In the Beginning: Man Ray

According to what I've read about him over the years, Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890-1976), identified himself primarily as a painter even though most others considered photography his forte. I think he was indulging in wishful thinking. His Wikipedia entry is here and another take is here.

The Wikipedia entry states that his earliest paintings were traditional, but a quick Web search didn't turn up any of those. What I did find were images of paintings he made following the famous 1913 New York Armory Show that introduced French avant-garde art to America. The exhibits influenced him to become a modernist painter, as did his association with Marcel Duchamp who was living in New York for about eight years starting in 1915. Man Ray also was strongly influenced by the Dada movement that began in Switzerland in 1916. At different times he considered himself a Dadaist and a Surrealist in photography as well as painting, though he supported himself mostly through commercial photography.

Below are examples of Man Ray's work starting with his early modernist paintings.

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Still Life with Red Tea Kettle - 1913

Departure of Summer - 1914

Five Figures - 1914

Hills - 1914These are among the earliest modernist Man Ray paintings I could locate.

Pisces - 1938

Self-Portrait - 1941These were done years later.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't find them much better than what he was doing around 1914.  But that might just be because it's modernism, which tends to place skill (as opposed to "creativity") low on its list of desiderata.

Photo self-portrait

Electricite la Maison - 1931
Here are two examples of his avant-garde photography, a field in which he was a genuine innovator.

Fashion photo - c.1930
Finally, an example of his commercial photography.  Contrarian me, I much prefer it to his various modernist darkroom and paintbrush efforts.

In the Beginning: Claude Monet

The early paintings of Claude Monet (1840-1926) are no deep, dark secret hidden by protectors to preserve his reputation as an early modernist. They can be found in important museums in France and America and not stashed away in storage areas. When in Paris, all you have to do is suffer standing in line for entry to the Musée d'Orsay before rambling around to spot one or two examples. And if the d'Orsay waiting line is too daunting, you can wander into the 16th Arrondissement and over by the Bois du Boulogne and visit the Musée Marmottan, which has a nice collection of Monet's work. In fact, years ago I was at the Marmottan and struck by the fact that Monet wasn't always haystacks and water lilies, even though his paintings were seldom entirely conventional for the times.

Here is a sampling of pre-Impressioninst (in style) paintings.

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Camille Doncieux (his future wife) - 1866

Garden at Sainte-Adresse - 1867

Women in a Garden - 1866-67

Mme. Gaudibert - 1868

Self-Portrait - 1886
Although he was well into Impressionism by this time, Monet chose to portray himself fairly conventionally.

In the Beginning: Thomas Hart Benton

Above is "The Wreck of the Ole 97" painted by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) in 1943. The exaggerated solidity and twistings of subjects and the strong colors are virtual trademarks of the artist's style. But like most mature styles, it was not evident during his formative years.

Justin Wolff's recent biography of Benton indicates that the mature Benton style did not emerge until the early 1920s. Before that, he experimented with a number of styles, hoping to find his artistic "voice." And it seems that he continued to experiment in later years, though those works were probably intended for his own use.

What I find interesting is that Benton explored an especially wide range of styles before hitting paydirt. Let's take a look:

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The Artist's Sister - 1913
This painting is entirely traditional, showing that despite his later anatomical antics, Benton was capable of honestly depicting a subject.

The Fish Hatchery, Neosho - 1912
Yet in the previous year he was already tentatively experimenting with modernist stylistic elements.

Bubbles - c.1916
He fell under the Synchromist spell of Stanton Macdonald-Wright for a while.

Upper Manhattan - 1917
Then he backed away from pure abstraction to modernist form-simplification with a touch of Synchromist coloration.

Rhythmic Construction - 1919
Amongst his ziggings and zaggings, Benton included this stab at abstraction. Note the hard-edge look and hints of shapes and colors he would soon turn to in his more representational work.

Self-Portrait with Rita - 1922
This is one of the earliest paintings showing Benton's signature style. Rita Piacenza was his new wife.

In the Beginning: Mark Rothko

The image above has neither subject-matter nor title. It's a "Color Field" abstract painting by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) who made his artistic mark by creating it and similar works. His Wikipedia entry is here.

Before Rothko entered the Color Field genre, he drifted along with other artists of the interwar period in a search for creative results when the real modernist creative spadework had already been completed. I discuss this problem in my e-book "Art Adrift." Rothko eventually succeed to a degree, in that his Color Field paintings featured geometrical shapes (usually rectangles) that had lost part of their geometrical character because edges were blurred, indistinct. (Earlier artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich painted their geometry in the old, tried-and-true hard-edged fashion.)

Here are examples of Rothko's pre-Color Field work.

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View of Portland (Oregon) - c.1928
This is the most naturalistic painting that I could find. He situated himself on the hill to the west of downtown Portland and faced east. That's the Willamette River in the middle ground and Mt. Hood on the horizon to the left of center.

Untitled (three nudes) - c.1926-35
Highly uncertain date for this. As best I know, Rothko never followed the Cubist route, but instead relied on distorting subject's shapes to a considerable degree and colors to a lesser extent while observing the modernist diktat of "honoring the picture plane" (avoiding the appearance of depth). These remarks apply to most of the paintings below.

Woman Reading - 1933

Self-Portrait - 1936

Contemplation - 1937-38

Entrance to Subway (Subway Scene) - 1938
Here Rothko edges away from the flatness requirement. Nearer objects overlap more distant objects and nearer objects are larger than distant objects (I'm referring to people in this case). However, flatness is retained to a large degree because Rothko paints his subjects as if they were flat, cardboard cut-outs, no doubt preserving his modernist credentials.

In the Beginning: Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) is best known for "action" paintings such as his "Woman" series. Below is the first of that line, done around 1950-52.

But this was not his only style. Unlike some others in the postwar New York School, de Kooning had received a fairly rigorous traditional basic art training, as his Wikipedia entry indicates. At the end of his active career, as his mind was deteriorating, he was painting curved dabs of paint on light-colored canvases. Unlike most other New York modernist painters active 1945-1960, de Kooning did not go totally abstract; his work always a connection (however slight) to the observed world, as is exemplified by "Woman I" above. As shown below, he experimented with abstraction a bit during the 1930s and began producing abstract paintings by the 1980s when he began its descent into dementia.

Between his student training in Rotterdam and the beginning of his fame in the early 1950s, de Kooning was busy experimenting with varieties of modernist stylistic traits, such as I discuss in Art Adrift, seeking to find his artistic "voice." Here are some examples:

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Still Life - 1921

WPA mural study - 1936

In his studio - 1937

Two Standing Men - 1938

Seated Woman - c.1940

Elaine Fried - 1940 or 1941

Standing Man - 1942

In the Beginning: John Twachtman

Among my myriad character flaws is that I've never much liked hardcore Impressionism of the mature Monet variety. It surely has to do with the fact that such images are too vague for my taste. I really appreciate a hard edge here and there, and a value (light-dark) design is welcome indeed.

So it is that I've never been much of a fan of the American Impressionist John Twachtman (1853-1902) aside from his Arques-le-Battaille currently residing the Met in New York (also see image below). His Wikipedia entry is here, a website devoted to him here, and a chronological presentation of his paintings is here.

But then there is the early Twachtman, before the Impressionist bug bit him, and there is more to him than Arques-le-Battaille. Take the painting shown at the top of this post, for example. It was buried in the storage area of Seattle's Fry Art Museum and only recently reappeared in conjunction with the museum's reopening following reconfiguration of gallery layouts.

The painting is titled "Windmills, Dordrecht" and was created in 1881 or 1882 while Twachtman was vising Europe with his new bride. It might be a bit hard to tell from the small image, but the painting (which in fact isn't very large) was painted with crispness and economy. Very pleasing to me, at least. Makes me wonder how things would have turned out had he never taken up Impressionism.

Below are two paintings from the first part of his career and three from the later part when he regarded himself as an Impressonist.

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"Dunes Back of Coney Island" - c.1880
This painting was also on display at the Frye reopening.

Arques-le-Battaille - 1885
This might be Twachtman's very best.

"Figure in a Landscape" - c.1895
He seldom painted people. This is an Impressionist portrait of sorts.

"Gloucester Harbor" - 1900
There are plenty of details in this scene, but they get smudged away thanks to the Impressionist style.

"Waterfront Scene, Gloucester" - c.1901
Structures with clean edges dominate this scene, so Twachtman was forced to tighten things up compared to what he might have done if he were painting a countryside scene.

Emile Bernard: He Could Have Been Gauguin

Émile Bernard (1868-1941) strikes me as currently having a reputation in that gray zone between famous and footnote. In part, that might be because most of his noteworthy paintings were done over a comparatively short span of years early in his career. Perhaps a more important reason is that he was soon overshadowed by an artist whose work he influenced, an artist who became famous. Details can be found in this Wikipedia entry.

Bernard was involved in the development of Cloisonnism and Synthetism around the time he was working in Pont-Aven, a coastal town near the western tip of Brittany that was popular with artists. Paul Gauguin, who had decided to become a full-time artist, traveled there to paint and rub elbows with fellow painters while being able to live cheaply. At this time, Gauguin and Bernard painted in a similar style and they later disputed who influenced the other.

However, something noteworthy is that Bernard, by the time he was 20, had formed a philosophy of art that, according to Herbert Read in an essay that can be found here, greatly influenced Gauguin's drift from Impressionism to favor what Bernard had been contending. Now for some irony: While Gauguin followed the Pont-Aven path, Bernard did not; at least that's what the appearance of his later paintings suggests. Well, actually he continued to include some outlining in his images, and use of outlines was a component of the theory he spun when he was young.

Bernard was interested in religion and related issues to the point where his artistic career shifted away from the avant-garde. For example, he lived in Egypt for 10 years starting 1893 and in some respects "went native." After returning to France his career drifted, though he did eventually instruct at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Here are a few examples of his work.

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Madeleine au Bois d'Amour - 1888

The Harvest - 1888

Breton Women in the Meadow - 1888
The two paintings immediately above are similar to what Gauguin was painting in Pont-Aven.

The Three Races - 1898
Ten years later, Cloisonnism had been abandoned.

Lady With a Fan (also known by other titles)
This was probably done while in Egypt.

Portrait - c.1928
A touch of 1920s simplified-surfaces modernism at this point in his career.

In the Beginning: Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 - 1912
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) painted little after completing the iconic work shown above. Instead, he focused on playing chess, advising art collectors and creating non-art assemblages that he claimed were art, setting the stage for all that wonderful Postmodernism we've been subjected to for the past 50 years.

But his past, those pre-"Nude" days, are largely terra incognita so far as Standard Narrative Art History is concerned. Perhaps that's because it might damage Duchamp's reputation if

this image was widely known and associated with his name.

What you see is a detail of the painting below.

Portrait d'Yvonne Duchamp-Villon née Bon - 1907
I spotted it recently while visiting the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.