Marine Museum and Marin-Marie Too

Paris seems packed full of museums. A tourist who has visited the town a few times is advised (by me) to devote several hours a day to being simply a flâneur, one who strolls the rues and boulevards instead of rushing from museum to famous site to yet another museum. Even so, it can be worthwhile to drop below Paris' layer of world-class museums from time to time. If you happen to be interested in history, naval history or simply ships, a nice place to visit is the Musée National de la Marine, located a few steps from where one views the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadéro area. Its Wikipedia entry is here and its website is here.

A visitor will find decorative bits from old sailing ships, an early diver's suit, paintings dealing with seafaring and naval warfare, plus many, many models of ships. Below are some photos of ship models along with some paintings. These subjects were behind protective screens, so I wasn't able to avoid some reflections appearing.

Gallery

The models are of French vessels only, as best I could tell.

At the top are models of some of France's last battleships, the Dunkerque and the Jean Bart.

A variety of naval types.

Pre-Great War battleships.

A few displays dealt with old shipyards and ship construction.

Among the artists featured was Marin-Marie, who I wrote about here. The images below are from two paintings dealing with arctic exploration ship Pourquoi-Pas (the "Why Not?"). I have a soft spot for nice brushwork, and Marin-Marie certainly accomplished that in these paintings made during World War 2, long after the Pourquoi-Pas was destroyed in a storm with only one man surviving.

"Le Pourqui-Pas dans le Soresby Sund en 1925" (detail) - 1943

"Le Pourqui-Pas à Jan Mayen en 1926" (detail) - 1943

Studies Displayed at the Louvre

Paris' Louvre is considered one of the finest of the world's art museums. It is huge, with many hundreds of works on display. Even so, paintings and sculptures made after 1850-70 or thereabouts must be sought elsewhere in Paris. What can be seen in the Louvre includes such famous works as the Venus De Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace (currently under restoration), David's monumental painting of Napoléon's coronation, not to mention Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

A typical first or even second time traveler to Paris is likely to visit the Louvre for a couple of hours and then retreat in physical and mental exhaustion, having seen perhaps half of the galleries. Because I am more interested in post-1850 painting than what the Louvre has to offer, I tend to gravitate to the bookstore rather than stalk the galleries. The last time I was there, my wife had a few paintings that she really wanted to view, but they were in galleries on the top floor in parts of the museum remote from the five-star offerings. Plus, she was having trouble following the map of the place, so I had to take on the guide task.

As a result, I stumbled onto a number of interesting paintings from the first half of the 19th century, including a couple of small-scale studies for the huge paintings over in the Denon wing. These are shown below via images of the final results plus my snapshots of the studies.

First up is The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.

Next is Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix.

And to wrap this up, here are costume studies by Delacroix.

Impressions of the Musée d'Orsay Renovation

The Musée d'Orsay was partly closed for renovation the last time I was there, July 2010. It reopened in the fall of 2011, but I didn't get to see the results until last month. Moreover, I was focusing on the paintings being exhibited rather than where and how they were presented, but that doesn't prevent me from tossing out my two-bit reactions for all to read.

A detailed report regarding the renovation is here, and interested readers should scan it to to get an idea as to what was done.

Photographs of any kind was not permitted, so the above image was grabbed from the Web. It shows the grey walls that the linked article was unsure of. I was aware of the change in background color, but it didn't bother me. And it was probably an improvement over what was there before.

On my 2010 visit to the d'Orsay, the staff had made their best effort to have the most famous items in the collection on display. That visit sticks in my mind more than what I saw saw in 2009, the previous time I was there. What this means is that what follows as a comparative perspective might well be in error. But this is professional blogging, so content flow trumps all -- and here I go:

I am not a huge fan of hardcore, Claude Monet style French Impressionism, which means that I might not have been paying as much attention as I should. But my impression of the Impressionist galleries is that a lot more works were on display than pre-renovation. For some reason, I was especially aware that a good number of Monet's early paintings were on display -- the sorts of things I especially noticed when visiting the Musée Marmottan when I was there years ago.

Fortunately for me, the d'Orsay still devotes a generous amount of space to artists outside the Art Establishment approved historical timeline to Modernism. To be found are academic works including several Bouguereaus, Orientalism, Symbolism and other interesting species of paintings from a time when uncertainty began to dominate the world of art. I took notes on what caught my attention, and these will serve as starting points for some future posts here.

So far as I am concerned, the Musée d'Orsay continues to be the don't-miss Paris art museum.

Brussels' Comic Strip Museum

For some reason, Belgians are very fond of comic strips. So of course Brussels has a museum, the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée dedicated to that field. The Web site for the museum is here.

I had a few spare hours on a recent visit to Brussels, so hiked over to it. It's on a nondescript side street, but the building itself, the former Magasins Waucquez store, is an Art Nouveau design by architect Victor Horta.

The displays were nicely done but, as would be expected, featured comics and artists familiar to Belgians and unfamiliar to Americans. One plus was that I learned how to pronounce the name of the most famous Belgian strip -- Tintin. It's not tin-tin as in the metal tin. Nor is it tin-tan, where the final "n" is nasal, French. It is tan-tan with the nasal "n." So there.

First, some views of the building.

Gallery

Shown here is the first floor (the second floor, if you're American). Note that Horta's Art Nouveau décor is comparatively restrained here.

The street level floor, with a comics display that includes a Citroën 2CV.

Looking up towards the first floor and the skylight ceiling.

The ground floor again, the entrance at the left and the museum shop taking up most of the view.

You might have noticed that the first two photos included promotional material for a current exhibit dealing with Will Eisner, a major player in the American comics scene and widely considered the inventor of the "graphic novel" comic book genre.

I enjoyed very much seeing workups and finished art for some of Eisner's graphic novels and pages from his comic strip, The Spirit. Below are a few snapshots of the displays, the first three of graphic novels, the last of a 1950 Spirit strip. You'll see some reflections because the material was in display cases or otherwise behind glass.

The Vermeer Museum in Delft

Delft in South Holland was the place where famed painter Jan Vermeer (1634-1675) lived and made his comparatively small number of paintings. It is a pleasant small city that's worth a visit if you are in the Netherlands and would like to see more of the country than Amsterdam.

Besides getting a sense of Vermeer's roots, you can visit the Vermeer Centrum Deft which does its best to inform you about the artist. What you won't see there are original paintings due to their rarity and high market value. (I suspect that strongly attributed Vermeers are virtually "priceless" because they are in important museums, and no such museum would part with a Vermeer under any but the more dire of circumstances.)

What you can see are full-size reproductions of his paintings with explanatory captions that include the work's current location. Many are here in the United States; they can be found at the Met and the Frick in New York and in the National Gallery in Washington. Also pictured is a painting owned by casino owner Steve Wynn of Las Vegas, but its attribution is weak, as a glance at the image will suggest.

On the upper level of the museum are items of interest to artists and people interested in the technology of painting. Included is a camera obscura, but the museum does not commit itself to whether or to what extent the device was used by Vermeer. Below are some photos I took of that part of the museum. Click on them to enlarge.

This chart indicates the colors thought to be most often used by Vermeer.

In Vermeer's day, artists had to mix their own paints. This display explains how it was done.

Here a viewer can compare a reproduction of a Vermeer painting to a rough approximation of his studio setup.

Vermeer was careful in his used of perspective. This exhibit shows how he might have constructed perspective for multiple vanishing points along a horizon line.

Teachout , MoMA and the History of Abstract Art

I usually enjoy reading what Terry Teachout (biographer, playwright, librettist and theater critic for The Wall Street Journal) has to say about subjects I'm familiar with (art) and those more distant from my cultural radar (music, theater, dance). He strikes me as being a sensible man, something I suspect can be hard to find at times in the cultural world.

Not long ago on his blog "About Last Night" he posted "Getting out more" (scroll down to April 9, 2013) in which he mentions his visit to New York's Museum of Modern Art which was holding an exhibit dealing with early abstract painting. Here is one of his observations:

* * * * *MoMA has always been provincial about pre-1945 American modernism, and "Inventing Abstraction" (surprise, surprise!) is no exception to the rule. I was astonished to see that Arthur Dove, who can lay a serious claim to having invented abstraction, was fobbed off with two paintings tucked away in a corner--though I do give the curator full credit for devoting an appropriate amount of space to Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, and Morton Schamberg. That corner installation was one of the best parts of the show.
* * * * *
I quite agree. About a year ago I wrote about Macdonald-Wright in this blog and I also dealt with him in my e-book "Art Adrift" (see sidebar to the right).

Paintings at the 2012 Whitney Biennial

A century and more ago, the salons -- major art exhibits -- were the creature of an Academy, the Art Establishment of the day. Nowadays, academies are often peripheral, the Art Establishment residing in the form of certain major museums, art dealers, university-based art schools and art critics and commentators. Establishment thinking as to what is the best in art is revealed in various venues, the most publicized being recurring exhibitions and awards such as the Turner Prize in Britain, the Venice Biennale and New York's Whitney Biennial.

Let's consider the most recent Whitney, which took place last year. The Wikipedia entry on the Biennial is here, and the Whitney's list of exhibitors in 2012 is here.

There were about 50 artists or groups selected. Of these, only about five dealt with drawing or painting, as best I can tell from the Web site. It seems the the Biennial curators are free to seek what they consider art wherever they can find it. The result is that I find it hard to deny the the American Art Establishment must consider juvenile attempts to be "creative" as the cornerstone of True Art. To me, it's at best a manifestation of public relations in the form of self-promotion by artists that benefits the Establishment by providing grist for displays and commentary.

But why read my screed when you can link to artist information from the Whitney Web site. Below are images from that site for the five artists who more or less were dealing in traditional graphic media. Enjoy!!

Gallery

Kai Althoff

Nicole Eisenman

Werner Herzog (yes, the movie guy)

Jutta Koether

Andrew Masullo

Packards Everywhere

They call it the Antique Car Museum, but it's really mostly about Packards.

My wife was getting in a tennis session plus some poolside sunning, and I was at loose ends because those activities aren't for me. A dive into the guidebook entry for Fort Lauderdale, Florida mentioned a car museum, something up my alley. So off I went. The museum lies a mile or so south of the city's downtown on a sidestreet so, like me, you might have to grope around a little to find it. But the price of admission is very reasonable, and the collection is interesting.

What the museum's not is glitzy or over-curated. No shiny black floors and spotlights like the Blackhawk museum in California. No faux street scenes as in the ex-Harrah museum in Reno, the Petersen museum in Los Angeles or the Henry Ford museum near Detroit. Just all kinds of stuff everywhere. That stuff includes custom car designer renderings from the 1930s, framed car ads for many brands, cases containing shelves of hood ornaments, gasoline station and car dealer service signs, and much more potentially fascinating clutter. There's even a small room in homage of Franklin D. Roosevelt who for some reason didn't seem to favor Packards. Nobody's perfect.

Here are some of my photos. The quality varies because the museum walls are pierced by many small windows that let in the intense south Florida daylight that contrasts with the otherwise fairly dark interior.

Gallery

Touring car - 1931
This is one of the more elegant Packards from the marque's heyday as America's top luxury automobile.

Runabout - 1928
The golf bag in the rumble seat is a nice touch. Note the huge spotlight mounted aft of the front fender. 23-skidoo!

Convertible - 1939
Seen 74 years later, this Packard seems very impressive. But at the time, its styling lagged behind its Cadillac and Lincoln competition which were featuring more streamlined shapes.

Caribbean - 1955
One of the last of the "real" Packards. After the 1956 model year, Packards were built, but their bodies were facelifted Studebakers. That's called dying with a whimper.

Station wagon - 1948
The greenhouse rear treatment makes it sort of a "woodie," but nearly all the body was metal. The photo doesn't show how narrow the woodie part was; this wagon wasn't all that functional.

Convertible - 1950
This car and the wagon in the previous photo represent facelifts of the attractive 1941-47 Clipper body. The facelift included clumsy flow-through fenders that enhanced the awkward, bulky appearance of the cars. The convertible shown here was the top-of-the-line model and somehow seems slightly impressive nowadays.

Light Eight - 1932
Luxury car makers were hit especially hard by the Great Depression. For 1932, Packard added the Light Eight line in an attempt to offer lower prices without tarnishing the Packard mystique. From what I read, the Light Eight was still expensive to produce, and it did little to stanch declining sales. The line was abandoned for the 1933 model year.

Light Eight grille
The styling feature I like best on the Light Eight is its grill, popularly called "shovel nose." To me, it combines the traditional Packard iconography at the top with a gesture to streamlining at the bottom.

New Chihuly Museum

Dale Chihuly (born 1941) is probably the most famous living artist sculpting in glass. He happens to be a local boy, born in Tacoma and graduating in Interior Design from the University of Washington's School of Art where we overlapped for a year or so but never met.

Tacoma has had a museum devoted to glass art and some of Chihuly's works for several years. Seattle just got into this act, opening the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum a few days ago. Its web site is here. Chihuly's own web site is here and his Wikipedia entry here.

My knowledge about sculpture of any kind is limited, so I have nothing to say about Chihuly's work. I wasn't even very interested in visiting the new museum, but my wife dragged me in while we were at the Seattle Center (site of the 1962 Century 21 world's fair) for other reasons. I wasn't packing my camera, so the photos below were grabbed from various Internet sites.

Gallery

Flashy photo of museum gallery, a Chihuly work and the Space Needle

Exterior view shortly before opening

Views of some of the exhibits

I think the museum is nicely done. The interior features a number of elaborate works mostly from the early part of his career. Outside is a garden where glass sculptures and plants coexist. My garden-loving wife was highly enthused about the juxtapositions, so I'll take her word for it.

Blogger Visits Art School Open House

Actually, the Open House involved many of the departments at the University of Washington, but I went because (1) I could visit the University's Henry Art Gallery for free, and (2) there were supposed to be some interesting activities at the School of Art where I did my undergraduate work.

Let's look at some photos I took to set the scene, and then I'll do some follow-up commentary.

This is part of a timeline display in the Henry Gallery. I'm probably being delusional, but somehow the selection of events strikes me as having a political bias.

The founding collection of the Henry Gallery contains some noteworthy late 19th century paintings including a Bouguereau. Here, alone in a room, is the only item of traditional art I could find on display.

Two of several examples of Installation Art on view that day. The people at the far right of the lower photo are real, by the way.

These are student drawings for Art 190, the introductory drawing course. I was told that not all those taking 190 are art majors. Nevertheless, these are part of a hallway display that apparently serves to demonstrate what the students are up to. The items shown here are typical of the quality of the entire display. Note that perspective is poorly done and that ellipses are also incorrect. Why didn't the instructor actually teach the students how to do these basic tasks?

Another hall display, this probably from a life drawing class where the students must have been asked to draw with expression but not violate the model's proportions. The results are better.

An event at the School of Art that I wanted to attend was a set of lectures by Art History majors. Unfortunately, I was about to leave for Florida and didn't have the time. Here is a list of the lecture topics taken from a handout:

"Constructing a Colonial Identity: Eighteenth Century Paintings of Indigenous Families in New Spain"

"Magic and the Miracle - Working Image: The Interplay of Art and the Supernatural in Fifteenth Century Italy"

"Enduring Disassociation: Mixed Racial Identities and Historical Interpretations"

"Modernity and Artistic License: Neo-Victorianism as Other"

"Classicizing Proximity: The African in Seventeenth-century Rome"

Okay, let's unpack those lecture titles that with one exception are likely related to Masters theses and PhD dissertations of the presenters. Race/ethnicity? Three of the five seem to deal with that, an obsession of a certain line of politics common to most colleges and univerities.

The title mentioning "the Supernatural" is harder to puzzle out. Could it have to do with religion? That would make sense where Italy in the 1400s is concerned. I can't think of many (any?) paintings featuring ghosts from that era, but I'm no expert and could easily be wrong.

Wikipedia indicates that the term "Neo-Victorianism" has to do with a number of things including people doing dress-up in 1880s clothing and the Steampunk literary genre. The term "Other" has been used to refer to racial/ethnic/subcultural groups that are ignored by the mainstream, yet pose some kind of ominous threat or other to it. Well, that's my superficial impression. So where do Modernity, Artistic License and a possibly sinister Neo-Victorianism intersect? Beats me, so I'm sorry I couldn't get to that lecture.

What strikes me is that none of the titles suggests serious study of the history of art. I'll accept that MA theses aren't expected to be much more than dry runs for further scholarly exercises. But every subject listed above (the last two by PhD students) is trivial and to my mind greatly off-topic if the topic is art history. Where current academicians see scholarship, I find strong evidence of politically induced intellectual rot. If I were running the university I would fire the Art History faculty to ensure that no other students waste precious years of their lives on the study of the irrelevant.