learned some things about postcards over the last three years. I've learned that postcards really became popular in the first decade of the twentieth century and that basically for the first half of the twentieth century the standard format was what are called linen cards—“hand-painted” linen cards. And then in the postwar period the dominant format became what are called chrome cards—as in Kodachrome and Ektachrome—which are postcards made from color photographs.

After finding my first postcards at Staunton Antiques, I found a vendor at the Factory Antique Mall in Verona who must have 10,000 postcards for sale. He’s got bin after bin after bin of postcards. The bins are divided into states (for Virginia they’re divided into cities and towns) and, being from South Carolina, I naturally checked out the South Carolina section and found these two beautiful chrome postcards of Church Street and the Battery, which I bought just to have, not for the bicentennial tour series.

Click on images to enlarge them.

The following February it occurred to me that my nieces don’t really know anything about their Uncle Ned from before they were born, and I decided to send them another series of postcards as a sort of  postcard autobiography. Not that my life is anything special, but they’re my nieces, and long after I’m gone, when they’re telling stories about their Uncle Ned, it would be nice if they knew some of the more interesting details from my early life.

This stretch of Church Street, showing the Dock Street Theater and St. Philip’s Church, is like ground zero of my adult life. In the summer of 1982, after graduating from high school, I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I had met a girl at camp and I went to Charleston to visit her for the weekend. She and her parents asked what my future plans were, and I said I had no idea. They suggested that I stay with them for a while and see what happens.

Shortly after I got there, there were auditions for The Sound of Music at the Dock Street and I won the role of Rolf! One of my nieces is a singer, the other is an art historian, and they are both thespians, so I felt they should know that their Uncle Ned once sang “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” at the venerable Dock Street Theater in Charleston. (At the audition I sang “Vincent,” by Don McLean.) 

One of the fun things about these projects is carefully composing the texts that go on the cards. Obviously, there is limited space, and sometimes you have to go over to the right-hand side of the back of the card, the address side, but it is a gratifying challenge to tell a little story in this small space. And, of course, all of the cards add up to a larger narrative. 

I sent the cards at three- or four-day intervals, hoping the postal service would get them there in sequence. There were 12 cards in this series, giving some highlights of my years in Charleston, Charlottesville and New York. I sent a second postcard autobiography to my nieces that summer and have now sent over 400 postcards to friends and family over the last three years, usually in dedicated series. (In the winter of 2023 I sent a series of postcards to the curator of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art detailing my theory of The Starry Night.)

Going back to 2022, in April I said to myself, “You know what I want? I want the official Museum of Modern Art postcard for The Starry Night.” But I found that museums don’t sell postcards online; it’s just not worth it to them. But one day I woke up from my nap and my brain was, like, “Ebay, dummy.” So I found Starry Night postcards on Ebay. And then a couple of weeks later I was watching the Heritage golf tournament on TV and I thought, “Man, I’ll bet I could find some really cool vintage postcards of Harbour Town on Ebay.” 

Harbour Town has a special place in my heart. Growing up in Barnwell, we went to the Heritage every year, and Harbour Town, this world-class resort in our own backyard, was just about the coolest thing in the world. I went my last two years of high school on Hilton Head and tended bar at the Crazy Crab in Harbour Town during the summers of my graduate school years. 

In my search for Hilton Head postcards I found a couple of cards that made me chuckle a little. The top one is St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Now, this was my church in high school and my aunt still goes there and it’s a cool modernist church, but I thought, “Why would anybody want a postcard of the new Episcopal church on Hilton Head.” I mean, it’s not like it’s a historic church.

And then I found a postcard of the entrance to Shipyard Plantation. (The gated communities in Hilton Head are called “plantations,” which is obviously problematic, but that’s not what I'm talking about here.) I can talk bad about Shipyard because we lived in Shipyard. Shipyard is nice, but it isn’t Sea Pines. Sea Pines, which is where Harbour Town is, was the gold standard on Hilton Head. And this postcard is not even of the resort hotel in Shipyard or the racquet club or anything but simply of the entrance.

These postcards seemed humorously mundane to me, and I sent them to my aunt and an old friend from high school, writing on the back of the second one, “I find it hilarious that somebody would think anybody would want a postcard of the Shipyard entrance!”

The kicker was this postcard of what we call the “new bridge.” It was built in 1982 to replace the old swing bridge from the 1950s. Again, why would anybody want a postcard of this plain, concrete bridge, not even from an interesting angle? And this is when I started to recognize that these postcards were all by the same person, somebody named Ernest Ferguson. And so I sent two copies of this card to my aunt and my high school friend, writing, “This Ernest Ferguson certainly had an eye for the mundane. Still, all man-made objects are works of art, and from an archaeological point of view this may turn out to be a valuable record of a representative artifact from the twentieth century.”

I was kind of needling him a little bit, being a little ironic. But I had started to think of him as a twentieth-century South Carolina equivalent of the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris are prized for their aesthetic value today but who was essentially a documentary photographer in his time. I was starting to give Ernest Ferguson a little more credit, thinking even if he wasn’t a great “artist,” a great eye, at least maybe he had some historical significance. 

Back in December and January, when I had been buying postcards from the vendor in Verona, I had found a couple of other cards that I thought were humorously mundane. The top one I have to say doesn’t appear to me to be as mundane now as it did the first time I saw it. Part of my bias is that this is Edisto Gardens in Orangeburg, and if you grew up in Barnwell you really had a lot of disdain for Orangeburg, as a kid anyway. So this one’s on me. 

The bottom one is the naval hospital outside of Beaufort on the way to Parris Island. I had bought these cards months before I had any idea who Ernest Ferguson was but, again, a couple of months later, I woke up from my nap and my brain was, like, “I wonder if those mundane cards are Fergusons.” And they were!

And finally, a couple of days later, I wondered if the Church Street and Battery cards might be Fergusons. I had already mailed these to my nieces, but I make photocopies of all the cards I send—it’s an art project, and I want to have a record of it—and indeed these two were also by Ernest Ferguson. Note the photo credit on each of the cards.

Now I began searching Ebay for Ernest Fergusons. It’s fun! If you enter “south carolina postcards” in the search box, you’ll get over 50,000 results! I don’t go through all of them, but I’ll scroll through quite a few results pages, and the fun thing is that I got pretty good at identifying Fergusons. What you see on the results page is just the obverse of the cards, and you have to click on each card to see what's on the back. And I started to find some nice-looking cards.

The top card is the old bridge to Hilton Head. It’s still utilitarian (though it’s got a little bit of character), but the colors and the composition are really nice—the green and blue and the overhanging palmetto trees. The bottom card to this day is absolutely one of my favorite Ferguson cards. This is Trinity Church in Ridgeland, which is just outside of Hilton Head, and I think the image is absolutely gorgeous. The azaleas, the Spanish moss, the dappled sunlight on the façade of the church. And that sandy yard is like sacred ground for anyone who grew up in the Low Country.

I started to recognize recurring themes in Ferguson's works. One of these is historic churches. We’ve already seen Trinity Church in Ridgeland. This is Old Sheldon Church, one of the great South Carolina landmarks. It's in the middle of nowhere, outside of Beaufort, actually closer to Yemassee, which is basically a train depot. But my father, as his father had before him, made sure that we as kids were aware of this remarkable ruin. Whenever we drove to Beaufort or Hilton Head or Fripp Island, what have you, we’d always stop on the way and visit Old Sheldon Church. 

Built in the 1750s by William Bull, the church was burned twice. It was burned by the British. Then, after it was restored, it was burned by Sherman, and they did not rebuild it after that. I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to Ferguson’s work is because I, too, used to drive around the Low Country taking pictures of historic churches.

Here are St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s, basically the two flagship Episcopal churches in downtown Charleston. 

These cards give you an idea of something else I learned about postcards. There are two sizes of postcards. There’s what’s called the standard size, which is three and a half by five and a half inches, and there’s the continental size, which is four by six. St. Philip's here is on a standard card, and St. Michael's is on a continental card. And you can see the classic scalloped edges that occur on many continental cards.

One of the ways that we date these photographs is by the cars, so the St. Michael’s card is clearly from the 1960s. 

Back to recurring themes, here is Old St. Andrew’s outside of Charleston. Actually, one of William Bull’s daughters, Charlotta, is buried here. This card leads to another recurring theme in Ferguson’s work, which is foreground flowers. 

Here’s the State House. I love how in South Carolina we call it the State House, not the state capitol. Some of the other states do as well, but most of them call it their capitol. These foreground flowers just made it into the frame. Ferguson could have backed up, I guess, but I feel like he cut off the top of the capitol to make sure he got the flowers in the frame. This is actually a good thing because at that time the Confederate battle flag flew above the State House.

This is a house on Sullivan’s Island, with wildflowers in the foreground. The cool thing about this house is it’s underneath a mound of earth. I don’t think it’s there anymore.

Talk about foreground flowers! This is Ashley Hall, the exclusive girls’ school in Charleston, alma mater of Barbara Bush and Madeleine L’Engle, among others. In fact, that summer of ’82 I went to the commencement exercise at Ashley Hall because a lot of my friends who were my age were graduating that year, and the commencement speaker was L’Engle.

This is the Caroliniana Library at USC in Columbia, which is basically the special collections library at USC. This library actually has 179 Ernest Ferguson postcards in its permanent collection. (I myself have identified over 700 cards by Ferguson.)

Again, the cars are fantastic. The yellow car on the right appears to be a T-Bird. And then there’s the iconic car of the counterculture Sixties, the VW Beetle, or Bug. And this leads to another recurring theme in Ferguson’s work, probably unintentional: the green Beetle. 

This is Senate Plaza, an apartment building in Columbia. I love this card; I love the way the shape of the building echoes the format of the card. And I love mid-century modernist architecture; this building dates from 1965. Note the green Beetle at right.

This is an old hospital in Florence called the McLeod Infirmary, and way down in the right-hand corner is a green Beetle. 

And there is a green Beetle parked on East Bay Street in front of Rainbow Row. So, one wonders if this was Ferguson’s car. I have to admit, the Beetles in front of the Caroliniana Library and the one in front of Rainbow Row look more gray than green.

In fact, when the Rainbow Row card was reissued, he retouched the Beetle to make it red. When I was a kid we played a car-spotting game called Spud, where you competed to call out “Spud!” upon spying a Volkswagen Beetle. A red Beetle was a “Spud Magoo” and counted for two points. So when they reissued this card, they made the Beetle a Spud Magoo.

On the topic of reissues, there are a couple of interesting things that I’ve found. When he first issued the Church Street card, the caption read, “The Dock Street Theater, on left, opened in 1736, is the first building in America designed solely for theatrical purposes and is still in use today. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in background, erected 1835, is one of the most famous landmarks of the city.” 

Well, the original Dock Street Theater is famous for being one of the first buildings in the Colonies built expressly for theatrical performances. But that building is long gone. The present building was built in 1806 and was originally a hotel, the Planter’s Hotel. By the 1930s it was empty and the WPA restored it and turned it into a theater. So, in subsequent reprints of this card, Ferguson amended the caption to read, “The Dock Street Theater, on left, opened in 1736, is the first building in America designed solely for theatrical purposes. The present building represents a restoration of the old Planter’s Hotel façade plus a re-creation of an early Georgian playhouse on the site of the old theatre. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in background, erected 1835, is one of the most famous landmarks of the city.”

The first title of the Battery card was “East of High Battery.” However, this view isn’t east of High Battery, this is the High Battery. Or East Battery. This is East Battery Street. East Bay Street is on the east side of the peninsula of Charleston—Rainbow Row is on East Bay Street—and when East Bay bends and goes down into this area that used to be marshland it becomes East Battery Street, and this seawall is the High Battery. So, in a subsequent printing of this card, Ferguson had the printers create some sort of patch to change “of” to “or,” making the title "East or High Battery."

While we’re looking at the backs of these cards, I would note that most of Ferguson’s cards were printed by Dexter Press in West Nyack, New York. And his business was Photo Arts, in Winnsboro, where he lived.

Military bases are also a recurring theme in Ferguson’s work. There are a lot cards of Fort Jackson, outside of Columbia. And there are a lot of cards of Parris Island, where the above picture was taken. 

This card is titled “Guidon Ceremony,” the presentation of the colors, also at Parris Island. I love this postcard. I love these women in their shirtwaist dresses and their bluchers. During the lecture, the mostly female audience remarked upon the gloves, which I had overlooked, and I said I wasn’t surprised that women would notice the gloves. 

Another recurring theme is small-town Main Streets. I think this is another reason why I’m drawn to Ferguson’s work: nostalgia. Growing up in the postwar period, this is what small towns in the South looked like when I was a kid, and these cards are records of what these small-town business districts looked like before Walmart killed them.

One of my regrets in my study of Ernest Ferguson is not having found a card of the central business district of Barnwell, which we call the Circle. There are postcards of Barnwell’s famous upright sundial in front of the courthouse, but I haven’t found any cards of the Circle. Also, there is a lovely Episcopal church in Barnwell which I feel certain Ferguson would have known about. He was an Episcopalian and most of the churches he photographed were Episcopal churches. (All of the churches in this essay are Episcopal churches.) So I hold out hope of one day finding a postcard of Holy Apostles in Barnwell, where I was christened and in whose churchyard my parents and grandparents are buried.

But Batesburg in the above postcard has a lot of the same stores that the Barnwell of my youth had. We had a Mack's, which my father actually built (not as the developer but as the contractor). That place was like mecca to me. It had everything a kid in the Seventies needed: model cars, record albums and singles, novelty T-shirts, Icees. I used to run around that place unattended and I’m sure I let everyone know that my daddy built it.

You can see the signs for a Western Auto store, which Barnwell also had, and Cato, a women’s apparel store, and possibly Belk. 

In this card of Main Street in Sumter you can see the Home Furniture Company, the S. H. Kress five and dime, Belk and a movie theater marquee, the Carolina. Top billing that week went to La Dolce Vita. A quick internet search reveals that while this film came out in 1960, it was also re-released in 1966, so unfortunately it doesn't help us precisely date this card. But it is cool to know that Fellini was playing in Sumter, South Carolina.

Here is an old linen card of Sumter that I have to believe Ferguson would have been aware of, as a professional postcard artist. He has photographed the same stretch of Main Street from the exact same perspective. The old post office building on the right is still there. And Ferguson’s card even has a green vehicle in the lower left-hand corner, this one a VW Microbus.

Looking at all of these postwar small-town business districts has given me the idea of turning a town like Batesburg or Barnwell into a living history museum, like Colonial Williamsburg, only instead of taking it back to the colonial period, we take it back to the postwar period, restoring the buildings, restoring the signage and having people dressed in period outfits, working the stores, the soda fountains, etc. All these pictures make me think about what I’m starting to think about as the “before times,” and I think there would be a nostalgia to go back in time and walk a city square like it was in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. 

During the lecture, one audience member reminded me that Williamsburg was restored with Rockefeller money and I said, “That’s right. So if anybody knows of any foundations that want to get involved, let me know.”

Now we’re just scrolling through some of my favorites. This is Main Street in Columbia. Note the State House at the end of the street.

This is Folly Beach. Judging by the cars, it’s probably the ’50s, maybe early ’60s. The cool thing about this one is that sometime in the 1980s they built a big Holiday Inn at the end of the street, blocking the view of the ocean, so this card allows us to see what it looked like before. Two of the buildings on the left are recognizable as still standing today.

The Cooper River Bridge leads to another recurring theme: Charleston. This is the first Coope River Bridge, the Grace Bridge, crossing the Cooper River from Charleston to Mt. Pleasant. This was one of the first cards that I started to think of as an arty card. It’s a neat composition, an interesting angle. Of course, he might have just had to take it from this angle to get the whole bridge in.

We can date the first Cooper River Bridge card to before 1966, because the second Cooper River Bridge, the Pearman Bridge, was completed in that year. The second two cards picturing both bridges are good-looking images. My whole impression of Ferguson’s work as humorously mundane is long gone by now.

Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse. 

Drayton Hall. 

Peacock at Middleton Plantation. 

This is the old Charleston Museum. When I first moved to Charleston in the early Eighties all that was left of this building was the four columns. Kind of like Sheldon Church. The site is now a public park with the four columns standing at the entrance to the park on Rutledge Avenue, almost like modernist sculptures. (The brown patch in the grass shows up on every iteration of this card, so I’m thinking it was a flaw on the slide.) 

It is notable that there is a person in this card, a rare occurrence in Ferguson’s body of work. 

I feel like the woman leaning against the palmetto tree in the Charleston Museum card is quite possibly the same woman in this picture of Colonial Lake, which is just a couple of blocks down Rutledge Avenue from the museum. Maybe it was even the same day. Could this be Ferguson’s wife?

This one definitely falls in the mundane category. This is the interior of the then-brand new Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Same lady?

And then there’s this picture! If this is his wife, I’m thinking, “What a trouper!” Can you imagine the conversation that occurs before this picture is taken? The image itself is almost surreal. When I sent this card to my friend from high school, I wrote, “Ferguson dabbles in surrealism!”

There isn’t a whole lot on the internet about Ernest Ferguson. There’s a video of him, produced by South Carolina Educational Television in 2014, in his den, demonstrating the various cameras he used over the years. But I haven’t found any articles on him. I really need to go down to Columbia and Charleston and do some old-school research, going through the archives of The State newspaper, the Columbia Record, the old News and Courier, to see if I can find articles that were written about him back in the day that haven’t been digitized. 

But I have found his obituary. He was born in Richmond in 1924, and he died in 2016 in Winnsboro. So he lived to be 92 years old. I also learned from his obituary that he was survived by his wife, Betty. 

And there is a website for Ferguson’s old business, Photo Arts. There’s a phone number on the website, but it never occurred to me to call it because I just assumed that this postcard business was defunct, with the demise of its founder and the demise in the popularity and use of postcards. But last summer I went back to the website and I saw that Ferguson’s daughter, Louise Deahl, was listed as the president of the company and I decided to give her a call.

I dialed the number on the webpage and a woman answered the phone. I identified myself, told her I was an art historian researching Ernest Ferguson’s work, and asked to speak to Louise. The woman asked if I wanted Photo Arts, and I said I guess I did. She said, “Let me get that number.” As she was looking around for the number I realized she must be speaking on a land line and, given the elderly sound of her voice, I thought, “Oh my god, am I talking to Betty?” When she came back and gave me the number, I said thank you and asked, “May I ask who I am speaking to?” And she said, “This is Betty. I’m Ernest Ferguson’s wife.”

I almost started crying. I really felt like I was in a portal to the past. I had assumed Betty had passed away by now, but here I was presumably talking to the woman in these pictures. She was so gracious. We spoke for about twenty minutes. I told her I was an art historian and that I admired her husband’s work very much. She made a point of telling me that she still lived independently in her and her husband’s house and that her daughter comes up to visit her from Columbia once a week or so.

I said, “I know a gentleman’s not supposed to ask how old a lady is—” and she answered before I had finished the question, saying, “I don’t mind. I turn 93 in September.” 

Betty told me that Ernest was born in Richmond but that his father had died when he was a teenager and his mother moved back to her hometown of Winnsboro. Ernest finished high school in Richmond, went to college at Randolph-Macon and then returned to Winnsboro, where he lived for the rest of his life. Betty said that she was born in a small town between Winnsboro and Rock Hill called Richburg and moved to Winnsboro in 1953 to teach school. 

I asked if her husband had a green Beetle. She said, no, he had a red Microbus! (Not the green one in the Sumter card, alas.) Then I said, “There’s a picture of the Charleston Museum with a woman leaning against a palmetto tree.” She said, “That’s me.” I asked her about the Colonial Lake image but she said she didn’t recall that one. Then I asked her about the one with the alligator. She said that was not her. She said, “I don’t know who that woman is.” Which sounds like a whole ’nother story!

Here's another picture of a woman with an alligator, adding to our recurring themes. This woman looks younger, so I thought maybe this was Ferguson’s daughter.

But then there is this photo. Before I did the math I wondered if this was Ferguson’s granddaughter, since the photo credit reads “Photo by Louise Ferguson.” But Ferguson would have only been in his forties when this picture was likely taken. So I asked Betty, “What about the girl in the cotton patch?” And she said this was their daughter, Louise, who was born in 1960 and was four years old when this picture was taken. They also had a son, Ernest III, born in 1964.

The title of this card is “White Gold of Dixie.” Now, “white gold” is what they called cotton in the antebellum period, because it made a fortune for the white slave owners. But I also like to think that Ferguson might have felt that his little blonde daughter was white gold of Dixie as well. 

The photo credit on the version of this card that I currently own says “Photo of Louise Ferguson,” but other iterations of this card say “Photo by Louise Ferguson.” After doing the math and realizing the photo couldn’t have been taken by Louise, I felt like this was just a doting father giving his little girl the photo credit, to make her feel like she was part of the process. It would be interesting to know which credit, “by” or “of,” was first. I asked Betty about this but she said she didn’t know. 

I called Louise that same Sunday afternoon. I got her voice mail and told her who I was and that I had just had a delightful phone conversation with her mother and asked if she would call me back so we could talk about her father. She did not call me back.

"The Starry Night" postcard series

One of my postcard series lays out my theory of The Starry Night, which I have sent to numerous people, in varying iterations. 

In early December of 2022, I read in the New York Times that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was planning an exhibition of Van Gogh's cypress paintings for spring of 2023. The big news was that the Museum of Modern Art would be lending The Starry Night for the exhibition.

I have been researching The Starry Night in fits and starts for nearly twenty years, with the hopes of writing a book about the fallacy of the expressive theory of art, with my interpretation of this painting as the centerpiece. Gradually it has become apparent to me that the book is never going to happen, but I remain confident in my radical interpretation of The Starry Night. I felt certain that the curator of this new exhibition intended to perpetuate the standard interpretation of the painting, that it is a composite image from Vincent's imagination, and I figured that if I wasn't going to write a book I should at least get my core interpretation of the painting to the curator at the Met. I gave myself a deadline of mid-January and on January 23, 2023, I mailed a 43-page essay to Susan Alyson Stein, Curator of Nineteenth-Century European Painting at the Met and the curator of the upcoming show.

I submitted my essay for inclusion in the catalogue for the show. I knew it wouldn't be used, but I figured, why not shoot for the moon. At the very least, they would get an idea of how important I feel my theory is. A couple of weeks after I mailed the essay, I actually got a call from the Met, from one of Ms. Stein's assistants. I didn't recognize the number, obviously, so I let it go to voicemail:

“Hello, Mr. Hartley. I’m calling from the Metropolitan Museum and I just wanted to let you know that we received your letter about the van Gogh cypresses paintings. We really appreciate you contacting us but as I’m sure you can appreciate the catalogue is already [pause] about to go to print and the curator hasn’t really had much time to consider what you’ve sent. But she will take a look when there is an opportunity. And again we really appreciate your enthusiasm about this subject. So, thanks again for getting in touch; have a good day. Bye!”

A few days after I sent the manuscript, I decided to send Stein a series of postcards summarizing my theory. I hoped that this would pique her interest in reading the essay, or at least give her my theory in a nutshell.

Here are the cards I sent, with transcripts of the texts I wrote on them:

Click on images to enlarge them.

"The first time I threw the Starry Night up on the big screen in the classroom I did a double take, recognizing that the brightest 'star' must be Venus. ¶ Ned Hartley"

"Vincent painted the view from the window of his cell in the asylum at Saint-Rémy 15 times, 16 if you count the Starry Night. ¶ The 3 elements visible in all the paintings are the wheat field in the foreground, the stone wall in the middle ground, and the diagonal slope of the Alpilles in the background. ¶ Ned Hartley"

"This is the first painting Vincent did of the view. It has all the elements—the wheat field, the stone wall, the Alpilles—plus four buildings that will appear in varying numbers in all iterations of the view. ¶ I have dubbed the two central buildings 'asymmetrical' and 'anteroom.' ¶ Ned Hartley"

"This is the second painting Vincent did of the view. In addition to the buildings I have dubbed 'asymmetrical' and 'anteroom,' this one also depicts a lone cypress on the hillock just beyond anteroom. ¶ Ned Hartley"

"Here's another painting of the view featuring the lone cypress on the hill. ¶ Thanks for the phone call from your assistant! ¶ Ned Hartley"

"The romantic in me likes to think that Vincent identified with this solitary cypress, and the first day he was allowed off the grounds of the asylum he trekked up into the hills to find it and paint it. (When he got there he saw that it was actually two cypresses. nbd) ¶ Ned Hartley"

This is not the card I sent to the Met. This is a rare black and white postcard of The Starry Night, which appears to be an official MoMA postcard. 

"Vincent telescoped 'the view' to paint the Starry Night, bringing the cypresses and Venus closer to the picture plane. ¶ In the foreground can be seen 'anteroom', which Vincent surrounded with an imaginary village. ¶ Ned Hartley"

"Pickvance argues that this painting was done at a different site in the vicinity of the asylum to push his theory that the Starry Night is a composite image. But these are clearly the same cypresses on the hill, only seen from the opposite direction, with the smaller tree now on the right. ¶ Ned Hartley"

"The blue slope of the Alpilles in the background convinces me that these are the cypresses on the hill. ¶ Ned Hartley"

Postcards of this little painting in Richmond are rare. I've had a couple in my collection, but I sent the last one I had to Stein as part of this series. This is my photograph of the painting in Richmond.

"I think the next Van Gogh show should be the 15 paintings of 'the view', including this little one in Richmond. ¶ You could call the exhibition 'The View from the Asylum'. ¶ Ned Hartley"

A postcard of the top painting was next, although I did not discuss it in the text, discussing a painting of the view that was once in the private collection of J. Robert Oppenheimer instead. It is impossible to find a postcard of the Oppenheimer painting, so I used this one. I have since learned that the first painting has been de-attributed as a work by Van Gogh. Consequently, this brings the number of paintings of the view down to fourteen, fifteen if you count The Starry Night.

"The star of the show would be Wheat Field w/Rising Sun, formerly in the collection of J. Robert Oppenheimer and still in a private collection. ¶ It would be nice to bring it to light again ¶ Ned Hartley"

This postcard is actually from the 1986 exhibition at the Met where Ronald Pickvance gave the standard interpretation of The Starry Night as a composite. Stein served as an assistant to Pickvance. Mom and I went to this show!

"I hope you have enjoyed this series of postcards. My intention was to give you a sort of abstract of the essay and hopefully pique your interest in reading it. ¶ Best, Ned Hartley"

I make copies of all the postcards I send. Here's an example of one that I sent to the Met:

I have not heard from Ms. Stein. Obviously, she has staked her entire career on the standard interpretation. In the exhibition catalogue for the cypresses show, she unequivocally declares that The Starry Night is "a composite in the fullest sense of the word." I just happen to think she's wrong.

The cool thing is that my postcards are now in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, if she was smart enough to have saved them.

naked lunch

I've been working on this performance art piece where I text pictures to a core group of friends and family (individually) to see what kind of text threads I can engender. It's a lot more fun and effective than just texting "What's up?" The pictures are primarily mundane images of views around my apartment, and so I call both the photo series and the performance piece naked lunch, stylized lowercase.

It all started when the management company for my apartment building cancelled a scheduled inspection, which was supposed to include checking the status of our appliances. After they cancelled, I took a picture of my lunch with my stove in the background. No reason. The composition just caught my eye. I texted it to a friend from high school just for grins. (It was only later that I thought maybe subconsciously I felt the need to show my appliances to somebody, anybody.)

My friend texted back, "What is this?" which could mean two things: what is the dish? and/or why are you sending me a picture of your lunch?

"I call it chicken casserole," I texted back, which also has a double meaning: the dish is chicken casserole, and the photo is "Chicken Casserole."

Click on images to enlarge them.

I then decided to text the image to my closest friends and family members. Most of them texted variations on "Whatcha cookin'?" Here's a good thread: 

She: Nice! What are you making?

Me: Chicken casserole!

She: Yum. I made a chicken dish this week, too. With broth, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, over gluten free pasta. Very tasty. Having leftovers for lunch today. What’s in your casserole?

Me: Chicken, cream of broccoli soup, some onions and quite a lot of pepper! [I left out egg noodles]

She: Cool. Cheese!

Me: No cheese.

She: When you make a casserole do you make it for one meal or do you have leftovers?

Me: Excellent questions! It makes 4 meals. [I reheat the other portions for lunch on subsequent days]

She: Excellent planning!

Me: I’m an experienced bachelor.

She: Haha 

[new text] I need a cook.

Me: I need a woman.

Another thread:

He: Whatcha making

Me: Chicken casserole!

He: Nice, I made pecan chicken the other day. Learned that you can add frozen veggies to the rice cooker halfway through - game changer!

Me: Gnice! 

[new text] Did that sound like Borat?

He: I haven’t seen that movie in 10 years+ and I can still hear it crystal clear in my head lol

Me: He owned it!

And: 

Another she: "Lotta cooking happening there? Cool photo!" 

I have always said that the best response you can get to an artwork is "Cool!" At least one person probably looked at the Parthenon and thought, "Cool." After a few more exchanges, this friend wrote, "It’s so cool. I’d love to see this in a collection. What would you call it and what other subjects/scenes would you choose?" Eventually I started calling it naked lunch.

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, I caught a glimpse of my shower in the dark down the hallway of my apartment and texted this picture out:

She: Hey!! Where am I?

Me: My apartment!

She: [sent a picture of her sister holding a dog standing in front of a Christmas tree] Oh cool!! Here’s -------- with new puppy --------!

Me: That is the best picture I have seen in a really long time!

This person eventually picked up on what I was doing and started sending me pictures from her own life.

One friend usually responded by providing captions for my pics:

She: The Hallway as Interpreted by the Academic and Musician. 

Another she: Not a creature was stirring

Me: Nice!

The day after Christmas I sent an image of the Christmas cards I had received:

She: It looks like an exhibit!

Me: The internet is the largest art gallery in the world!

She: But the word museum back there! What’s that?

Me: [misunderstanding what she meant] It’s similar to the way we click on a floppy disk icon to save a file.

She: [loved “It’s similar to the way we click on a floppy disk icon to save a file.”]

Me: [smiley face emoji]

Later in the thread, it dawned on me that she was referring to the words on the poster behind the Christmas cards.

Me: I was going back over this thread and I realized you were asking about the word “Museum” on the poster behind the Christmas cards. I thought you were commenting on my reference to the internet as the world’s largest art gallery.

She: Yes!!! The word museum!!!

Me: The poster is from a Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. 

I like the way it says “The Museum of Mode” behind the cards.

She: [loved “I like the way it says ‘The Museum of Mode’ behind the cards.”]

Another she: [loved an image]

Beautiful! And I meant to tell you, my mother enjoyed reading your postcard folder as well

Me: omg, --------, that’s one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received! [heart emoji]

She: [loved “omg, --------, that’s one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received! [heart emoji]”]

Me: Give your folks my love. Happy Boxing Day!

She: To you as well! 

That same day after Christmas I had a friend over for tea and conversation. Before she arrived, I prepared a cutting board of cheese and crackers:

She (not the friend who was coming over): That cheese looks good. What kind?

Me: Smoked gouda!

She: I was going to guess that! Yum.

Me: It’s my go-to. 

With stoned wheat thins.

Another she: Oh yum!!! 

[she sent a picture of her sister pushing a cat in a fuchsia cat stroller] our joint Christmas present from mom!

Me: Now THERE’S a picture!

I should mention that most of these threads continued on about different things, many of them still active when the next picture came up. Also, throughout these texts I was sprinkling in self-portraits, to give people an idea of what I was looking like these days (and to show off my updated wardrobe!). The last one I sent I call "Dress Blues":

She: [loved an image]

Me: I’m going out tomorrow night and I was putting together my wardrobe.

She: Very handsome!!!!

Me: [toothy grin smiley face emoji]

He: What’s up?

Me: I’m going out tomorrow night and I was putting together my wardrobe.

He: On a date?

Me: No, to check out a band.

He: Alright. Looking good for that. Enjoy!

Me: [toothy grin smiley face emoji]

Another she: Looking sharp, there! Off to somewhere fun or new clothes?

Me: Both! I’m going out tomorrow night and I was putting together my wardrobe.

She: We both give a thumbs up!

Another she: Going out?

Me: Mañana!

She: Looking Dapper!

Me: [toothy grin smiley face emoji]

Yet another she: hey!! i know that guy!

Me: I’m going clubbing tomorrow night and I want to look cool.

She: i think you nailed it!

Me: [toothy grin smiley face emoji]

One last she: Oh very nice look!!!! [five gold stars emoji]

Me: I’m going out tonight and I was putting together my wardrobe.

She: Ya look like a handsome devil!

Me: [heart emoji] I’ve been working on it!

She: [loved “I’ve been working on it!”]

At this point, I thought this piece might be over. But then in January we got a couple of snowstorms, and I sent out pictures from that, including this one:

She: Clever shot! Rothko-like

Me: Yes!

Another she: [loved an image]

Snow in the shade

Me: Precisely!

Another she: Like it!

Me: [smiley face emoji]

Another she: [loved an image]

Love!!

Me: [smiley face emoji]

He: What made the tracks?

Me: Human!

One of my neighbors.

He: [thumbs up emoji]

Me: [peace sign emoji]

She: That picture is cool. 

Me: I have always said that the best response you can get to an artwork is "Cool!"

She: [loved "I have always said that the best response you can get to an artwork is 'Cool!'"]

Then I had the flu and was basically snowed in for a couple of weeks. When I finally started feeling better and the weather turned a little warmer, I left the door to my apartment open. I don't have a screen door, but there are no flies in the wintertime!

Me: Airing This Place Out

I don't usually give titles or captions to the pictures in this series, but I feared this one would be too random, even in a series of random photographs, and I wasn't sure how many people had picked up on the fact that this was a project, much less a work of performance art. 

She: Looks great! Love the light in the rug and the perfectly framed tree outside

Me: You're the first to comment on the tree! I put it there!

She: Oh, you mean you cut and pasted it?

That kind of gives it everything. You have your interior and your exterior. There's a tension between them because both of them look beckoning.

Me: No, I placed it there in the composition.

Thank you!

She: Oh well, I felt it was very intentional

Me: Yes, indeed.

She: And I like it even more knowing that that was already there. Which is what I presumed. Until you said you put it there, ha ha

Me: I was being overly clever.

She: Would you have called it art if you had cut and pasted it?

Me: Absolutely.

She: I don't think you were being overly clever. I think you were being observant and that's wise we care nothing for being clever. We have a good sense of humor but as artists we're looking for truth with a capital T.

Me: All man-made objects are works of art.

And, of course, scientists are looking for Truth, too.

She: I know you believe that and I tend to agree with you.

Everything we do is contrived as artists.

Me: It's complicated. [smiley face emoji]

She: But I find something particularly moving when it's already present in the world, and we simply reframe it without touching it. 

We just show people something with fresh eyes that has been there all along.

And when I say we, I am very lightly talking about my artistry. I am not taking myself as a serious art critic.

Me: Wordsworth said that.

She: [like "It's complicated."]

Me: Or Coleridge.

She: I gotta go back and read those guys, ha ha!

I know they were so into nature

Me: Me too!

She: And the sublime

I think it's our natural state, to feel connected to nature

Maybe that sounded dumb, because I said natural and then nature

Me: The idea of the "artist" showing the masses what is right in front of their eyes.

She: Yes!

Me: Although, I don't think they'd have used the word "masses."

She: Hordes

Hoi palloi

Me: I'm sure you still have your Norton Anthology of English Literature.

She: I have both volume one and volume two

Me: Lay people.

She: Probably, they thought of them as the great unwashed

I'm just joking around

Me: I lost my volume one somewhere along the way.

She: What a shame!

I'm sure you could pick it up at any secondhand online bookstore.

Me: Yeah, I was gonna say "rubes," but that doesn't sound like them, either.

omg, I live on eBay!

She: Rubes is a good one.

Me: And Thriftbooks.

She: I think it's funny how many people think hoi polloi means hoity-toity or fancy folk!

Me: I was just thinking that!

She: I guess HOI makes them think of hoity

Come to think of it I wonder where hoity toity comes from

Me: I mean, I was thinking, "Isn't hoi polloi fancy folk"!

Shows how much I know!

She: That's OK! I love learning new words

I learn new words almost every day on spelling bee on the New York Times because the words I can't get are usually words I have no idea existed

Like TENON

That was new to me the other day

Me: I'll bet you've heard "mortise and tenon," and "tenon" just looked odd all by itself.

And I texted her a picture of mortise and tenon work on a piece of furniture my dad made.

Me: From the dresser my dad made for me.

She: Oooo I love that!!!!! He was an artist!!!

Me: Stop it!

She: You don't think he was? or are you kidding? because that is master craftsmanship.

Me: It's complicated!

She: It goes beyond technical skill. You have to have the heart for this work.

I thought you said everything man-made was art

So when you said stop it, what did you really mean?

At this point I called her on the phone to talk about this in depth. Because it's complicated!

Another she: Yes! You're supposed to for the Lunar New Year for good fortune, wealth and health

Nice photo btw!

Me: I knew that! (not)

Thank you!

Another she: That's probably a good idea after your illness! [toothy grin smiley face emoji]

Me: Exactly!

Another she: Beautiful sunny day! I'm stuck in bed with a cold.

Me: Oh, shoot. I had the flu over the holidays. It was brutal.

He: Looking good!

Me: Feels good!

This project is all about working within the format to create an entirely new art form. I feel like the recipients of the photos should be able to sell them as NFTs, now that the (art) world knows they're part of an art piece. 

The next image in the series is actually a short video of me ironing a shirt that I posted on YouTube. If I'm honest, I must admit that I didn't realize it was part of the series until after I had finished it. But that's how art happens. You listen to the work and follow where it leads you. That's the beauty of it. I think it didn't occur to me that it was part of naked lunch at first because it wasn't sent via text. But it's definitely a mundane view into my apartment!

I sent the link to the group via email. I got a couple of comments and some long, thoughtful and often very opinionated email responses from other hard-core ironers, but there were few text threads because it didn't start out as a text. After a couple of days I tried to get text threads going by texting to some members of the group, "You've got to have something to say about my video!" 

This also has two meanings. The primary meaning is, "I know you thought my video was odd, but you must have some thoughts about it." The subtext is, "I'm working on this performance art piece, and you need to say something about my video to continue to contribute to the narrative."

folklore

This post originated as an email to my niece.

Hello, dear. I assume you have not commented on my blog post about The Tortured Poets Department because the ideas there are nothing you didn't know already, which is totally understandable. You're like, "Yeah, Uncle Ned, she's been doing that for years."

It is true that I am not as much of a Swift aficionado as most Swifties. I'm well-versed in the hits, the popular deep cuts, the notable live performances, but until recently the only album I had was 1989. I actually bought TTPD when it came out, but I only really listened to it over Christmas. And now I'm listening to folklore for the first time. Of course, it's brilliant. Won Album of the Year. She actually writes in the liner notes that she's writing in others' voices. "I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I've never met, people I've known, or those I wish I hadn't."

When I first heard "the last great american dynasty," I thought she was saying, "I had a marvelous time moving in everything," instead of "I had a marvelous time ruining everything."

One of the fun things about finally listening to this album is hearing the songs I've already heard in the context of the album and without commercial interruptions.

Hi to all! Hope y'all are doing well.

Much love,

Uncle Ned

Museum postcards

A few years ago, I hit upon this idea of telling a story through a series of postcards. It all started with a series I sent to my nieces in December of 2021, telling the story (from my perspective) of a road trip my family had taken in the summer of 1976. Since then, I have sent over 400 postcards to friends and family, usually in dedicated series. Most of these series have either been about this photographer and postcard peddler from the postwar period whom I discovered named Ernest Ferguson or about Vincent van Gogh and my theory of The Starry Night. 

While I originally shopped for postcards at local indoor flea markets, I eventually moved to eBay. But there are a few Van Gogh postcards that I am always hoping to find on the auction site that unfortunately rarely if ever show up for sale. Finally, I got the bright idea to order the cards from the museums themselves. 

But museums don’t sell postcards online. I assume it’s just not worth it to them. So I decided to try a fun little experiment and send twenty dollars cash to various museums and see who would respond. (I should mention that when it comes to postcards of paintings, I’m a bit of a snob, or a purist, in that I only want the official postcards printed by the museums that own the works.) Obviously, sending cash in the mail is a bit of a crap shoot, but that’s part of the fun of it. And after all, it’s only twenty bucks.

First, on August 17, 2024, I sent requests to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art for two of my favorite paintings by Van Gogh, Rain and Landscape at Saint-Rémy (Enclosed Field with Peasant), respectively, the latter of which is integral to my Starry Night theory. Indy came in quickly, in less than two weeks. I didn’t hear from Philly.

I didn’t know how much museum postcards were going for these days. I figured twenty bucks would get me maybe five, allowing for shipping and handling. I got 15 postcards from Indianapolis! I had wanted the cards originally for any future Starry Night series I might send to people, but when I got fifteen, I decided to turn this into a sort of performance art piece and send them to my core group of friends and family who had been receiving postcard series over the past few years, nine in all. Here is the first card, front and back, with a transcript of the text I wrote, telling my friends about the project.

Click on images to enlarge them.

“Museums don’t sell postcards online. So I mailed a $20 bill to the Indianapolis Museum of Art and asked them to please send me as many postcards of this ptg. as 20 bucks would buy, minus postage. I figured with inflation they’d be, like, 3 dollars each and I’d get maybe 5. ¶ I got 15!”

On August 26, I sent a twenty dollar bill to the Cincinnati Art Museum for postcards of one of my all-time favorite Van Goghs, Undergrowth with Two Figures. They responded within two weeks as well. Here is the postcard and my text.

“I also sent the Cincinnati Art Museum 20 bucks for postcards of this painting, and they sent me 9! ¶ This is one of my all-time favorite ptgs. by Van Gogh. I’ve only ever seen it on regular (continental) sized postcards (with lots of white space top and bottom). But given its odd dimensions (50 x 100 cm; Vincent actually used this size a bunch in the last months of his life, in Auvers; before that his preferred size was 73 x 92) anyway, I’ve always felt that this wide format would lend itself perfectly to an oversized card, and obviously so did they! (It is slightly cropped top and bottom, hence ‘detail’.)”

I got the feeling that the people in the museum shops in the heartland cities of Indianapolis and Cincinnati were open to my project, while the hard-boiled east coast Philadelphians were, like, “Thanks for lunch, hayseed!” So, I sent Philadelphia another request, on September 11, saying that if they had already sent my previous request (which I was pretty sure they hadn’t) to just send me an assortment of other major works in their collection. A week later, I actually got the first batch I had requested, a month after the initial request. Given the postmark, they had obviously mailed these before they got my second request. They had just taken their time with the first request. Here's the postcard and my text.

“Obviously, I was taking a chance sending cash in the mail. Indy and Cincy responded promptly, within 2 weeks. But after 4 weeks I figured Philly had pocketed the cash, making an example of a naïve Southerner. ¶ A few days after I’d sent them another request with another $20 bill—offering them a 2d chance to do the right thing—the original request came in! 15 of these cards! ¶ Maybe they had been temporarily out.”

A couple of weeks later I got the assortment of highlights from Philly and mailed these individually to the group, based on their personalities. 

This was August and September. In October, I initiated a Phase Two of the project. I started by sending a twenty to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), requesting the postcard of their prize Rothko, which was the first in my Regarding series of “art” photographs. (I actually mailed this request on September 30.) Then, on October 8, I sent a third request to Philly for a selection from the highlights they had previously sent. Since I now knew how much the postcards and the shipping costs were (they had sent receipts with the previous batches), I mailed them a check this time, figuring they couldn’t pocket this. Nothing! And according to my bank statements, they haven’t cashed the check.

Also on the eighth, I sent a twenty to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), asking for the postcard of another painting in the Regarding series, Jackson Pollock’s One. A week later, I sent another twenty to MoMA for The Starry Night. On that same day I sent a twenty to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for Van Gogh’s Irises. 

The Met sent the cash back with a note saying that they could not fulfil an order in this manner. I briefly thought about writing them back and telling them that their wholesome counterparts in the Midwest had fulfilled my request, even the cretins in Philadelphia had, and that in the time that it took them to send me the note they could have fulfilled the order. But I thought better of it.

Otherwise, I didn’t hear from any of the others! If these had been the first museums I had written to, in Phase One, this project probably would have never happened. 

Over a month after I sent the first MoMA requests, I did the same thing I had done with Philly, sending another twenty asking for The Starry Night again and saying that if they had already fulfilled my previous requests to just send me an assortment of their greatest hits. This was on November 23, and then, on December 14, I received the first two orders! Which means that this time, unlike Philly, they probably got my third request before they finally mailed the first two. I imagine a different associate or a manager at the MoMA Store opening this third request and asking the staff what previous requests I was referring to—and the culprit secretly going back and filling those requests.

The first two orders, you will recall, were for The Starry Night and Pollock’s One, and they fulfilled them together. Unfortunately, MoMA’s postcard prices are higher than the other museums (some of which gave me a volume discount) and so I only received nine of each of these postcards, and there are nine people on my mailing list for this project, which meant that there would be no cards left over for me, especially The Starry Night. So, some people got The Starry Night and some people got the Pollock, which kind of worked out because some people had already gotten a Starry Night postcard from me in the past.

They even gave me change!

"MoMA finally came in! But only after I mailed them a third request—two months after the first two! ¶ I think I sent them on a guilt trip!" At the bottom of the Pollock cards I wrote, "This is the painting in the Regarding series." At the bottom of the Starry Night cards, I wrote, "The brightest 'star' is actually Venus.©" This phrase is actually not copyrighted, but it is one of my taglines and it should be.

Oddly, I have never received the third MoMA request. And I’m still waiting for the third Philly request.

Miraculously, on Christmas Eve, I finally received the Rothko cards from SFMOMA, three months after the original request!

"I sent 20 bucks to SFMOMA on Sept. 30, and they came in on Christmas Eve! ¶ This is the first painting in the Regarding series."

"Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"

Taylor Swift is famous for writing personal, confessional songs, often about old love interests. Because of this, listeners may be inclined to assume that any song of Swift’s that is about a relationship is about one of her own relationships. A close listen to her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, reveals that many of the songs on this album are written from the perspectives of other people, particularly women in abusive relationships, often from lower class and/or fundamentalist Christian backgrounds. Swift uses her stature to give voice to this underrepresented group. (In her Eras Tour Book, she calls the album "Female Rage: The Musical.")

Some of the songs on TTPD are almost assuredly about old boyfriends. “So Long, London” sounds like it’s about Joe Alwyn. “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is definitely about Matty Healy. “The Manuscript” revisits the subject of Swift’s magnum opus, “All Too Well.” “The Alchemy” might be about Swift’s current love interest, Travis Kelce, with its sports references.

I think it’s assumed that “But Daddy I Love Him” is also about Kelce. However, there are no specific details that point to Kelce in this song. It’s a picaresque pop-country song written in the voice of a young woman who is vilified by her small townsfolk for getting involved with a man they deem to be a bad influence on her. The protagonist of the song decries “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutching their pearls, sighing ‘What a mess’.” She continues railing against fundamentalist hypocrites, singing, “I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing / God save the most judgmental creeps / Who say they want what’s best for me / Sanctimoniously performing soliloquys I’ll never see.” And she says multiple times, “You ain’t gotta pray for me.” (The nonstandard English further attests to the speaker's social class.)

Swift calls out fundamentalism in other songs on the album. “Guilty As Sin?” is about the fundamentalist prohibition against thinking salacious thoughts and self-pleasuring. The speaker sings, “What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh / Only in my mind?” and “Without ever touching his skin / How can I be guilty as sin?” She says that as “My bedsheets are ablaze / I’ve screamed his name / Building up like waves.”

The speaker also calls out fundamentalism when she sings, “Someone told me / There’s no such thing as bad thoughts / Only your actions talk.” She sings, “They’re gonna crucify me anyway.” She laments that religious types require of her “long suffering propriety” and avers that her infatuation is a type of natural religion: “What if the way you hold me / Is actually what’s holy?” and “I choose you and me . . . religiously” (her ellipsis). And she asks twice, at the beginning of the song and at the end, “Am I allowed to cry?”

In “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” the protagonist sings, “They shake their heads, saying ‘God help her’ / When I tell ’em he’s my man / But your good Lord doesn’t need to lift a finger / I can fix him. No, really, I can.” Another major theme of the album is depicted in this song: abusive relationships. “Trust me,” she says, “I can handle me a dangerous man.”

When I first bought the album and heard the song “Fresh Out the Slammer,” I was a little dismissive, asking what Taylor Swift knows about partners in prison. It was only after I realized that many of the songs are written from the perspectives of different types of people that I listened more closely and really began to admire this song. The narrative dialogue is written from the perspective of both the man and the woman. The man opens the song with the refrain, singing plaintively in a high-pitched voice, “Now pretty baby I’m running back home to you / Fresh out the slammer I know who my first call will be to.”

The verses have a much more strident cadence, illustrating the woman’s apprehension and giving clues to their relationship prior to the man’s incarceration: “Another summer, taking cover / Rolling thunder he don’t understand me.” She speaks of being “Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine . . . / In the shade of how he was feeling,” and “My friends tried but I wouldn’t hear it / Watched me daily disappearing / For just one glimpse of his smile.”

In “Down Bad,” she sings, “I’ll build you a fort on some planet / Where they can all understand it / How dare you think it’s romantic / Leaving me safe and stranded.” In “So Long, London,” she sings, “How much sad did you / Think I had in me?” and “Just how low did you think I’d go? / Before I'd self-implode / Before I’d have to go to be free.” She continues, “And my friends said it isn’t right to be scared / Every day of a love affair / Every breath feels like rarest air / When you’re not sure if he wants to be there.” And, “You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days / And I’m just getting color back into my face.”

In “loml” (love of my life/loss of my life), she sings, “Who’s gonna tell me the truth / When you blew in with the winds of fate / And told me I reformed you / When your impressionist paintings of heaven / Turned out to be fakes / Well, you took me to hell, too.” Of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she says, “In public [you] showed me off / Then sank in stoned oblivion.” “I would have died for your sins / Instead I just died inside.” And “You said normal girls were 'boring' / But you were gone by the morning.”

Abusive relationships are at the heart of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” This mesmerizing number is about a formerly institutionalized woman (who may or may not be dead) who is tormented by the people of her neighborhood. The arrangement is ominous, with spooky chords and “ooh ooh” background vocals that suggest Halloween ghosts. “If you wanted me dead,” the protagonist sings to her tormentors, “You should have just said [so] / Nothing makes me feel more alive.” And then the arrangement turns sprightly, as the speaker appears like a goblin: “So I leap from the gallows / And I levitate down your street / Crash the party like a record scratch / As I scream: ‘Who’s afraid of little old me?!'” 

“You should be,” she intones. This is the story of the toothless woman on the block who is treated as an outcast, as if she were a witch. “So all you kids can sneak into my / House, with all the cobwebs / I’m always drunk on my own tears / Isn’t that what they all said? / That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn / That I’m fearsome and I’m wretched / And I’m wrong.” 

She says, “They say they didn’t do it to hurt me / But what if they did? / I want to snarl and show you / Just how disturbed this has made me / You wouldn’t last an hour / In the asylum where they raised me.”

She says that it was the institutionalization itself that made her mentally unstable. “'Cause you lured me, and you / Hurt me, and you taught me / You caged me / And then you called me crazy / I am what I am 'cause you trained me.”

The title voices the feelings of many of the protagonists in these songs: Why are you so threatened by someone you clearly feel you have some sort of control over? These songs are deadly serious. Some of the stories are couched in pop arrangements (“Guilty As Sin?”, “But Daddy I Love Him,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), but most of them are straight-up ballads (with consistently sparkling arrangements). In her most mature album to date, Swift offers her fellow maturing listeners empathetic stories reflecting their own lives, helping them to see their situations clearly and hopefully to find a way out.

I would note that the relationship in "But Daddy I Love Him" has a happy ending. "But oh my God you should see your faces."

=//=

The first thing I thought of when I saw the photo of Swift on the cover of the Tortured Poets Department songbook (it's also on the cover of one of the "deluxe" editions of the album) was the sculpture by Michelangelo traditionally called the Dying Slave, now in the Louvre. I feel certain that Swift was intentionally making a reference to this sculpture. She didn't go to college, but she is very well-versed in Western culture and there is no way she hasn't visited the Louvre. I also picture her hosting dinner parties or salons with distinguished scholars from Columbia, NYU, etc. 

In addition to being a sculptor, painter and architect, Michelangelo was also a poet, indeed a tortured poet. My photo below does two things. It connects Swift to the larger Western creative tradition and it unites my two passions: music and "art" history. I have come to realize that the audience for my blog posts on Taylor Swift is not really millennials and gen z-ers but people of my own generation who may want to know why they should be taking Swift seriously as an artist.

Click on images to enlarge them.