Mikhail Vrubel: Square-Brush Paintings

Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) died blind and not totally sane. Before that, he was one of the most interesting artists Russia produced as the traditionalist-academic school of painting crumbled and Modernism worked its way to ascendancy.

Vrubel had a law degree, but then studied painting at the Imperial Academy of Art in St. Petersburg. For a few years he worked on a project in Kiev to replace 12th century murals and was able to travel to Venice, but also began to work on images of a demon based on an epic poem by Mikhail Lermontov. His first Demon painting in 1890 was noteworthy enough to launch his career. This and more biographical in formation can be found here and here.

Vrubel could vary his style, but his best-known paintings feature a good deal of square-brush work to create a fragmented, jewel-like effect around more smoothly painted faces and other features of his subjects. The best place I know of to view Vrubel's art is in Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery a short distance south of the river bordering the Kremlin. When I was there, an entire room was devoted to Vrubel.

Gallery

Head of a Woman (Emilia Prakhova) - study for "The Virgin and Child" - 1884 or 1885
Pencil and gouache. I include this to show Vrubel's approach early in his career. Later drawings were more wispy with plenty of possibly excess lines included.

Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel - 1904
The artist's opera singer wife. This was painted not long before he lost his sight. Vrubel was not completely wedded to the square-brush - jeweled effects he is most famous for.

Seated Demon - 1890
As noted, he made several Demon-themed paintings, and this is the first and most famous.

Swan Princess - 1900
His wife depicted in a role she sang in a Rimsky-Korsakov opera. Another of his best-known paintings.

Fallen Demon - 1902
Vrubel continued the Demon a dozen years after the first painting.

Artist's Wife in a Stage Dress - 1898
More of a sketch than a finished work here.

Siren - 1900
Absent the woman, this would be an abstract painting.

Six-Winged Seraph - 1904
Another classic Vrubel image.

When Renoir Doubted Impressionism

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was, along with Claude Monte and Camille Pissarro, a major French Impressionist whose painting style is archetypically "Impressionistic" in the minds of most viewers. (On the other hand Edgar Degas, although considered one of the original band of French Impressionists, painted in a more traditional style.)

Were I into pop-psychology, I might assert that Renoir experienced a "mid-life crisis" in 1883 when he was in his early 40s. He began to doubt his Impressionist painting style and experimented with a more delineated, harder-edge approach inspired by his admiration of Ingres (who Picasso also claimed to admire). This is noted in his Wikipedia entry and elsewhere on the Internet. It is also discussed in this book by Anne Distel, a Musée d'Orsay curator.

Renoir's wanderings in a not-quite-Impressionist wilderness lasted roughly five years (1883-88). He then picked up where he had left off stylistically.

But not entirely. From time to time he continued to make paintings featuring more sharply defined subjects. And not just commissioned portraits; the final painting below was done for his own purposes in 1896.

Gallery

Luncheon of the Boating Party - 1880-81

On the Terrace - 1881
To set the scene are the two paintings above, made not long before he modified his style.

Les parapluies - ca. 1880-86
As this link notes, Renoir began "The Umbrellas" around 1880-81 and then reworked and completed it about 1885-86. It notes that the right side seems to have been painted first and the left part later. So it is a stylistic hybrid that Renoir was hesitant to sell for several years.

Children's Afternoon at Wargemont - 1884

Bather Arranging Her Hair - 1885

The Large Bathers - 1887

The Washerwomen - ca. 1888

La famille de l'artiste - 1896

How Well Could Cézanne Draw?

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), who received little general recognition until the last decade of his life, is now credited as being the "bridge" to modernist "isms" of the early 1900s from Impressionism and various Postimpressionist styles. His career is summarized here.

His image to casual art fans is that of a reclusive, provincial bumpkin who somehow made good in terms of Modernist Establishment art history. There is some truth in this, but there was more to Cézanne than that. In the first place, he had a good pre-university classical education, being able to translate from the Latin, for instance. He was a close boyhood friend of Émile Zola, later the famous journalist and novelist. His artistic potential caught the eye of Camille Pissarro, a leading French Impressionist, who joined him on plein air painting expeditions.

At his core, Cézanne can be considered a theorist, especially where art was concerned. He theorized about color, perspective, brushwork, the basic nature of forms and other matters that became important to the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and other modernists who claimed that he had opened their eyes in various ways.

One thing Cézanne didn't much bother with was accurate drawing, especially of people -- something he must have considered incidental to his theory-based artistic goals. Or perhaps he didn't much bother with accurate drawing because he has limited ability in that task. Let's examine some evidence.

House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise - 1873Cézanne painted many landscapes and still lifes. This is one of his best and most famous plein air efforts from the early part of his career. One would have to see the original scene to properly evaluate how Cézanne interpreted it. But what we can see here is something solid and reasonably believable.

The Barque of Dante (after Delacroix) c. 1870-73He spent a fair amount of time in the Louvre when in Paris. Here is his copy of a Delacroix. Details are mostly omitted, but the colors and shapes of the subjects in the original are fairly well captured.

Hortense Breast Feeding Paul - c. 1873Cézanne didn't marry Hortense until 1886 when their relationship was on the skids. But he was devoted to his son, young Paul. For this painting, he did a better job of depicting people than usual.

Couple in a Garden (The Conversation) - 1872-73At about the same time, he made this painting where the people are badly done. It is likely that Cézanne did them from imagination, because he seldom paid for models.

Jeune garçon au gilet rouge - 1888-89Fifteen years later he still gets anatomy wrong. Note how elongated the boy's upper right arm is. Also, just where is the left arm's elbow? The ear seems too large or the face is too small. Cézanne was noted for spending much of his time observing rather than painting -- taking long intervals between brush strokes. But if he was observing so closely, how could he have messed up so badly what was right before his eyes?

Les joueurs de carte (The Card Players) - 1892-95Cézanne gets anatomy wrong in this, one of his most famous paintings. A charitable explanation is that he had his attention focused on other aspects of the scene, and that the men are mere props or fodder for his theoretical explorations.

So it seems that Cézanne was almost incapable of painting people properly proportioned. Now let's see what happens where painting and all his theories are stripped away and the focus is on depicting human form.

Studies - 1871-76A page of sketches. The upper female figure is convincingly done from around the waist down, and the Arab in the foreground seems solidly done. The other figures are too sketchy to evaluate.

Self-Portrait - c. 1875Another decently done job. Not a great drawing, but a good one. However, I do wonder a little regarding the size and placement of his ear.

Madame Cézanne with Hortensias - 1885I think this treatment of Hortense is the best Cézanne drawing I've ever encountered. It shows that, on occasion, he could do a good job of depicting people. All that he needed was a pencil instead of a paintbrush.

Did Mead Schaeffer Dislike His Best Art?

According to the article on Mead Schaeffer (1898-1980) in issue No. 45 of Illustration magazine, he was quoted as saying in 1945:

"I longed to do honest work, based on real places, real people, and real things -- work expressive of normal human emotions and activities. So, I did a right-about-face, and have never regretted it."

This was in reaction to painting "dudes and dandies, exaggerated sentiment, artificial romance, and love withe the endless 'he and she' pictures."

The images above reflect this change in attitude. The ones below are some of what I consider his better work done prior to his epiphany.

There is little question that Schaeffer was satisfied with his decision to change subject matter and, as it turned out, his style as well. But while he seemed satisfied, what about his audience and, in my case, his fan base?

To me, Schaeffer's appeal lies in his style -- the way he composed his scenes and, especially, his painting technique; subject matter is secondary. So far as I am concerned, his work from around 1940 onward was competently done, conventional, and not interesting to look at in most cases. Other contemporaneous illustrators could (and did) do pretty much the same sort of thing equally well. Very few in 1925-39 could equal Scheffer's work. Feel free to disagree in Comments.

(I wrote about Schaeffer here. A brief Wikipedia entry is here. A David Apatoff take can be found here. There is more about him here.)

Violet Shading in Circa-1930 Illustration

I'll leave it to art history scholars to tease out the various "firsts" related to this post. Instead, I'll just offer some approximations. For instance, if the French Impressionists didn't originate the concept that shaded areas on objects might be colored violet or purple, they surely popularized it.

I haven't fully researched its use in illustration, but Impressionism-influenced illustrator N.C. Wyeth was including small touches of violet shading on characters he was painting by around 1920 and Harrison Fisher might have been doing the same occasionally a few years earlier.

But it wasn't until well into the 1920s that American illustrators made bold use of violet as a shade hue. Perhaps the influence here was the popularity of toned-down colors on contemporary murals where opposites (in color-wheels terms) were either mixed or placed side-by-side Divisionist-style. At any rate, a warm-shifted approximate opposite to sunlit flesh color (that is, an orange) would be some sort of violet. Examples presented in the present post cover the period 1928-1934 when this color fashion was at its height. Actually, it wasn't much of a fashion, as only a few illustrators participated.

Perhaps the most famous was McClelland Barclay (1891-1943), who used violet shading in some illustrations he made for a General Motors' Fisher Body advertising series. Least-known was Karl Godwin (1893-1962), who I wrote about here. His big-time career period was in the late 1920s and early 30s, though he continued to work at the margins, as indicated here. Finally, there is Walter Baumhofer (1904-1987), whose career began with "pulp" magazines and later transitioned to "slicks." I wrote about him here. Other sources of information are here and here. But if you are really interested in Baumhofer and his work, consider getting a copy of this issue of Illustration Magazine, which is devoted entirely to him.

Gallery

Barclay - Fisher Body ad art - December, 1928

Barclay - Fisher Body advertisement - July, 1930

Godwin - From a 1929 Hudson automobile advertisement

Godwin - Ethyl advertisements - 1932

Baumhofer - Magazine cover - March, 1929

Baumhofer - magazine cover - May-June, 1931

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover - July, 1933

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover - February, 1934

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover art - May, 1934

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover - September, 1934
Baumhofer made the greatest use of violet shading, and that was mostly for some of the cover art he created for Doc Savage Magazine. One reason for this is that Dec was described in the stories as having a bronze complexion, and some sort of violet or blue would be the opposite of that dominant color. The cover shown immediately above is my favorite.

John Singer Sargent: Same Subject, Different Media

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) probably needs no introduction to Art Contrarian readers. A painting of his that I would really like to see in person is the subject of the present post.

Fumée d'Ambre Gris - 1880It is part of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute collection, whose description of it is here. Unfortunately for me, I seldom get to Massachusetts, so my chance of viewing the painting in person seems pretty slim. Yet I once spent more than four years in not-so-far-away Albany, New York -- but that was when I was still brainwashed by modernist propaganda and thought the Clark not worth visiting, if I had been aware of it at all.

Perhaps even more embarrassing, in recent times I was unaware that Sargent created some studies for it, including a watercolor now held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I've visited the Gardner, but (once again!!) failed to notice it (that is, if it had actually been on display at the time).

Here it is:

Incensing the Veil - c. 1880
A rambling discourse on Sergent's painting and the substance ambergris is here, and some supporting images are here.

More on Raeburn's Blurred faces

A while ago I wrote about how Henry Raeburn (1756-1823), one of my favorite portrait artists, tended to emphasize his subjects' crisp, white collars while usually leaving faces (normally the focus area) somewhat blurred.

And it's true that men's dress shirt collars of the early nineteenth century were white and very crisp, creating a sharp line at their edges that was sharper than adjoining facial features. Coat and jacket collars also yielded sharp edges. So Raeburn had some reason for his practice. Yet I think he often took the facial blurring a bit far from reality. No doubt he was striving for an effect that pleased him -- and perhaps his sitters, who often were older gentlemen with the usual wrinkles and complexion defects that age brings on.

A fairly extreme example of this is his portrait of James Watt from 1815. I included it in the post linked above. No long ago I revisited the Huntington Library in Marina, California (near Pasadena and the Caltech campus) and took more photos of the painting that I present below to further illustrate my point regarding Raeburn.

Here is a general view of the painting as it appeared when I visited the Huntington in November. The crisp collar area and contrasting facial details are obvious.

This is a close-up of the face. I included a bit of the frame when I snapped it to ensure that the camera's automatic focus would not get confused by the lack of sharp details on Watt's face. Note that Raeburn did include some sharp detailing for the eyes, leaving the rest of the face blurred.  So while he blurred the face, he did take care have the center of interest in sharp focus.

Roy Crane's Two Shades of Gray

Aside from Lyonel Feininger, I find it hard to come up with the name of an important fine artist who drew comic strips. After all, comic strips are highly constrained in terms of technology, spatial requirements, marketing channel considerations and other factors that can lead to their being ignored by fine artists and even by illustrators.

But lessons -- some, not many -- can be learned from comic strips. Consider value, the painting term referring to areas of light, dark, and intermediate shades on a painting. Value, in most cases, is the basis for an image's composition. Traditional art instruction sources suggest having one of a painting's preliminary studies deal with values, and a limited number (say, three or four) of them at that.

Roy Crane (1901-1977) was an influential comic strip artist who, as his Wikipedia entry indicates, evolved his style to a point in the 1940s that he could make use of areas of solid black, white (the un-inked newsprint background) plus two shades of gray. Earlier, he used black, white and a single gray shade, the latter based on a uniform benday screen. He found three values to be too limiting for his taste, so later adopted Craftint. That provided two levels of shading -- the lighter one simply parallel lines and the darker one a crosshatch of other parallel lines set at a right angle to the former. This blog post deals with Craftint and its eventual demise, using Roy Crane as an example of how it was made to work.

Artists wanting to sharpen their values awareness might consider the work of Crane and perhaps some other comic strip artists who made use of shading technology.

The examples below are from Crane's Buz Sawyer strip. He liked cute puns for names of some of his main characters. For instance, Buz Sawer = "buz(z)saw" and Wash Tubbs = "washtub." Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

Buz Sawyer - December, 1944
This strikes me as the best of the examples of Crane's Craftink work shown here. These are panels from successive daily strips. Not how he forces readers to rotate the page half a turn to display the Douglas SBD dive bombers at work.

Buz Sawyer - November, 1949

Buz Sawyer - January, 1950
More daily strips from a few years later.

The Vermeer Museum in Delft

Delft in South Holland was the place where famed painter Jan Vermeer (1634-1675) lived and made his comparatively small number of paintings. It is a pleasant small city that's worth a visit if you are in the Netherlands and would like to see more of the country than Amsterdam.

Besides getting a sense of Vermeer's roots, you can visit the Vermeer Centrum Deft which does its best to inform you about the artist. What you won't see there are original paintings due to their rarity and high market value. (I suspect that strongly attributed Vermeers are virtually "priceless" because they are in important museums, and no such museum would part with a Vermeer under any but the more dire of circumstances.)

What you can see are full-size reproductions of his paintings with explanatory captions that include the work's current location. Many are here in the United States; they can be found at the Met and the Frick in New York and in the National Gallery in Washington. Also pictured is a painting owned by casino owner Steve Wynn of Las Vegas, but its attribution is weak, as a glance at the image will suggest.

On the upper level of the museum are items of interest to artists and people interested in the technology of painting. Included is a camera obscura, but the museum does not commit itself to whether or to what extent the device was used by Vermeer. Below are some photos I took of that part of the museum. Click on them to enlarge.

This chart indicates the colors thought to be most often used by Vermeer.

In Vermeer's day, artists had to mix their own paints. This display explains how it was done.

Here a viewer can compare a reproduction of a Vermeer painting to a rough approximation of his studio setup.

Vermeer was careful in his used of perspective. This exhibit shows how he might have constructed perspective for multiple vanishing points along a horizon line.