A Bouguereau at the Meat Packers

The photo above was taken at the Frye meatpacking facility in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood perhaps sometime around 1940. The reason why all those paintings are there is because they were overflow from the home of Charles Frye and his late wife Emma who had an extensive collection. The painting at the upper left is Dans le bois (also called "The Sisters") a late (1905) work by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) the prolific French painter whose works were not worth much when the photo was taken, but now can be bought at auction for more than a million dollars.

The packing plant was destroyed in 1943 when one of the three prototype XB-29 bombers experienced an engine fire and crashed into it. The entire crew was killed, including famed test pilot Eddie Allen, and more were killed in the plant. The Bouguereau was not destroyed, and perhaps there were no paintings there at the time. What was lost was documentation for the Frye collection. More about the crash and the Frye collection is here and here. Some background on the Frye Museum, where the collection now resides, is here.

The two photos above and the one following are excerpts from the Fry Museum web site. This photo shows part of the collection when it was housed in the Frye residence.

Another Frye residence photo. Here the Bouguereau can be seen in the corner next to a portrait of Mrs. Frye.

And here is that Bouguereau as captured by my camera June 11th of this year.

Number One Thousand

This is the 1,000th post on Art Contrarian.

For the first few years of this blog I posted three times per week. But I've since cut production down to twice a week due to the need to keep my Car Style Critic blog chugging along. Plus I recently started a personal blog titled Retired Blowhard that has postings whenever I feel the urge to bloviate on one topic or another.

About Blogging

I wrote this for a Facebook posting, and thought I might as well post it here and on my Car Style Crtic blog.

It was almost exactly 12 years ago that I got involved with blogging. Since then I’ve written more than 2000 blog posts.

The first blog for me was the late, lamented (because it was pretty popular) 2Blowhards blog. The guy running it was Ray Sawhill who wrote bylined articles on art and culture for Newsweek magazine in the 1980s and 90s. Ray blogged using the nom-du-blog “Michael Blowhard” in order to maintain separation from his Newsweek day job. The other Blowhard was “Friedrich von Blowhard,” a Princeton buddy of Ray’s based in Los Angeles.

The blogging software they used was primitive by today’s standards — an important defect being that post drafts couldn’t be stockpiled for later publication scheduling. That meant each post had to go live shortly after it was written. That put strain on the bloggers who wanted content flowing at the rate of one or two posts per day in order to keep readers interested and returning to see what was new.

So for some reason Ray pulled me from the commenter ranks to full-time 2Blowhards blogger to ease the load on the original 2. Except that I posted using my actual name.

At first, I was worried that I could maintain a reasonably high rate of posting. I knew I had perhaps a dozen really nice items that I could write up, but after that? You see, I recalled what happened when old vaudeville stars such as Eddie Cantor first appeared in TV “specials.” They used the good stuff that they’d honed over decades on stage, so their first show would be a wowser. After that, in future specials, their material wasn’t nearly as good due to lack of testing.

So I resolved to hold back on my so-called good stuff and write what came to mind each day. And it worked. As far as I recall, I never used up the “good stuff.”

Here’s the deal. Be sure to blog on topics you know something about. Then you must stay alert and notice things related to those subjects that might serve as hooks for posts. It’s even better if you can relate whatever it might be to similar or opposite examples, because that can make for a deeper, more interesting post. Apparently, it’s a special skill set: Ray Sawhill once told me that he thought I was “a natural blogger.”

Eventually, after his Newsweek buyout, Sawhill tired of 2Blowhards and turned it over to me. I carried on for a few months and finally decided to strike out on my own. My first blog, Art Contrarian, debuted in 2010. It is based on the idea that modernism in art was an experiment that largely failed. More interesting work had been done by more traditional painters in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Illustration, architecture and industrial design are other subjects I treat.

I’ve always been interested in automobile styling, so in 2013 I started Car Style Critic blog. I post two articles per week on each blog and maintain a backlog of two or three months’ worth of post drafts. Readership for each blog is several hundred page views daily, which is good enough for me.

My New Book: How Cars Faced the Market

My latest e-book has just been released at Amazon.com. That's the cover above.

It deals with automobile grilles and other details of the “face” or front end of a car. Facial appearance has long been an important consideration in the automobile industry because it is a major means by which people – especially potential buyers – identify makes of cars.

Over the years, different brands (actually their management, stylists, marketing and advertising personnel and consultants) have taken varying approaches to continuity of styling themes for fronts of their cars. The degree of such continuity is the theme of this book.

More than 30 brands are dealt with here, some sketchily, others in detail, depending on the points I think need to be made.

In most cases, there is considerable model-year coverage for American cars from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. That is because this was the time when styling evolution largely ended, when cars received so-called “envelope” bodies where fenders and other items were no longer the clearly distinct objects they were before. Therefore stylists began to grapple with new themes that were more fashion-related than having to do with goal-related lines of body development.

Chapters are ordered alphabetically by brand, so readers are urged to first read the Introduction and then skip around the chapters depending upon their interest in the various makes of cars. The format of the chapters can be characterized as a series of captions to the images presented.

Brands covered are Rolls-Royce, Plymouth and Volkswagen (in the Introduction), followed by in separate chapters: Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley, BMW, Bugatti, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, DeSoto, Dodge, Ford, Honda (Civic), Hudson, Imperial/Chrysler Imperial, Jaguar, Lancia, LaSalle, Lexus, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Mercury, Nash, Oldsmobile, Packard, Pontiac, Saab, Studebaker and Volvo.

Thanks to Amazon's automated conversion-to-Kindle processing, the illustrations are not as large as they were in my Word draft. Therefore, for people buying the book, I suggest they download it to their device with the largest available screen.

But thanks again to Amazon, if you have a desktop computer or a laptop with a reasonably large screen, they have a free Kindle App that displays the book and lets you size a page so that the images are as large as they were originally. Of course, you need to have already purchased the book and downloaded it to your iPad, Kindle or other device before you can access it via the app.

One-Work Artists

The title of this post does not refer to artists who created only one work in their careers. Instead, it has to do with artists who suffer the fate of being known to the general public for one really famous work. Often, the public at large will know of the work of art, yet cannot recall the name of the artist who made it.

I can't make up my mind as to whether or not this is a good thing. Many artists would be perfectly happy to have become famous or to have painted a famous painting. Others might prefer to be known for their career-wide accomplishments. Few, I would think, would rather remain essentially unknown.

Artists known for a number of their works where none looms over the rest include Rembrandt, Velázquez, David, Monet and Picasso, to name but a few.

Below are examples of famous paintings that, in my judgment, tended to overshadow the artist's other works. They are arranged alphabetically by the artist's name.

Gallery

September Morn - 1912
By Paul Émile Chabas (1869-1937).

Mona Lisa - ca. 1506
By Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519).

LOVE (print) - 1965
By Robert Indiana (b. 1928).

Washington Crossing the Delaware
By Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868).

Sunday on the Grande Jatte - 1884-86
By Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891).

Portrait of George Washington (unfinished) - 1796
By Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828).

American Gothic - 1930
By Grant Wood (1891-1942).

Monuments, Texas-Style

The state of Texas has many virtues, especially for a good many of its residents. A deficiency is in tourist attraction sites, the only truly famous one being the Alamo.

For several year my wife was anxious to tour Texas, and we finally made good on the plan in April. For various reasons en route from San Antonio to Houston's Clear Lake area, we skipped a planned visit to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station. Instead, we visited the San Jacinto battlefield east of Houston where on 21 April 1836, Texans defeated a Mexican army (for more information click here).

San Jacinto (the J is pronounced by Texans using a hard "J", not the expected Spanish "H" alternative) is not a strong attraction for most non-Texans, but I found it an interesting place.

One attraction is the San Jacinto Monument. This link states: "The monument, constructed between 1936 and 1939 and dedicated on April 21, 1939, is the world's tallest masonry column..." It is 567.31 feet (172.92 m) tall, slightly higher than the better-known 554.612-foot (169.046 m) Washington Monument in the District of Columbia. Note that construction began a century after the year of the battle.

Also on the site is the battleship USS Texas, BB-35 (Wikipedia entry here). Commissioned in 1914, it is the oldest remaining dreadnought-type American battleship; other survivors are of the World War 2 vintage "fast-battleship" type.

Below are some of my photos.  Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

There stands the monument behind our rental car. Unlike the plain, obelisk-like Washington Monument, the San Jacinto Monument has flutings like Greek columns on four of its eight faces.

Atop the monument is a four-sided Texas star.

The base, containing a museum, features inscriptions describing the battle's circumstances.

And there are very 1930s-Moderne bas-relief images with captions.

Not far away is the USS Texas. In a few years it will be placed in a dry setting (it has experienced leaks and other deterioration from time to time since it arrived at San Jacinto in 1948). Aside from the placement of the main turrets, the superstructure and armament of the Texas are drastically different from its appearance in 1914. I know it's financially impossible, but I'd love to see the Texas as it was when it was new.

Navy buffs will find the Texas interesting due to the layout of its main gun turrets. The guns are 14-inch cannons mounted in pairs. Since ten guns are carried, there are five turrets strung along the ship. This is not ideal because the third turret is placed so that its guns cannot fire fore or aft nor even nearly fore or aft, a waste of potential firepower. The strung-out turrets also require a longer swath of side armor, adding to the ship's displacement. Later battleships used three- and even four-gun turrets (Dunkerque and following French battleships).

Identify the Artist

I download a lot of images to my desktop computer. Some are reference photos. Others are intended to be used in posts on this blog. Quite a few are snagged simply because they interest me.

Of the latter group, there are a few where I can't identify the artist. In some cases, they are not signed. Others, I can't quite read the artist's signature. I think I'm in need of help, so please take a look at the images below and, if you know who the artist was, let me know in a comment. Thank you in advance.

Gallery

Number 1
An interesting setting, though not a great fine arts painting. But it might be a pretty good illustration.
* * *
Aha! Even before I added this post to the publication queue, I discovered that it's by Charles Hoffbauer, painted in 1907 and given the English title "In the Restaurant." Hoffbauer was one of those artists who did edge near the border of fine arts painting and illustration.

Number 2
Not a high priority here, but I find it interesting because it's so 1930s escapist from the Depression (which had eased a bit at the time this was done). Note the use of watercolor, a big shift from the common use of oil paints in the 1920s.

Number 3
This looks like a detail from ad advertisement, perhaps an ad for cigarettes. Very 1920s. I like it.

Number 4
This I don't especially like, but the treatment of the background figures interests me. It's from 1930 and the style is similar to what Bernard Boutet de Monvel was doing around that time. I wrote about him here. In this case, there is a signature. The first name looks like it might be "James," but the rest is hard for me to read. It looks like there's a "+" sign, so maybe two artists contributed; the style for the foreground and background figures look like they might be by different hands.

Number 5
From a Simoniz car wax advertisement of around 1936 or 37. No signature, but it reminds me of Earl Cordrey's work. However, there were plenty of other illustrators in those days who could have done it.

Number 6
This interests me the most, so I find it the most frustrating. No signature, but the little box with initials that might be "BT." Or something else. It was painted in 1926, but my reference material for that era comes up short.
* * *
On the other hand, this source says it's by Saul Tepper, and that could very well be true, given the quality of the painting. It also includes a Tepper image from 1939 with a similar identification, but where the "S" doesn't look like a "B" or whatever. (Tepper typically signed an illustration using his full name.) So in this case, let me know if this image is not by Tepper.

Amoeba Patterns, 1950s

I use the word "amoeba" in the title, but for commercial usage by the company making Formica products, the names "Skylark" and "Boomerang" were used to describe a type of decorative pattern. Some background can be found here and here.

For some reason, blobs with bent shapes were considered the height of modernity in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. One possibility is that Surrealist paintings of the 1930s served as inspiration. Other possibilities exist, and I'm not yet prepared to research the origin of their use.

What we do have is yet another example of fashion, a collective set of appearance preferences that can fairly easily be associated with a given period of time. This is true for clothing, architecture, furniture, illustration and fine-art painting. Which is why it is often easy to identify something as being "very 1920s" or whatever. And why current preferences are doomed to become quaint artifacts of past times.

Below are images related to the circa-1950 amoeba fashion that I gathered here and there on the Internet. Any copyrighted material is duly acknowledged.

Gallery

Interior of travel trailer - 1955
A publicity photo. The surface of the counter top is probably in Formica or a similar product, but not in a Boomerang pattern.

Advertisement for Formica
This is probably from the early-to-mid 1950s; the Boomerang name wasn't introduced until mid-decade, though there was overlap in name usage, as is indicated in the image below.

Some Formica patterns

Boomerang-type patterns

Formica-topped kitchen table - 1950s
The top surface has a Boomerang pattern or something pretty similar.

Container Corporation of America advertisement - 1949
The artist is Ben Cunningham of Nevada. Note especially the ochre blob at the bottom.

Interior - 1950s
The coffee table has a rounded-off, non-rectangular top shape. Typical of 1950s furniture design are the thin legs of chairs, tables, and such. The idea was to achieve the appearance of lightness -- a reaction to heavy furniture of Victorian times and ensuing decades.

Shifty School Colors

I can only write with confidence about certain parts of the United States that I'm especially familiar with. But I wouldn't be surprised if the same sort of thing I'm about to discuss isn't fairly common elsewhere.

The subject here is school colors at the college and university level. (For overseas readers, "colleges" in America are post-secondary schools. Setting aside two-year "community colleges," technical schools and such, a college is typically a four-year undergraduate institution of the liberal arts variety that lacks additional schools a university will have such as law, medicine, business, engineering, etc.)

Schools at almost any level here in the States have associated colors. Often when a school is established, its students will vote on a color scheme -- typically a two-color combination. For schools established many years ago such as in the Ivy League, colors might have been set by other means; I don't know details. As for my personal experience, as best I remember, my elementary school had no colors. My junior high was something like violet and white, and the high school had green and gold (actually more like a yellow in practice).

Where it gets interesting enough to blog about is when one begins to notice that school colors don't necessarily remain exactly the same over time or setting.

Let's start with the Ivy League, and focus on Harvard and Penn. Harvard's color is crimson, a bright red that edges slightly in the blue direction. Around Harvard Yard one can actually see some crimson here and there such as in the banner shown above.

But as to what students wear when it comes to school colors, the hue used is more like a maroon. I suspect that's because a strong red such as crimson usually doesn't work well on apparel.

Nowadays, schools can earn tidy amounts of extra money via products licensed to display coats of arms, colors and so forth. As seen above, Penn lays out in detail just what the expected colors are.

Penn's colors are red and blue. The banner pictured here shows a different set of those colors than the official specification indicates. When I was at Penn, I would see banners, pennants and such with the brighter hues shown above as well as the darker, slightly toned down official shades. To put it roughly, the bright Penn colors are associated with athletic settings (though not on team uniforms) and the darker colors are for clothing, uniforms and most other purposes. This is much like Harvard, where bright, rather "pure" colors aren't for everyday wearing, especially by 20th and 21st century American males.

I have a BA and a MA from the University of Washington. Its school colors are purple and gold, voted by the students in 1892 who were inspired by the first stanza of Lord Byron's The Destruction of Sennacherib. The colors shown above were those I experienced when I was there. As this indicates, those are the colors to be used for Web applications.

On the other hand for "branding" purposes, this color palette is now official, and is about what you see on the hoodie above, with the purple a bit lighter. This washed-out purple and gold color set is comparatively recent and is tied, I think, to the marketing of clothing for students and sports fans. I prefer the stronger colors aesthetically, but don't buy UW color clothing because (1) I don't think I look right in purple, and (2) I earned my right to be an Ivy League snob, and so prefer Penn colors.

Down the road at the University of Oregon, the colors are green and gold, like those of my high school in Seattle. Oregon sports teams are called the Ducks, so many years ago Disney artists created a fighting Donald Duck in Oregon colors as a kind of team mascot.

Even an angry Donald Duck is not very terrifying. So as Oregon grew to become a national football power over the last 15 years or so, the Donald was de-emphasized and the colors shifted, at least for athletic and logo clothing purposes. Shown above is what seems to be current. The green has been blackened and the gold turned into a yellow. The gray items (not an official color) represent duck feathers.

Farther down the coast is UCLA. It seems that all University of California branches use forms of blue and gold, but these vary from campus to campus, with UCLA favoring something like a horizon blue, sometimes even a little lighter than on the hoodie seen here.

Yet darker blues are also seen around UCLA, blues suspiciously near those found up north in Berkeley. Apparently that's legit, as this color guide states. The paler blue is favored, but a darker shade is considered okay as a "secondary" version. Both color set variations are wearable, so unlike Harvard and Penn and, to perhaps a lesser degree at Washington and Oregon, the avoidance of strong colors did not seem to be a consideration at UCLA.

"Miscellaneous - C" Images

I like to download art images from the Internet to my computer. Some are intentional grist for a post that I'm working up. Others are collected because I really like them. And then there are those serving as aides-memoirs of paintings that catch my eye for potential future collecting of images. At some point, when I have a lot of images by an artist, I'll create a directory ("folder" seems to be the term of art these days) for that artist, moving those images from a "Miscellaneous" directory to the new artist-based one.

Today's post contains images from my Miscellaneous directory for painters, and I'm selecting from those artists whose last names start with the letter C.

The original paintings were made during the 70-year period between 1870 and 1940, a time when Modernism was on the rise from ignorable quirkiness to near-domination in fine-arts painting. By the time I was being brainwashed in college, many or even perhaps all of the images shown below would have been greeted by a sniff and a condescending remark by modernist cognoscenti.

Yet I now find that same 1870-1940 period endlessly fascinating for both mainstream Modernism and art that ignored Modernism entirely or selectively nibbled at it. Of course, I am not alone nowadays, because the previously ignored non-Modernist art is regaining the respect it was denied in the 1950s.

The images shown below are in alphabetical order of the artist's name and reflect no particular theme. Have fun looking at them.

Gallery

Cabanel, Alexandre - Samson and Delilah - 1878

Cadorin, Guido - Decorazioni del salone all'Hotel Ambasciatori (detail) - 1926

Caputo, Ulisse - Lavoro di sera

Citroën, Paul - Corry Mohlenfeldt - 1939

Clark, Alson - Portal, Mission San Gabriel - 1919

Constant, Benjamin - Afternoon Languor

Cortès, Edouard-Léon - Champs Élysées scene

Cucuel, Edward - The Bather

Cursiter, Stanley - The Fair Isle Jumper - 1923

Czachorski, Wladislaw - The Proposal - 1891