Manly Art
January Men's Room
SHANE FERNANDO is director of Cape Fear Community College’s Humanities and Fine Arts Center and sadly does not yet own an original Dogs Playing Poker.
When thinking of the serious art collector’s artist of choice, one’s mind might go to the likes of Matisse, Renoir, or Pollock, but what about the artist of choice for the “man’s man” collector of art?
Can machismo be exhibited or even guaranteed through the purchase of art?
Of course! Enter the nineteenth- and twentieth-century artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.
Coolidge, not to be confused with the United States president, was an American artist born to a Quaker family in 1844, having no formal art training. In the 1860s he moved away from home and involved himself in a variety of careers, including sign painter, pharmacist, and was the founder of a bank and a newspaper, all before the age of thirty.
As a side note, Kash is credited with inventing and creating “Comic Foregrounds.” These canvases are usually found at carnivals where life-size caricatures are painted, with openings for someone to place their head through, to be photographed for a comic effect.
Another surprising aspect of the multi-talented Coolidge is that he wrote an opera and even designed the costumes and set when it was produced. The comic opera, titled King Gallinipper, told the story of eliminating a mosquito epidemic that New York and New Jersey were combatting at the time.
Forgive me, but I digress.
It wasn’t until Coolidge’s move at the turn-of-the-century to Rochester, New York, did he find his fame, or at least his artwork’s fame, of which you are all familiar.
In 1903, Coolidge, or “Kash” as he as affectionately referred to by family and friends, began working for the advertising firm Brown & Bigelow, the primary producer of the ever-popular advertising calendar.
Over the next ten years he painted sixteen oil paintings for the firm to use as artwork in the advertisement of cigars. All of the paintings featured dogs with human qualities; nine of the paintings were scenes of dogs engaged in poker games, a meme Kash is credited with creating.
So you might be asking, “What’s the big deal about dogs playing poker and Kash Coolidge?!?” His work certainly cannot be seen at the Louvre or MoMA … at least not yet.
However, his work can been seen in hundreds of thousands of pool halls, bars, basements, and garages. And, in 2005 a pair of his poker dog paintings sold at auction for a cool $590,400.
As one can imagine they made ultimate addition for the buyer’s man cave.
To view more of illustrator Mark Weber's work, go to www.markweberart.blogspot.com
