Art Contrarian

Sex and Sanctity: The Temptation of St. Anthony - 2

2012-02-15T02:26:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I featured a sampling of paintings about the temptation of St. Anthony made from the early 1500s to the mid 1900s. I stressed that most of the artists probably had a fine time dealing with the subject because they could include images of pretty (and usually naked) women packaged with a pious theme of self-denial for the sake of living as Jesus suggested.

It turns out that the subject was so juicy than some artists tackled it more than once. The present post features cases where artists painted two versions of the Temptation.

Gallery

By Paul Cézanne - c.1870

By Paul Cézanne - 1875-77
Poor Cézanne could barely draw, and in my contrarian judgment, didn't paint very well either. In the days before settling in on creating pre-Cubist landscapes he dealt with a variety of themes including St. Anthony.

By John Charles Dollman

By John Charles Dollman - c.1925
Dollman (1851-1934) was a British painter and illustrator (Wikipedia link here) I hadn't been aware of until researching for this post. The upper painting's nude woman strikes me as odd; I can't tell if Dollman left her not quite finished or whether the unfinished appearance was purposeful. The 1925-vintage painting has a crisply-rendered nude, but unlike so many other depictions of St. Anthony's temptresses, she is shown as passive rather than sexually aggressive.

By Lovis Corinth - 1897

By Lovis Corinth - 1908
Ah, Corinth! I wrote about him here in the early days of this blog. During the first part of his career he tossed a lot of what might as well be called pinups into his paintings. And he certainly did so when it came to St. Anthony.

Sex and Sanctity: The Temptation of St. Anthony - 1

2012-02-13T01:49:00.000-08:00

St. Anthony was a hermit who lived around the year 300, abandoning his money and possessions to take up a life of self-denial for the sake of living as Jesus suggested.

While in the desert he was supposedly afflicted with torments and temptations to abandon his self-imposed lifestyle. Among those temptations were women because, apparently, Anthony had denied himself the pleasures of the flesh along with other features of normal life.

This subject proved to be catnip for many artists because they had the theme of extreme piety with which to wrap images of lovely, usually naked women.

There are lots of paintings dealing with St. Anthony's temptation, so here is but a sampling.

Gallery

By Joachim Patinir (figures) and Quentin Massys (landscape) - 1515-22
This is a pretty early depiction of St. Anthony being tempted. Note that the temptresses are clothed.

By Giovanni Batista Tiepolo - before 1750
By the time of the great Tiepolo, showing nudity was okay.

By Paul Delaroche - c.1832
Delaroche has the the gals really ganging up on the poor saint.

By Félicien Rops - 1878
Rops took the risk of having a lively cross-bound woman as the key temptation with the crucified Christ and the devil on either side of her.

By Jules Pascin - c.1911-12
Pascin, on the other hand, made do with a Cecil B. DeMille sort of crowd scene.

By Dorothea Tanning - 1945
Tanning, who died a few weeks ago at age 101, was a borderline surrealist and gave the scene a surrealistic cast.

By Salvador Dalí - 1946
Dalí, being Dalí, threw in a bunch of personal symbolism. And yes, there's a nude woman someplace.

Photo of Dalí at work on the painting
This obviously staged photo shows Dalí supposedly working on the painting shown above. True, here is a nude blonde model, but her pose is not what's in the painting. In any case, Dalí has already painted the nude, so why is the model still standing around?

By Domenico Morelli - 1878
The other images are in approximately chronological order, but I saved Morelli's for last because (1) I like it best and (2) I saw it a few years ago in Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna.

In the following post I'll deal with some painters who liked the subject so much that they did two versions of St. Anthony's temptations.

Howard Pyle Exhibit Catalog Gripes

2012-02-10T08:55:00.000-08:00

The Delaware Art Museum has an exhibit (November 12, 2011 – March 4, 2012) dealing with famed illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911). It opened three days after the 100th anniversary of Pyle's death.

The cover of the exhibit's catalog is shown above. If you can't visit the museum store, you can order the catalog here.

I have issues with the catalog. That's because it drifts a small way into the cesspool of academic political correctness which, in my possibly warped judgment, is unfair to both the subject and readers interested enough in the subject to fork over the $45 cost of the book.

First, the positive elements. I thought the chapter by illustrator James Gurney was especially informative, probably because he is knowledgeable about the history of illustration and understands the trade's practical aspects. As for the authors of the other chapters, I didn't at first know who they are because nowhere in the book is there any background information. Gurney is not identified either; I'm aware of him because I follow his blog (linked above).

Although there is some subject matter overlap, most of the chapters are informative, even the one dealing with Pyle and the Swedenborgian Faith that was related to some of his works.

One place that ruffled my feathers was a chapter titled "The Gender of Illustration: Howard Pyle, Masculinity, and the Fate of American Art" by Eric J. Segal. Some Googling suggests that this Segal is on the faculty of the University of Florida and has written about masculinity with respect to Norman Rockwell and the matter of race as related to the Saturday Evening Post magazine. "Gender" and race are two politically motivated academic obsessions of the last few decades, so I suppose Segal is doing a nice job of building his career dealing with those and related subjects. I regard this business of applying currently fashionable views as a yardstick for evaluating a past that was essentially unaware of them as both intellectually silly and potentially dangerous to the reputations of worthy historical figures. This chapter should never have been included in the catalog.

I also had a problem with part of the chapter "The Persistence of Pirates: Pyle, Piracy, and the Silver Screen" by David M. Lubin. Lubin's chapter isn't all that bad except where he takes several detours attempting to link piracy to late 19th century capitalists, a gratuitous gesture unnecessary to the chapter's subject. Lubin is on the faculty of Wake Forest University.

As for my overall reaction to the catalog, I would have preferred more larger reproductions of Pyle's art and a lot less "scholarly" analysis.

John Berkey Featured in Illustration

2012-02-08T02:21:00.000-08:00

It's pile-on time. Illustration magazine just came out with its 36th issue which features ace illustrator John Berkey (1932-2008) and illustration-oriented blogs are already posting about the great event. So why not join in? After all, I too am a Berkey fan and wrote about him here just about a year ago.

The author of the illustration piece is Jim Pinkowsi who maintains a blog that has images of much of Berkey's work; the link is here. A Website by the Berkey estate is here.

Pinkowski's article has details on Berkey's use of casein paints, a medium I was never fond of. It seems that Berkey didn't use the paints out of tubes (though he might have early in his career), instead he mixed his own batches using raw pigments. Later he seems to have added acrylic binder to some of his mixes.

Let me propose two classes of classical illustrator (ignoring those using digital media for most of a given piece): There are those who paint using easels (Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, Dan dos Santos, Greg Manchess) and there are others who work on a drawing board. Drawing board based artists tend to be commercial artists who use gouache, airbrush and other water-based media on materials such as illustration board, though a small (less than 0.5 meter, say) illustration can be done on a drawing board using almost any kind of medium and support.

Berkey was a drawing-board guy. And he was shrewd enough to realize that working close to the image could degrade the result; it had to be viewed from farther away because the final version usually would be reproduced at a smaller size than the original -- in effect increasing the viewing distance. Berkey's eventual cure for this problem was a mirror setup. His drawing board was reflected using a mirror placed above it to another mirror placed at a distance. This double-reversal allowed him to view the work-in-progress at a distance of about eight feet (2.5 meters) without having to budge from his chair.

Here is how the setup looked from the perspective of the drawing board. This image was scanned from the book whose cover is shown below.

Pinkowski's blog includes other images of this setup.

The Illustration article is of interest because it contains more than just a bunch of Berkey's space ship images, great though they are. A nice selection of other subjects can be found, demonstrating Berkey's overall ability and versatility.

If you don't see the new issue of Illustration in your local Barnes & Noble's magazine rack, go the the Illustration site linked above and order before it is sold out.

In the Beginning: Robert Fawcett

2012-02-06T01:43:00.000-08:00

Up until now, the items I've posted on early works by artists dealt with painters -- mostly modernists who began their careers painting in a more traditional manner. But recently I've been doing a little research on illustration art from the 1920s and 30s and stumbled across some early examples of work by illustrators mostly known for their later styles. So I thought I'd expand the concept to include illustrators.

The main source for the present post is the Annual of Advertising Art, an awards publication of the Art Directors' Club of New York (its history is here). The first volume appeared in 1922 and succeeding volumes have continued to the present. I found a number of early volumes in the stacks of the University of Washington's main library and took photos of selected pages: these photos are the source material for the "beginning" art in this post. Ideally, I should have made scans, but that wasn't convenient so I hope the inferior quality of the images won't be held too much against me.

Illustration for Sherlock Holmes story
Above is a characteristic illustration by Robert Fawcett (1903-67), one of the most successful illustrators in his day. A number of items about Fawcett can be found on the Web, and here are links to blog posts by Charlie Parker, Leif Peng, and David Apatoff -- the latter wrote the text for a recent book about Fawcett that I reviewed here.

Note Fawcett's mature style in the image above and compare it to some of his early work below. I cast dates as "c.1929" and so forth; my conjectural date is for the year preceding the year the Annual in which the image appeared was published.

Gallery

Illustration for Rayon advertisement - c.1929

Illustration for Knox Hats - c.1929

Lesquendiu lipstick advertisement illustration - c.1929

Illustration for Cadillac - c.1931

Illustration for Cadillac - c.1931
Note that the depiction of the couple in this illustration is nearly the same as in the illustration below. I don't know which was created first, but Fawcett was able to leverage his effort and his art director apparently either didn't notice what was going on or else didn't mind it.

Illustration for Cadillac - c.1931

Fawcett was in his late twenties when he did the work shown above. To be included in the Annual of Advertising Art was a major feather in an illustrator's career cap, so the young Fawcett was no slouch even though these works are unrecognizable to casual Fawcett observers.

Keep in mind that he was building his career in those days, not maintaining it. He was experimenting with the styles of around 1930, creating salable works while evolving towards the classical Fawcett idiom.

Architectural Training: Penn in the 1950s with Louis Kahn

2012-02-03T02:37:00.000-08:00

Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, 1965, Louis Kahn, architect.
A while ago I stumbled across this book by Herbert Bangs (1928-2010) who was the architect and principal planner for Baltimore County. Bangs had an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins, received art training in New York and then attended Penn, earning a Master's degree in Architecture.

The book itself gets involved in matters spiritual as well as geometrical bases of aesthetics, fields largely outside my ken. What interested me was his take on architectural training in the 1950s, when modernism was at high tide and postmodernism was waiting in the wings. Two factors (among others) fueling my interest: I took first-year architectural design while an undergraduate at the University of Washington, and I later attended Penn, though in a different field.

The following quotations are from pages 37-38:

On the one hand, the rational, scientific analysis of structure and space is what is taught, while on the other the work is evaluated and graded on the basis of so-called aesthetic appeal. When I studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, this factor of aesthetic appeal tended to dominate the proces of design, even though its existence could not be logically or scientifically justified. The studio courses were, in fact, directed largely to refining what was considered to be a subjective and individual aesthetic intuition. To the critics [assembled to evaluate student projects], a design either looked good or it looked bad, and students were supposed to learn to recognize the difference by a trial-and-error referral to their own aesthetic sensitivity.

There was, however, no theoretical discussion of "aesthetics" itself, and what it might be, or, oddly enough, of beauty either, although that was presumably what architecture was about. Neither was there any unifying vision on the part of the various critics or masters that could relate the material, utilitarian-functional aspect of our work to the mysterious aesthetic sensitivity, or even provide some simple understanding of what the aesthetic sense might be. This was not the result of negligence on the part of the instructors; I do not think they ever considered the matter, or thought it necessary to do so. They simply assumed that the direction
initially established by the Bauhaus and the "Modern masters" was the right way to go and were content to swim with the flow. We students were also remarkably incurious and did not raise the question either, although in retrospect it is apparent that the issue is vitally important, even essential, to an understanding of architecture.

The idea that the practice of architecture was primarily a scientific and technical discipline seemed, without exception, to be accepted by all of our regular faculty members. Louis Kahn, for instance, who was just beginning to acquire a name for himself at the time, took his responsibilities as a teacher seriously, and met with groups of students in the evening to talk about architecture and what it meant to him. It appeared, from what Kahn said, that even the powerful geometric forms that he intuitively sought, and that made much of his work of lasting significance, were not valid in themselves, but were accepted only if they could be logically justified in terms of some utilitarian requirement.

This analytical, rational aspect of Kahn's thinking sometimes led to dreadful results when carried to conclusion....

[Visiting critic Lucio] Costa told Kahn that what he had been asked to review was not architecture, but something deadly, and destructive of the human spirit. Two attitudes were thus seen to be opposed: the logical, scientific attitude responsible for new and daring technological forms and the older humanism that was primarily concerned with enhancing the lives of those who would inhabit the buildings. Costa's remarks were not well received by the dean and the other jurors and he did not return.

And in a sidebar on page 38:

Kahn, even then, had completed a number of famous buildings. Modest and unassuming, he was completely devoted to architecture as an art and was venerated by many of his students. When I worked on a studio project under his direction, I was disappointed to find that he encouraged a slavish imitation of his own buildings, not so much from simple egotism as from an absolute conviction that his way was the only right way.

Flawed Golden Age Ad Art

2012-02-01T02:13:00.000-08:00

Some observers place the Golden Age of American Illustration from the last few years of the 19th century up through the first two decades of the 20th. Me? I'm more partial to the 1920s and 1930s, possibly because that era interests me greatly and also because color printing technology continued its advance, allowing artists' intentions to be better realized.

Regardless, the publishing industry was crawling with illustrators during the heady late 1920s because color photography technology hadn't reached the state where resulting images reproduced as well as illustrators' work did. As always, quality of those illustrations varied. This variation was due to the spectrum of talent and skill of the illustrators as well as to deadline pressures resulting in rushed work.

Below are two examples of flawed illustrations that appeared in advertisements by important automobile companies of the day. One set of flaws is minor, another flaw is more noticeable: were the advertising agency art directors asleep at the switch?

This image is not from the original Hudson Motors ad, but rather a photo I took of a page from a book that included the illustration. (I used a photo because my available scanners can leave funny striped patterns when dealing with some printed images. In any case, my intent is discuss details, not the piece of artwork in general.)

The advertisement was probably for Hudson or Essex cars and the artist was Karl Godwin (not to be confused with the contemporary and better-known Frank Godwin). I have found little concerning Karl Godwin on the Internet, and this short post by Leif Peng contains most of what seems to be out there.

The illustration appears to be done in transparent watercolor, a difficult, unforgiving medium. Godwin did a nice job from a technical standpoint with the exception of that ugly, too-dark shaded area at the base of the neck of the girl at the top.

But the real mistakes have to do with the cloche hats at the top and left. Note that, in each case, the front base of the hats' crowns do not align with the foreheads of the wearers; their foreheads are, in effect, chopped just above the hats' brims. Putting it another way, trace the lines of the foreheads up from the eyebrows and continue the curves are they should appear naturally: such extended lines will fall outside the sides of the hat crowns.

Here is another Karl Godwin illustration, this for the 1929 Hudson. The kinds of defects noted above are not found here. (Well, just maybe there's a similar problem with the bathing cap of the girl at the top, but there's not enough image available to be certain.)

I do like Godwin's use of color. Very 1920s. Rich, toned-down effects. The orange skins are set off by purple shadows in a manner picked up in the early 1930s by Walter Baumhofer on his cover illustrations for Doc Savage Magazine (scroll down the link for examples).

This is a detail from a late 1920s advertisement for Willys-Knight automobiles. I don't know the name of the artist.

By the 1930s and 40s, illustration art for automobile brochures and advertisements usually featured smaller-than-normal people who were often placed closer to car windows than they could possibly be in reality -- the idea was to make the cars appear larger than they actually were.

This Willys illustration has a college theme, and Joe College, Jim College and Jerry College are scaled about the right size for the car. The problem is with Betty Coed, perched on the running board. She is much too small compared to both the guys and the car. Plus, her pose looks awfully familiar, though I can't place the source. Why didn't the art director catch this sizing error? Lack of oversight? Or was the printer deadline too soon for changes to be made? We'll probably never know.

Example: Wrong-Era Hairstyle

2012-01-30T02:36:00.000-08:00

My impression is that the practice of fashion conformity unraveled around 40 years ago. While it's possible to identify characteristics that peaked in usage at various times (bold patterns on men's sport jackets in the early 1970s, padded shoulders on women's garments about ten years later), these styles weren't nearly as dominant as those of previous decades. A good example is women's skirt lengths -- short in the mid-1920s, long in the mid-30s, knee-length in the early 40s, mid-calf during the 50s, etc.

Of course fashion following was never entirely lockstep. Older women tend to shy from wearing short skirts, for instance. And I tend to maintain a preppy look when my wife insists that I have to abandon my beloved blue jeans for some occasion or another.

Then there is the matter of transitions between dominant styles. Women's bobbed hairstyles of the 1920s were anticipated around 1910 when some avant-garde gals got their long tresses chopped. That bobbed style apparently became boring to some women even before 1930 and they began to let their hair grow out. Consider the photo below.

This publicity photo (which I cropped a bit) is of a 1929 Auburn model 120 with girls from a physical culture club of some sort providing a lot of added interest.

Note the girl on the left and compare her hairdo to those of the others. The girls on the right have the typical tight-wave permanents of the 20s, the one on the left has much longer hair that strikes me as being more "natural" and perhaps "timeless." She also lacks the boyish, curveless figure that was the height of female body fashion during the flapper era. Compared to the other two, she looks terrific, not to mention out of place given the rest of the setting.

Lexus Goes for Baroque

2012-01-27T01:42:00.000-08:00

Among the many technical advances over the years related to automobiles has been the capability of stamping sheet steel into increasingly elaborate shapes. Effects that are common today were only remotely possible, say, 60 years ago, and then only for car bodies created by hand at coachbuilding shops such as those thriving in Italy.

Once it is possible to do something, it also becomes possible to over-do it. Such is the case for the Lexus CT Hybrid, a luxury take on the Toyota gas-electric hybrid Prius (Lexus, in case you aren't aware, is a part of the Toyota empire). For more information about the car, here is the official Web site.

From what I glean from the automobile press, Lexus management has been concerned about styling in recent years. Early Lexuses featured smooth, rather bland styling and the brand quickly achieved success thanks to its luxury touches and excellent build-quality, not to mention the then-legendary Toyota reliability. Lexus styling remained bland for a long time while failing to include enough design cues to give the make strong visual identity as compared to rivals Cadillac, Mercedes and BMW.

This styling failure finally began catching up, so in recent years we have seen new Lexus cars sporting more aggressive looks, though nothing yet has emerged that strongly states "Lexus!" when one spies one on the street. The current sedan front end theme, for instance, has a grille with a V'd look and there's a sports model with inward-facing double-Vs on either side of the grille (think >--<). (Hmm. Perhaps those Vs are actually variations on the pinched L-for-Lexus logo found on different parts of its cars. Whatever.)

When Lexus introduced its luxury compact hybrid, as a cure for blandness the poor car got seriously Baroque sheet metal treatment. Baroque enough that the result is a confusing mishmash of curves, angles and planes. Dare we take a look?

It's the rear of the car that bothers me the most.

Working from top to bottom, we find dog-leg curve-reversals for the rear side-windows and for the wrap-around parts of the back window ensemble. Nothing wrong with this in theory, but on the Lexus the two reversals are not well linked and therefore clash. Plus, there an odd little crease from the inflection point of the side window curves running to and then along the lip of the back window's overhanging roofline terminus. This feature is cramped and fussy.

The rear face below the windows is little more than an incoherent set of smallish surfaces forming projections, recesses, lips, voids and Lord knows what other visual chaos. It reminds me of the visual clutter found on early post-World War 2 Japanese cars. The solution to this mess would be a large, controlling form supported by details related to function (the opening for the trunk-lid/5th door, for instance) and visual linkage to shapes and design elements on the adjoining sides.

Finally, there is that bulbous-yet-creased part of the rear bumper's plastic sheathing at the rear corners of the car. At the top is a faint echo of the shape of the wheel well opening that is broken into a drop conforming to the main surface of the bumper sheathing's impact plane. Admittedly a car's corners presents tricky situations for stylist to deal with, but the Lexus staff should have been able to come up with a better resolution. They didn't because, I suspect, they were expected to do some wild and crazy things as part of the scheme to jazz up Lexus styling.

And as for creating a strong styling theme for Lexus? Back to that drawing board, gang.

Muddy Colors: An Illustration Group-Blog

2012-01-25T01:59:00.000-08:00

I only recently stumbled across Muddy Colors, a group-blog written by some leading figures in the science-fiction and fantasy (SFF) genres, one illustration field where representational art (even if the subject is non-existent) still rules. It's a highly worthwhile blog, so I immediately added it to my Links list on the sidebar.

I'm not fully "into" art created by computer programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter, so I appreciate the fact that the Muddy Colors crew use traditional handwork media as much as possible for their illustrations. Moreover, they have a keen sense of historical representational art and classical illustration which informs their professional efforts.

Blog subjects include multiple views of works as they progress from thumbnail sketch to final art, tips regarding techniques, insider views of the business side of illustration, occasional interviews with artists not part of the group, news of upcoming events such as conventions and master-classes, and even something called Crit-Submit whereby aspiring illustrators send in works to be evaluated and (often) digitally modified or corrected by a group member.

Go to the blog for a full list of contributors on the sidebar. I'll mention four of them here and toss in a few images for good measure. The instigator of Muddy Colors is Dan Dos Santos an articulate art-book junkie who specializes in book cover art. Donato Giancola (who professionally goes by the name "Donato"), considered a leader in the field despite the fact that he must deal with the consequences of an eye injury "which destroyed the macular region of my right eye (the part that lets you see detail, and yes it was permanently destroyed)." Greg Manchess who does not restrict himself to SFF. He painted a mural for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Illinois, created images for postage stamps and did illustrations for publications such as National Geographic. Arnie Fenner, who along with his wife Cathy, created and continued Spectrum, an annual publication featuring jury-selected SFF art.

Gallery

Dos Santos illustration

Book cover by Dos Santos

Illustration by Donato

Manchess self-portrait

Cover of recent Spectrum, punk Wizard of Oz illustration by Manchess

Leonor Fini: Image Unsafe for Work!!

2012-01-23T02:22:00.000-08:00

You have been warned! Scroll down a ways on this post and you'll encounter an image that isn't something you necessarily want your office mates to notice. And if at home, you might have to do some splainin' to your spouse or kids.

For those viewers remaining after the mad dash for the exit ...

An artist can't be expected to be as aesthetically pleasing as his subjects; many are not, but some lucky few are. Four years ago I wrote in the 2Blowhards blog about attractive female artists. Included in the write-up were Angelica Kauffmann, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Berthe Morisot, Elin Danielson, Suzanne Valadon, Elaine de Kooning and Dorothea Tanning. In the present post, I add surrealist Leonor Fini (1907-1996) to the list.

When I was in high school, I checked out a number of 1930s and 1940s vintage library books about Surrealism. But if Fini was ever mentioned or images of her paintings shown, I missed it all. She first came to my attention about two years ago when I noticed this book about her in bookstore art sections.

Fini led a decidedly interesting and unusual life, as the above link associated with her name indicates. As an artist, she strikes me as being competent and imaginative, but not as wild as were leading surrealists such as Dalí or Max Ernst. Like the semi-surrealistic and (in my humble judgment) highly over-rated Frida Kahlo, she included images of herself in many paintings, though not to the extent Kahlo did.

As for her appearance revealed by photographs, I find Fini a very attractive women who wasn't quite classically or even everyday beautiful. The "flaws" were a slightly too-short nose and a slightly too-long distance between her nose and mouth along with a slightly small chin. Altogether, trivial "defects" that, as part of the overall package, gave her a distinctive look that could trigger the hormones of plenty of men, me included.

So let's take a look at some self-images she painted along with a number of photos of her; click on images to enlarge.

Gallery

Redhead with glasses
This seems to be a self-image by Fini.

Autoportrait au turban rouge - 1938

Autoritratto - 1968

Photo of Fini, possibly by Man Ray - 1936
The web site I grabbed this from claimed the photographer was Man Ray, but the image lacks his expected flair.

Photo of Fini by Dora Maar - 1936
Maar famously was a squeeze of Picasso's. She took in-progress photos of his Guernica.

Photo of Fini by Horst P. Horst - 1946
Horst was a leading fashion photographer of the 1930s.

Fini with a basket as hat

Fini in peasant blouse

Fini at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo of Fini by Georges Platt Lynes - 1936
Sensational image.

Gil Spear and the 1942 Chrysler

2012-01-20T02:32:00.000-08:00

The son of parents who worked as illustrators, Gil Spear, Jr. made a career as a car stylist; a summary of his career can be found here.

Whenever I think of Spear what comes to mind are a few renderings he made of what many people around 1940 considered to be the shape of cars of the (possibly near) future. Spear was working for Chrysler at the time, and the above link mentions that he might have had a hand in designing the grille for Chrysler's 1942 models.

Obviously, one doesn't see a lot of 70 year-old cars on the road, but 1942 American cars are an especially rare breed from the circa-1940 era. That's because the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the county's entry into World War 2 resulted in an order from the government that production of civilian automobiles be curtailed and then should cease by 22 February 1942. Chrysler brand sales for 1941 models were 161,703, but only 36,586 1942 model cars were produced and sold, most of these in the first months after their Fall 1941 introduction.

Below are examples of 1942 Chryslers, the first from an advertisement or a sales brochure, the others are restored vehicles.

So where does Spear come into play? Below is an image I grabbed from the link above that pairs a Spear concept rendering with a photo of the front end of a '42 Chrysler (click on the image to enlarge).

Indeed, the front of the concept car looks pretty similar to that of the production job aside from its hooded headlights and its prow that juts ahead on the main frontal plane. But this rendering was in no way a prediction of the 1942 theme because it is dated September 22, 1941 -- near the time when 1942 Chryslers were appearing in dealers' showrooms.

What I find most interesting are other features of the concept. It has a double-wrapped (horizontally and vertically) windshield not greatly different from windshields on some Chrysler models of the late 1950s. The roof over the passenger compartment seems to be transparent, a not-so-practical styling obsession that has persisted until present times on concept cars built for automobile shows.

But note the general shape that is also shown at a different angle in the car in the background. What we see is a "aerodynamically streamlined teardrop" shape beloved by car-of-the-future forecasters of the 1930s done up in a nicely stylish manner. It's not a pure teardrop because the motor is at the front, so a hood is required as is that windshield. Otherwise it fills the streamline styling bill of those days right down to the parallel chrome strips and the lack of open wheel wells. Note how the trunk lid is a double-opening type. Of course, a functioning version of the concept drawing would probably be more ungainly looking if it were to function at all; as pictured by Spear, the front wheels have no room to turn for steering and this would have to be fixed. Also, the design seems to allow for only one seat; the top slopes too radically for a rear seat. And what about a back window for rearward vision?: I see none.

By the way, those fighter planes look pretty nifty too. Too bad they're nose-heavy (the wings are mounted too far aft) and that the wing area is too small. But this is concept art after all, so why not let a stylist have even more fun than the cars offer?

Here are two more Spear concept renderings from the same period (once again, click to enlarge the images). These designs are variations of the one shown earlier. The cars have the same basic shape and clearly have no rear seat, though headlights are exposed rather than lurking behind doors and there is no top over the passenger compartment for either car. The car in the lower image seems to sport a small tail fin, a style item that would become the rage in the later 1950s, especially for Chrysler Corporation's brands. The diagram below the ladies indicates the position of grille openings and the radiator, so it seems that Spear was paying some attention to practical matters and not going totally blue-sky.

Once again, the aircraft designs are stylish and interesting. The upper image shows four-motor bombers with pusher, rather than tractor, propellers. This arrangement appeared in a number of actual aircraft design studies in those days, but the only American production bomber with pusher props was the B-36 which appeared following the war and served well into the 1950s. Spear's bomber has potent, though perhaps impractical, defensive armament; those guns appear to be something on the order of 37 mm or even larger.

The image immediately above features what appears to be a fighter and includes some interesting features. First, the pilot is in a prone position. This serves to reduce the cross-section of the aircraft and thus should lower drag and increase top speed. It also would lessen the likelihood of a pilot "blacking out" from blood loss to the brain during extreme maneuvering. This arrangement was tried out after the war, but proved impractical in a number of areas including rearward visibility, something important in combat situations. Spear places the propeller amidships in a rotating cylinder faired into the fuselage contour. I don't recall if this was ever actually tried, but defects include mechanical complexity and potentially reduced propeller surface for a given radius. But the propeller arc as shown in the airborne craft is so great that the propeller would scrape the ground on takeoff or landing rotation.

Nevertheless, a lot of fun for both Gil Spear at the time and for us 70 years later.

Kees Did Fashion Art Too

2012-01-18T02:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote about Fauvist-turned-society-artist Kees van Dongen here. Recently I came across a piece of fashion illustration by him and thought I'd present it along with a few other works that are fashion illustrations or items looking a lot like they were.

To set the scene, above is a fairly typical van Dongen painting that might have been done in the early 1900s. Note the large, darkly painted eyes and the intense, Fauvist color scheme.

Now consider some works he did in the late 1920s or the 1930s in the fashion illustration genre:

Gallery

This is from perhaps the British edition of Harper's Bazaar magazine.

From a French publication.

The two items above might not be fashion-related illustrations, though they give every appearance of being so.

Van Dongen retained his characteristic rendition of eyes, likely with the strong approval of the art director who commissioned the piece; the whole point being that the image was done by van Dongen himself, a well-known artist at the time.

What is missing is the Fauvist coloring, but Kees no doubt was willing to sacrifice that feature of his work for some francs that he needed to support his lifestyle.

I suppose there are many who consider van Dongen a sellout because he made a lot of money doing portraits of fashionable ladies and because of the commercial work shown here. Me? I figure that people need to make a living. Even artists.

Molti Ritratti: Andrew Jackson

2012-01-16T02:16:00.000-08:00

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), seventh president of the United States (1829-1837), lived just long enough to have had a few photographic portraits taken. For most of his life his image had to be recorded by various artists, which is the point of this continuing Molti Ritratti (many portraits) series.

Let's begin at the end with a couple of those late-in-life photographs.

From 1844-45

From 1845
The second image appears to be retouched, assuming that the top image and another I found via Google are representative of the quality of the time.

Now let's have the painters have their say:

Gallery

By Samuel Lovett Waldo - 1817; black & white image of a painting
This strikes me as one of the better images of Jackson. Note to self: find some information on Waldo.

By Ralph E.W. Earl - 1817
Apparently Earl and Jackson were friends, and he did several portraits of his subject over the years.

By Thomas Sully - 1824
Thomas Sully, perhaps the best portrait painter in America in his day, also did several paintings of Jackson. The color on this image was altered digitally by someone who didn't seem to like an equally oddly colored version on a Wikipedia site.

By Asher Durand - 1835
Durand was another competent portraitist of the first half of the 19th century in America.

By Ralph E.W. Earl - 1837
Another version of Jackson by Earl, who wasn't in the same league as Sully and Durand. This portrait strikes me as being too abstracted from what the painter actually saw; could it have been done from memory?

By Thomas Sully - 1845
This Sully painting was done shortly after Jackson's death. It might be strictly from memory or perhaps the artist relied on his earlier sketches and paintings of the former president. Regardless, this is the image of Jackson most familiar to Americans because it served as the basis for the engraved portrait on ten dollars bills.

One Body, Multiple Car Brands: GM 1949

2012-01-13T02:11:00.000-08:00

Let's pretend you are the president of a major automobile manufacturer with several brand divisions in your stable. The marketing folks and divisional managers insist that each brand be distinct in order to spur sales. But the dreaded guys wearing those green eye shades are equally insistent that it's too costly for each brand to be totally different from the others; sharing parts among brands will save lots of money and help profits.

By the 1930s the accepted solution was to generally side with the bean counters, but attempt to retain a degree of brand uniqueness. Before the 1960s when multiple sizes of cars became the prevailing mode, General Motors had five car brands and built them using two or three different bodies that were trimmed differently for each brand. In those days GM divisions designed and built their own engines, which helped to distinguish brands in a meaningful way.

I'll probably return to this subject again because I find it interesting. For now, let's take a peek at the brands using GM's 1949 "A" bodies that were intended for the least-expensive cars.

The 1949 A body was all-new, the first of its rank since before World War 2. A new post-war "C" body for GM's expensive cars was launched for the 1948 Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs and, months later, for senior-range 1949 Buicks. A-bodies were used by Chevrolet and Pontiac for all their production and for junior-range Oldmobiles.

Gallery

1949 Chevrolet 2-door sedan

1949 Pontiac
As noted, all Chevrolets and Pontiacs used the A body. The brands had distinctive chrome trim that visually distinguished them, though from today's perspective the differences were surprisingly minor. Each make featured a rock guard on the lower leading edge of the rear fender, a functional necessity. Side chrome strips varied in placement and detail and the grilles differed. Pontiac also had its then-distinctive "Silver Streak" chrome stripes on the top centerlines of its hood and trunk. It also sported a short horizontal crease on the front fenders just aft of the headlights. The Pontiac shown is longer between the front door and wheelwell because it has an inline 8 cylinder motor and not a "straight six" as in the Chev.

1949 advertisement illustration showing Oldsmobile 76 and 88 models
These Oldsmobile series also used the A body. This artist's interpretation is slightly distorted, as was the norm in those days, but it serves to show the grille and trim used by Olds. Again, differences from Chevrolets and Pontiacs are not great.

1950 Oldsmobile 88 coupe
1950 A-bodied Oldsmobiles were almost identical to the 49s, the main difference being a chrome strip on the front fenders. Compare the body to the Chevy in the top image and note the overall similarity.

From brochure for 1949 Oldsmobile 98
This illustration depicts Oldsmobile's top-of-the-line 98 series that used the GM C body. The fender treatment is similar, but not identical, to that on the A body. And the upper part of the body differs even more. Oldsmobile stylists had the task of preserving brand identity across the two bodies, so grilles and other chrome trim details are similar. This assured buyers of 76s and 88s that they indeed were driving Oldsmobiles, a prestige step or two above Pontiacs and Chevrolets.

2011 Chevrolet Cruze

2012 Buick Verano
Today GM makes a greater effort to distinguish models from different brands such as the Cruze and Verano shown above. This effort includes different sheet metal on the fronts and sides, though the basic body structure is shared (note the doors and windows).

Herb Kane on Art Training and Portrait Subjects

2012-01-11T02:44:00.000-08:00

In the previous post I presented some works by Herb Kane, master illustrator of Hawaiian history.

The present post is devoted to some of Kane's views on art training, illustration and dealing with portrait subjects, as presented in his book Voyagers. Kane attended the school at Chicago's Art Institute and pursued a career in illustration in that city for several years before moving to Hawaii and taking up the depiction of Hawaii's past. I'm presenting his views because I agree with them and thought readers might be interested in hearing them from a different source.

In high school, storytelling through painting became my great interest. I was inspired by the work of American regionalists Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. After serving in the Navy, I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, but discovered that representational art which conveyed a mood or message was no longer labeled as real 'Art,' but as 'mere illustration.'

With the death of regionalism, art faced the new requirement of being 'universal.' Craving acceptance from my peers, like any twenty year old, I applied myself to learning formulas for what then passed as advanced theories of painting; that year it was abstract expressionism.

Of all possible subjects, Homo Sapiens has always held the most interest for Homo Sapiens. Artists who represent the human figure with skill and sensitivity will find larger and more interested audiences than artists who do not.

There have been great painters of landscape, still life, and natural history subjects to be sure, and in the last century some outstanding painters of non-representational art; but the history of art is largely the family album of humanity. Ironically, of all subjects, it is the human figure, the one subject with which viewers are most familiar and critical, that proves the most difficult. Learning to draw this figure with authority has allowed competent figure painters to surmount this difficulty, but then competent figure painters have always been a minority.

That minority is smaller today than it has been for centuries. Learning to draw, which is learning to see clearly, requires a laborious effort in which there is no instant gratification. Drawing classes have always been unpopular with art students, which may be why they are no longer required by art schools or university art departments, where the primary concern seems to be keeping up enrollments. The assumption is that drawing is not fundamental to to current art theory.

Kane goes on to mention that the Art Institute in his day had a few hard-nosed traditionalists who provided the training he needed. When he went to work in an illustration studio, he found that "Here, alive and well, was the ancient master-apprentice system, only superficially different from the way it had operated since the Middle Ages" -- another good thing for his development.

I'll finish with some of Kane's views regarding portrait painting that you might find entertaining:

Women of middle age are the most difficult portrait clients if they have not yet become resigned to their years. In her mirror, each still sees the girl in her twenties that she once was. No honest likeness will please them, and they can easily find others who will agree that the artist has missed his mark.

Most men will not object to features of age that may add character to their faces. They are usually less interested in handsome appearance, but more interested in portraiture which conveys some impression of their status. Everyone who has passed forty seems to think of himself as a young person. Nobody can know how he or she is seen by others. This is why the portrait painter is often frightening to his sitter; and why each may find the other so difficult and sometimes so impossible to forgive....

I think it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who said that when faced with a difficult female subject, he always painted the most beautiful face he could imagine; then added only those adjustments necessary to make it resemble the sitter.

Quotes are from the third (2006) printing, pages 12-17 and 142.

Herb Kane, Illustrator of Hawaiian History

2012-01-09T02:12:00.000-08:00

Herbert "Herb" Kawainui Kane (1928-2011, last name pronounced KAH-nay) was an illustrator of Hawaiian-Danish descent who abandoned a career in commercial art in Chicago to return to Hawaii and create paintings illustrating Hawaiian history. Plus, he instigated the building of replica catamarans that duplicated voyages by Hawaii's Polynesian settlers. For more details on his career, here is his Wikipedia entry.

I'll present some of his views on art and illustration in a follow-up post and focus here on the art he created.

Kane was basically an illustrator in the sense that he tried to convey the appearance details of people, man-made objects and nature as they were in times past. This required a good deal of research along with personal knowledge of sailing techniques and acquaintance with Hawaiian and Polynesian culture. Therefore, in his paintings tended to be "hard-edge" (not "painterly") in style so that he could present as much detailed information as possible. Exceptions were allegorical works dealing with Hawaiian gods and legends.

My own taste runs to adding a dash of the painterly. For example, I tend to be less fond of depictions of aircraft that include lots of little dots representing rivets than of pictures showing non-center-of-interest parts of an aircraft slightly out of focus (such as they would be seen in person).

Nevertheless, I find Kane's approach both suitable for his purposes and satisfying from a visual standpoint. Below are images of some of Kane's work. Original-size versions are much more impressive than what you see here; click images to enlarge for slightly better views.

Gallery

Wa'a
One of a series Kane painted of Polynesian sailing craft.

Ka'anapali 200 Years Ago
This beach on western Maui is now lined with resort hotels.

The Arrival of Keoua Below Pu'ukohola
The rival king to Kamehameha approaches the stone temple and soon will meet his death.

Kamehameha Landing
Kamehameha and his army landing on Oahu near Waikiki Beach. Note the swivel cannon on Kamehameha's craft and the Western style sailing ship in the background.

Kamehameha at Kamakahonu (detail)
The aged king at what is now Kailua-Kona.

Moment of Contact
Captain James Cook's ships meet native Hawaiians off Kauai, 1778.

Pele
The Hawaiian goddess of fire and vulcanism.

Hula Holoku
Multiple views of a hula dancer wearing a holoku gown. I find this image charming.

Molti Ritratti: Salome

2012-01-06T02:21:00.000-08:00

Salome was quite the gal, as this Wikipedia entry indicates. Dancing, sexiness, murder and other factors contribute to rich grounds for artists to exploit. I was even about to use the work "beauty," in the last sentence but did not. That's because no one since her days has had any idea what she looked like. The best we have is the image on the coin shown below, and it isn't very inspiring.

This lack of information was never a barrier to artists who were handed subject matter to spare plus unlimited freedom to imagine her. Below are some examples of her depiction in approximate chronological order.

Gallery

By Titian

By Caravaggio

By Henri Regnault

By Gustave Moreau

By Pierre Bonnaud

By Ella Ferris Pell

By Aubrey Beardsley

By Robert Henri

By Franz von Stuck

By Lovis Corinth

By Nelson Shanks

And which Salome has the most appeal? Beats me. I'll take any of them except, perhaps, the image from Beardsley (nice drawing that it is). And the one on the coin.

An Earlier "Painter of Light"

2012-01-04T02:16:00.000-08:00

Thomas Kinkade (b. 1958) used the slogan "The Painter of Light" for many years while building his artistic sales empire. The image above is an example I snatched from the Web; it even has a Kinkade stamp asserting that it's the real thing. Most of his twilight-plus-glowing-windows paintings are rural or semi-rural scenes, but he also does some urban scenes such as the one above. He also can be a better painter than one might gather from seeing originals and giclées in galleries, but a guy has to earn a living.

There being not much totally new under the artistic sun, I hereby offer some paintings of Paris street scenes by Édouard Cortes (1882-1969):

Cortes' Paris paintings interest me because of his attention to detail. Note the Citroën by the cyclist in the image immediately above: he didn't just dash off a generic car shape.

Will Cotton: Sweets Painter

2012-01-02T01:46:00.000-08:00

A representational artist who has been getting attention of late is Will Cotton (b. 1965). For instance, Rizzoli released this book dealing with his art in November, and his cover painting for a Katy Perry album prompted this Artinfo piece.

Why the fuss? Take a look:

Gallery

Cotton Candy Katy - 2010
The original painting measures 72 by 84 inches; that is, 6 by 7 feet or 183 by 213 cm. The image above has been cropped at the top (it was painted for the cover of the CD album mentioned above, and album art requires a nearly square format).

Photo of Will Cotton's studio
Note the size of the work in progress.

Will Cotton and Katy Perry
Behind is a painting of her titled "Cupcake Katy."

Chocolate Forest - 2001

Nude in chocolate landscape

Taffy Forest - 2007

Ice Cream Venus - 2010

Ice Cream study

As you might have noticed, Cotton's theme is candy in various guises. Some paintings feature nothing but close images of solid or flowing chocolate. And because Cotton wants everything to look really real, he builds landscape maquettes using the real thing. This led him to become a serious maker of chocolates, now a sort of side job.

Another impression from the images is that his work seems photographic, even though it's actually oil paint on linen canvas. This effect is partly achieved because Cotton paints on huge canvasses, this giving him room to deal with details in a smooth, not-so-painterly way.

Speaking of photography, whereas he does use reference photos, Cotton is quite able to draw very well on his own, as the final image above indicates.

Not everyone cares for hyper-realistic beautiful women in candy environments. Leah Ollman's piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Art review: Will Cotton at Michael Kohn Gallery" (link here) contains the following:

Cotton’s name is often uttered in the same breath as Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, painters who also emerged in the '90s with work that flaunted its political incorrectness in regard to the female nude. Yuskavage and Currin undermine erotic conventions in their own idiosyncratic ways, while Cotton merely plays into them in a manner that’s more pedestrian than provocative. In a catalogue essay for Cotton’s previous show here, in 2005, art historian Robert Rosenblum posits that the opposing poles of avant-garde and kitsch (famously articulated by Clement Greenberg) merge in these saccharine visions, but to me, the paintings look only backward, not forward. Cheesecake has been replaced by cupcakes, as per the gastronomic trend, and the subjects’ girly, cutesy sex appeal now disingenuously credits itself as post-feminist. None of Cotton’s choices speaks of subversion or criticality, and his rococo froth is only minimally clever. Exhausting familiar sexist correspondences between women and fantasy, desire, indulgence and consumption, the work exploits a single gimmick to the point of sugar shock.

So she states that some people link Cotton to Yuskavage (crude autoerotic images of women) and Currin (gross, cartoon-like exaggerations of female anatomy); I see no connection at all. As for Ollman, just why must (by implication) art be tied to "subversion or criticality" to be considered worthwhile? To me, this attitude, along with slavery to political correctness and other foibles, is a major defect in the mindset of postmodernist art.

Yes, Cotton's paintings lack "serious" themes and psychological "depth." But they're extremely well crafted and fun to look at (for some of us, anyway). That said, I hope that Cotton has a few paintings hidden away in the storage area of his studio that place those gorgeous gals (and other figures) in real world settings as a test of his skills.

Another thought: Those 19th century paintings of odalisques and harem scenes were, in their way, as fantastical as Cotton's candy-related settings. In all cases, the artist was seeking an excuse to show off his skills for depicting female beauty. So Cotton can be seen as following in a time-honored fine-arts tradition.

Todd White: SpongeBob to Party Time

2011-12-30T02:10:00.000-08:00

Todd White worked on graphic character development in the early days of the SpongeBob SquarePants animated cartoon television program. Then he went on to an apparently successful career making satirical cartoon-like paintings.

I've been noticing his work in galleries in California's arty, affluent Carmel-by-the-Sea for several years now, and the current issue of Carmel magazine (a locally-focused glossy magazine that appears quarterly or thereabouts) contained this article about him which inspired me to write this post.

A sketchy Wikipedia article on White is here, and the biography on his web site here.

White's images are distinctive and can be witty. But they perhaps are best taken in small doses -- something true for the works of many artists who make numerous paintings of similar subjects in a consistent style. For a large dose of White's paintings, here is a page of examples on his web site. And below is a sampling plucked from various Internet sites:

Gallery

Set 'Em Up Joe

Writers Block

Drinking Boas
Many of White's paintings are bar scenes which gives him license to depict loostened emotions and behavior.

Heaven Beside You

Ballads and Bruises
These two paintings edge slightly closer to straight-up representational depiction. I wonder what would result if White dropped the cartoonishness once in a while.

While I'm perfectly willing to change my mind as time goes on, at this point I don't consider White to be a fine arts painter, his gallery presence aside. Rather, I think of him as someone who could have made a splendid career as a cartoonist for the likes of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair in the 1925-1940 era. Being born 80 years after his time, he has done a good job of surviving in an era not quite suited for him.

Molti Ritratti: Otto v. Bismarck by Lenbach

2011-12-28T02:30:00.000-08:00

The "Molti Ritratti" set of posts usually deals with views of a single person as painted by several artists. But this time, I'm pulling a semi-switcheroo. It's still a case of a single subject, but this time all the paintings are by the same artist.

The subject is Otto von Bismarck who more than anyone else can be said to have created the German Empire from a scattering of lesser states. The artist is Franz Seraph von Lenbach (1836-1904) who was an important and successful Munich School painter. A plaza in the city bears his name and his house is now an important museum. A major collection of Lenbach works in the United States can be found here.

So why did Lenbach paint so many portraits of Bismarck? (I forget when and where and how many, but once I came upon an estimated number, probably somewhat greater than a dozen. Seems to me that source or perhaps another mentioned that Bismarck did pose for Lenbach, but that Lenbach also made extensive use of reference photos to supplement the sittings. This seems to make sense, but keep a grain of salt handy.)

When I was in the army, someplace in each unit's facilities would be a chain-of-command photographic portrait collection starting with the President and working down through the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Army, Army Chief of Staff, commanding general of the army to which the unit was assigned, various unit commanders, perhaps a post commander and so forth. This sort of thing is found in many kinds of government agencies in the USA and probably elsewhere; it's what bureaucrats do.

I don't know that German bureaucrats and officials in the late 19th century did. Yes, photography was available, but it seems likely that someone as important as the Kaiser or his Chancellor should deserve more than just a photo. Which is one possible reason for Lenbach's Bismarck commissions. No doubt some such commissions were from nobles or major political figures. But lacking a catalogue raisonné for Lenbach, it can be troublesome to locate all of his Bismarck portraits and their provenance starting points.

Gallery

I find it interesting how much variety Lenbach was able to introduce in the form of costuming and even poses. No doubt this was influenced by what sort of commission he was working under. Even so, some near-duplicates are known to exist: the text in this link to the Walters Art Museum notes that the Baltimore painting is like one in Munich's Lenbachhaus.

Paul-Albert Besnard: Adventuresome Careerist

2011-12-26T01:46:00.000-08:00

Paul-Albert Besnard (1849-1934) was French turn of the 20th century artist who gained most of the important Establishment honors while being ever-so-slightly adventuresome in his style of painting. For some background on this, his Wikipedia entry is here.

I had never heard of him.

No doubt that was partly because, like most largely traditional painters of his time, he became an unperson once the Modernist Establishment came to the academic and art-critical fore. Still, in the more than six years I've been blogging about art, I've spent a lot of time reading art history and biographies of artists. Plus, I've visited the Musée d'Orsay and other important museums with good 1850-1920 era collections. And still, Besnard's name and art never stuck in my mind.

According to the link above, Besnard paid attention to the various modernist movement of his time, starting with Impressionism, and borrowed a bit here and there while backing somewhat away from his academic training. The same could be said for many other contemporaneous artists whose names are better known today. Where Besnard stands out is that he was able to gain all sorts of official recognition up to and including a seat in the Académie française

Here are examples of his work.

Gallery

Garnet Joseph, Viscount Wolseley - 1880

La Parisienne - 1885

Madame Roger Jourdain - 1886

The Eclipse - 1888

Madame Georges Rodenbach - 1897

Decoration for a ceiling

Actually, Besnard was pretty good, as nearly as I can tell from viewing digitized images instead of actual paintings. His style varied over time, and his paintings are more intellectually stimulating than purely decorative alternatives would have been. One gripe I have is that he tended to suppress facial detail in places (note some of the figures in the final image above). Most viewers, I believe, want to see a face with recognizable details rather than blurred-over eyes and so forth.

Eliel Saarinen, Uncomfortable Modernist

2011-12-23T01:59:00.000-08:00

Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950), father of the more famous Eero (1910-61), was a modernist of sorts -- of the romantic, Art Nouveau departure from historical styles that was modernist in the almost trivial sense in that it was indeed a departure, modest though it was. Otherwise, its adherence to modernist dogma was circumstantial.

As Saarinen approached his fifties he drifted along with the evolution of Art Nouveau into Art Deco while retaining a fondness for traditional northern European and Scandinavian building forms. It was only by the late 1930s when he was around 65 that his designs became simplified and ornamentation almost disappeared. My feeling is that his heart really wasn't into modernism, but that he felt he had to comply with the New Order for professional reasons. I suppose some documentation might be found to refute my conjecture. Nevertheless, his later buildings tell me otherwise.

The Wikipedia link above contains photos of some of his important buildings. Below are views of some of those.

Gallery

Kansallismuseo (National Museum), Helsinki - 1904
Saarinen was comfortable with Finnish vernacular architecture and doubtless sympathetic to the sense of Finnish nationhood percolating during the final decades of the land's status as a Russian duchy. As befitting a national museum, it looks very Finnish. I walked past it in 2005, but didn't have time to explore it.

Main railway station, Helsinki - 1909
Another impressive structure (which I did enter) is the railway station. It's Art Nouveau, but more severe and stripped down than how the style was practiced across the Baltic in Riga, Latvia.

Pauluse Kirik (Paulus Church), Tartu - 1917
Compare this to Saarinen's 1940s churches below.

Chicago Tribune Tower competition entry - 1922
Although his design failed to win, it greatly impressed the architectural profession and led to his move to America in 1923.

Cranbrook view
In 1925 Saarinen moved to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit where he designed and also taught at Cranbrook. The style of the buildings shown in this photo similar to what he used in Finland, though other structures had modernist elements.

First Christian Church, Columbus, Indiana - 1942

Christ Church Lutheran, Minneapolis, Minnesota - 1949
These church designs of the 1940s are modernist in their simplicity of form. But brick is used and repeated window shapes and other details create a smidgen of ornamentation that Saarinen apparently could not bear to completely abandon.

Wyndham Lewis' Deco Portraits

2011-12-21T02:18:00.000-08:00

When Americans find themselves thinking about Art Deco portraits, I suspect the work of Tamara de Lempicka comes to mind first. But the English just might be more likely to conjure paintings and drawing by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957).

The above link to Lewis has a good deal of information, as does this book review from 2000 posted on the Guardian's web site. There also is this site devoted to Lewis, but it is patchy.

Many people can be considered multi-talented in that they can do more than one thing passably well (skiing and cooking, dancing and gardening, etc.). There are a few who are multi-talented at levels at or near professional quality, but such folks usually focus on one talent or another as the tool to build a career or notoriety. Lewis is exceptional in that he was successful in both art and writing, as the links attest.

For example,he was a co-founder of Vorticism, a British version of Cubism. After serving as an artillery observer officer in the Great War he returned to painting and then for a few years writing dominated his efforts while he began to focus his art on portraiture.

If he had a problem, it was and is that his political beliefs were, shall we say, unfashionable. That is, he was extremely right-wing in the 1930s sense. This is mentioned in the Wikipedia and Guardians links.

That aside, his abilities as a portraitist were widely recognized in his day. Augustus John and Walter Sickert held his portraiture in high regard.

I consider Lewis' portrait style Art Deco because of (1) when they were done, (2) the simplification of forms towards a geometrical basis, and (3) the crisp, clean style of delineation. Lewis did not go nearly as far as did Lempicka in these respects, but the underlying spirit is consistent.

Below are some examples in drawn and painted form.

Gallery

Portrait of the Artist As the Painter Raphael - 1921

T.S. Eliot

Froanna, the Artist's Wife - 1937

Rebecca West - 1932

Self-Portrait With Hat - 1932

For more images, here is a link to London's National Portrait Gallery collection of Lewis' works.

Molti Ritratti: Georgette Magritte

2011-12-19T02:01:00.000-08:00

Rather than posting a usual Molti Ritratti where views of one sitter by many artists are displayed, I thought I might as well show several views of the same subject painted by a single artist. So today we feature Georgette Magritte, wife of Belgian Surrealist René (1898-1967) who used her as a model for many of his works. Salvador Dalí's wife Gala had the same gig, but Georgette is far less well known, so why not give her a break?

According the the Wikipedia link above, Magritte met Georgette when he was entering his teens and (other sources say) again in 1920, this leading to their 1922 marriage. Magritte had formal art training 1916-18 while the Great War raged and didn't do his army service until later. This was because his part of Belgium was occupied by the Germans in 1914 and remained under their control until the war ended.

Georgette was about two years younger than Magritte. Pretty and photogenic, she apparently didn't mind being her husband's model and muse. After Magritte took up Surrealism in the late 1920s (and perhaps even before), images based on Georgette's modeling were not always intended to be portraits. For example, one has her nude from the waist down and from the waist up is the front half of a fish.

Below are some photos of Georgette along with a few of Magritte's paintings that were either actual portraits or images using her as a model.

Gallery

Georgette and René at the time of their marriage

Georgette - 1929
The photo is probably reversed; she should be looking to the left.

Georgette - c.1935-38
One source has this as from 1938, but 1935 photos show her in the same dress and hairdo.

Nu allongé - 1923

Drawing of Georgette - 1924

Georgette double portrait - 1935

La magie noir - 1935

Portrait of Georgette - 1937

Portrait of Georgette - early 1940s

Based on post-1930 photos of her, when Magritte's aim was to do an actual portrait of Georgette, he usually took care to accurately depict her.

Las Vegas Interiors, Mod and Trad

2011-12-16T02:22:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, the gambling center of the United States was Las Vegas. Alas for Vegas, there are now plenty of other places to find slot machines, gaming tables and such -- often in the form of casinos owned by Indian tribes. This means that Las Vegas has to offer more than gambling to survive.

Restaurants and live entertainment were in place long before serious competition for the gambling dollar emerged. To these were added fancy retailing (I've lost count of the number of Gucci shops in town) and flashy architecture and interiors in non-casino areas of major casino-hotels. Accepting it for what it is, Las Vegas can be an entertaining place to spend a week even though you don't gamble a cent.

Some properties feature themes such as pirates, desert oases, Italian palaces and more. A few are basically modernist, but jazz things up because that's what Vegas patrons have been trained to expect.

Let's take a peek at a few photos I shot recently:

Gallery

Entrance to retail passage at the Bellagio
I love the Bellagio and walk this passage a lot because it leads to valet parking and skybridges for crossing streets to Caesars or the Paris. The shops? Lovely to gaze at, but well beyond my price-point.

Atrium at The Palazzo
This space, off the gambling floor, is surrounded by shops.

Shopping mall at Caesars Palace
There's a new atrium here, but this photo shows the older area, curved passages lined with shops and a fake-sky ceiling.

Palio coffee shop at the Bellagio
I grab a cuppa almost every morning that I find myself in the Bellagio. Prices are high, but the Siena atmosphere appeals even though I've never been in town when the horse races are held.

Bar in The Palazzo
As you noticed, The Palazzo is traditional. But this bar tucked at the side of the retail area is modernist, though in a decorated, non-purist way.

H&M store in the Caesars Palace shopping mall
This used to be a F.A.O. Schwarz toy store, but the Swedes selling inexpensive rags took over Schwarz's space in the older, passage-oriented part of the mall shown a few photos back. Up on the side wall is a DJ playing really loud rock music -- so loud I had to wait in the hall while my wife and daughter checked out the wares.

Crystals shopping mall at CityCenter
The huge, new CityCenter project is a collection of buildings designed by a bunch of well-known modernist architects. I consider it a failure in several ways, but will save that discussion for another post. Shown here is part of the interior of Crystals, the ritzy shopping area in the project. Like the Palazzo bar, modernism in its pure form had to be compromised in favor of increased detail to add visual interest to what otherwise would be a pretty dead space (imagine flat, white walls instead of the faceting seen here). Postmodern architecture often follows this same path of jazzing up purist forms without employing traditional decorative detailing.

Restaurant in Crystals
Another example of decorative postmodernism is this Crystals restaurant-bar. The use of wood and the enclosed feeling of the wooden elements make it more "organic" than geometric; I wonder if Mies van der Rohe would approve.

Noel Sickles: A Cartoonist Who Could Draw Really Well

2011-12-14T01:53:00.000-08:00

The key words in the title of this post are "really well." All cartoonists by the nature of their game have to draw. Some (I won't mention names) can hardly tell which end of a pencil is pointy. But a few, by the time they hit their stride, were top-notch draftsmen who maintained a high level of quality despite a highly demanding deadline environment. Examples from the classic era of comic strips include Hal Foster ("Tarzan" "Prince Valiant"), Burne Hogarth ("Tarzan") and Alex Kotzky ("Apartment 3-G").

And there is another class of top-notch comic strip artist, cartoonists who were skilled enough to do commercial illustration at the "slick" magazine level. John Cullen Murphy ("Big Ben Bolt" "Prince Valiant"), Frank Godwin ("Connie" "Rusty Riley") and Alex Raymond ("Flash Gordon" "Jungle Jim" "Rip Kirby") did this to a limited extent, but remained in comic strips. Then there was Noel Sickles (1910-82) who switched completely from strips to slicks (and other publications).

The Wikipedia link above is limited, so if you want to pursue Sickles' career in depth, I recommend this book which contains his "Scorchy Smith" panels along with many examples of his post-Scorchy work.

So how well could Sickles draw? Take a look (click to enlarge most images):

Gallery

Scorchy Smith panel out-take

Servicing AVG (or perhaps 14th Air Force) P-40, China

Colonial scene

Cold War scene

Life magazine cover

Comp sketch

Comp sketch

Oh, did I forget to mention that Sickles was versatile?

Pene du Bois' Solid, Simplified Images

2011-12-12T02:38:00.000-08:00

Guy Pène du Bois (1884-1958) studied art 1903-04 at the New York School of Art with Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent, among others, under Robert Henri.

Hopper gained the most permanent fame from today's perspective whereas Kent and Pène du Bois were fated (again from today's perspective) to respectively become archetypical 1930s and 1920s representatives of American painting. Which is slightly ironic in Pène du Bois' case, because he spent much of the 20s in France.

A short Wikipedia entry is here, but for useful depth regarding Pène du Bois, read this article.

I find his paintings frustrating to look at. That's largely because of his simplification of facial detail -- eyes are sometimes depicted by a small slash of black paint -- and the sad fact (for Pène du Bois) is that most viewers tend to focus on a face if one is present in a painting.

What was going on, I think, is that he was caught up with the challenge of modernism, as was true for many of his contemporaries. There were several approaches taken in those days, but Pène du Bois opted for depicting people by means of simplified, solid images. This was in contrast to striving for flattened images in supposed conformity to the picture plane, an alternative favored by artists of a more theoretical temperament. My take is that Pène du Bois pushed the simplification option a little too far.

Here are examples of his work.

Gallery

The Arrivals - c.1918

Dining Out - 1919

Woman with Cigarette - 1929

Country Wedding - 1926

Opera Box - 1926

Carnival - 1927

Woman in Brooklyn - after 1929

Blue Armchair - 1923

Pène du Bois was quite capable of making representational depictions, but examples are hard to find on the Web; the image immediately above is one of the few I found that go in that direction. Examples I've seen off-line suggest that he tended to set modernism aside when painting family and friends.

Jazz-Age Murals in Las Vegas

2011-12-09T02:40:00.000-08:00

For the past three weeks posts on this blog have been appearing on their regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday publication schedule. That's because, speaking of schedule, I can schedule publication of posts ahead of time and let kindly Google do the rest.

Me? I was in California and Las Vegas and wrote not a single post while there; a backlog was worked up before I left home. But I did take some photos to thrill and amaze you. Coming soon are views of architecture and interior decoration, but for now I offer some blurred shots of a few murals that I spied while on my annual non-gambler casino crawl.

For those of you who have never been to Las Vegas or haven't visited since the mid-1990s, The Strip (Las Vegas Boulevard, which isn't actually inside the LV city limits) is comprised of a host of large casino-hotels, most of which are designed around a theme. Examples include The Palazzo, The Venetian, Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, Paris, Luxor, and New York - New York to name a few whose names convey their theme. Such complexes are costly to build in part because of the décor that is crucial for conveying the theme.

The photos below are of some murals that are really quite minor details contributing to the atmosphere of each place. The first two were taken in the New York - New York, the other two in the Wynn, which is luxurious but has no obvious theme attached to it. Both sets have a 1920s feeling in terms of subject matter and style. Take a look:

Gallery

Paul Rand, Graphic Designer

2011-12-07T02:26:00.000-08:00

A very cursory web search didn't point to the actual source of the above quotation, but the agreement is that it indeed came from graphic designer Paul Rand (1914-96), a dominant player in that field for decades.

Of course, there were some who used it as a departure point for other ideas such as "Don't try to be good, just original" and "Try to be both original and good." Me? I'm with Rand. The modernist emphasis on creativity (= originality) has led to some bad side-effects including the nearly invisible amount of true instruction I received as an undergraduate art student (apparently they thought training would kill creativity). If one tries to be good doing art, a useful dab of creativity has a decent chance of creeping in.

Back to Rand. A website dealing with him is here. It contains a biography, a large collection of photos of Rand and many examples of his work, some of which are shown below.

Gallery

Some logotypes Rand designed

Direction magazine cover - March, 1939

Direction magazine cover - Spring, 1943

Book cover - 1958

Unused logotype for Ford - c.1960

My take on Rand is that he was indeed a master of his trade. That said, I think his strongest work was in the field of logotypes and graphic corporate identity.

A good deal of the rest of his work was in the odd, spotty graphics that were most popular from the late 1930s into the mid-1950s. Other designers followed Rand's lead, and a fair amount of it was found in page designs and advertisements that were intended to look "sophisticated." This style is evident above in the images of magazine and book covers. I find it for the most part too unstructured and insubstantial for my visual comfort.

In contrast, Rand's corporate symbology was usually solidly structured incorporating strong design elements. It was highly influential: I recall a student project where I tried to come up with a simple, modernist logo for Miller Beer that of course was a design failure.

Speaking of design failures, Rand's attempt at redesigning the classic "Ford oval" falls into that category. Ford was wise to shelve his proposal. Even the best designers have their off-days, it seems.

F.C.B.Cadell: Scottish Colourist Who Used Black

2011-12-05T02:54:00.000-08:00

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937) was one of a four-man group known as the Scottish Colourists: his wikipedia entry is here.

The Colourists (I'll use the British spelling in this post) were influenced by Post-impressionism and perhaps Fauvism. They succeeded the previous-generation Glasgow Boys (scroll down) who were influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Cadell was socially well-connected, living for a number of years in a fashionable Edinburgh neighborhood (Ainslie Place) a few blocks from the west end of Princes Street. He tended to live higher than his inheritance and painting sales could support and was essentially broke when he died from cancer and liver disease aged 54. What little tangible estate he had (probably mostly in the form of unsold paintings) was willed with a few stated exceptions to his housemanager/companion Charles Oliver. Unlike the other Colourists, Cadell enlisted for the Great War and was twice wounded.

As for his mature art, his subjects ranged from portraits to interior scenes to still lifes to plein-air works. Some pre-war paintings were done in a loose style, but his later work tended to be carefully composed with defined edges.

For one known for color, his works tended to feature significant areas painted in pure black and much of the rest were flatly painted in pure or tinted grays. These served as contrast to other colors that then stood out. In a number of interior scenes from the 1920s he included a Chinese Red chair as a prop that provided a considerable color jolt.

I have yet to see a Cadell in person, so will assume that their general appearance is colorful. Here are examples of his work. They are in rough chronological order (he seldom dated his work), and some titles might be conjectural.

Gallery

Ben More from Iona - c.1913
This was from his first visit to the island. Cadell went there many times in the 1920s and early 30s.

Afternoon - 1913
An interior scene painted when his style was relatively loose.

The Black Hat - c.1914
From the same period. He used a black hat as a prop for many of his portraits of ladies.

Portrait of a Lady in Black - c.1921
This is one of his better-known paintings. Post-war, he tightened his brushwork and incorporated flatly painted areas. A good deal of black is used here while the rest of the color is limited to pastel shades.

The Embroidered Cloak - c.1923
This painting used a similar color scheme to the one shown above.

A Lady in Black - c.1925
Still more similar colors.

The Orange Blind - c.1927
Blacks and grays set off the orange, gold and blue-green.

Vertical Grille Bars as Styling Theme

2011-12-02T03:02:00.000-08:00

Today's cars often incorporate visual focus points and linear features at the front, sides and rear that serve as brand identifiers. This is nothing new: one of General Motors' styling section founder Harley Earl's desiderata was including styling details that would keep viewers entertained as they walked around the car.

But in Earl's day the main focal point was the car's front, or "face" that it presented to the world, and another desideratum was that a car's front should make the brand identifiable from a block or so away. These days the front and grille itself (because air is now usually drawn in through a slot below bumper-level) are no longer necessarily the main focal point thanks to side and rear detailing. (Yes, there are exceptions such as Cadillac Escalades and all Lincolns starting with the 2010 model year.)

Back in the 1940s, Earl notwithstanding, side and rear views of cars were often rather bland in terms of details and not particularly distinctive. So a distinctive grille was the main feature viewers could seize upon to identify what make a car was. For this reason, many brands strove for continuity in grille design themes. Examples are Rolls-Royce, Packard and Cadillac (which has featured an egg-crate motif since the 1941 models). Other makes such as Ford were less consistent.

1940 is also interesting because it was around then that grille openings assumed a horizontal (landscape) format after having been vertical (portrait) for about 30 years. This led some stylists to propose a grille motif featuring vertically positioned chromed bars. Each of the Big Three U.S. car makers had one of their brands assume this style which was retained for many years as an identifier. These makes were General Motors' Buick, Chrysler's DeSoto and Ford's Mercury; examples are shown below.

Gallery

Buick

Buick - 1942
Buick introduced its vertical bar theme for its 1939 models and returned for a long run starting with the 1942s, few of which were built thanks to production being curtailed for the war effort.

Buick - 1949
By 1949 the grille bars were more rounded, but the 1942 theme was adhered to.

Buick - 1950
1950 Buicks sported an overhanging teeth look that was derided by observers who called it a "dollar-sign grille" and worse.

Buick - 1952
Buick dropped the overbite for its '51 line and the 1952 models were similar. 1955 was the last year for the vertical bar theme for many years; it crept back in during the 1980s.

Buick - 2012
Current Buicks have a strong vertical bar theme, carrying on the 1940s tradition.

DeSoto

DeSoto - 1942
DeSoto used the vertical bar theme on its 1941 line, but I'm showing a 1942 car because its "face" is distinctive and classic in its way. The grille is waterfall-like, for instance. But the important detail is the headlights covered by doors that opened when the lights were turned on. Hidden headlights were a fad around 1970, but DeSoto only had them on its war-constrained '42s.

DeSoto - 1949
The entire Chrysler line got its post-war restyling for 1949 and DeSoto featured grille bars of varying width.

DeSoto - 1953
The bars got chubby for the 1951 model year and that theme was continued in 1953 when Chrysler offered it next round of restyled bodies.

DeSoto - 1955
The 1955 model year (another completely new set of bodies for Chrysler) was the last for DeSoto's vertical bar theme. I like the way the grille opening makes those little hops above the bumper guards. Sadly, Chrysler abandoned the DeSoto brand during the 1961 model year.

Marcury

Mercury - 1946
Mercury didn't adopt vertical bars until 1946. Note how thin they are.

Mercury - 1949
The '49 Mercury is considered by many as the classic version of the brand. Grille bars are still fine, but their expanse is greater and the convex curve of the ensemble ads greater reflection from the sky making the grille seem bolder.

Mercury - 1952
I find the restyled 1952 Mercurys interesting because of their integral bumper-grille that was innovative. The vertical bars are found only at the bottom -- sort of like chopped-off remains of the 1950 Buicks' toothy overbites.

Mercury - 1958
By the late 1950s Mercury was drifting away from the vertical bar theme, though vestiges can be seen here. By the mid-1960s only the sporty Mercury Cougar line retained vertical bars.

Mercury - 2010
In the years leading up to Mercury's 2011 demise the vertical bars theme was brought back to the fore, perhaps as a last-gasp attempt to distinguish the brand's products.

Matisse and Fergusson: Color Versus Drawing

2011-11-30T02:56:00.000-08:00

At its root, the issue of color versus drawing is a matter of taste. So there is no agreed-upon point where one can draw the line (pardon the expression) where one or the other should begin to take precedence.

Those who favor color are sometimes called "colorists." I thought it might be interesting to compare two colorists whose emphasis on drawing differed somewhat, this to illustrate what I noted above.

In one corner, I offer Henri Matisse (1869-1954) who went wild with color as a Fauvist in the early 20th century. After Fauvism faded, Matisse continued to emphasize color for the rest of his career. What he de-emphasized was drawing; people and other objects were presented in a sketchy and somewhat distorted way, being subordinate to colors.

Matisse was quite able to draw accurately. So why did he persist in distorting the images he painted? I don't know. Perhaps he was simply following modernist fashion. But I'm inclined to doubt this because he tended to intellectualize his work, stewing over whether he was making "progress." My guess is that he justified his casual draftsmanship on the grounds that the drawing should also serve the needs of composition and perhaps that well-drawn images would distract viewers from focusing on his color experiments.

The opposite corner is John Duncan (JD) Fergusson (1874-1961), a member of the four-man Scottish Colourists group. Some of Fergusson's painting subjects were as casually rendered as Matisse's, but most of the time his images featured more careful draftsmanship.

Below are examples of their work. For Matisse I favor his odalisques, of which he painted many in the 1920s, because he was paying more attention to draftsmanship then than in his Fauve days or later on.

Matisse

Decorative Figure Against an Ornamental Background

Odalisque with Gray Trousers - 1927

La robe jaune - 1929-31

Woman in Purple Coat - 1937

Fergusson

Tete

Summer - 1920

Spring in Glasgow - 1941

Le voile persan - 1909

An Astonishing Rochegrosse

2011-11-28T02:11:00.000-08:00

The Musée d'Orsay recently completed its renovation. Galleries have been reorganized, paintings rehung.

I have no plans to visit Paris any time soon, so like many readers of this blog, I'll just have to read reviews and try to imagine how things look.

One painting whose fate I'm curious about is this one:

Le chevalier aux fleurs - The Knight of the Flowers - c.1894
Click to enlarge.

It's by Georges Antoine Rochegrosse (1859-1938) and the d'Orsay's web site offers this commentary.

So why did I use the word "astonishing" in this post's title?

For one thing, it's huge -- 2.35 meters high by 3.76 meters wide. And it's bright; compositionally, there are few dark areas to tie things together. But what struck me most when I first saw it were the reflections on Parsifal's suit of armor. By pulling in the surroundings, they made Parsifal almost as ethereal as the rest of the scene.

I don't suppose professional art critics would ever call it a great painting. Me? I find it an astonishing (there's that word again!) tour de force.

Future Fashions from 1936

2011-11-25T02:41:00.000-08:00

That's science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells at the left on the set of Things to Come, a 1936 movie based on his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come that was produced by Alexander Korda. To the right are Margaretta Scott and Raymond Massey.

The plot has a 1940 war (the most accurate prediction is the date -- the Battle of Britain was fought that year) in which England and much of the world sinks to near-barbarism after decades of conflict. A group of engineer-technocrats recreates a modern society in Basra, Iraq and then spreads it throughout the world, setting things straight in a Wellsian socialist-inspired utopia. The final part of the movie takes place in 2036 where a mission to the moon is launched.

Photos below show some of the costumes predicted for 2036, a century after the release date of the movie.

I don't know who designed the costumes, but they surely had Wells' okay, grudging or otherwise (he had considerable input to the project). Ultra-broad shoulders aside, the impression I get is that of snazzed-up Roman Empire outfits with a generally clean look in synch with late-Deco modernism of the 1930s -- which should probably be expected.

We are 25 years away from the movie's fashion predictions, so there's a remote chance that they will be fulfilled. The photo below of a celebrity (Nicky Hilton, whoever she might be) indicates how things stand in our casual times.

Syd Mead: Famous Designer of Unbuilt Cars

2011-11-23T01:14:00.000-08:00

So far as I can tell, car stylist, industrial designer and visualization renderer of future environments Syd Mead (born 1933) never had any of his automobile designs enter production. It's possible that some of his industrial designs were produced, but I don't know of any offhand.

Yet Mead is well known by styling and design practitioners and some of his efforts are famous to groups of the public at large. For instance, he designed the future Los Angeles for the movie Blade Runner and the vehicles for the original Tron. More recently, he has been involved with computer game settings. Mead's web site is here; it contains many examples of his work and even t-shirts that you can buy from his on-line shop.

I first came to be aware of Mead back in my army days at Fort Meade (of all places!) when a buddy of mine showed me a copy of a brochure with Mead's designs commissioned by U.S. Steel. Many of those illustrations were included in his first Sentinel book, a copy of which I own.

One aspect of Mead's work that interests me is that it's hard to distinguish which designs and renderings are recent and which were done when he was working on the U.S. Steel project in the early 1960s. (As can be seen below, his very earliest efforts are easier to spot.) So Mead seems to have attained a personal version of the future that was strong enough to serve him for a career of 50 years. Let's take a look.

Gallery

Blade Runner visualization
His Blade Runner designs are probably his best-known work so far as the general public is concerned; but they likely would not know who Syd Mead is.

Student design while at Art Center School

Illustration of Ford Gyron show car - 1961
These are examples of Mead's work from when he hadn't attained his mature sensibility.

Concept car for U.S. Steel

Design for U.S. Steel

U.S. Steel project scene
It's a little hard to believe that these designs and renderings are nearly 50 years old.

Commuter car designed for Philips
This design could be produced; it's not very futuristic, which Mead acknowledges by placing a black contemporary car in the near-background.

Futuristic scene
This was done more recently than most of the illustrations above.

Future horse race

Automobile design
Another design that's not totally blue-sky futuristic; note the costumes of the background figures aren't as wild as in the image directly above.

David Gauld: A Fringe Glasgow Boy

2011-11-21T03:02:00.000-08:00

I know little about David Gauld (1865-1936) who Roger Billcliffe includes in his Glasgow Boys book, but admittedly as having a "distant relationship with the Boys."

It seems he worked in stained glass as well as painting, and a couple of 1888 paintings are done in an outlines-with-flatly-painted-interiors style that, for a reason I can't explain, has always intrigued me. Another reason for presenting him here is that my wife recently booked us on a tour of Ireland and Scotland for next summer, so I need to prime myself for some gallery gawking in those places. (I've been to Ireland and Scotland, but that was before I got involved with blogging about art. So while having paid some attention then, I plan to be more knowledgeable this time; be braced for more posts about Scottish and Irish painters.)

Here are a few examples of Gauld's work.

Gallery

Music - 1888

St. Agnes - 1888
These paintings are done in the cloisonné style mentioned above.

The Procession of St. Agnes
St. Agnes-related again, but in a more conventional style.

Portrait of Irene Vanburgh
A nicely done portrait of the actress.

At this point, I have have nothing special to say about Gauld's paintings. But I'll keep my eyes peeled once I'm in Glasgow and Edinburgh so that I might confront one in person.

Auction Results: Christie's, NYC, 9 Nov 2011

2011-11-18T02:18:00.000-08:00

I find it tricky to glean meanings from art auctions.

For one thing, most of the best and most famous works eventually gravitate to museums, leaving collectors and speculators to paw over what remains. Then there is the problem of separating purchases by those who buy because they love the particular work from those who buy with the intent of flipping it once the price is likely to have increased to their satisfaction. And there are buyers who collect what they like but are prepared to sell later if prices become tempting and then use the spoils to buy more art they like.

I tend to pay attention to sales results for representational painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a gauge for assessing how strong a comeback such art might currently be making (for instance Alma-Tadema going from near-worthless to tens of millions of dollars over the last 60 years).

Then there are modernist paintings that I wouldn't dream of putting on one of my walls that auction for huge sums. Consider a few results from the Christie's "Post-War and Contemporary" auction that took place 9 November in New York:

$1,034,500: Untitled, by Richard Diebenkorn (1822-93)

$938,500: Untitled, by Agnes Martin (1912-2004)

$734,500: Lone Star, by Yashimoto Nara (b. 1959)

$362,500: Portrait of Robert Graham, by Alice Neel (1900-84)

$182,500: Slice of Pie, by Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

$782,500: Dollar Sign, by Andy Warhol (1928-87)

More Walter H. Everett Illustrations Appear

2011-11-16T02:15:00.000-08:00

Based on the surviving fraction of his work that he himself mostly destroyed, I judge Walter H. Everett to be one of the very finest painter-illustrators of 20th century. I last wrote about him here.

Until fairly recently little could be found on the Internet. But Leif Peng recently posted some Everetts that I hadn't encountered before. Peng found them on Greg Newbold's blog, and Newbold mentioned that he had been trading Everett scans with Kev Ferrara. The illustration at the top of this post is from the group of "new" Everetts just mentioned.

Clearly I've been well out of the Everett image loop, so I hope that Kev or Greg Newbold will drop a hint as to where those images were found. Regardless, the images solidify my initial judgment regarding Everett.

Henry C. Pitz in his book The Brandywine Tradition characterized Everett as follows:

Everett was cocky and confident, short but broad and deep-chested, with knotted arms like a wrestler. He had a strongly modeled, dark-skinned, rather handsome and pugnacious face that seemed to threaten bad temper. All this left one unprepared for the eventual discovery that behind this manner was a vein of poetry. Although he possessed all the outward signs of a brusque man of incessant action, he was in his heart a dreamer -- a daydreamer, incorrigibly lazy....

All his best pictures, even those of banal subject matter, had some flavor of an imagined world. His people were believable but not ordinary. Most pictures had a secret place; a tantalizing area where nothing was explicit, but where the eye was coaxed to muse and speculate. He preferred tonal subtleties, close values, edges that were lost and then found again....

Yet he was difficult, for he hated deadlines. Things were put off until the last moment or beyond it. He loved the long indolent hours of dreaming about pictures he would paint and when the day for delivery arrived he would go fishing to avoid the insistent telephone calls. Editors, wise in his ways, planned to spend the last twenty-four or forty-eight hours before deadline in his studio while he painted furiously and surely... For once galvanized into action, he was amazingly rapid and certain -- a true temperamental virtuoso.

Everett was a student of immensely influential Howard Pyle who is best known for illustrations featuring pirates and Revolutionary War themes.

So the illustration above from the May 1897 Ladies Home Journal strikes me as unusual. Moreover, compare it to the Everett below:

If the Pyle illustration had been painted around the time Everett was his student, I'd be wondering if the work was partly done by Everett, many of whose works are similar in spirit and also include blossoms. As things stand, it's possible that Everett was aware of that illustration even though he was 16 or 17 at the time it appeared in a women's magazine. Or perhaps Pyle has similar material to show his students while Everett was there.

(My source for the the Pyle publication date is Arpi Ermoyan's Famous American Illustrators, page 64.)

Art and Comics Coverge?

2011-11-14T02:40:00.000-08:00

Above is the October 2011 cover of Art News, where the top heading says "Where Art Meets Comics." The article it headlines is here. In case the link disappears, here are two paragraphs from it dealing with its thesis:

"Over the last decade, the boundary between fine art and comics has grown increasingly porous. In 2002, original panels from Chris Ware’s comic book Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, a minimalist meditation on longing and isolation, were featured in the Whitney Biennial. Four years later, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles collaborated on a seminal exhibition of 15 groundbreaking artists, called “Masters of American Comics.” In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened “Comic Abstraction,” which looked at how fine artists have employed elements of comics’ visual language.

"This year will see a slew of related exhibitions. The Whitney Museum is devoting a retrospective (closing October 16) to the painter Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), which explores his work as a cartoonist for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. (The characters he drew in his strips inspired wood carvings that he produced for the rest of his life.) In April 2012, the Oakland Museum of California will present the first major survey devoted to Daniel Clowes, the artist behind Ghost World, the graphic novel that inspired the 2001 film of the same name. And in April, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris will hold a full-scale retrospective of the counterculture comics legend Robert Crumb, creator of the straight-talking guru Mr. Natural and the hedonistic Fritz the Cat."

The thrust of the article is that contemporary comics are being looked at as "art." What was not mentioned is that some postmodern "art" looks a lot like contemporary comics. And no, I'm not thinking of Roy Lichtenstein who painted his take on comic book panels from the 1940s and 50s. Consider these:

Music (Borrowed Tune) by Brian Calvin - 2006

Loafers by Martin Maloney - c.2005

Kyoto Sky by Aya Takano - 2004

Streamlined Battleships

2011-11-11T02:41:00.000-08:00

During the 1930s the industrial design profession was clawing its way into viability. One device pioneering practitioners such as Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy relied on was flashy, self-funded designs intended to catch the eye of newspaper and magazine editors.

And those days were the era when modernistic design often incorporated streamlining as a theme. It even reached the point where Loewy came up with a streamlined pencil sharpener.

If aircraft and pencil sharpeners could be streamlined, then why not battleships? After all, streamlining could lead to either faster speeds or more efficient cruising, depending on the situation. And maybe streamlined cladding, if done right, might deflect enemy shells.

Otto Kuhler, best known for his streamlined locomotive designs, did the battleship design shown above as a just-for-the-hell-of-it proposition.

This, from a 1941 Revere Copper and Brass advertisement, is another version of a streamlined battleship. I don't know who designed it.

The problem is, whatever advantages streamlining might offer, the examples shown here would not have been combat-worthy in World War 2.

In terms of armament, they are more similar to the pre-Great War USS Florida (BB-30) shown here than to World War 2 equivalents. American battleships of 1912 vintage were spare designs with turreted main batteries and smaller, anti-torpedo boat guns mounted in the hull. The tall cage masts supported observation compartments where spotters noted where shells were hitting and passed aiming corrections to fire controllers below. Florida's masts also supported searchlight batteries. Aside from the masts and related equipment, the newly-operational Florida could have been streamlined in the Kuhler manner had that concept occurred to naval planners and architects in those days.

This is the USS South Dakota (BB-57), commissioned in 1942. When new, its topside bristled with anti-aircraft guns and more and more were added as the war progressed. Streamlining is clearly antithetical to the need for strong protection from aerial attack.

I'm no naval architect, so I'll only note that the design in the Revere ad has a hull shaped more like that of a powered yacht than those of fast battleships of the early 1940s which featured a more vertical prow near and below the waterline.

Another problem is that the turret armament is impractical. In the first place, five real guns couldn't be fitted into those turrets. In the second place, five guns would make for extremely awkward ammunition handling even if that many guns could be crammed in.

Those streamlined battleship designs were never anything but futuristic fluff. Yet streamlining was in the air in the late 1930s and the notion might have been briefly considered by a few naval planners. If it had, then it was quickly rejected in the interests of practicality under combat conditions.

Koester: Rembrandt of Ducks

2011-11-09T02:41:00.000-08:00

Being a one-trick-pony is something usually looked down upon. But what if that single trick is done with genius? Something to be said for that, thinks I.

Consider the painting below.

It's an audience favorite at Seattle's Frye Art Museum. And in fact it's really nicely done. In person, those duck feathers look almost buttery in their painterly smoothness, a real tour de force.

The artist is Alexander Max Koester (1864-1932), and here are a few more of his duck paintings.

Koester was born near Cologne and studied at the Karlsruhe Academy of Art. He moved to Munich and later to the Tyrol, painting landscapes and Tyrolean peasant life. But he was best at ducks. Especially white ones.

William Wontner, Faux Orientalist

2011-11-07T02:46:00.000-08:00

William Clarke Wontner (1857-1930) Liked to paint beautiful English women who usually were costumed in an oriental manner. Nothing seriously wrong with that: as any magazine rack will attest, pretty girls rule, and in late 19th century Europe Orientalism continued to be a popular painting genre.

Apparently Wontner had a good thing going because he painted many images in one-third length portrait fashion. Seen in isolation, this isn't in itself a problem, but his formula becomes obvious when several are seen at the same time. Take a look:

An Emerald Eyed Beauty

The Elegant Beauty

The Fair Persian

The Turban

Valeria

Wontner didn't follow that formula exclusively. Below are images that feature some variety.

Lady of Baghdad

The Jade Necklace

Wontner treated flesh and fabric with skill. He also avoided the "classical" version of the female face that was fashionable over much of the 19th century in some artistic corners. That is, the faces he painted are more like what we encounter daily. Moreover, he included hints of individuality and personality.

Lacking is any sense of psychological or narrative depth to his subjects: it's largely a case of decoration. And there's the matter of his models being obviously English rather than from Persia, Baghdad or whatever part of the Middle East the costuming suggested.

Apart from technique, it's hard to take Wontner's work seriously, pretty though it (and his subjects) might be.

"You had to have been there..."

2011-11-04T02:20:00.000-07:00

The early decades of modernism in painting featured innovation and experimentation. I have nothing against these so long as the results don't congeal into dogma -- which they did to some degree, unfortunately.

When reading about painters active in the early 20th century, I am struck by how often Paul Cézanne is cited as having been an important influence on artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. For my part, when in my brainwashed-by-modernism days, I never cottoned to Cézanne's paintings. And even now I have difficulty understanding just what it was that so inspired those other artists.

After years of puzzling over this, I'm coming to the conclusion that it was a case of "You had to have been there."

When reading history, one usually knows the outcome and this affects one's perception. But of course the actors in that history were prisoners of their time and had to make do while ignorant of future outcomes. And their frames of reference can be hard to understand by those of us from later times; it can be difficult indeed for us to strip away what we know and put ourselves exactly in the place of Picasso, Matisse, et. al., when confronted by Cézanne's works.

To illustrate this, consider special effects in science fiction movies. Actually, the following example won't work for readers under age 45 or thereabouts, but it's the best I can come up with because I can personally relate to it, not having seen Avatar.

Here are some space ships depicted in sci-fi movies over a 40-year span:

Flash Gordon serial - 1936 or 1938

The Day the Earth Stood Still - 1951

Destination Moon - 1950

2001 A Space Odyssey - 1968

Star Wars - 1977

Yes, these aren't in motion, so the main visual effects are missing. But the moving images become increasingly realistic over time. Space Odyssey images were sensational in their day, as were those for the earlier Destination Moon in 1950. But the technological leap that had the greatest impact was that of the original 1977 episode of Star Wars. In it, space ships were not static from a viewing angle (as in Space Odyssey), being made to maneuver realistically while not appearing to be the models they actually were (in contrast to the Flash Gordon example). Since 1977, models in matte environments have been replaced by computer graphics, but the visual difference has been relatively minor.

I haven't seen the 1977 Star Wars since it was new. At the time I found the effects stunning. I suspect that if I saw it again now they would seem less impressive. Moreover, I imagine that a teenage boy of today would consider the effects ho-hum: nothing special at all. That hypothetical teenager is my likely position regarding Cézanne compared to Matisse whose position was analogous to mine when I first viewed Star Wars.

Reacting to Modernism: Walter F. Isaacs

2011-11-02T02:30:00.000-07:00

My old stomping ground, the School of Art at the University of Washington, held an exhibit featuring three former faculty members including its first chairman Walter F. Isaacs (1886-1964). I went to see it because two of the artists (Ray Hill, 1891-1980 and Boyer Gonzales, Jr., 1909-1987) were there when I was. But I was most anxious to see Isaacs' work because he was active during a period that interests me greatly: 1920-1945.

Why those years? Because they were the time following the surge of art movements (Cubism, Fauves, Futurism, Blaue Reiter, etc., etc.) in the years just before the Great War. Following the war many avant-garde artists experienced a what-do-we-do-next? realization as the number of new movements fell off drastically. Meanwhile, artists trained traditionally had to come to terms with modernism because the art market seemed to be drifting in that direction and the matter of bread on the table could not be totally ignored. So many artists struggled stylistically, and it is the art they created while struggling that interests me.

Isaacs was raised on an Illinois farm, but other than the fact that he attended college somewhere, I have no information about what he did from the time he left the farm until he enrolled at Chicago's Art Institute in 1914 when he was about 28 years old. He then went on to teach at what is now Northern Colorado University in Greeley, but left to study in France in 1920. In 1923 he was hired as art professor at the University of Washington and headed the art department until his 1954 retirement. While at Washington he continued to travel to Europe in order to experience what was still the world's leading art.

Below are photos I snapped while viewing the exhibit. They are definitely of the quick-and-dirty sort, uncropped, shot with the lens set to wide-angle so that the focusing is (mostly) okay. The exhibit designers were astute enough to hang a series in chronological order; these are the first ones shown.

Gallery

From 1920s

From 1930s

From 1940s

From 1950s

From 1960s
It seems that Isaacs was never truly avant-garde. In fact, his work seems to lag about ten or 15 years behind what passed for cutting-edge during the confused decades from the start of the Great Was until the end of World War 2. For instance, note that he seems to have avoided Surrealism, the most prominent movement of the 1930s, and that he failed to surrender to pure abstraction, if the images in the exhibit are any guide.

Nevertheless, his paintings are influenced by modernism. Shapes are simplified and the appearances feature flatness, not depth.

Self-portraits
The portrait at the left was done in 1909 when he was in college. The center one dates from around 1930 and the right-hand one is thought to have been done in Paris in 1928 or thereabouts.

Mildred Isaacs - 1931

Babette Hughes - c.1942
Isaacs became more conservative or traditional when painting portraits, though the modernist characteristics of simplicity and flattening are still evident.

I have no proof, but the paintings shown above suggest that Walter Isaacs was most comfortable painting in the slightly-modern mode he practiced from 1920 into the 1940s. His later works strike me as being a bit forced, as if his role as art department chairman required him to keep up with both the times and the work of younger faculty members who were more comfortable with modernism.

Alphonse de Neuville: War Art Master

2011-10-31T02:00:00.000-07:00

When I wrote about combat art a while ago I mentioned that I thought that the best of the examples shown was a painting by Alphonse de Neuville (1835-1885). Actually, as I sit typing this post, I can't think of an artist who did that kind of job better. But if I do come across a better combat artist, I'll let you know.

Here are examples of his work dealing with the Franco-Prussian War:

Gallery

Les dernières Cartouches - 1873
This is Neuville's most famous painting, depicting surrounded French troops fighting at the point where their last cartridges are about to be expended.

Attaque, par le feu, d'une maison barricadée et crénelée - 1875
Aside from some corpses, not many men are to be seen in this urban skirmish.

Défense de la porte de Longboyau - 1879
Neuville liked to paint lots of men at dramatic moments. And he seldom failed to include wounded and dead soldiers.

Bivouac devant le Bourget, après le combat du 21 Décembre 1870 - 1872
A moment of calm following a battle near where Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis 57 years later.

Le cimetière de Saint-Privat (18 Août 1870) - c.1881
Once again German troops are about to breech a French defense in the war that cost Napoleon III his throne.

Scène de combat dans une église - c.1881
Neuville loved to include a lot of atmosphere; note the smoke from gunpowder.

Un porteur de dépêches: Sainte-Maries-Aux-Chênes, près de Metz (Septembre 1870) - c.1881
A comparatively calm scene where a French courier disguised as a peasant is brought before Prussian officers. Because he is not in uniform, he likely will be executed.

A Cavalryman - 1884
Neuville also painted studies of various soldiers.

Neuville's Wikipedia entry is here. And there is a recently published book about him.

I see that Amazon lists it, but I bought my copy through their French site (amazon.fr). It has plenty of reproductions including some full-page detail views. The text is in French and mostly comprised of quotes from reviews of his works along with some of his family correspondence. I considered the pictures more than enough to justify the price.

As for seeing his works in person, the Metropolitan in New York has one, but I suspect it isn't on display (let me know if I guessed wrong). You can see some of his work in Paris at the Musée de l'Armée, but otherwise you'll probably have to rent a car to track down his most important paintings elsewhere in France.

Turner Prize Finalists 2011

2011-10-28T02:35:00.000-07:00

It's Turner Prize time in Britain. This year's winner hasn't been announced yet, but the four finalist are known.

As the link above notes, the prize is given for recently completed works usually in the postmodern Concept Art genre. Examples of finalists' work are shown below.

Gallery

What to Ask for Others - Karla Black - 2011

A Library of Leaves - Martin Boyce

Man - Hilary Lloyd - 2010

The Resurface - George Shaw - 2011

I'm not sure why Shaw's painting made the grade. That's because (1) it's an actual painting and (2) there isn't much concept to it. I suppose the concept part is that he focuses on drab, commonplace subject-matter that a viewer is supposed (I assume) to read meaning into.

Black seems to be following the Marcel Duchamp path of designating whatever the self-proclaimed artists designates as art. Lloyd's piece is projected images, possibly video, though I can't rule out the positioning of the projectors as part of the Installation. Boyce's work can be considered some kind of sculpture.

The works of the latter three are the usual grist that can be found in the Tate Modern. I don't consider most of it art.

My problem is that the term "art" has been watered down (Duchamp's legacy) to the point where anything can be called "art." But if anything runs the risk of being "art," then art is nothing special and the term becomes meaningless.

Something created by a human being that pleases the eye might be considered art; this removes art a step from the proclaimed "art" by the self-proclaimed "artist" noted above. I'm willing to accept this as small-"a" art which this blog deals with it a fair amount.

Then there's capital-"A" Art which I define for the purpose of this post as the traditional Fine Arts.

Turner Prize art mostly falls in the first and (to some extent) second categories just mentioned. Sad to say for the Turnerites, such art has little likely long-term future in the sense that viewers a century from now probably will be less able to grasp the Concepts than the average viewer-in-the-street can today.

I find the Turner Prize both sad and silly. Its main worth is that it demonstrates how far Establishment art has fallen as modernism continues its aimless course.

Bernie Fuchs in Telluride

2011-10-26T02:52:00.000-07:00

I am kicking myself. Really hard. You see, I was in Telluride, Colorado, the old mining town - cum - deluxe ski resort in September and had totally forgotten that illustration master Bernie Fuchs painted views of the area and was the subject of a major exhibit in a gallery there a year or so before he died. I have a copy of the catalog and had I remembered to do so, I could have brought it along and correlated his Telluride scenes with what I was observing. This would have been interesting because artists necessarily have to be at least a little selective in what details they paint and also can invoke artistic license if deemed necessary.

For readers not familiar with Fuchs, here is his Washington Post obituary, here is a post by David Apatoff, a blogger who knew Fuchs personally and here is the Web site of the Telluride Gallery which held the exhibit and sells his works.

Since I didn't duplicate Fuchs' points of view, the best I can do here is pair two of his paintings with two of my photos that deal with the same subjects, but from different viewpoints. Also, he painted in winter whereas my photo showing mountains includes a dusting from an early storm that passed through two days earlier.

Telluride Looking East - 2007

Looking down East Colorado Avenue
Fuchs placed himself a block or two farther east than from where I shot my photo. His painting has a telephoto lens perspective, so it's quite possible that he worked up the painting from a reference photograph.

Winter Noon on Main Street - 2008

New Sheridan Hotel
My shot of the old (but recently restored) New Sheridan was taken from directly across the street whereas Fuchs seems to have selected the lane in the middle of Easy Colorado that is used as a zone for temporary parking for unloading while checking into the hotel.

Adam Hughes Draws Cover Babes

2011-10-24T02:48:00.000-07:00

The best comic book art is usually found on the covers. That's because an artist can spend more time on a cover illustration than on any one of all the panels required for inside illustration. Oh, and the publisher always wants a flash cover that will generate sales, so that adds to the motivation.

An illustrator whose career has focused on cover art is Adam Hughes (born 1967). His Wikipedia entry is here, his web site here and he also has posted work and comments here.

The image above is the cover of his book dealing with cover work done for DC over the last 20 years along with other items. It seems to be doing well because the copy I recently bought is from the fourth printing.

Allow me to confess that I don't follow the comic book trade nor that of the graphic novels field. It's all so complicated these days what with editors and writers valiantly trying to keep their products fresh by reinventing backstories, creating alternative universes, assembling new character juxtapositions and diving headlong into politically correct themes. When I was a kid reading comic books, the superheroes simply went about their business of dealing with criminals of various sorts.

Another change from the good old days -- one that I approve of -- is the improved quality of cover art. Nowadays there is a body of illustrators who create dramatic scenes whose impact is heightened by the sound drawing and anatomical knowledge of the artist. Such illustrations and their creators are so prized that collections of their work are published in book form, as is the case for Hughes.

But Adam Hughes differs from the rest of that pack: he includes humor and a general light touch as opposed to depicting stern scenes of superheros in conflict with their opposition. Examples are shown below.

I wish I knew more about Hughes' background. He was born and raised in New Jersey but spent most of his career in Atlanta. He has called himself a high school dropout and on another occasion claimed that he didn't go to college because he was, as he has put it, too middle class to get financial aid and didn't muster the grades and test scores to earn a scholarship. As for art, he is essentially self-taught, which is probably a good thing; the usual art school training would have wasted a lot of his time.

That said, Hughes comes off as a sharp cookie in the commentaries he likes to make on many of his works. He knows art history and color theory plus a good deal of general history and other useful knowledge. I didn't catch any serious errors while reading through those commentaries. And by the way, those commentaries are salted with humorous bits; buy the book and enjoy!
Gallery

Catwoman head rendering stages
This shows stages of Catwoman's head as it appears on the book cover. The image to the left is in ink and colored markers. It was scanned into Photoshop where coloring, shading and other details were added; this is Hughes' typical approach, though his convention demonstrations go no further than the ink and marker stage.

Cover art for Catwoman No. 56
This isn't Catwoman, but instead her apprentice Holly who's recuperating at a diner after a rough night learning the cat burglar trade.

Power Girl
The Power Girl character is mega-stacked, and Hughes had some fun with it here.

Bookplate for Hughes' San Diego Comic-Con materials
Hughes is a big Art Nouveau fan and likes to use that style when he can get away with it. That's Wonder Woman, by the way.

Wonder Woman and Lois Lane dish while Superman ponders
Besides Catwoman, Hughes did a lot of Wonder Woman covers. He likes this illustration a lot because Wonder Woman is relaxed and smiling, which he feels is her true character.

Small Cars get Sexier

2011-10-21T02:17:00.000-07:00

Small cars sold in America are generally cheap to buy. They also usually look cheap. That's because labor costs for building a small car aren't much less that the cost of assembling a larger car. So what suffers is appearance.

Small cars use less material than larger cars, but not grossly less. What they don't usually have are parts made from top-quality materials. That is, instrument panel knobs and switches are made of cheap plastic, seats are simple and covered with comparatively inexpensive cloth, wheels feature small hubcaps or phoney-metallic disks made of plastic and so forth. Body shapes tend to be simple as well. Rather than fluid lines and dips and creases requiring multiple metal press strikes, sheet metal is usually shaped using as few strikes as possible to cut fabrication costs.

A major exception to all this was the original Volkswagen Beetle that hit American shores in the 1950s. VWs, while not luxurious, were clearly well made and were a sales success.

In the last few years run-of-the-mill small cars are being challenged by new models featuring styling that's as flashy as that used on much more expensive models. Hyundai and Ford are leading the charge; if their sales are good, other makers will have to follow suit.

Gallery

Chevrolet Cobalt - 2007
The Cobalt features some metal sculpting along the sides, but other body panels are generally simple. It looks cheap to me.

Kia Rio - 2009
The same goes for the Rio, a truly basic car.

Ford Focus - 2011
This is Ford's latest iteration of its popular Focus model. It's a European car with modifications required by American regulations and consumer tastes. Note the fancy sheet medal work; it's a lot classier looking than the Cobalt and Rio shown above.

Hyundai Elantra - 2011
The Elantra is also heavily sculpted, providing an image that doesn't seem cheap.

Illustrators and World War 2

2011-10-19T02:11:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a war on, and nearly everyone pitched in to fight or provide support for those who did.

This was true for illustrators and the clients they worked for. World War 2 illustrations and photos in American advertisements (along with some stray government promotional works, editorial content and even comic strip panels) are the subject of a book by the Frenchman Georges Grod who came to love American aircraft and related advertising as a boy at the time of the Liberation. The cover with a fine J.C. Leyendecker illustration for Goodyear Aircraft (yes, the tire company built planes too) is shown above and a link to Amazon is here.

Although illustrations are scattered throughout the book, one chapter is devoted to illustrators organized alphabetically. Each illustrator is given a short biographical note and examples of his work in war advertising are shown nearby. Featured illustrators include Melbourne Brindle, Reynolds Brown, John Gannam, Clayton Knight, Jo Kotula, Fred Ludekens, Paul Rabut, Noel Sickles, Thornton Utz and even Coby Whitmore.

Some advertisers used ads to push their products, but did this in the framework of wartime. Others such as automobile companies no longer had products to sell, but advertised their war manufacturing in part to remind people that they were still in business and (perhaps) to keep their name in mind for after the war. In many cases advertisers were able to make a strong link to the war effort, but others sometimes had a large stretch to do so. Below are a few examples I located on the Web.

By Dean Cornwell

By Saul Tepper

By Ray Prohaska

Ernest Blumenschein: Moderately Modernist

2011-10-17T03:08:00.000-07:00

Ernest Blumenschein (1874-1960) was building a career as an illustrator when the supplies wagon he and another artist were using while touring the Southwest broke down near Taos, New Mexico. This event served as the catalyst for his eventual abandonment of illustration and move to Taos to practice a career as a fine arts painter and leading light of the artist colony that developed there.

Biographical details can be found on WIkipedia (here) and this link. I recently wrote about his home here.

A fairly recent book about him discusses his relationship to the modernist movement which he began to embrace in the early 1920s. Compared to other Taos art colony painters, Blumenschein and a few others regarded themselves as progressives rather than conservative in their artistic styles. But the book also notes that towards the end of his long career, he held doubts regarding the Abstract Expressionism that epitomized modernism by the 1950s.

From my 2011 perch, I find only the mildest whiff of modernism in Blumenschein's post-1922 works. Yes, he simplified shapes of hills, trees and people. But no more so than many other artists of the day such as Grant Wood. Poor Blumenschein was never able to break away from his art training and illustration background to the point of gross distortion as Picasso, George Grosz and other were doing.

Below are examples of Blumenschein's fine art work. There might be examples of his illustration on the Internet but, alas, I didn't notice any. (He turned out good work and could have had a distinguished career had he stuck with illustration.)
Gallery

Taos Indian Holding a Water Jar - 1911
This is the earliest example I could find. It's a competent, illustration-like work with Impressionist color touches; illustrator N.C. Wyeth was painting in a similar fashion at the time.

Star Road and White Sun - 1920
This is perhaps Blumenschein's best known painting.

Superstition - 1921
Another example of his pre-modernist work, though it does exhibit considerable picture-plane flatness and decorative touches.

Sangre de Cristo Mountains - 1925
Simplification of forms and other stylizing are obvious here. Other artists 1925-35 took a similar approach, but depicted parts of the country such as Iowa or New England.

Canyon Red and Black - 1934
Stylization is less obtrusive in this painting.

The Chief Goes Through - 1956
Towards the end of his career Blumenschein was painting townscapes as well as landscapes. Simplification is present, but not grossly so. The "Chief" in the title is the Santa Fe railroad's Super Chief passenger train seen at the right.

Floating Fifties Furniture

2011-10-14T02:06:00.000-07:00

Last week I paid a brief visit to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Canada), mostly because I'd never gotten around to visiting the place on previous visits and thought it was high time I did so.

The museum is modest in scale because the Victoria metro area is not large. The main exhibit when I was there had to do with the art of Victoria native Emily Carr, but it too was of modest scope.

An exhibit that aroused enough interest to justify a blog post had to do with Canadian furniture and industrial design from the late 1940s into the 1960s. I'll skip over the hi-fi sets and tabletop radios to focus on the furniture style which I'd half forgotten. Although the objects were Canadian, the core style is close to what was being done in the United States and elsewhere at the time.

The photos above are of objects in rough chronological order (if my all-too-quick glance at the information plaques sank in correctly). The top photo deals with the late 1940s and early 50s, the middle with the mid-to-late fifties and the bottom one with the late 50s and early 1960s.

Judging by appearance alone and not any designers' statements of intent, the goal was an appearance of lightness. This was in contrast to "heavy," "substantial" styles of traditional furniture. Horizontal elements tend to be thin. legs and supports are often in the form of thin metal dowels painted black so as not to intrude on the "floating" effect created by the bright or light colored horizontal bits.

A popular contemporaneous style was Danish or Scandinavian modern. Such furniture usually featured wood and fabric (which material and to what degree depending on function). It too tended to be uncluttered, but usually seemed more substantial than the rather extreme look pictured above.

From an interior and furniture design standpoint, the 1950s seem to represent an extreme of the modernist movement in keeping with Abstract Expressionism in painting which peaked at the same time.

Taos Artist House-Museums

2011-10-12T02:19:00.000-07:00

Taos, New Mexico became an artist colony beginning around the turn of the 20th century. Its start is generally reckoned as the breakdown of a wagon that illustrator Ernest Blumenschein (1874-1960) and a fellow artist were using while exploring the American southwest. Blumenschein stumbled into Taos, New Mexico, the nearest town, and became enthralled by the scenery and quality of light. As time went on, other artists, including Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955) came to spend all or part of their time in the Taos area. Santa Fe, about 70 miles distant, collected its own set of painters.

The residences of Blumenschein and Fechin still exist, but have been converted to museums. Both are only a short walk from the old Taos town square.

Fechin's place is now the Taos Art Museum. It began as an old adobe structure that he modified using touches of Spanish Colonial and Russian dacha styles.

Blumenschein's house has a 1797 structure at its core and was enlarged over time. It features the art of Blumenschein, his wife and daughter. Works of other artists are rotated in, but tend to be restricted to one room so as not to crowd out the Blumenschein art. The same can't said of the museum at Fechin's; when I was there, only one room contained Fechin's works, most of the wall space being devoted to an exhibit by a currently active local painter.

Let's take a look:
Gallery

This is the Fechin house as viewed when approaching from the street; the museum entrance is at the rear.

Here is a cardboard model Fechin used when working out his modifications.

The dining room was the only one displaying Fechin's work the day I visited.

At least they left a self-portrait on the wall.

These are views of the living room.

Fechin's studio was in a separate building to the rear of the house. Here is an interior view, but the paintings are by the local artist, not Fechin.

This is a bedroom in the Blumenschein house. The artwork between the beds is by Blumenschein's wife, Mary Sheppard Greene.

Here is the Blumenschein living or perhaps dining room. Again, the main piece of art is by Greene.

Burton Silverman Goes Soft -- Or Not

2011-10-10T02:18:00.000-07:00

While window shopping art galleries in Taos, New Mexico recently, I spotted the painting shown above ("Summer Night" ca. 2001) at Total Arts Galley. It was by Burton Silverman, yet it has a different "look" than the Silvermans I am familiar with.

The difference is that it's a lot softer looking than I've come to expect from Silverman. He tends to paint crisply, especially in focal areas.

Here are other examples of his work:

Gallery

The White Couch - 1997

Ambivalence - 2008

Anne Benson
At first, I wondered if he had changed his style. But no, he painted it about ten years ago and what he's done since is typical Silverman. What I think happened was that he allowed the setup surrounding his wife Claire to intrude into the foreground more than he usually does and had to soften it so that it wouldn't distract from her. Further, the interior lighting is somewhat softer than the starker lighting usually found in his interior scenes. The net result was a surprising Silverman (well, surprising to me).

I like Silverman's work a lot. He is extremely good at faces, which is why he has gotten many portrait commissions over the years since he abandoned his career as an illustrator. Plus, he has a quirk that fascinates me. Note that he includes fine, black lines in finished paintings. Some appear to be little accents that help define the structure of his subject. Others are more like the residue of sketching.

And I wonder how he does those lines. Since I'm too cheap to buy one of his demonstration videos, I'll have to guess. He paints in oil, so they probably aren't via pen and ink. Moreover, they're often pretty long, and that tends to rule out palette knives and most fine brushes due to the amount of paint they can hold. For now, my theory is he uses fine flat sable brushes, stroking sideways. Yet many of his lines are long and uniformly thin, which suggests the palette knife or pen theories I just set aside. Other theories or (better yet) solid information would be greatly appreciated, so please comment.

Matisse's Favorite Painting

2011-10-07T02:20:00.000-07:00

I'm working my way through this biography of Henri Matisse in a belated effort to find out why there was all the fuss about him. Pages 72-74 and elsewhere deal with his purchase of and relationship to Paul Cézanne's circa 1879-82 "Three Bathers" at a time when he was nearly broke. Despite his lack of money, Matisse arranged to finance the painting because he considered it very important to his own art. He kept it for decades as a constant source of wonder and inspiration. An on-line reference dealing with this is here.

For those readers expecting any kind of halfway rational commentary regarding the painting and Matisse's longstanding relationship to it, forget the idea. Yes, to a very limited degree I can place this in the context of the Standard Art-Historical Narrative of the Triumph of Modernism. But that's about it.

You see, I've never ever in all my years viewing and reading about art been able to understand either Cézanne or Matisse. In fact, I don't really like anything either one produced. That includes the Three Bathers painting shown at the top of this post: so far as I'm concerned it's a crude piece of art having nothing of interest to me.

Obviously my take runs counter to the beliefs of a lot of famous artists, art critics and art historians who do find what they consider wonderful things in the paintings of Cézanne and Matisse. Yet somehow I don't think that I'll ever be persuaded that the two were as great as claimed.

My best guess as to why Cézanne and Matisse were venerated by modernist-leaning contemporaries is that it had something to do with the art-historical context and the timing of the appearance of their various works as well as the modernist veneration of creativity as an end in itself.

Cutaway to G.H. Davis

2011-10-05T02:22:00.000-07:00

When I was young I used to come across illustrations by the Illustrated London News' technical guy G.H. (George Horace) Davis (1881-1960). I could find little on Davis on the Internet: this link has a biographical squib just below the portrait photos.

Not that I read the ILN anyplace but in the form of bound issues in the college library stacks, it's just that his work would be reproduced elsewhere and I would notice his distinctive signature.

Davis' specialty was cutaway illustrations where exteriors are selectively peeled away to reveal structural and functional interior details. His main subjects were airplanes and ships, though he also used his approach on other items as needed by his editor. And he did non-cutaway paintings on the side.

Here are examples of his work. Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

HMS Ark Royal - 1939

High-altitude aircraft - 1930s

Bristol Beaufighter - early 1940s

Hawker Hurricane - c.1940

Supermarine Spitfire - c.1940

Photo of a Spitfire and a Hurricane together

I'm pretty sure that Davis "freehanded" most of his illustrations. Compare his Hurricane and, especially, Spitfire with those in the photograph. A charitable explanation is that he had to do these drawings on a tight deadline and lacked time to work up the images mechanically from three-view drawings as an architect would do when preparing a rendering of a structure. This method or something analogous was used in Davis' time by cutaway artists for British aviation magazine who apparently were allowed longer lead-times. Artists who do paintings of aircraft also generally begin with mechanical delineation; failure to do so would run a strong risk of making a distorted image.

Another problem Davis and other aircraft cutaway specialist faced was security; too much detail might be useful to enemies in times before aircraft could be shot down and examined. For example, Davis' Beaufighter is the daytime version. The radar-equipped night fighter flew only over Britain on interceptor missions, so His Majesty's Government would be most unhappy if Davis had spilled any airborne radar-related beans in 1941 or '42.

John Whitcomb: Never-Changing Style

2011-10-03T02:50:00.000-07:00

I recently posted the first in an occasional series of posts about illustrators who changed their style in order to maintain their careers. Those who failed to do that either had shooting star careers or were the fortunate few who successfully worked for decades with few or no adjustments. Most famous of the latter is Norman Rockwell, who never went out of style and now is on the fringe of being considered a member of the fine arts crew. J.C. Leyendecker had a long run as well, but fell out of favor after a 30-ish year run.

In the present post I deal with Jon Whitcomb (1906-1988) who also did well for decades with minor style adjustments. His brief Wikipedia entry is here. Matthew Innis provides examples of Whitcomb's work along with quotations dealing with the female face, Whitcomb's primary subject. A slightly sour take on Whitcomb is here.

For a number of Whitcomb illustrations that have dates assigned, click here. One illustration is dated 1930, but that must be incorrect, given the fashions depicted; I'd say 1940 would be closer.

This brings to mind the fact that I cannot find examples of his work from earlier than the late 1930s on the Internet (though I might have overlooked some). Whitcomb was in his early 30s by that time and surely must have been in a career-building mode before then. Illustration Magazine notes that Whitcomb is in the queue for a future article; perhaps that will reveal some early exmaples.

Here is some of his production (he presented himself as a businessman cranking out product, not as an artist):

Gallery

Advertisement for 1939 Cadillac 62
The illustration is signed, so presumably Whitcomb also did the car rendering. However, for years it was common for one artist to do the car and another one the setting. Until I get more information I'll take the signature as proof.

Magazine illustration - 1939
This was done about the same time as the car ad. It shows that Whitcomb had attained his mature style by that point.

Collier's magazine cover - 12 August 1941

"I think I love you" - magazine illustration
Archetypical Jon Whitcomb.

Woman wearing large hat
No signature, but plenty of web sites claim it's a Whitcomb. If so, I'd guess it was from the 1960s.

Minimal face
A great illustration, also likely from the 1960s (can any reader help us on this?).

Jon Whitcomb specialized in the "big face" type of illustration that emerged in women's magazines during the 1940s and remained dominant into the mid-1960s. He did it very well, creating personal fame and earning a bundle of money. Lovely though much of his work is, it's hard to argue that it's anything beyond superficial on any other dimension. From what I've read about him, it's a good chance that Whitcomb would agree as he hopped into his fancy car to head for the bank to deposit the latest check.

Artist's Name = Widespread Expression

2011-09-30T02:57:00.000-07:00

When an artist becomes famous, the nature of that fame usually resides in the images of his work in public's mind. This is different from the fame of movie stars, actors, fashion models and others whose physical appearance is the leading "hook" for public grasping. A few artists are generally recognized by their appearance as well as their work, examples being van Gogh, Lautrec, Picasso and Warhol.

Then there is the odd case where the artist's subject matter becomes a concept that, in turn, is given the artist's name by the public. It's an odd path to artistic immortality, but there it is.

As an American, I naturally think of the Rube Goldberg machine, an elaborate, illogical sequence of odd connections that results in an outcome that could easily have been reached by simpler means.

Above is an example of a Rube Goldberg device and here is the Wikipedia entry for Goldberg who it seems earned an engineering degree from the University of California (Berkeley) before taking up the cartoonist's pen.

If I were British, I would use the term Heath Robinson to refer to the same sort of thing. Below is an example and here is his entry.

Robinson came from a family of illustrators and could whip up some nice, straight work in that field as well as his gizmo cartoons.

I don't know the inner thoughts of Goldberg and Robinson regarding the nature of their fame. But fame of a nice sort is rare, and if I had been them, I'd be happy to accept it.

When Eduardo Benito Was in Vogue

2011-09-28T02:49:00.000-07:00

Eduardo Benito (1891-1981) was an icon of the Art Deco era. When I was young I enjoyed seeing his work while flipping through library copies of old issues of the Art Directors Annual, a publication that taught me more than any other about the history of commercial art from the late 1920s into the 1950s.

Here is the best biographical information I could find about Benito on the Internet. It seems that magazine publishing magnate Condé Nast kept Benito busy doing covers for Vanity Fair when he wasn't producing Vogue covers for him. Not a bad gig for an illustrator from Spain.

Gallery

Vogue cover - April 1927

Vanity Fair cover - August 1931

Vogue cover - August 1929

Vanity Fair cover - March 1929

Illustration - 1928

In the Beginning: Gustav Klimt

2011-09-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

For a time Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was obscure, but now he is famous if for nothing else than his gilded painting "The Kiss." If you venture into Vienna and cast about for a souvenir, you're likely to encounter one Klimt image or another unless you are truly into stocking up on Mozart candies. His Wikipedia entry is here.

As his career proceeded, Klimt's style became increasingly loose while his colors brightened. His early works were done in a highly academic fashion with a great degree of skill. From what I've seen, I'd have to conclude that Klimt could have practiced in almost any style extant in his times and would have been successful at it. Many other modernists could not handle academic style art well and, perhaps for that reason, quickly moved to modernism because there was little in the way of alternatives.

Let's take a look at some of Klimt's pre-Kiss work:

Gallery

Fabel - Fable - 1883

Idylle - Idyl - 1884
Click on the image for a large version.

Auditorium of the Alte Burgtheater, Vienna - 1888
This was painted in gouache.

Joseph Pembauer - 1890
Here we find touches of the later Klimt such as the introduction of gilt design in the background.

Liebe - Love - 1895
The painting of the background is in a looser style.

Sonja Knips - 1898
Click on the image for a large version.

Damenbildnis - Portrait of a Lady - 1898-99
Klimt is on the cusp of abandoning his previous academic/naturalistic style for the stylized paintings best known to us today.

Blogging Note

2011-09-24T02:51:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed that my response to comments has been slower and weaker than usual. That's because I've been traveling for most of the last two weeks. The posts you've been reading were written earlier and queued for scheduled later release. I'm writing this in artsy Taos, New Mexico and will post about it if I see anything interesting enough to merit doing so.

Design at Your Fingertips

2011-09-23T02:29:00.000-07:00

No doubt the concept (in rudimentary form, perhaps) has been around for ages. And perhaps someone else articulated it clearly earlier, but the guy I'm aware of who built a highly successful career around ergonomics and human factors was industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. As the result of reading his book Designing for People when I aspired to be an industrial designer, along with a lot of interaction experience with various devices in the years since, I pay a lot of attention to the quality of interaction with tools of various kinds.

This post lightly touches on the subject of computer keyboards, something I and most readers of this blog deal with often. It's not a comprehensive survey; I have some illustrations below, a few comments and a wistful conclusion. Feel free to toss in your two Euro-cents (while they last!) in our new, improved, faster publishing Comments link at the bottom.

Gallery

Apple II computer - 1977
Early Apples integrated the keyboard with the body of the machine. I suppose this helped keep costs down a little, but it forced users to be in a fixed position while typing.

IBM PC - early 1980s
The IBM PC featured a keyboard tethered to the system unit. This allowed a user to work with the keyboard on his lap or in other convenient positions: greater freedom. The keyboard had a nice touch along with a click-clack aural feedback. I bought my PC in May, 1983 and really liked the keyboard (which was probably relatively expensive to produce).

Microsoft ergonomic keyboard

Microsoft wireless keyboard

Flexible, waterproof keyboard

Combimouse keyboard
The set of keyboards shown above indicate the variety of ergonomic and other solutions that are or have been on the market. I haven't tried any of them, so I can't comment as to their effectiveness in aiding typing. The reason I haven't tried them is because, unlike some office workers, I seldom engage in extended typing sessions on a computer. When I compose a blog post such as this I'll write a few sentences and then pause to consider what I wrote, taking my hands away from the keyboard. And, in any case, these posts aren't long. Similar thing if I'm writing a computer program: write a few lines of code and then think and perhaps run a test.

But in theory those warped-looking keyboards should be in better synch with one's body. Try dropping your hands before you on a table. Note how your forearms tend to converge, forming something like a 90 degree angle to one another. If your hands are extended, the bones of your middle finger should fall along the same axis as the forearm. But when typing on a standard keyboard, the wrists will have to turn outward a bit so that the hands can cover the board better; this breaks the fingerbone-forearm axis I just mentioned. Warped keyboards tend to preserve that axis.

Apple iMac keyboard
I have an iMac and paid extra for this keyboard which is larger than the basic one (which is like that of a MacBook laptop computer). This keyboard has, among other additions, a key allowing for forward-deletes and a numeric pad, two features that make the extra cost worthwhile to me.

Apple MacBook Air
I also have one of these. For some time Apple keyboards have had flat keys that (for me, anyway) took some adjusting, though I've now adjusted my "touch" accordingly (but still don't like it). I can understand why those flat keys are used in slim laptops such as the Air; tall keys would require a thicker computer.

So why didn't Apple provide better (for me, at least) keys on desktop machines? To cut costs, probably -- though their computers are pretty pricey and probably profitable enough to warrant the added cost of a decent keyboard for iMacs.

Apple iPad virtual keyboard
I've only tried the iPad virtual keyboard briefly -- I used it to bring up this blog on an iPad at an Apple Store. So I know it works, but have no idea as to how well I could knock out an email or blog text using it.

Conclusion? Thirty years later, the IBM PC keyboard is still the best, though I concede the necessity for flat keys on slim laptop computers.

Bunny Art

2011-09-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

Australian painter Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny (1864-1947) was stuck with a last name that I consider unfortunate, though I don't know his take on the matter. To me, "Bunny" is unserious. On the other hand, it's distinctive, so might have been an marketing asset.

Setting this aside, he seems to have been a skilled painter who produced some interesting works. I can't recall seeing any of his paintings either in the USA or Europe. Many are in Australia, which I've never visited. Therefore accept what I just said as a provisional take.

There is a Wikipedia entry on Bunny here, but it's quite brief. A more comprehensive biographical not is here and a short one here.

Below are examples of his work.

Gallery

A Summer Morning - 1897

Dolce farniente (Sweet Idleness) - c.1897
These are two earlier works.

Nellie Melba - 1901-02

CF Keary
Two portraits, the upper one of the famous Australian opera singer.

Return from the Garden - c.1906

Nocturne - c.1908

A Summer Morning - c.1908
Three paintings from the same period.

The Sun Bath - 1913
This was painted on his return to Paris from a visit to Australia. Note the more impressionistic style.

Muses Plucking the Wings of Sirens - c. 1922
An even later work. Bunny seems to have believed that he wasn't Modernist so, like so many other artists of his time, made an effort. If he tried this because his earlier style wasn't selling, I can sympathize even though the result isn't as impressive as his earlier works.

Dictators, Portrayed

2011-09-19T02:32:00.000-07:00

If you're a dictator, l'état c'est moi is the real deal. So if the nation requires glorification, you must humbly submit to at least a small dose of same.

In the age of photography, portrait painting seems to have taken a back seat to the lens and darkroom where dictators are concerned. Nevertheless, paintings were produced for many of the leading dictators of the era 1920-50.

My guess is that the Soviet Union's Stalin was depicted in paint the most. These paintings weren't not necessarily portraits; a good many showed him with workers, children, et cetera gathered around him or in other genre settings.

Stalin and China's Mao Tse-Tung had their faces on huge banners, but that's something different from a formal portrait; our Mao example is in fact a poster. Adolf Hitler, despite of or perhaps because of his background as a painter (of architecture, mostly) tended to favor photographers.

Below are examples of dictator portraits.

Gallery

Joseph Stalin by Victor Oreshnikov - 1948

Adolf Hitler by Jacobs

Francisco Franco

Mao Tse-Tung poster

Jozef Pilsudski by Wojciech Kossak - 1928

Benito Mussolini by Gerardo Dottori - 1933

Gary Larson: Best Single-Panel Cartoonist?

2011-09-16T02:10:00.000-07:00

What's considered funny varies from person to person. I find Gary Larson's "The Far Side" cartoons such as those above hysterical: my wife doesn't get them. Nevertheless, she's happy to say "Hi" to Gary and his wife if we cross their path while taking an evening stroll. (The Larsons live in a nicer neighborhood than ours, but only three blocks away from us.)

A lengthy Wikipedia entry on Larson is here.

I'd better qualify this post's headline. By one-panel cartoons, I'm restricting the meaning to syndicated newspaper cartoons, but needed to keep the headline short so didn't elaborate. Single-panel magazine cartoons such as in the New Yorker are another matter, and my top names there would include Charles Addams and Peter Arno.

I enjoyed The Far Side because of the quirky humor, the unexpected situations and his cast of occasionally-reappearing characters and stereotypes. Added to this was his drawing style -- clear and not cluttered layouts coupled with amusingly designed, often dumpy humans, not to mention animals and other creatures with personality. Text and illustration often provided the viewer with several things to chuckle over and not just a punchline.

Consider Gary Larson a cartoonist totally in synch with the times in which he was active.

Koloman Moser Did It All

2011-09-14T02:55:00.000-07:00

Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the leading lights of the Vienna Secession and probably the most versatile of the lot. He designed furniture, posters, stained glass windows and household objects besides doing a little painting. Moreover, the work he did was generally of very high quality (with an exception noted below).

Biographical information on Moser can be found here and here. There are books about him as well; check Amazon or another web site for details.

Here are a few examples of his work:

Gallery

Poster design (not used) for first Secession exhibit - 1898

Poster design - "Read!"

Frommes calendar - 1899

Secession Exhibition poster - 1902

Window, Steinhof chapel - 1905

Cruet stand - 1904-05

100 Crown banknote, Austria-Hungary Bank - 1910

The Three Graces
For some reason Moser was not adept at painting, or so I think. This one is better than most, but still rather messy compared to the clean, well-designed posters, bookmarks and other graphic work he produced.

Lawren Harris: Strong Canadian

2011-09-12T02:50:00.000-07:00

Lawren Harris (1885-1970) came from a rich family. That's helpful if you want to make painting your career. And was Canadian. For some reason that's not so helpful if you want to become a world-renowned painter.

At least Harris had the advantage of being a member of Canada's most celebrated artistic ensemble, the Group of Seven, a collection of painters he subtly helped financially during their early, struggling years.

Since I started blogging six years ago at 2Blowhards I've been forced by the requirement to come up with new posts to broaden my art history horizons beyond the Received Modernist Narrative that I experienced in college. What I discovered were a good many very good painters who had the art-historical misfortune to ply their trade outside of Paris for much of their careers.

So it is with Harris. I have trouble distinguishing "good" and "great" in everything from spaghetti sauce to portraiture -- at a certain point the evaluation becomes more subjective than ever. Let me just say that I think Harris was very good. And versatile, too. See below.

Gallery

Mt. Lefroy - 1930
Harris painted many landscapes in this vein -- in the same spirit as his near-contemporary Rockwell Kent.

The Corner Store - 1912
An early painting. He also did a number of townscapes.

Pine Tree and Red House - 1924
Later on he came up with this blend of townscape and snowy/icy scene. Hard to avoid for a Canadian painter unless you're based in Victoria.

Mrs. Oscar Taylor - 1920
Harris could paint portraits too. This one has a whiff of modernist simplifying, but not enough to overwhelm the subject (as so often happened with other artists of the time).

Dr. Salem Bland - 1924
Another solid portrait.

Paul Allen Collects Flying Objects

2011-09-09T02:11:00.000-07:00

Let's say you were co-founder of a tiny start-up company selling a version of the computer language Basic that would run on grossly underpowered small computers with hardly any data storage capacity. And after 20 years that puny company would grow to dominate a new, huge industry by virtue of its operating systems and office productivity software. Which made you filthy rich.

What, then, do you do with your money?

You could have a huge yacht built for yourself. You could buy some professional sports teams -- a basketball team in Portland, Oregon and in Seattle a soccer team and a football team. You could invest in stuff. But aside from that yacht, what about spending on fun things? How about a museum near the foot of Seattle's Space Needle devoted to rock music and science fiction? Done; what else? How about buying a selection a World War 2 vintage aircraft, meticulously restoring them to flying condition and creating a museum for them?

So that's what Paul Allen of Microsoft fame did. His aircraft museum is in a converted hangar at the south end of Paine Field in Everett, Washington. (The north end of the airport hosts Boeing's huge factory that builds 747, 777 and 787 airlines, many of the latter currently parked engineless near Allen's museum.)

It's called the Flying Heritage Museum and here is a page from its web site with a short explanation of how it came to be.

The planes actually do fly on occasion. Not long ago I saw its P-51 Mustang and Supermarine Spitfire cavorting over Lake Washington before the start of unlimited class hydroplane races. A few planes, while flyable, are never flown. That's because they are the only ones of their kind known to exist.

The museum web site has plenty of fine pictures of the collection, but below are some photos I snapped in an attempt to provide a tourist's view. It was a rare sunny Seattle day, so light pouring through the windows made it almost impossible to get top-quality exposures.

Gallery

P-47, Fw-190 and B-25
Here is a general view of part of the museum.

B-25 bombardier compartment
A head-on view of the B-25 Mitchell at the right of the first photo. Note how complete the restoration is: bombsight, machine gun ammunition belts and so forth. Something I had never been aware of is the windshield wiper on the bombardier's optically flat center windshield, this for improved perfomance of the bombsight.

Messerschmitt Bf 109 E-3
E-series 109s came on line in time for the Battle of France in 1940 and fought in the Battle of Britain.

Hawker Hurricane Mk XII A
Although more Hurricanes flew in the Battle of Britain than Spitfires, there are fewer survivors. This was probably because the Spitfire was more glamorous and saw first-line service throughout the war, whereas Hurricane production ceased in 1944.

P-40C Tomahawk
Most P-40s I've seen are later versions which are longer, have different cockpit glazing and sometimes Merlin engines rather than their initial Allisons. The similar-looking B and C series and derivatives were in combat in 1941-42 with the British in North Africa, the AVG "Flying Tigers" in China and the U.S. Army Air Forces at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in the Pacific. Combat capability aside, I always thought that early P-40s such as this one were the best-looking of the lot.

Polikarpov I-16 Type 24 Rata
Allen's Rata was the first I've ever seen. I was surprised any remained, though it seems that more than half a dozen actually still exist. They were used by Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, Chinese fighting the Japanese invasion and by the Soviet air force in the weeks following Hitler's 1941 invasion.

Adaptive Artists: Dean Cornwell

2011-09-07T03:02:00.000-07:00

With this post I started an occasional series dealing with illustrators who preserved their careers by adjusting their style to suit changing illustration style fashions.

Now I consider Dean Cornwell (1892-1960), who is usually ranked among the top illustrators of the first half of the 20th century.

Cornwell reached prominence around 1920 and was hugely successful working in oil using a "painterly" style where brushstrokes are strong and visible. This style gradually fell out of favor during the 1930s when flashy watercolor work became the rage. In turn, this fashion was replaced in the wartime 1940s by sober oil paintings that had a more "finished" appearance where painterly qualities were subordinated.

It was in the 30s that Cornwell decided it was time to "play Shakespeare" (my term for wanting to become accepted as a legit fine artist) and began painting murals -- a quest that didn't net him much or any profit. He continued illustration to make ends meet, so adapted to the non-painterly approach of the 40s. As far as I know, he didn't buy into the 1950s "big head"/gouache style.

I'll be writing more about Cornwell later. If you want considerably more information right away, I suggest you get a copy of Illustration Magazine's issue number 23 that features Cornwell.

Here is an example of his work from the 20s and one from the 40s.

From 1921.

From "The Robe" - 1947.
I fully understand that you gotta do what you gotta do, and there was no way Cornwell could have survived had he continued the style of the top picture. That said, I really like his 1920s work and find later illustrations such as the lower picture undistinguished, generic work almost any competent illustrator of the time might have produced.