The 21st century ‘Renaissance man’: The art beyond Bob Dylan’s music
Bob Dylan is primarily known and celebrated for his music, but since his childhood, he has dabbled with multiple creative mediums, including painting, sculpting, filmmaking and writing. The word ‘dabbled’ might not even be the correct terminology to describe his artistic portfolio, as he has been celebrated for his work in each of these fields, in his own right.
Unlike his music, Dylan’s art was publicly celebrated only recently, despite him having worked on it since the 1960s. Although his art has been in the public eye since 2007, the real turning point came in 2019, when he conducted his first solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, titled Retrospectrum. This exhibition saw resounding success, with 100,000 visitors in just three months, demonstrating how people see Dylan’s genius beyond his music.
But his artistic accolades haven’t stopped there. Throughout his career, he’s won a Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking poetry and song lyrics. He’s also won America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, an Oscar, and over ten Grammys.
These public recognitions are all a result of Dylan’s talent and efforts; he wasn’t born with a silver spoon. He grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, an industrial city in the Midwest known for cargo shipping. It was nicknamed the ‘Iron Range’ because of the iron manufacturing that took place there for the shipping industry. Thus, Dylan described being surrounded by iron his whole life. However, only in his adult years did he begin to bend the strictly functional values of this material he’d grown up with, realising he could make something more out of it.
People close to him have often joked that when he’d wake up in the morning, he wouldn’t pick up his notebook and guitar and start writing music; instead, he’d start welding some iron. Taking metal scraps he found, Dylan began making sculptural objects with a certain decorative flair—for example, an ornate railing for a staircase or a gate for a horse pen—gifting these to people close to him. In this way, he was combining the functionality of iron with the beauty of its malleability to create new, beautiful yet useful everyday objects.
Circular Wall Hanging 8 from 2018 is one of my favourite metal works by Bob Dylan. In it, he’s used different colours of metal to make a fun and playful composition, which changes our perception of the material qualities we typically associate with metal. The spanner as an object is bent into loopy shapes, challenging the very nature of metal as an indestructible material. He’s also added horseshoes, which are typically objects associated with their very utilitarian use in farming, and repurposed and redefined them, creating a beautiful and intricate composition that also harks back to his midwestern roots. Each metal work is finalised with the small metal buffalo, his signature from Black Buffalo Iron Works, his metal workshop.
In Dylan’s metal works, he explores the transformation from functional to aesthetic. Angular, pointed parts of wrought iron are assembled to create aesthetically pleasing compositions. There is a very Duchampian quality to his works, as, like Marcel Duchamp, he takes ownership of existing objects but repurposes them.
Critics have drawn comparisons between the collages of metal in Dylan’s sculptures and the collages of musical genres in his songs, from American folk to elements of French literature. In both, the amalgamation of worlds is simultaneously recognisable and is also transformed into something new and cohesive. Dylan even made a reference to this in his 1974 song, ‘Never Say Goodbye’, singing, “My dreams are made of iron and steel with a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground”.
Akin to his metalworks, his paintings are also deeply personal and connected to his life as the son of Jewish immigrants in the Midwest. The Beaten Path—Dylan’s America explores the America we don’t often see, but one that he’s all too familiar with, through an impressionistic ensemble of paintings. In this collection, Dylan has painted overlooked locations in America that form the backdrop of daily life for the majority of its citizens, describing this as “how you see it while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it’s worth”.
For the non-American viewer, looking at these paintings feels as if we are travelling back in time to what the ‘Wild West’ would have looked like as a movie set, but actually, it is very much the reality of America still today. This is the America that even those in the big metropolises don’t see because they exist within their bubbles. Dylan aims to portray that which isn’t obvious to the average tourist who opts for other, more well-known sites and misses out on what is truly American. Abandoned motels in the middle of the desert or lonely highways, which are then contrasted with bustling city streets filled to the brim with smog. Some of these scenes are often unsettling, featuring no people, just derelict buildings. However, Dylan’s use of vibrant colours with impressionistic brushstrokes fills them with life, creating an interesting juxtaposition that also recalls the harsh yet vibrant colours of the American desert.
In the present day, it seems like there’s a harsh binary opposition between people who are bothered by established and budding artists exploring or even honing their talents in different modes of media versus another school of thought which puts pressure on artists to don the hat of a multi-hyphenate career: “actor, turned philanthropist, turned director-screenwriter” for example.
It’s unclear how the former or the latter came about, but on one hand, it might have something to do with our 21st-century obsession with branding and labels, which makes artists feel pigeon-holed to perfecting only one medium. I think about how, during the pandemic, so many young Gen Z TikTokers, like the D’Amelio sisters, came to be known as “TikTok dancers” and built an entire new identity around it, leading to living in “content houses” in Los Angeles to film videos nonstop. But then, when they gained traction and started making brand deals and connections with other artistic forms, people criticised them for not having enough talent to do so. Charli D’Amelio is now a dancer on Broadway, a role that, for many, is more reputable than being a TikToker. But ever since she started dedicating more time to this side of her, she’s lost attention on her original social media platform.
On the other hand, there are actors and singers, like Gwyneth Paltrow, Millie Bobby Brown and Selena Gomez, who have launched beauty, wellness or fitness brands which they claim to be passion projects. The bar for success for these brands is even higher for these individuals, with content creators testing and critiquing their products online. Many accuse them of throwing away their money towards something that doesn’t work, made by the marketing entourage behind these brands, as compared to actual skincare/beauty experts.
This way of thinking is the complete opposite of past artistic discourses, like during the Renaissance period, when the term ‘Renaissance man’ was coined. It referred to an individual who was a creative genius in more ways than one. The title was most notably embodied by Leonardo da Vinci as he wasn’t just a skilled painter but an equally proficient mathematician, botanist and more.
But back to Bob Dylan. Many people are shocked when they find out that Dylan was an artist beyond his music, perhaps because they don’t look beyond his primary artistic medium and judge him at face value. If we took a second to explore the artists of today and shifted our mentality, we would be able to notice that creative geniuses, akin to the ‘Renaissance man’, still exist and should be applauded for their limitless talents; Bob Dylan being one of them.
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