In the Beginning: Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud (1922-2011), grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, is considered by the Art Establishment to be a leading British 20th century modernist. His Wikipedia entry is here.

Alas, I fail to see much merit in Freud's work aside from that he painted subjects in a largely representational manner. After due consideration, if I had to characterize his works using one word, it would be: Icky.

As for his early works, they too were essentially representational, though shapes were simplified and distorted to one degree or another. The following images were found on a BBC web page.

Gallery

Welsh Landscape - ca. 1939-40
Painted about the time Freud was an art student.

Man with a Thistle (Self-Portrait) - 1946

Girl with a Kitten - 1947

Kitty - his first wife - 1948-49
For some reason all three of the above portraits feature heads where the part above the eyes is compressed.

Still Life with Squid and Sea Urchin - 1949

Girl in a Green Dress - 1954

The Painter's Brother, Stephen - 1985-86
This is an example of Freud's mature style.

In the Beginning: Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) -- biography here -- did not quite make it to his 37th birthday, joining a surprisingly long list of artists who died before reaching 40. Had he lived a normal life-span, most of his existing paintings, posters, and other works might have been classed as "early."

Even so, it might interest readers to feature some of his really early paintings, works completed by the time he was about 25.

As can be seen, he was a proficient artist even as a teenager and capable of competently painting in traditional style. Yet even then, he was experimenting with a more thinly-painted, sketchier manner as can be seen in the first image below done when he was about 18.

Gallery

Young Routy in Céleyan - 1882

Seated Nude - 1882

Academic study - 1883

Gustave-Lucien Dennery - 1883

Portrait of a Young Woman - 1884

Carmen Gaudin - 1885

Suzanne Valadon - ca. 1886

The Laundress - Carmen Gaudin - 1886

Mme. Lili Grenier - 1888

Hélène Vary - 1888

Poudre Riz (Suzanne Valadon) - 1888-89

In The Beginning: John Sloan

John Sloan (1871-1951), one of the so-called "Ashcan School" painters, began his artistic career as a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia and continued that trade in New York City as he pursued his goal to be a painter. (Biographical information on Sloan can be found here.) Even though he eventually mostly painted, he continued to sustain himself economically by illustrating, making etchings and teaching.

When I began planning this post, I had hoped to find examples of his early newspaper work on the Internet. But the best I could manage was to find works from 1900-10 when his newspaper career was largely winding down. I previously wrote about Sloan here, dealing with an odd style he practiced late in his career.

All artists are not entirely consistent with regard to the quality of their work. Sloan strikes me as being more hit-and-miss than most -- mostly on the miss side. In fact, I find it puzzling that he is regarded as favorably as he seems to be. Some of that might be due to the fact that he was associated with a group of (better) artists active at a pivotal point in American art history. Perhaps his political views appeal to a number of art critics and scholars who therefore might be inclined to give his work the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, my take on Sloan is that some of his better work was done as a newspaper illustrator based on examples I've seen in print, but not on the Internet. For what it's worth, below are examples of Sloan's monochrome work from the 1900-10 decade along with a color illustration and one painting.

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This is from the Society of Illustrators site that includes a good discussion of Sloan as an illustrator. It's not monochrome like the ones below. Moreover, I think it's a pretty nice example of Art Nouveau illustration. In fact, although I trust the Society of Illustrators, I somehow can't quite believe Sloan actually did this.

Drawing (crayon) - 1903

"Fun, One Cent" - 1905
I find Sloan's illustrations lacking class warfare content most interesting and perhaps even better done; those others take on the feel of political cartoons.

"Memory" - etching - 1906
Sloan and his wife Dolly at at the right.

"Sleepwalker and Hypnotist" - magazine illustration? - 1903
Looks like he dashed this one off.

Election Night - 1907
A sketch of a painting, though one of his better ones from around the same time as the illustration above.

How Well Could Picasso Draw?

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), like Rembrandt, is probably still synonymous with "artist" for the general public. As regular readers of this blog probably know, I am not a Picasso fan. I never liked his work aside from a very few paintings. On the other hand, I have no problem with artists who are famous and financially successful in their own lifetime, something that applied to Picasso in spades.

From what I've read, it seems that his abilities were regarded with something like awe by artist friends in his early Paris days. That prompted the idea behind this post: just how well could he draw? After all, the ability to draw is an important artistic skill.

Below are some examples of Picasso's naturalistic drawings that should help indicate how well he could depict people when he put his mind to it.

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Femme assise dans une chaise (Dora) - 1938
To begin, here is a drawing of Dora Maar, his mistress at the time this drawing was made. I include it as a reminder of one sort of drawing he made later in his career. Some Modernist Art fans might insist that this is a marvelous drawing if one disregards accurate depiction and considers other qualities. But that is a separate matter from this post's focus.

The Artist's Father - 1896
Picasso was 15 or 16 when this painted sketch was made. Okay, it's not a drawing, but not a finished painting either. It does show that he was precocious. Very good considering his age.

Unknown subject, unknown date
Were I really diligent I might have tracked down the missing information. What matters is the quality, which seems to me is at the level one would expect from a good academic art student.

Self-Portrait - 1901
I like this drawing. It captures the 20-year-old artist without hard-edge detail: "suggestive," I'd say.

Portrait d'Olga - 1920
This is Picasso's first wife. It seems he first sketched in pencil and then inked it -- some pencil lines still show, especially near her nose and left eye. Anatomically correct aside from her fingers that seem over-simplified.

Olga au chapeau à la plume - 1920
Her head seem a bit small compared to the rest of her, but otherwise this is a competent linear treatment.

Mother and Child - from p. 28 of sketchbook 77 - ca. 1922
By this time, Picasso was in his classical phase where heads were inspired by Greek statuary and bodies were somewhat massive. An idealization, not really a depiction.

My verdict from the gallery above is that Picasso was quite capable of representational depiction. But this did not rise head-and-shoulders above what a number of other artists could do. He was a shrewd man and made a wise career choice by becoming a Modernist. Otherwise, he seems to have had nothing special to offer artistically.

In the Beginning: Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935), who dropped "Frederick" early in his career, was one of the best known and most successful American Impressionists. An extensive Wikipedia biography is here, which indicates that Hassam was largely self-taught, receiving instruction sporadically, and began his career as an illustrator.

Hassam was able to visit Paris while still in his twenties. Therefore, he was aware of the French Impressionists and perhaps Postimpressionist stirrings in the Parisian art world. Combining his virtual lack of academic art training, the need to make illustrations fairly quickly, and his exposure to Impressionism, Hassam was a fast, prolific producer of images then can fairly be termed sketchy. This was true for most of his career after around 1890, though when the occasion called for it, he could tighten up his technique. Examples include watercolors featuring architecture and oil portraits or studies of female nudes.

The present post features paintings Hassam made in the mid-to-late 1880s and very early 1890s. While they contain greater or lesser hints of Impressionism and sketchiness, they are distinctly different from his strongly Impressionist-style paintings of, say, 1910-20.

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Allies Day, May 1917 - 1917
When the subject of Childe Hassam comes up, this is the kind of painting that often comes to mind. It is Impressionist, but of the American variety where more attention is paid to value (light-dark), and the structure of subject matter is more carefully depicted than was the wont of Claude Monet in his later years.

Old House in Dorchester [Massachusetts] - 1884
Painted not long after Hassam first visited Europe. The siding boards of the building are clearly shown, but the foreground grasses are freely painted.

Boston Common at Twilight - 1885
Perhaps his best known non-Impressionist work. It can be seen at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Rainy Day, Boston - 1885

Rainy Day, Boston - 1885
Two wet Boston scenes. Below, you will find similar treatments of Paris.

A City Fairyland - 1886
Again, in Boston.

Paris Street Scene - 1887

Grand Prix Day - 1887-88

Cab Station, rue Bonaparte - 1887

Hackney Carriage, rue Bonaparte - 1888
I've walked the rue Bonaparte many times, but can't place the locations of these paintings on that street. Either my memory is poor, or a few changes might have happened over the past 125 years. (I just checked Google Maps and didn't notice the walls shown in the paintings, so I suppose that changes were indeed made.)

April Showers, Champs-Élysées - 1888
Hassan clearly enjoyed painting rain-soaked streets, but he tightened up when it came to the woman, omnibus and horses.

Lower Fifth Avenue [New York] - 1890
The subjects are crisply outlined, but their interior coloring was influenced by Impressionism.

Diego Rivera's Cubist Period

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (1886-1957) usually known as Diego Rivera, remains Mexico's best-known artist nearly 60 years after his death. Much of Rivera's art from around 1920 onwards featured political subjects. Since I happen to believe that politicized art distracts viewers from aesthetic content (paintings become elaborate political cartoons), I have never been a Rivera fan.

His earliest works tended to be non-political because he seems to have been sharpening and evolving his artistic skills until he reached his early 30s. He spent about a dozen years in Europe -- Paris, mostly -- starting in 1907, and knew many of the modernist artists who created the onslaught of stylistic "isms" in the early 1900s. This included Cubism, a practice he adopted for about three years, and the subject of this post.

Wikipedia's Rivera biography is here. A discussion of his Cubist phase can be found here. Rivera's Cubist paintings was the subject of a museum exhibit in Dallas a few years ago.

Here are some of Rivera's works from that period.

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The Flower Carrier - 1935
An example of Rivera's mature style. There are political implications here, but they are less overt than usual.

Girl with Artichokes - 1913

The Adoration of the Virgin - 1913
This image and the one above it have hints of Cubism, but are largely representational with other modernist elements thrown in. I like them better than his more purely Cubist works.

Oscar Miestchaninoff - 1913
Cubist faceting is more prominent here, but use of "multiple perspectives" is still absent.

Portrait of Zinoviev - 1913
Now we find face-on and profile views, here for a portrait of a Russian artist.  A muted Braque-Picasso color scheme also intrudes.

Two Women - Angelina Beloff and Maria Dolores Bastian - 1914
Many facets, but not much in the way of varying viewpoints.  Apparently Rivera could do Cubism superficially, but had a hard time going all the way.  Perhaps he realized that Cubism's central premise was silly in reality.

Young Man with Stylograph - 1914
Another derivative experiment by Rivera.  No worse than many Cubism-inspired painting of that time.

Ramon Gomez de la Serna - 1915
The subject is shattered Cubist-style, but the woman in the upper-left corner is garden-variety modernist.

Zapatista Landscape - 1915
The rifle is not cubified: Rivera's homage to revolutionary times back home in Mexico.

Maternity - Angelina Beloff and their son who died in 1918 - 1916
Plenty of facets and even some Fauvist coloring.  Rivera abandoned Cubism not long after this painting was made.