The fine portrait shown above is a 1923 self-depiction by Mabel Alvarez (1891-1985), aunt of Luis Walter Alvarez (1911-88), winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968.
Her Wikipedia entry is here and another biographical sketch here.
She was born Hawaii when it was a kingdom, but moved to the mainland while young, spending most of her life in California. The biographical notes indicate that she was interested in spiritual matters and the color theories of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the Synchromist painter I discussed here. Apparently she had an affinity with green for a number of years. Alvarez has also been associated with the California Impressionism school, though she did few or no landscape paintings. She is better classed with the Group of Eight, southern California artists who maintained an association from 1921 till 1928.
Alvarez was a modernist of sorts whose paintings made use of the modernist vocabulary to a sometimes greater -- but usually far lesser -- extent. As can be seen below, people portrayed in the paintings seem to be exclusively women.
Gallery
Here Alvarez channels Symbolism.
The hair style suggests this was painted in the early 1940s.
I'm guessing this dates from around 1930.
A comparatively late painting showing Synchromist influence.
Aside from the self-portrait at the top, I find this to be the most appealing work.
Another hard to date painting, but probably from the 1940s.
She would have been about 53 and aging gracefully.
Alvarez is hard to pin down, for me anyway. Most of what I've found on the Internet is pleasing, though I prefer it when images have solidity rather than a flattened Impressionistic character.
3 comments:
Why such glum subjects? Why would I want them on my wall?
Thank you for posting on Mabel Alvarez. What a lovely woman. She is a new artist to me and I am tyring to find out as much about her as I can.
I've been working with the estate to keep the website going and I've been wondering about why she or her sitters seldom smile in the portraits. This was not unique to Mabel Alvarez. A serious, composed expression was simply the convention in fine-art portraiture through this period — smiling was associated with candid snapshot photography, not "serious" painted portraits. Academic and Impressionist portrait painters across the US and Europe treated a held, dignified expression as a marker of gravitas; a grin read as informal, even undignified, for a sitter being memorialized in oil. Alvarez inheriting that convention isn't unusual on its own — it's the default for almost any serious portraitist working in her period.
She also followed Will Levington Comfort's writings and began meditating regularly, drawn to Theosophy's distinction between the "world of form" and the "formless world," and the idea that art should make visible a person's inner sensation rather than their outward social performance. A smile is, almost by definition, an outward-facing, social expression — it's for someone else. What Alvarez seems to have been after instead was something closer to interiority: a sitter caught in private thought, self-contained, not performing anything for the viewer.
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