In the Beginning: Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero (1932 - ), Wikipedia entry here, is not one of my favorite artists, as I have posted. I like neither his art nor his politics, but do not particularly begrudge his success.

Since the mid-to-late 1950s, when he was in his 20s, Botero stumbled on his trademark subject matter of grossly fat people. That takes in nearly his entire career. But for a few years his style was different, though quickly evolving into what made him wealthy.

I found a few examples of the early Botero to show you:

Gallery

Woman Reading
Typical Botero painting to set the scene.

Frente al Mar - 1952
Most of these folks are scrawny.

Indian Girl - 1952
A normal-size person.

Horses on the Beach - 1953
Now we see some unnaturally chubby horses.

En blanco rosa y negro - c. 1952-55
A heavier human, but within normal bounds.

Photo a Botero with La Camara degli Sposi (Homena a Mantegna) - c. 1961
I almost think the overweight Diego Rivera should have been the artist here and not the normal-size Botero.

In the Beginning: William Cumming

William Cumming (1917-2000) was a Seattle area artist who knew the nationally acclaimed "Northwest Mystics" Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and the rest, but was not considered part of that group at the time. When I was in high school and college, Bill Cumming was mentioned so rarely by my mentor circles that I wasn't aware of him. Nowadays, his local reputation is much higher. My take on Cumming can be found here.

Recently I was at an opening at the Woodside / Braseth Gallery where, in addition to the featured painter, there was displayed a rediscovered WPA-era mural that Cumming painted in 1941 for the Burlington High School, some 60 miles north of Seattle.

Background regarding the mural can be found here and here.

I am not a fan of Cumming's art, though I respect him for not falling fully into the clutches of abstraction, as so many of his generation did. And even though the second mural-related link suggests the mural might be worth a six-digit sum (were it salable), it does not impress me.

What interests me about it is that it shows some Cumming traits that he still practiced almost 60 years later. One is the lumpy depiction of human forms. Another is Cumming's reluctance to include his subject's faces.

Here is the mural. Note that only one complete face is shown. Detail views are below.

This is a painting made in 1998, also displayed at the gallery. It is an example of the artist's late style.

More Early Duchamp Paintings

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) did a lot of damage to western culture and art. Or so I think. But if it hadn't been Duchamp, someone (or, more likely, several someones) would have done the same thing not long later. Biographical information on him can be found here.

Duchamp had a comparatively brief career as a painter before drifting over to other activities including his passion for chess. His most famous painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase" was a mix of Cubism and Futurism. I mention it and an early, more naturalistic painting here.

I revisited the Ringling Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida in May and found the portrait of his sister-in-law that I featured in the link above, and also found several other early Duchamp paintings. As often happens when photographing paintings in museums, images of two of those paintings were too blurred to post here. The others are presented below. Click on them to enlarge.

The point I make with these images is that while the early Duchamp painted in a modernist vein, it was a conservative variety of modernism.

Gallery

Sur la Falaise - 1905
Duchamp was about 18 years old when he did this landscape.

Portrait d'Yvonne Duchamp-Villon, née Bon - 1907
An establishment photo I took in 2012 that also can be found in my older Duchamp post.

Detail. He was about 20 when he did this. Although it is signed, the sketchy treatment of Yvonne's hand gives the painting an unfinished appearance. The rationalization for this probably would have something to do with the idea that the hand was an irrelevant detail.

An even closer view. I find it interesting that Duchamp essentially washes out the subject's mouth and to a lesser extent her eyes while emphasizing (comparatively) her nose. Note the limited color palette. Altogether, a nice pierce of work for one that age.

Maison Paysanne, Yport - 1907
A peasant's cottage painted the same year, but in quite a different style.

Detail of the above, showing how thickly Duchamp painted here.  Or perhaps this was an over-painting of a previous work that used thick paints: I'm not expert enough to be sure which possibility is correct.

In the Beginning: Georges Seurat

Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891) was a founder of the color-dot technique of Pointillism and is best known for his paintings in that style. As this mentions, he had a few years of formal art training before his military service, and then went on to his brief career as a painter.

Also mentioned is that Seurat did a good deal of preparation before making his large, Pointillist paintings -- understandable, given their subject matter, composition and coloring. Part of this preparation involved smaller studies. And before that phase of his career he did paint many small works that had an impressionist feeling.

Gallery

Un dimanche après-midi à l'île de la Grande Jatte - 1884-86
This is the painting Seurat is most famous for.

Head of a Girl - 1879
Here is the earliest Seurat that I could locate. Done while attending the École des Beaux-Arts.

Sunset - c. 1881
An early post-Army painting. Wispy and not nearly as solidly conceived as most of this later works, but at this point, he was probably just experimenting with Impressionist ideas.

Banlieue - 1881-82
A mix of a few well-defined and ill-defined forms. Brushwork is nondescript.

Landscape in the Ile-de-France - 1882
Brush strokes here are more obvious.

Fishing in the Seine - 1883
Stronger brushwork for the riverbank, similar to what is found in the following images.

Man Painting a Boat - c. 1883
A good deal of hatching brushwork in the vegetation.

The Stone Breakers, Le Raincy (c. 1882)
I found this at the Norton Simon in Pasadena. It's a small study (compare its size to the information plaque). The museum's web site deals with it here.

Detail photo. Again we see short, strong brush strokes at different angles. An exception is the human figures who are rendered in a different manner. Note that on the stone pile, Seurat was careful to paint thick-over-thin, a concept he surely learned at the Beaux-Arts if not before. Click on the image to enlarge.

A Pre-Impressionist Renoir Painting

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is known as a French Impressionist, but he wasn't always one. For example, I posted here about a time when he doubted Impressionism. This, and more about him and his art can be found in his Wikipedia entry.

So when I visited the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena, California in April I wasn't surprised by his 1867-68 vintage painting of the Pont des Arts, a footbridge over the Seine connecting the Louvre with the École des Beaux-Arts.

It's a comparatively early Renoir, before French Impressionists such as Claude Monet began using broken (or divisionist) color. The Norton Simon web site's blurb on the painting states; "Planted in the heart of Paris, we stand on the Left Bank of the Seine, looking upstream toward the wrought-iron Pont des Arts... The crisp shadows and liberally applied black are typical of Renoir’s early career, when the artist and his friend Monet set out to document their changing city in a celebrated series of views to which this one belongs."

Monet is mentioned, but there also are hints of Édouard Manet in some of the nearly-flat color areas.

Gallery

This is "On the Terrace" (1881), the sort of painting most folks associate with Renoir.

Here is Le Pont des Arts, Paris (1867-68), the painting I noticed at the Norton Simon.

What my camera saw: establishment shot.

A detail photo. Click to enlarge and inspect Renoir's brushwork.

In the Beginning: Frederick Frieseke

Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939) was an American expatriate who spent most of the last 40 years of his life in France. A fairly lengthy Wikipedia biography is here. It mentions that he regarded himself as more self-taught than formally trained. This was despite that he had studied at Chicago's Art Institute, New York's Art Students League, and the Académie Julian in Paris as well as the Académie Carmen under Whistler. Even though he summered in Giverny, Monet's haunt, Frieseke did not consider himself influenced by him. Rather, he claimed Renoir was more of an influence.

Considered an Impressionist, Frieseke was of the American variety, stressing drawing and depicting form as well as the play of colors.

Even so, it took Frieseke a while to establish his best-known style, The images below do not include his very earliest works, but show what he was producing during his first five years or so in France.

Gallery

The Garden in June - 1911
As usual, I include an establishing image, this showing the kind of painting Frieseke is best known for.

Luxembourg Gardens - 1901
Here he shows interest in the effects of light and shade, but he does this without the use of broken colors.

Landscape, Le Pouldu, Brittany - 1901
This painting seems to have been done with thinned paints that were then wiped.  The famous American illustrator Bernie Fuchs also did something like this at times.

Medora Clark at the Clark Apartment, Paris - 1903
Another fairly thinly painted work, but less sign of wiping.

Nasturiums (Girl with Book) - 1904
The flesh areas are painted conventionally here, but much of the rest is made of heavier or more distinct brushwork.

The Green Sash - 1904
To me, this seems Whistler-like with a strong hint of Japanese-influenced flatness in the setting.

Ballerina - 1904
Another fairly conventional work, but again the setting is flattened.

Lady with Parasol - 1905
The lower half seems Van Gogh- like, the upper part more like Gauguin.

Lady with Parasol - 1908
Even though Frieseke was approaching his signature style, this painting includes thin, wiped areas as well as more solidly depicted parts.  No divisionism or broken colors.  This would have been a really nice painting except for the botched boat (if that's what it is).

In the Beginning: Coby Whitmore

Maxwell Coburn (Coby) Whitmore (1913-1988) is considered by many -- including me -- as one of the great illustrators of the period 1950-1965. Biographical links are here and here. I briefly mentioned him here.

Like nearly all artists, it took Whitmore a while to settle into a mature, characteristic style. Below, I feature examples of his earlier work. These images were competently done, but do not stand out from works of other illustrators from that era. Nevertheless, his work was already appearing in major magazines, and by the mid-1950s Coby Whitmore had truly become the Coby Whitmore we know.

Gallery

Typical Whitmore illustrations from his mature period
The man in the upper image strikes me as looking a lot like William F. Buckley, founder of National Review.

Advertisement from around 1942
Whitmore is already adding a dab of the risqué.

From around 1944
I don't know the source, but it's probably from an advertisement or perhaps a story. During World War 2 women were used to ferry aircraft from place to place around the country. A few might have been test pilots who checked out newly-built aircraft. None, so far as I know, were test pilots of the classical kind who wrung out prototype airplanes. As long as I'm being picky, pilots almost always enter the cockpit from the left side of the aircraft, not the right, as pictured here.

Saturday Evening Post story illustration - 8 December 1945
The woman's pose echoes the one from around 1942, above.

Cosmopolitain cover, July 1946
Whitmore did a number of covers for Cosmo in the early post-war years.

Advertisement - 1947
The car in the background seem oddly old-fashioned -- late 1930s styling. But Whitmore was a car guy, and must have had his reasons for including that vintage.

Story illustration - 1948

Illustration for Schlitz Beer advertisement - c. 1949
This image and the one above it include plenty of background detail, something unusual for Whitmore. But in the late 1940s, many art directors expected it.

Illustration for Arrow Shirt advertisement - 1949

Saturday Evening Post cover - 5 January 1952
At last, Whitmore gets to seriously combine his love of cars and beautiful women. The styling is imaginary, though the basic shapes are early-1950s.