Rubens Does Some Advertising

San Francisco's Legion of Honor has on display through 8 September 2019 an exhibit titled
"Early Rubens".

There were many works, the paintings being mostly large. Even at the stage of his career shown, Rubens supported a crew of apprentices and assistants who needed to be paid or otherwise compensated for their work. All professional art is a business of some kind, and Rubens and many other famous painters around his time needed to operate like any serious business. That included doing what we now call Marketing to drum up future commissions to support the artist and his staff.

An instance of such marketing can be seen in the image below, a detail of "The Dreaming Silenus" (ca. 1610-1612) depicting: "The drunken, goat-legged Silenus and his companions appear in the last stages of a Bacchic revelry..." as the plaque pointed out. I will spare you that. What mostly interested me was the trove taking up much of the right half of the painting that's shown in the detail view below.

Note how skillfully those shiny objects are depicted.  At this late date, I cannot say if Rubens himself did all, some, or none of that work.  What matters is that this display was almost surely intended to catch the eyes of potential clients who might well be impressed enough to seek out Rubens and give him and his team a commission.

Max Beckmann Self-Portraits

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) is associated with Germany's post- Great War Neue Sachlichkeit movement. It favored harshly depicted, distorted, exaggerated subjects that often were little more than elaborate political cartoons.

Beckmann did not always go deeply in that direction. This was the case for his portrait work. Like Rembrandt, he chronicled his appearance sometimes as often as once a year, and more often than that at times. The numerous images below are not an exhaustive compendium of his self-portraits, but offer a sense of how he chose to represent himself as time passed.

Background on Beckmann can be found here. He left Germany for the Netherlands four years after modernist art hating Hitler gained power. Following World War 2 he moved to the USA, but died of a heart attack a few years later.

Gallery

Photo of Backmann
I don't have the year this was taken, but he appears to be in his 50s or older. His most noticeable feature is a strong, jutting jaw.

1907
Painted in Florence before he delved very far into Modernism. Note the cigarette -- many of the portraits below include one or sometimes a cigar.

1915
I suppose I would need to consult a biography to find background for this.  Beckmann ordinarily would have been conscripted and later moved to army reserve status.  He was about 30 years old when the war began, but theoretically would have been called to active duty on mobilization in August of 1914.  In fact, he served for about a year in a medical unit and, as his French Wikipedia states, Il est démobilisé en 1915 en raison d'une dépression nerveuse.

1917

1919

1921

1923
A Mussolini-like pose.

1926
Starting around 1920 his self-depictions are of a strong, not a weak, person. The cigar is in his mouth, not his hand as usual.

1927
This is probably Beckmann's most famous self-portrait.

1936
Shortly before he moved to Holland.

1937

1938

1942
Wartime, again.

1945

1950
Painted the year he died.

Garrett Price of the New Yorker

Garrett Price (1897–1979) is best known -- to me, at least -- for his New Yorker cartoons. His career was more varied than that, however. Besides cartoons, he illustrated books and for three years wrote and drew a comic strip. His Wikipedia entry is here, and here is a lengthy piece that goes into a good deal of detail regarding Price.

Successful though he was, Price's cartoon style strikes me as being more functional than distinctive. Fellow New Yorker cartoonists Charles Addams and Peter Arno, for example, had highly distinctive styles and became famous, unlike Price.

Examples of Price's work are below. Be aware that New Yorker cartoonists often (perhaps usually) did not come up with the ideas they illustrated: outsiders regularly submitted ideas to the editor.

Gallery

Life cover - 21 January 1926
Price did not work exclusively for The New Yorker.

Stage Magazine - May 1933

New Yorker

New Yorker
Judging by the woman's dress, this was a late 1920s cartoon.

New Yorker

New Yorker
The girl is nicely posed and drawn. Clearly Price often dialed down his illustration skills for his cartoon work, but not here.

New Yorker

New Yorker cover - 29 August 1925
A cover from the earliest days of The New Yorker. I suppose the joke is that the man is eating, whereas the flappers are having coffee or tea, but I could easily be wrong.

New Yorker cover - 12 July 1941
New Yorker covers often made no special point.

New Yorker cover - 30 August 1941
Here, six or so weeks later, Price worked in a more solid style.

New Yorker cover - 19 August 1951
This cover notes the opening of the United Nations Secretariat building.

Ellen, Another Pyle

Ellen Bernard Thompson Pyle (1876-1936) was a highly successful illustrator whose career mostly took place 1920-1935. My criterion is that she illustrated around 40 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, America's leading general-interest magazine in those days. For an illustrator, getting even one cover assignment for the Post marked entry into the big leagues of the field.

Ellen was not a birth-relation of Howard Pyle, the famous illustrator and teacher. But she was a student of his at Drexel in Philadelphia (her home town, she came from the upscale Germantown area). More important, she was one of his select group of students at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

She became a family member of Howard Pyle via marriage to his younger brother Walter Pyle (1859-1918). Ellen dropped her illustration career to raise their children, but resumed it upon his death.

Background on Ellen Pyle can be found here and here. The second link has Walter dying at age 42 when in fact that was Ellen's age when he died.

Below are examples of her Post cover art.

Gallery

Saturday Evening Post cover - 21 January 1922
She mostly painted attractive young women as subjects.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 10 July 1926
This cover marked the 150th anniversary of America' independence.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 11 June 1927
She included men as needed to set the scene.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 8 October 1927
Until the early 1940s Post cover art was vignette format, often with a geometric device as can be seen here and in the first two images above.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 17 October 1931
An unusual cover format (for the time) that is more framed art than vignette.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 9 January 1932
In real life, a roadster driven in January would have the car's top raised along with the side curtains -- so here Ellen used some artistic license.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 24 November 1934
This is a study for the final cover that is essentially the same.  Her car is convincing, which to me is a sign that the illustrator knew her stuff.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 21 September 1935
One of her last Post covers.

Pre-Rapahelites Up Close: Some Snapshots

A large exhibit of Victorian art from Birmingham, England is touring the USA, currently parked at the Seattle Art Museum. Part of that exhibit is of paintings by Pre-Raphelite artists whose works are well-represented in Birmingham.

As I have mentioned from time to time, I'm not a big fan of hard-edge, highly detailed painting. I can respect it, and I prefer it to most modernist painting, but don't love it for the most part.

While visiting the exhibit I took snapshots using my iPhone of reference images followed by close-ups of Pre-Raphaelite painting on display. Some are shown below: click on them to enlarge considerably to view that painstakingly detailed work.

Gallery

The Blind Girl (1854-56) by John Everett Millais
Millais later painted more conventionally -- many portraits -- and eventually became president of the Royal Academy.

Note the many blades and other details on this fairly small painting.

Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851-59) by Ford Maddox Brown
Another fairly small painting.

Detail everywhere -- from the quilted garment to the wool and grasses.

Elijah and the Widow's Son (1864) by Ford Maddox Brown
A "finished study for a picture" Brown stated.

Being a study, it's not hard-core Pre-Raphaelite. But it's essentially a complete work and pleasing to me because detailing is less intense. Note the Hebrew writing around the door.

Work (1859-63) by Ford Maddox Brown
A well-known Pre-Raphaelite painting that yet again isn't large.

Even the tiny sign slogans are depicted.

Perspective on the boy' head seems a bit off, but hey, Pre-Raphaelite's weren't normally painters of action scenes.

Detail, detail, and more detail here in this small segment.

Medea (1866-68) by Frederick Sandys
Not strictly Pre-Raphaelite style aside from being hard-edge.

The painting's plaque notes the Japanese influence on the background.

A Tempest Called Ralph Barton

Ralph Waldo Emerson Barton (1891-1931) had a tortured mind and a short, tempestuous life that ended in suicide. Yet he was a talented, highly successful cartoonist for such publications as Puck, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

A general biography is here. For more on his failed romantic life, David Apatoff provides a summary here. For much more detail regarding Barton, you might was to read what The New Yorker published in 1989 here.

Also, Apatoff discussed Barton's art here.

Barton developed a simplified, modernist cartooning style during the 1910-20 decade and refined it during the 1920s. He usually relied on thin pen lines, areas of black plus washes to depict his usually exaggerated scenes. Some examples are below, but do take a look at the examples in the Apatoff links.

Gallery

A Montparnasse scene in Puck, 30 October 1915.

Charlie Chaplin in his Tramp costume beheading mannequins with German "pikelhaube" helmets used in the early years of the Great War.

Barton (left) and Chaplin (right) were buddies for many years.

Barton's take on Ernest Hemingway for Vanity Fair.

"Heywood Broun finds America suffering from a dearth of Folly" -- a literary caricature.

Flapper entering a party.

Tullio Carminati and Muriel Kirkland - "Strictly Dishonorable" - 1929

Famous theatre couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

Photo of Lunt and Fontanne from a few years earlier.