Windy Gaetano Bellei

I probably didn't drill deeply enough into Google, so all that I can report now is that Gaetano Bellei (1857-1922) apparently was born and died in Modena, Italy. And he spent at least part of his career there, because some of his paintings include the name of the city along with his signature.

Bellei was a good draftsman and created many paintings featuring accurate drawing and a painting style tending fairly strongly to the hard-edge school. He seems to have been successful (though I can't be sure of this, lacking a biography), and that was because he often painted everyday scenes and characters with a sentimental twist. This approach has long been popular with a public that likes to see art that they can relate to.

Artists that cater to that public can do well financially (think Thomas Kinkade, for a recent example), but at the price of being scorned by "sophisticates." I happen to think that sophistication can be carried too far if it becomes an end in itself, which might be one reason why I title this blog Art Contrarian. Moreover, I have no problem with artists who can make a decent living from their work; becoming famous and pulling down high auction prices after one's death doesn't strike me as satisfactory. That said, even though I appreciate Bellei's technical skill, I would not have any of his paintings hanging on a wall in my place.

What caught my eye regarding Bellei was how he depicted wind in a few of his works. I include those below along with a few other paintings by him and others to provide context.

Gallery

Bellei liked to paint pretty women. This one's skin is shown soft and perfect. The clothing and background are essentially hard-edge style painting, perhaps reflecting a likely academic training for the artist.

But it wasn't all pretty women. Here he has three generations of a family in a sentimental setting.

Back to pretty girls. Here are two on their way up a staircase to a masked ball. Except they are not wearing masks, having removed them temporarily so that we can better see who they are. Note that one is a blonde, the other brunette.

Now for some wind. A conventional windy scene, here.

Now a blonde and a brunette, but not necessarily the same ones we just saw at the ball.

A blonde and a brunette again, but this time it's raining, though they don't seem very wet yet.

Same thing, though the brunette now has a different skirt. Note that the setting is about the same in all three paintings (the dome in the background is a tip-off). What interests me is that Bellei includes rain with the wind, whereas almost every other painter of pretty women in stormy settings only features wind.

Boreas - John W. Waterhouse - 1902
Here I include some paintings by other artists showing wind and women, starting with this Waterhouse.

A Gust of Wind (Judith Gautier) - John Singer Sargent - 1886-87
A sketch, rather than a finished work by Sargent. The main indication of wind is Mme Gautier holding her hat down.

Gil Elvgren pinup
Golden Age Pinup artists such as the great genre master Gil Elvgren could use wind as a cause for showing off some hose and underwear.

George Morland, Dissipated Genre Painter

Yes, he was dissipated, throwing away an otherwise successful career through lack of financial and personal self-control. That was George Morland (1763-1804). What I find interesting is that he was a prolific painter of mostly countryside genre scenes that had little to do with his wild, largely urban life. An extensive Wikipedia biography is here.

I don't find Morland's works very interesting from an artistic standpoint. On the other hand, they can be useful documentation of aspects of late 18th century English life. Let's take a look.

Gallery

Coast Scene -1792

Winter Landscape

Herdsman with Cattle Crossing Bridge

Cowherd and Milkmaid - 1792

Pigs in a Sty
Morland painted many pigsty pictures.

Lovers Observed

Easy Money

The Public House Door - 1792

The Fortune Teller

The Artist in His Studio and His Man Gibbs - 1802
No fancy studio here, for Morland was trying to avoid his creditors after leaving debtor's prison.

Disaster and Chaos as Depicted by John Martin

"If it bleeds, it leads" is an old newspaper saying, a comment on the taste of the general public when it comes to news. That's just human nature: how much might daily circulation increase if the top front page headline stated "Crocuses are Now Blooming?"

Before the advent of photography and even after, painters had the option of depicting scenes of mayhem and destruction. One artist who did quite well at this was John Martin (1789-1854). A lengthy Wikipedia biographical entry on him is here. In 2011-12 Martin was the subject of an exhibition at the Tate Britain, in London.

Actually, Martin's painting were more epic than gory, as can be seen below.

Gallery

Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion - 1812

Fall of Babylon - 1819

Belshazzar's Feast - 1820

The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum - 1822
This painting was badly damaged in the 1920s and required a restoration much more extensive than usual, as this Guardian piece indicates.

Pandaemonium - 1841

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - 1852

The Great Day of His Wrath - 1851-53

The Last Judgement - 1853
Painted not long before Martin suffered a debilitating stroke.

The Test of Time: PoMo vs. Velvet Elvis

Just an idle thought, here. Nothing profound, as usual. I was thinking about something I wrote about in my e-book Art Adrift, and this odd idea popped into my head. Let me explain it.

An Art Adrift contention is that much modern and probably even more postmodern art lacks staying power. That's because, especially for the postmodern case, subject matter and presentation fashions are too rooted in the current scene, and universals of humanity tend to be ignored. Ironic takes on cultural references replace emotions such as joy, sorrow, wistfulness and such. Centuries, or even decades from now, how many viewers of paintings will have any idea what such paintings are about, especially if images are considerably distorted from everyday reality? We can relate to paintings by Rembrandt, but will folks 400 years from now (to use a similar time scale) be able to relate to one of Willem DeKooning's messy paintings of women?

Now for my (insightful? crazy? silly?) thought. A couple of hundred years from now, would a painting of Elvis Presley on black velvet be better appreciated than postmodern paintings of certain types? Consider the following:

Gallery

Two Elvis Presley paintings on black velvet
I found these images near the top of a Google seach.

"And Then And Then And Then And Then And Then" - by Takashi Murakami

"Postmodern Sisyphus" by Ana Maria Edulescu

Political portrait of Obama by Samoa

Clearly Elvis is a 20th century cultural icon / artifact / whatever. Few in the distant future are likely to know about him. But he is a fellow human, and a viewer of even an on-velvet Elvis might well be interested in viewing it for its human aspects. The Murakami painting might be recognized as some kind of cartoon, and the painting of a man wearing a hat could well be dismissed as not interesting or informative. As for the artist Samoa's painting showing Barack Obama, it is highly likely that it will simply be a puzzlement, its (poorly drawn) subject and accompanying iconography without meaning.

To be clear: I don't contend that Elvis paintings are or will be necessarily considered great art; but I suggest they'll be easier to relate to than much postmodernism.

Aeropittura: Futurism Takes to the Skies

Hitler's Nazi Germany tried to wipe out modernist "degenerate art" and replace it with Aryan naturalism. Stalin's Communist Soviet Union discarded post-Revolutionary art "isms" in favor of Socialist Realism's farm tractors and heroic workers. And Mussolini's Fascist Italy? Modernism was just fine with Il Duce's crowd, and plenty of modernist artists were just fine with Fascism.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurism was the prime home-grown modernist movement in Italy, and its focus on dynamism was in synch with the dynamism that Mussolini attempted to impart to Italian society after he assumed power. Futurism was pushed along over time via manifestos and other means of rejuvenation. Around the end of the 1920s, one form of this emerged in something called Aeropittura -- aviation pictures.

Perhaps the best of the Aeropittura painters was Tullio Crali, who I wrote about here. There were others, and I think it might be interesting to look at some of their works along with a couple of Cralis.

Gallery

Aeropittura - Barbara (Olga Biglieri) - 1938

Assalto di motori - Tulio Crali

Bombardamento aereo - Tulio Crali - 1932

Battaglia aerea - Renato Reghetti (detto Di Bosso) - 1936

Volo sul paese - Giulio D'Anna - 1929

Aeropittura - Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) - 1932

Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseso - Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) - 1930

Edgar Maxence: Symbolism via Women

There are plenty of images of the work of Edgar Maxence (1871-1954) on the Internet, but little information about him. His Wikipedia entry is here, and the French Wikipedia entry is about the same size. One possibly noteworthy fact is that he studied under Gustave Moreau, the noted Symbolist painter.

Maxence painted a good many religious scenes and a number of his other subjects were treated in a similar manner. He was a good draftsman and used other media besides oil. As best I can tell, he painted in a higher key (less darks) by the 1920s and some of his landscape paintings are loosely done. Perhaps because of the war or maybe because he had turned 70, his production seems to have fallen off drastically after 1941.

Although he occasionally depicted men, his subjects were almost always attractive young women.

Gallery

L'Âme de la Forêt - 1898

Les fleurs du lac - 1900
Note the two ladies glancing at us.  Plus the rare inclusion of male subjects.

La femme à l'orchidée - 1900
Might that be a cigarette in her right hand?  Don't notice any smoke, though.  Must be unlit.

Edelweiss
Not a religious painting, and not very Symbolic, so far as I can tell (though I'm ignorant of many symbols, religious or otherwise). But, as noted above, the treatment is similar.

Jeune fille nourrissant des cygnes

Portrait de jeune fille - c.1900

study of a young woman's head
It looks like the same model was used for these three paintings.  A caption I found on the Internet for the middle one stated that the media were watercolor, gouache and pastel.  The lower work clearly incorporates some watercolor.

Serenité - 1912

Le livre de la paix
All three women look like they were derived from the same model.

Reflection

Le carrefoure de Prigny
This is dated, but I can't quite read it. Might be 1944. But it's freely done and modernist-influenced.

Portrait du femme - 1941
One of his later works. Its style shows a modernist influence in its simplicity, but only slightly.