Acrylic on canvas. 91 x 183 cm.
The lighting around the window frame I really like, the light blue-green, gold.. reflected in the dress and the high-heeled shoe. The eye-shadow.
The empty room. The green-blue floor, smooth floor.
Researching the Henry George 5 c Cigar sign… I found this,
20th July 2007. ‘Ghost sign’ in Mount Pleasant, Utah.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_George_Ghost_Sign.jpg
Looking at the markings, the paint that has peeled, this is the same sign! (I am not sure how many signs originally existed with this exact design — Searching I see other designs of sign for this brand of cigar that still remain in ‘ghost’ form. You ever seen a ghost sign? No.. but you heard of ‘em).
The paint is peeled off in the same places. Note the black paint peel above the N. The G. Also, it’s interesting how he has painted the black paint peel above the H.. to actually be part of the letter, making it into more of an A shape.
My question here is.. was there originally a window to the right of this, or is this a composite of this sign and another window… This led me to the question of was this sign in a film/movie. From the paint peeling I suspect the painting was painted from a photograph of this sign around this time. I have found two or three other photographs of the sign, up until, it appears, 2020. The paint peel level seems quite similar in all of them.. So, possible the sign could have been in a film a few decades prior to 2007, with the paint peel being similar to this? (I am a little suspecting of the 2020 date of the one blog post with a photograph of this sign, due to how similar the paint looks to the 2007 photograph).
One sign of the more modern day is the wire and box on the wall—just under the H in the photograph. Looking closely at the ‘H’ in the painting…
..It isn’t obvious, but that small grey square is in the exact same spot as the electrical box on the wall in the photograph. From photographs it seems that this was there from 2007-2020 at least (if the dates on he photographs I have found are correct). ..
*time passes* .. (as I suppose is it has a tendency to do)
After a bit more searching around I found the location of the sign
Is that a sign of a bricked up window…? (The ghost of a window.. I notice that these old signs that remain have been called ‘Ghost Signs’.
After typing that I have just realised that the woman would have to be quite a size if she was to the same scale as this sign!.. The bricked up opening seems to come to the top of the ‘George’ in the photograph… where as in the painting:
The more I look into this, the more interesting it gets…
She is holding a cigarette. Is there a resemblance to the woman in the ‘Radio’ painting?
.. Either way, after finding the location of the building, I found out that the building has been demolished (the ghost sign, and the possible ghost window are gone.. but the painting of the painted ghost sign remains.)
The location: N 39° 32.814 W 111° 27.383
Note the circle and square pattern on the ground where the entrance to the alley way was.
Looking around this area on google street view, I can see that the building to the left is called Wasatch Block.
.. Researching into this building, I have found this image (from 2012). I had suspicions about some of the previous dates on the photographs of the sign.. Especially the one from 2020—someone posted it on a blog, saying that they had taken the photograph in 2020. The paint peeling seemed exactly the same as the 2007 photograph (I will leave the notes in about this above..)
“This is a picture of the Wasatch Block Building when it housed JC Penny's.” ..
Note that the building on the right appears to be a wing of this building (the part the sign was on) .. It appears that Bob Dylan’s painting of the sign was from a modern photograph of this though (the 2007 paint peel / electrical box era).
.. The information about JC Penny use of the building, didn’t give a date (It was from a construction website page for the modern building:
https://www.facebook.com/people/Wasatch-Block-Building-Project/100082122169690/)
James Cash Penney Jr. — (September 16, 1875 – February 12, 1971) was an American businessman and entrepreneur who founded the JC Penney stores in 1902. James Cash Penney Jr. Hamilton, Missouri, U.S.
It seems that before that the building would have been part of the Wasatch Academy..
“Wasatch Academy is an independent, coeducational, college preparatory boarding school for grades 8-12 and post-graduates located in Mount Pleasant, Utah, United States. It was founded in 1875 by Reverend Duncan McMillan, a Presbyterian minister who had come to the Sanpete Valley, in the mountains of central Utah, to both recover his health and to do missionary work among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in the geographic center of Utah.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasatch_Academy#External_links
https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/98
I can’t seem to find any reference to this building.. if it was ever used in a film.
Either way, going off the size of the sign, the window, I suspect this a composite of this sign, and a window from a film …
*time continues to pass* (In its usual direction)
(Whilst typing this here I had a suspicion who the woman in the window might be—After some searching around, and watching some of the 1956 film, Bus Stop, starring Marilyn Monroe—I found this scene at the window)
I notice that the light blue-green light I mentioned on first seeing the painting makes sense as I watched this scene …
The newspaper that she is fanning herself with, in this one frame, is vertical, and not recognisable as a newspaper/fan. Her hand though is in the position that a hand might be in if she was holding a cigarette… (she isn’t holding a cigarette in the film) — Bob Dylan has a painted the vertical line of the newspaper.. but darker than it is in the film). It seems that he has used what is there (if you look at it in a certain way, or quickly, maybe), to make something new. I sense that there is a connection to his song writing/ writing here)
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As an aside, the previous painting that I came across, Basement Party, had a similar scenario—a woman dancing with a man, in the painting, appeared to have her finger-tips pressed on his upper back. I was drawn to how this hand looked, the sense of the fingers pressing in a certain way. On inspection of the frame from the film it was painted from, the woman was holding a glass in that hand. By taking the glass out of her hand, it made something new, that looked natural, but also a kind of illusion.
(I am typing these notes quite quickly, as they happened, and will post them like this, rather than put them together in a more after the happening way—I hope that something can be followed here.)
I mentioned previously how I first noticed the light green-blue colour—there seemed something quite singular about this lighting—the way the floor inside the room was this colour—The floor in the film hasn’t got this same lighting/vibrancy, but in the frames when the newspaper is in full view of the light on the outside wall, it takes on this colour—It almost seems like he has hidden the newspaper, but transferred the impression of that colour to the floor inside the room.
The diagonal shadow down her leg in the film I think is quite striking, the lighting at the end of the shadow, the gold shoe, the glinting gold window latch in the middle of the window—Bob Dylan has painted these in his painting. The darkness, the bricks, along with the yellow/gold —green/blue in this film scene are really something—I can see why by Bob Dylan would be drawn to this scene!..
Regarding the ‘vanishing’ newspaper — even this is actually part of the original film scene (but in a slightly different way). Just before the man arrives at the window to drag her inside, she is about to throw the newspaper to the ground, but stops as he pulls her in, she then places the newspaper on the edge of the wall, and it falls to floor more of its own / gravities accord.
Going back to the Henry George 5 C Cigar sign—Of course the connection now comes into view—a nod to the the cigarette that Bob Dylan has conjured up. The ‘H’ in Henry George, being changed to an ‘A’ when on the original wall and sign the top of the H was in fact marked with a line because of peeled off paint—It wasn’t an A. Of course Bob Dylan knows that, again to me it seems a nod to this ‘technique’, whatever it is — I realise I am mainly just pointing out observations here, rather than analysing in any kind of way.
I am interested in the connection with this particular sign (other than cigar/cigarette).. the building I mentioned above (I will likely post this, before I look into that further) — I did mention earlier how in that one photograph of the building where this sign is (2007), there appeared to be a bricked up opening similar to the shape of the window here. Could Bob Dylan have visited this place, could he have seen that alleyway somewhere else? Or is that just by chance. Really I would say again, this sign, it doesn’t appear to be ‘famous’ or well known. There are very few photographs of it online, as far as I can see. To find the location of the sign took quite a lot of searching, image searches, etcetera.
I was unable to find what the original building was used for, although the name suggests it was part of the college that I linked.
Here is a video that I have put together — the film scene, with the painting contained within.
Henry George:
“This image (from a Henry George Cigar box) reflects George's fame at the time of his run for the Mayoralty of New York in 1886 (and later in 1897). George outpolled a young Theodore Roosevelt, but lost to machine Democrat Abraham Hewitt. The rooster was George's campaign icon, and his slogan was "The democracy of Thomas Jefferson. And although the cigars were advertised "for men", George was in fact an outspoken advocate for women's suffrage.”
“A HUNDRED YEARS AGO a young unknown printer in San Francisco wrote a book he called Progress and Poverty. He wrote after his daily working hours, in the only leisure open to him for writing. He had no real training in political economy. Indeed he had stopped schooling in the seventh grade in his native Philadelphia, and shipped before the mast as a cabin boy, making a complete voyage around the world.
Three years later, he was halfway through a second voyage as able seaman when he left the ship in San Francisco and went to work as a journeyman printer. After that he took whatever honest job came to hand. All he knew of economics were the basic rules of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other economists, and the new philosophies of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, much of which he gleaned from reading in public libraries and from his own painstakingly amassed library. Marx was yet to be translated into English.
George was endowed for his job. He was curious and he was alertly attentive to all that went on around him. He had that rarest of all attributes in the scholar and historian that gift without which all education is useless. He had mother wit. He read what he needed to read, and he understood what he read. And he was fortunate; he lived and worked in a rapidly developing society. George had the unique opportunity of studying the formation of a civilization -- the change of an encampment into a thriving metropolis. He saw a city of tents and mud change into a fine town of paved streets and decent housing, with tramways and buses. And as he saw the beginning of wealth, he noted the first appearance of pauperism. He saw degradation forming as he saw the advent of leisure and affluence, and he felt compelled to discover why they arose concurrently.
The result of his inquiry, Progress and Poverty, is written simply, but so beautifully that it has been compared to the very greatest works of the English language. But George was totally unknown, and so no one would print his book. He and his friends, also printers, set the type themselves and ran off an author's edition which eventually found its way into the hands of a New York publisher, D. Appleton & Co. An English edition soon followed which aroused enormous interest. Alfred Russel Wallace, the English scientist and writer, pronounced it "the most remarkable and important book of the present century.”
https://www.henrygeorge.org/whowashg.htm
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Bus Stop (1956)
Bus Stop is a 1956 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Joshua Logan for 20th Century Fox, starring Marilyn Monroe, Don Murray, Arthur O'Connell, Betty Field, Eileen Heckart, Robert Bray, and Hope Lange.
Unlike most of Monroe's films, Bus Stop is neither a full-fledged comedy nor a musical, but rather a dramatic piece; it was the first film she appeared in after studying at the Actors Studio in New York. Monroe does, however, sing one song: "That Old Black Magic" by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.
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Edit (26th August, 2024)
Looking at historical street view images, it looks like the Henry George sign was no longer there in October, 2007.
The image that I found with the exact date taken is from July, 2007.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_George_Ghost_Sign.jpg
It appears that at some point between July, and October 2007 the painted sign was removed from the wall. By 2012 that part of the building had been knocked down. I am wondering why that would be. The Flickr account that posted the October 2007 photograph no longer exists.
nm.
https://womeninthewindow.tumblr.com