Lhermitte: Rural Realist

Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925) was a "realist" painter in more than one sense. In the first place, his style was traditionally representational, to which the everyday usage of realist applies. He also was a Realist in the art history sense of depicting everyday scenes as opposed to subjects taken from mythology, history, religion and others favored by the Academic art establishment of his day. His Wikipedia entry is here, and more detailed biographical sketches can be found here and here.

Sources indicate that Van Gogh liked Lhermitte's work, his illustrations and pastels in particular. Perhaps that had to do with their subject matter.

That said, Lhermitte is not well known today even though his La paye des moissonneurs is usually on display at Paris' Musée d'Orsay.

Below are examples of his work. As can be seen, he favored rural scenes or, failing that, proletarian ones.

Gallery

Les cordonniers de Mont-Saint-Père - 1880

La paye des moissonneurs - 1882

Moissonneurs à Mont-Saint-Père - 1883-84

Le reveil du faucheur - 1899

Le pardon de Ploumanach'h

Les Halles, study - 1889

The Gleaners - c. 1908

The Art Dictator's Art

Aleksander Gerasimov (1881-1963) was an important Socialist Realist painter. As his Wikipedia entry states, "His heavy-handed leadership of the Union of Artists of the USSR and the Soviet Academy of Arts were [sic] notorious..."

More details on his career can be found here.

I am no fan of centralized authority in any form, so I offer the following Gerasimov paintings, technically well-done though some of them might be, as examples of what gets produced under authoritarian circumstances.

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Lenin on the Tribune - 1930

Stalin at the 18th Party Congress

I.V. Stalin and K.E.Voroshilov in the Kremlin After the Rain - 1938
This painting won Gerasimov an important prize, though it's hard to understand why. Maybe Stalin liked the way his likeness was painted.

Portrait of the Ballet Dancer Olga Lepeshinskaya - 1939
A welcome break from Socialist Realism.

The Meeting of F.D. Roosevelt and the Shaw of Iran - 1944
This would be related to the Teheran Conference of 1943. So the subject is political, but in no way glorifies the Soviet regime.

Peonies - 1952
In his spare time, Gerasimov set politics and Socialist Realism aside to do a little Post-Impessionism for his own purposes.

Will Cotton: Sweets Painter

A representational artist who has been getting attention of late is Will Cotton (b. 1965). For instance, Rizzoli released this book dealing with his art in November, and his cover painting for a Katy Perry album prompted this Artinfo piece.

Why the fuss? Take a look:

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Cotton Candy Katy - 2010
The original painting measures 72 by 84 inches; that is, 6 by 7 feet or 183 by 213 cm. The image above has been cropped at the top (it was painted for the cover of the CD album mentioned above, and album art requires a nearly square format).

Photo of Will Cotton's studio
Note the size of the work in progress.

Will Cotton and Katy Perry
Behind is a painting of her titled "Cupcake Katy."

Chocolate Forest - 2001

Nude in chocolate landscape

Taffy Forest - 2007

Ice Cream Venus - 2010

Ice Cream study

As you might have noticed, Cotton's theme is candy in various guises. Some paintings feature nothing but close images of solid or flowing chocolate. And because Cotton wants everything to look really real, he builds landscape maquettes using the real thing. This led him to become a serious maker of chocolates, now a sort of side job.

Another impression from the images is that his work seems photographic, even though it's actually oil paint on linen canvas. This effect is partly achieved because Cotton paints on huge canvasses, this giving him room to deal with details in a smooth, not-so-painterly way.

Speaking of photography, whereas he does use reference photos, Cotton is quite able to draw very well on his own, as the final image above indicates.

Not everyone cares for hyper-realistic beautiful women in candy environments. Leah Ollman's piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Art review: Will Cotton at Michael Kohn Gallery" (link here) contains the following:

Cotton’s name is often uttered in the same breath as Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, painters who also emerged in the '90s with work that flaunted its political incorrectness in regard to the female nude. Yuskavage and Currin undermine erotic conventions in their own idiosyncratic ways, while Cotton merely plays into them in a manner that’s more pedestrian than provocative. In a catalogue essay for Cotton’s previous show here, in 2005, art historian Robert Rosenblum posits that the opposing poles of avant-garde and kitsch (famously articulated by Clement Greenberg) merge in these saccharine visions, but to me, the paintings look only backward, not forward. Cheesecake has been replaced by cupcakes, as per the gastronomic trend, and the subjects’ girly, cutesy sex appeal now disingenuously credits itself as post-feminist. None of Cotton’s choices speaks of subversion or criticality, and his rococo froth is only minimally clever. Exhausting familiar sexist correspondences between women and fantasy, desire, indulgence and consumption, the work exploits a single gimmick to the point of sugar shock.

So she states that some people link Cotton to Yuskavage (crude autoerotic images of women) and Currin (gross, cartoon-like exaggerations of female anatomy); I see no connection at all. As for Ollman, just why must (by implication) art be tied to "subversion or criticality" to be considered worthwhile? To me, this attitude, along with slavery to political correctness and other foibles, is a major defect in the mindset of postmodernist art.

Yes, Cotton's paintings lack "serious" themes and psychological "depth." But they're extremely well crafted and fun to look at (for some of us, anyway). That said, I hope that Cotton has a few paintings hidden away in the storage area of his studio that place those gorgeous gals (and other figures) in real world settings as a test of his skills.

Another thought: Those 19th century paintings of odalisques and harem scenes were, in their way, as fantastical as Cotton's candy-related settings. In all cases, the artist was seeking an excuse to show off his skills for depicting female beauty. So Cotton can be seen as following in a time-honored fine-arts tradition.

Art and Comics Coverge?

Above is the October 2011 cover of Art News, where the top heading says "Where Art Meets Comics." The article it headlines is here. In case the link disappears, here are two paragraphs from it dealing with its thesis:

"Over the last decade, the boundary between fine art and comics has grown increasingly porous. In 2002, original panels from Chris Ware’s comic book Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, a minimalist meditation on longing and isolation, were featured in the Whitney Biennial. Four years later, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles collaborated on a seminal exhibition of 15 groundbreaking artists, called “Masters of American Comics.” In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened “Comic Abstraction,” which looked at how fine artists have employed elements of comics’ visual language.

"This year will see a slew of related exhibitions. The Whitney Museum is devoting a retrospective (closing October 16) to the painter Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), which explores his work as a cartoonist for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. (The characters he drew in his strips inspired wood carvings that he produced for the rest of his life.) In April 2012, the Oakland Museum of California will present the first major survey devoted to Daniel Clowes, the artist behind Ghost World, the graphic novel that inspired the 2001 film of the same name. And in April, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris will hold a full-scale retrospective of the counterculture comics legend Robert Crumb, creator of the straight-talking guru Mr. Natural and the hedonistic Fritz the Cat."

The thrust of the article is that contemporary comics are being looked at as "art." What was not mentioned is that some postmodern "art" looks a lot like contemporary comics. And no, I'm not thinking of Roy Lichtenstein who painted his take on comic book panels from the 1940s and 50s. Consider these:

Music (Borrowed Tune) by Brian Calvin - 2006

Loafers by Martin Maloney - c.2005

Kyoto Sky by Aya Takano - 2004

Koester: Rembrandt of Ducks

Being a one-trick-pony is something usually looked down upon. But what if that single trick is done with genius? Something to be said for that, thinks I.

Consider the painting below.

It's an audience favorite at Seattle's Frye Art Museum. And in fact it's really nicely done. In person, those duck feathers look almost buttery in their painterly smoothness, a real tour de force.

The artist is Alexander Max Koester (1864-1932), and here are a few more of his duck paintings.

Koester was born near Cologne and studied at the Karlsruhe Academy of Art. He moved to Munich and later to the Tyrol, painting landscapes and Tyrolean peasant life. But he was best at ducks. Especially white ones.

William Wontner, Faux Orientalist

William Clarke Wontner (1857-1930) Liked to paint beautiful English women who usually were costumed in an oriental manner. Nothing seriously wrong with that: as any magazine rack will attest, pretty girls rule, and in late 19th century Europe Orientalism continued to be a popular painting genre.

Apparently Wontner had a good thing going because he painted many images in one-third length portrait fashion. Seen in isolation, this isn't in itself a problem, but his formula becomes obvious when several are seen at the same time. Take a look:

An Emerald Eyed Beauty

The Elegant Beauty

The Fair Persian

The Turban

Valeria

Wontner didn't follow that formula exclusively. Below are images that feature some variety.

Lady of Baghdad

The Jade Necklace

Wontner treated flesh and fabric with skill. He also avoided the "classical" version of the female face that was fashionable over much of the 19th century in some artistic corners. That is, the faces he painted are more like what we encounter daily. Moreover, he included hints of individuality and personality.

Lacking is any sense of psychological or narrative depth to his subjects: it's largely a case of decoration. And there's the matter of his models being obviously English rather than from Persia, Baghdad or whatever part of the Middle East the costuming suggested.

Apart from technique, it's hard to take Wontner's work seriously, pretty though it (and his subjects) might be.

Edd Cartier: Wry Sci-Fi Art

Edward D. Cartier (1914-2008) was an illustrator who specialized in science-fiction. I saw his work fairly often as a budding teenager during the era when sci-fi magazines had largely abandoned their pulp heritage and were appearing in digest or semi-digest format with better quality paper. By the time I reached my twenties I'd drifted from short-story sci-fi in magazines to paperback novels and Cartier faded from my view. That was quite a while ago.

So it surprised me to learn recently while exploring the Internet that Edd (he combined the "Ed" from his given name with his middle initial to derive his professional monicker) died fairly recently after attaining an old age riper than most of us can expect. He rated an obituary in The New York Times that provides a decent amount of detail regarding his life (link here).

As the obit notes, Cartier saw combat in Europe. He was badly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge (earning a Bronze Star along with the Purple Heart) and further wounded during medical evacuation. This didn't affect his wryly humorous take on bedrock components of science fiction illustrations of the day: spaceships, alien monsters, gorgeous women and the heroic men who save them from whatever fate authors could dream up.

Contrast this with illustrator Gilbert Bundy who, I as mentioned here, could not shake off his combat zone experiences and eventually killed himself.

The market for science fiction was not large when Cartier was active in the field, so he eventually found himself day jobs and, so far as I know, continued sci-fi on the side. Very sensible.

Below are examples of Edd Cartier's work beginning with one of his pulp mag illustrations for a Shadow story before World War 2.

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Illustration (cropped) for Shadow pulp magazine story, 1930s.

Magazine cover, 1940.

An example of Cartier's alien species.

Girl meets alien.

Mad scientist? Or just an old techie slaving over an even older adding machine?

Space explorer babe from 1952.

I really should do a comparative analysis, but for now I'll go with my gut feeling that Cartier had more ability than almost any other sci-fi magazine illustrator active in the 1950s.

Nature, Enhanced

The Seattle Art Museum has an exhibit of 19th century paintings of western scenes on view until 11 September. There are Names from the Hudson River School represented, but the featured guy is Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902).

Bierstadt was born in Solingen in what is now Germany and moved to Massachusetts as a child. He returned for art training in Düsseldorf, not far from his native Solingen, but made his career in the United States painting nature scenes. A web site striving to catalog all his paintings is here.

What I found most interesting about the exhibit was that most of the paintings were dramatic exaggerations of what one actually sees when at the various sites depicted. I know those sites because I've spent most of my life on the West Coast and have traveled through many parts of the Mountain West as well as coastal areas.

But the audience for paintings by Bierstadt and the others lived far to the east of the painting sites, had never traveled out west, and therefore was ignorant of its reality. This was more true around 1860 when Bierstadt made his first sojourn; later in the century the west became better documented by photography.

Below is an example of the kind of exaggeration I noticed.

Mount Rainier - Albert Bierstadt - 1890
This painting sold at a recent Coeur d'Alene Art Auction for $2,143,000.

Mount Rainier as seen from Tacoma harbor
Bierstadt probably made his sketches approximately from this angle to the mountain, but a few miles closer to it on a ridge east of Tacoma overlooking the Puyallup River (which empties into Commencement Bay, where this photo was taken).

Waif Art

I'm sure waifs are fine people. Salt of the earth, they.

However, despite their charm and other exemplary qualities, I can't get enthused about paintings featuring waifs. Don't necessarily hate those works, mind you -- it's just that I can't seem to move my appreciation needle into the positive zone.

Back during the 1960s waif art was dominated by Walter Keane who painted waifs of various types in assorted settings who stared with large, sad eyes directly at the viewer. Except that Walter Keane didn't actually do all the paintings or maybe didn't do any, his signature notwithstanding. It was his wife Margaret who did the grunt work. Perhaps her waifs were tying to tell us something that eventually required a court of law to sort out. (The Wikipedia entry on Walter offers some of his side of the issue, in case you might be interested.)

Waif art has been around longer than the Keanes, confirming that there indeed is and has been a market for it. So I straighten my back, click my heels and give that market a hearty (if uncomprehending) salute and turn you over to a galley of waifs dating as far back as the 19th century.

Gallery

By Margaret Keane

The Youngest Daughter of J.S. Gabriel - Alfred Augustus Glendening
Probably not a true waif, though the house looks pretty rustic -- or seedy, even.

Waifs and Strays - Joseph Clark, 1882

The Sand Artist - George Luks, 1905

Pas Mèche - Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1882