In Defense of Dogs Playing Poker
C. M. Coolidge (1844-1934), A Friend in Need, 1903
There is a stereotype about art lovers, especially modern art lovers. You know the one. They’re the kinds of cultured literati types that many aspire to be, perfectly at home in white-walled museums, squinting at enormous abstract paintings through their monocles. They’re also, if you asked the average person on the street, snobs. Of course, this stereotype is less about the artists making the actual art in their studios – often messy, often alone – than it is about the art world, which is very much a community, a place to see and be seen, and very much concerned with its categories and movements. If you are an artist in the twentieth century, experimenting with abstraction and emotion, materials and philosophies, then you’re considered avant-garde. If you’re a critic who can structure that artist into a movement, then it becomes much easier to decipher those spatters and squares. And if you’re able to decipher what might seem, to the average eye, indecipherable, you are awarded the coveted title of connoisseur.
But what about the other side of the art coin? There are plenty of undiscerning critics who just enjoy paintings that make them chuckle, and plenty of moderately talented artists who need to make a living painting them. And for them – and thanks to them – we have the world of kitsch.
What is kitsch? The easiest definition is of a kind of art that is mass-produced, commercial, highly palatable, and often a little cheesy – think about the kind of art you would find in hotels or buy at Ikea to decorate your first apartment. Kitsch goes back a long way; as long as there has been fine art, there’s been its commercial counterpart. This was explored by the critic Clement Greenberg, who wrote the seminal essay on kitsch in 1961, called “Kitsch and the Avant Garde.” In it, and in tones both curious and derisive, he describes kitsch as “operating by formulas. . . it is vicarious experiences and faked sensations. It asks nothing of its customers except their money.” (I think it’s fair to assume that Greenberg, for the sake of both this essay and his own, is clutching a monocle.)
So you can understand why kitsch is a bit of a dirty word in the art world – no artist wants to make it, and no critic wants to love it. But, as we’ve established, so many people do. People who are exhausted from trying to decipher spatters and squares; people who want to look at things that amuse them, things they relate to, things they understand. Art historians like me have long gotten in trouble by assuming that kitsch has no value, or by overlooking the stretchiness of what defines art at all. That elasticity encompasses the entire spectrum of avant-garde to kitsch, from the emotional abstraction of a Mark Rothko to the nostalgic Americana of a Norman Rockwell and everything in between. Both poles, Greenberg allows, “are products of the same society.” One is just at a frequency that’s low enough for us all to hear.
Which brings us to the most famous example of kitsch, some may even say the Mona Lisa of kitsch: Dogs Playing Poker from 1903, which is actually the most famous painting in what was a much larger series. Its actual title is A Friend in Need, and it depicts, as we well know, a group of dogs of various breeds sitting around a green felt poker table beneath a red glass light fixture. We’re in what’s known as a pregnant part of the narrative, the moment right before the action, where the titular friend in need is one of the bulldogs in the foreground who is getting slipped an ace from his buddy. This errant little act of cheating is about to upset the entire game, if the smug expressions on the other dogs is to be believed. The scene is taut with anticipation before the silence is shattered by the reverberation of outraged barking.
This canine drama was conceived by the mind of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, known to all as Cash, who painted the original for a series of anthropomorphized dogs in 1894. Coolidge was born in 1844 in upstate New York, and as a young artist, Coolidge had no formal education, but had sketched for his local newspaper and eventually became an accomplished cartoonist on the margins of more lucrative careers (including inventing the Comic Foreground, those one-dimensional, propped up walls that depict scenes with a hole for your face that you can look through for a fun photo op).
In 1903, the promotional company Brown and Bigelow commissioned Coolidge to paint a series of dogs in human scenarios to use in their cigar ads. And a cultural meme was born. The ads were a runaway hit, with sixteen paintings commissioned in all. Brown and Bigelow printed additional copies to use as giveaways. The paintings were then given a second life in the 1970s when kitsch had an enormously popular revival, and A Friend in Need – its king – reproduced endlessly for living rooms, on tee-shirts and calendars, and making C. M. Coolidge the most popular and endlessly reproduced artist you’ve never heard of.
Why was his work so popular? You could make a monocle-clutched art historical argument: there are several significant paintings of card players, from Caravaggio to Cezanne, that Coolidge was tapping into, borrowing scenes of human dynamics that mirror everyday life, and displaying his own artistic talent for observation and empathy. After all, each dog has its own personality. And what difference does it make if these human motivations are acted out by dogs? Fine art is founded on a rich history of allusion and metaphor. And you could also make the argument that the twentieth century – a time when the public was swimming in images like never before – was all about the integration of high and low art, for advertisements that contained artistry and art that incorporated the logos from soup cans.
But you can also simply make the argument that there is a time for emotional, high-keyed abstraction and also a time for gambling dogs. Art can have all the dignity in the world, and also simply be what people want to see, decipher, and enjoy. And it is flexible enough to contain both, and everything in between.
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), The Cardplayers, 1890-1892. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Caravaggio (1571-1610), The Cardsharps, 1594. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, USA