In the Beginning: Kasimir Malevich

Kasimir Malevich or maybe Kazimierz Malewicz, given that his parents were ethnic Poles living in the Ukraine when he was born in 1878 (well, it now seems he was born in 1879, according to this Wikipedia entry which offers a Ukrainian version of his name along with the others), founded the modernist abstract movement of Suprematism. Oh, and we're still pretty sure he died in 1935.

Examples of his Suprematist painting can be found here, but I offer the following to give you a sense of it:

Black Square - 1923, concept from 1913
The black square was the symbol of the Suprematist movement.

Supremus No. 58 - 1916

The Knife Grinder - 1912
Not Suprematist, but showing his awareness of Cubism and perhaps the work of Duchamp.

As the Wikipedia entry indicates, Malevich had little exposure to art when young, beginning drawing training in his mid-teens and not getting formal schooling in painting until he was in his mid-20s living in Moscow. That city had important collectors of impressionist and modernist art, so this quickly rubbed off on Malevich who felt comfortable enough with the new ideology to begin his Suprematist variation.

Along with many modernists he supported the Communist takeover and was able to assume leadership roles in the Soviet art world. For a while. Eventually he found himself on the margins and finally had to face the Stalinist imposition of Socialist Realism, moving a number of his paintings to the relative safety of Germany in anticipation of the change of wind.

Below are examples of his work showing varying degrees of realism.

Apple Trees in Blossom - 1904

Unemployed Girl - 1904
These two painting date from the year he entered painting school.

This is a portrait, probably of a family member -- ca.1906

Self-Portrait - ca.1910

Self-Portrait - 1933

Based on what is shown above, Malevich strikes me as having the ability to have been a very good representational painter had he followed that path instead of abstraction. But given his background and times, his career makes sense. After all, Golden Age Modernism (perhaps 1900-1960) was an experiment that needed to be undertaken eventually. And as I mention from time to time, my gripe with it is that it became a religion and an Establishment, both hostile to non-modernism (despite lip-service to the contrary).

In The Beginning: Georges Braque

Georges Braque (1882-1963) is famed for being the co-creator, with Pablo Picasso, of Cubism. The most detailed biography of him that I could find on the Web is here. It mentions that he destroyed much of his early, student-period work.

This is not a nice thing with respect to this series of posts about the stylistic roots of modernist painters. That is, I have yet to find any painting by the young Braque that are uninfluenced by modernism in one form or another. Nor could I find any late works suggesting serious movement to representational art.

The result of this frustration is that I have no way of telling if Braque might have been capable of painting in a realistic manner at all, let alone how well he might have done so had he persisted. In this respect, Braque might well be the earliest of many artists whose post-art school work is uniformly modernist.

For what it's worth, then, are some examples of his paintings made when in his mid-twenties.

Gallery

Harbor at Estaque - 1906

Landscape at Estaque - 1906

Le port d'Anvers - 1906

Olive Tree Near Estaque - 1906
(Stolen from Paris' Musée de l'Art Moderne in 2010.)

Le viaduc de l'Estaque - 1907-08

Le viaduc a l'Estaque - summer, 1908
This version shows hints of Cézanne.

In the Beginning: Henri Matisse

Just because you study under a famous painter doesn't mean any of it will rub off on you.

Consider Henri Matisse (1869-1954) who received some of his training from William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. By his late twenties Matisse was leaving strongly representational art behind on his march to Fauvism and colorful points beyond.

Since the point of this "In the Beginning" series is speculation as to how modernist artists' style might have evolved absent modernism, we need to take a look at Matisse's more representational works that have survived. (I could locate only one work on the Web dated before his 25th birthday; might others have been destroyed or otherwise lost?)

Still Life With Books - 1890
Matisse claimed that this was his "first" painting. I couldn't find a larger image.

Woman Reading - 1894
Shown is Caroline Jobau, his mistress at the time and possibly pregnant.

Village in Brittany - 1895
Again, this is the largest image I could locate: apologies.

The Maid - 1896
Still representational, but more simplified than earlier works. Click on the image to get better quality.

The Dinner Table - 1896-97
Just about Matisse's last gasp at representational painting.

Carmelina - 1903
Colors are now becoming flatter, but not yet Fauve-wild. Again, click for a better image.

The White Plumes - 1919
For a few years before 1920 some modernist painters including Picasso and Matisse briefly backed away from the spasm of "isms" of preceding years. The result was some paintings in a noticeably simplified sort of representationalism.

Absent modernism, how would Matisse have fared? Given his training, the time spent copying masters (images not shown) and the very limited evidence shown above, I think that he had the potential to become a good representational painter. Impossible to say whether he might have become great.

In the Beginning: Piet Mondrian

This is the second in a series of posts about the roots of modernist painters. The first, about Salvador Dalí, is here

I'll start this post by confessing that I've always liked the 1930s work of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). That is, those irregular grids formed by straight, black lines on a white background with some of the grid areas filled with a primary color (red, blue or yellow). These paintings served as reference points for exercises in a design class my Freshman year in the University of Washington's School of Art.

Unlike many other modernists of his time, Mondrian wasn't trying to "say" anything during this phase of his career; these paintings were essentially design experiments where the elements of line and color were reduced to fundamentals about as far as it was possible to do so.

But Mondrian didn't begin his career painting such works. His father was an artist, so he received some training at home before he began formal art studies. Moreover, his formative years were in an era before the surge of modernist "isms" hit the art scene with full-force. Here are examples of pre-abstract Mondrian paintings:

View of Winterswijk - 1898-99 - (watercolor)

Self-Portrait - ca. 1900

Mill at Edge of Water - 1900-04

Red Tree - ca. 1908

Devotie - 1908

Self-Portrait - 1918

Based on the examples above and others seen on the Internet, I think Mondrian made an exceedingly smart career-move when he hit upon his geometric-abstraction style. The 1918 self-portrait, for example, was painted when he was 45 or 46 years old and had had plenty of time to hone skills in realism. True, the style takes a bow to modernist thinking, but it and the other paintings shown suggest that Mondrian would never have been top-notch had he stuck to representational works.

If you disagree with this assessment, please Comment.

In the Beginning: Salvador Dali

This is the introductory item of a series of occasional posts dealing with modernist painters who began their careers as representational artists.

My concept is that this will form the basis for speculation as to how a given artist might have developed had he not "gone modern." Obviously, there is no way of telling for sure what might have happened absent a system of parallel universes and wormholes for traversing them. Still, speculation is usually a fun, harmless activity as evidenced by the popularity of pre-game sports programs on television.

To begin, let's consider Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Unlike the artists to be featured in later posts, he almost never drifted very far from representationalism and, in post-Surrealist years, largely returned to representation. This gives an example of beginnings and representational potential attained. The main defect with my choice of Dalí is that examples of his early painting that I could find are not particularly representational. Oh, well.

Maybe I'd better explain what I mean by his degrees of representationalism. Surrealism, as Dalí practiced it, meant painting images representing unreal things in a manner so detailed that they might be seen as being real. That's why I claim his drift was small; small compared to changes in style exhibited by the likes of Picasso, Kandinsky and Mondrian, for example. By the 1950s, as we shall see below, the Surrealist content of his paintings became much less extreme. The result was that some paintings, particularly those with religious content, were close to representational with a touch of symbolism analogous to details in religious art of the mid-second millennium.

Let's take a look:

The Artist's Father at Llana Beach - 1920
Dalí was about 16 when this was painted. It's hard to tell if he was already experimenting with modernist ideas (see below for examples) or, like many at that age, hadn't developed much skill.

View of Port Dogue - 1920
This was painted the same year as the one above, and the same critique could be applied.

Self-Portrait (Detail) - 1923
I snapped this at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid where it and the two following paintings (not my photos) can be found. Dalí is now about 19 and experimenting with Cubism.

Retrato de su hermana (Ana María) - 1925
Two years later, he is returning to representational art. This portrait of his sister is hard-edged and slightly simplified -- a style often found in paintings of the 1920s and 30s.

Figura en una finestra - 1925
Another painting of his sister from the same year. This takes on the solidity and featuring of form that characterize much of Dalí's future painting.

The Persistence of Memory - 1931
At 27, Dalí created this, his most famous work. Most of his purely Surrealist paintings were done between the late 1920s and mid 1940s. Art critics tend to dismiss work done after this period.

Leda Atomica - 1949 (click for larger, clearer view)
This was painted when Dalí was about 45. It contains echoes of his earlier Surrealism, but actually was as carefully planned as any classical or academic painting.

Leda Atomica study
This is one of several studies for Leda Atomica. Others dealt with the perspective of the platform his wife Gala is (almost) seated on.

Christ of St. John of the Cross - 1951 (click for larger, clearer view)
Aside from the landscape at the bottom, this painting might be considered an example of hyper-realism.


Dalí did receive formal art training, even though surviving examples of his early work do not suggest this. Nevertheless, once his venture into Surrealism sealed his permanent fame, he focused his efforts on becoming a highly skilled representational painter of interesting works. I reject the idea that his work worsened after World War 2 and his focus on Surrealism.