By Tim Gihring //
The dog days of summer are upon us, officially the twenty days before and after the Dog Star, otherwise known as Sirius, rises and falls with the sun. Unofficially, of course, it’s that hot, humid time in Minnesota when all you want to do is laze around and hope someone else supplies your food and water.
The ancient Greeks first came up with the notion. They hated this time of year. It felt dangerous, even. The Dog Star, they thought, caused plants to wilt, men to weaken, and women to become aroused—all bad things, in their estimation. Bad enough that one of the dog days, at the peak of the heat, was set aside as a kind of open season on canines: men were apparently permitted to kill any dog they came across.
The ancient Romans were no more enamored with summer. They sacrificed a dog at the start of the season to appease the gods. But, in general, they adored the animals—especially as guard dogs. If you’ve ever been to Pompeii, the city in Italy that was buried by a volcanic blast in the first century, you probably remember the mosaic outside the so-called House of the Tragic Poet: a dog showing its teeth, with the phrase “cave canem” inscribed beneath it. Basically, beware of the dog.
Almost as long as people have been making art, it seems, they have made art of dogs. A few years ago, researchers exploring a cliff in the Arabian desert came across some highly detailed engravings on the cliff face, made more than 8,000 years ago—the oldest depictions ever found of dogs. Thirteen of them, wearing leashes.
You can see this ubiquity at Mia, as nearly every corner of the collection—from across the world and thousands of years of history—features canines. They are, in a sense, our shadows across time: whatever we’re up to, whatever values we hold, eventually it all shows up in our dogs.
Colima, dog, c. 100-300 CE, clay. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John R. Kennedy,
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The Colima Dog
The oldest artworks of canines at Mia are also the closest geographically: the Colima creatures from what is now northwestern Mexico. Sometime between the first and third centuries CE, artisans from the ancient Colima culture created pottery sculptures of dogs—as well as lizards, owls, coatis, vultures, and other animals—that remain strikingly charismatic. Found in burial sites, they seem alive with hopeful enthusiasm: mouths open, legs poised, ready to accompany the deceased into the afterlife with tails wagging.
These aren’t the fluffy doodles of today, however. They’re dogs that came down the continent from Asia along with the first people, tens of thousands of years ago. Small and hairless, for the most part, like hot dogs with legs. In fact, they were food, when they weren’t serving as guard dogs—protection and hunger being equal needs.
These indigenous dogs, as they’re known, began disappearing when the Spanish arrived with their own breeds, generally war dogs used to attack and punish. It was a couple of artists, actually, who tried to revive interest in the indigenous dog: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. They kept several Xoloitzcuintle (pronounced “show-low-eats-queent-lee”), a tiny dog with an outsized cultural importance, and Kahlo often painted herself with them, these living links to Mexico’s past.
Five years after the popular Frida movie came out, in 2002, one of these depictions—her 1949 painting The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl—began appearing on Mexican money. A 2020 study, however, found that no dogs in the Americas are truly indigenous anymore. Only the Chihuahua and the Xoloitzcuintle have any precolonial dog DNA, and even then it’s just three and four percent, respectively.
Alexander Roslin (Swedish, 1718–1798), The Comtesse d’Egmont Pignatelli in Spanish Costume, 1763, oil on canvas. The John R. Van Derlip Fund, 2006.33
The Lap Dog
In the 1700s, with the Enlightenment in full swing, the growing insights of science and philosophy prompted people to see themselves differently—and animals. Lines were drawn, between humans and everything else, based on the idea that people are rational, in control of their destiny. Animals, by contrast, started to look naïve, innocent—like children, only hairier—especially dogs. They could be bred to be anything people wanted, after all, and so soon there were poodles for hunting bears, terriers for hunting rats and badgers, hounds for hunting deer and boar. Dogs for our dirty work.
Eventually, people who didn’t need to do anything in particular started to have dogs that did nothing in particular. Pets, you might say. A status symbol for the rich, to say my dog doesn’t work and neither do I. Pugs and spaniels and bichon frises. Lap dogs. Naturally, they started showing up in portraits. Emperor Joseph I, as a child, posed with a cocker spaniel. Louis the XV’s daughter posed with a large book and a tiny Papillon. William Hogarth, the English painter, made sure to include in his self-portrait his beloved pug, named Trump.
A 1763 portrait of Comtesse Pignatelli, on view at Mia in gallery 307, shows her at 23, the Jackie Kennedy of her day, stretched out on a day bed with a guitar and a small, black-and-white spaniel, raising its paw in a kind of invitation to play. A 1779 portrait of James Ward, currently off view, shows the young man with his arm around a canine companion, his last name and initial on the dog’s collar.
People in the 1700s hoped others would see something of their dogs—their loyalty and kindness—in them. It was Voltaire, the curmudgeonly philosopher, who called them out on this: “The best thing about man,” he wrote, “is the dog.”
Yoshitomo Nara (Japanese, born 1959), Your Dog, 2002, fiberglass, gift of Dr. George T. Shea and Gordon Locksley, 2007.100
Your Dog
Yoshitomo Nara, growing up in a distant part of Japan in the 1960s and ’70s, spent much of his free time listening to records and reading comics, alone in his room except for his dog. “I was lonely, and music and animals were a comfort,” he would later say. “I could communicate better with animals, without words, than verbally with humans.”
Nara moved to Germany for college, where he didn’t speak the language and had few friends. Suddenly his childhood experiences came back to him, and he found in a way his artistic purpose. He began drawing children, always looking a bit angry or defensive, smoking a cigarette or holding a knife.
And he began making dogs—like the large sculpture called Your Dog now on view in Mia’s “Domestic Idols” exhibition in the Bell Court on the third floor. It seems enormous, the way a dog might seem to a small child. It is, like childhood itself, a mix of reality and fantasy, promise and fear.
In 1999, Nara wrote and illustrated a children’s book called The Lonesome Puppy, about a dog so big that no one sees him. His paws are as big as a small country, straddling Russia and Japan. His eyes are downcast and sad. He’s huge but harmless. Eventually, someone does notice him: a girl who’s lonesome, too, and doesn’t care how big the puppy is, how scary he appears to everyone else. It’s enough that they need each other.
At the end of the book, thinking perhaps of his own childhood, Nara writes, “The little girl and the big puppy each found a friend. And they were friends forever. Though sometimes they fought, as friends do, they still had fun and played together. No matter how alone you are, there is always someone, somewhere, waiting to meet you. Just look and you will find them.”
“Domestic Idols” is on view at Mia through September 29. Admission is free.