John Sloan's Topographical Paintings

I was never fond of the works of Ashcan School painter John Sloan (1871-1951) -- Wilipedia entry here.

To my way of thinking, Sloan was one of those artists whose paintings became progressively less satisfying to view. His early works (which I might get around to discussing sometime) were pretty good, though not distinctive. Mid-career paintings were less well done, in my opinion, but were distinctively Sloans, which is not a bad thing when it comes to long-term artistic notoriety, if not fame. During the last 20 or so years of his life, Sloan went off the rails and began using tempera paints to create underpaintings featuring topographical-like lines describing a subject's surface, much like the sort of engravings one sees on paper money. Atop that base, he applied oil paint glazes. I show some results below.

Gallery

Election Night - 1907

Women Drying Their Hair - 1912
Above are two mid-period Sloans to set the scene. When one thinks of Sloan, this is the general style that is most likely to come to mind.

Girl, Back to Piano - 1932
A fairly early topographical Sloan effort. The surface definition lines are mostly on the subject, not so much on the setting.

Barbara in Red and Gold

Helen [Farr Sloan] at the Easel - 1947
Two portraits. I have no idea why Sloan persisted with this style when it should have been obvious that resulting works were rather ugly. The technique is so strong and odd that it easily distracts viewers from the subject matter.

Santa Fe Siesta - 1949
A late painting illustrating Sloan's stylistic obsession applied to an entire human form.

Charles Curran's Hilltop Women

Charles Courtney Curran (1861 – 1942) was of the same ilk as his Boston School contemporaries, though he did his work in New York State and Ohio rather than in or near The Hub. His Wikipedia entry is here, and a more detailed biography can be found here.

Curran was highly skilled and painted attractive women in a variety of settings for the most part. For nearly 20 years or so he made many paintings of young, usually white-clad woman on hilltops near his summer home in Upstate New York. I offer a sampling of these below.

Gallery

View of Ellenville, New York
This is the area where Curran did his hilltop scenes. Ellenville lies in Ulster County, up the Hudson River from New York City, near the southeastern corner of the Catskill Mountains. The view is from the Shawangunk Ridge near the tiny village of Cragsmoor (about three miles south of Ellenville), where Curran had a summer home. The Catskills are seen in the background.

Faraway Thoughts
This painting is more hard-edge than most of the others.  I don't have a date for it, so can't give it context.

Noonday Sunlight - 1918

On the Cliff - 1910

On the Heights - 1909

Summer - 1906

Summer Clouds - 1917

Sunlit Valley - 1920

Sunshine and Haze
I like this (and the preceding image) because Curran did a convincing job of painting the usually humid summer atmospherics of that part of New York State. I can attest to this because I spent more than four years in Albany and traveled to the Catskill region many, many times in those days.

Jacek Malczewski and Muses

Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929) made astonishing paintings. Not astonishingly good paintings, necessarily, but paintings that astonish. Not only do they astonish, they fascinate. This is mostly because of their subjects and how Malczewski presented them. For me, its a "What in the hell is going on here?" reaction in many cases. Malczewski carried this off because was a skilled artist; off hand, I can't think of any other painter who could have painted what he did in such a convincing manner.

I lasted posted on Malczewski here, showing some of his paintings dealing with death. The present post deals with artists, muses, and in particular, Malczewski's most important muse, Marii Balowej, also known as Maria Balowa or Maria Bal. For a short summary of Malczewski's career, click here.

The images below are in chronological order. Click to enlarge.

Gallery

Natchnienie malarza (Painter's Muse) - 1897

Artysta i muza (Artist and Muse) - 1898

Autoportret z muza - (Self-Portrait With Muse Holding Scepter and Heart) - 1904
Although he was married, Malczewski began using the recently-divorced Marii Balowej as a model. This turned into an affair that lasted for about ten years. Even after it ended, the two remained friends. As best I can tell, this and all the images below have her as the model for the woman.

Portret Kobiety (Marii Balowej) - 1907

Modelka (Maria Balowa jako śmierć czytająca nekrologi w gazecie) - Model as Death Reading Obituaries - 1907

Moja dusza (My Soul) - 1908
This is really a sketch, but Malczewski considered it finished because he signed it. I include it because it suggests his technique at an early stage of creating a painting.

Wiosna (Spring) - 1909

Auroportret - 1915
Another partly completed work.

Pytia Pythia (the Delphic oracle) - 1917
Painted after the break-up. Marii is fully clothed, perhaps due to that.

Tim Huhn's Retro-Deco Art

There is little personal information about Tim Huhn on the Internet. His own Website has this biographical snippet, and an art gallery site tells us this.

Essentially, Huhn comes from up here in the Seattle area, was trained in California, worked in illustration for a number of years in the Los Angeles area, dropped that and moved to the central California coast, and finally relocated back here.

As for his art, Huhn strikes me as being extremely versatile and able to "sell" his concepts very well. For example, he convincingly painted a number of images in 1930s Moderne style. These poster and mural-like paintings look as if they actually were made in those days. Very impressive. More recently, he seems to have shifted to traditional subjects and technique -- again in a skillful manner. Interestingly, his Web site contains no 1930s iconography; too bad, because he was good at it.

Gallery

Dawn of a New Age

The five images immediately above are posters derived from some Huhn paintings apparently in cooperation with the Just Looking Gallery in San Luis Obispo, California that deals in his art.

Posters of the four seasons.

In Repose
The Just Looking Gallery site indicates that this is a recent work by Huhn.  Still in Moderne mode.

Colonnade at Tolosa (in San Luis Obispo)

Biltmore Tower (the hotel in Montecito, California, near Santa Barbara)

Quartermaster Harbor Morning (on Vashon Island, Washington)
These last three paintings show Huhn working in a traditional mode.

Morton Roberts, Isaak Brodsky and the Revolution

The distinction between historical art and political art can be fuzzy. Whether a painting or illustration falls into one category or the other is often a subjective judgment. One might think that a painting of some event from Greek or Roman times would be a history painting pure and simple. But even there, if the painting depicts one side of a conflict in a more favorable light than the other side, then a political statement of sorts is involved. This probably doesn't matter much if the subject is not related to politics or ideology at the time the painting was created. However, I'll contend (until I change my mind) that if an artist paints a scene from history in such a way that commentary is made about current (for the artist) events, then this is political art. And artistic commentaries on events or people contemporary to the artist are indeed examples of political art.

The present post deals with the era of the Russian revolution of 1917 and two artists who dealt with it.

First is Isaak Brodsky (1883-1939), mentored by the great Ilya Repin in pre-revolutionary times, who became and advocate for, and practitioner of, Socialist Realism in the USSR under Stalin's regime. His Wikipedia entry is here. Brodsky's public painting after the revolution was was largely political.

Morton Roberts (1927-1964) was a fine illustrator and painter who died far too soon. David Apatoff wrote about him here, Leif Peng presented some images here, and a biographic sketch is here. If you can find a copy, issue 22 of Illustration Magazine (Spring, 2008) has an article about Roberts. Otherwise, you can click here, and flip through that issue on-line.

Roberts illustrated Life Magazine articles on the Russian Revolution that appeared during 1959. Although the Cold War was going strong then, Roberts' illustrations strike me as being far more historical documentation than political commentary. But judge for yourself.

Gallery

Brodksy: Demonstration - 1930
I don't know if Brodsky was depicting a pre- or post-revolution rally here. It seems he wasn't afraid to paint crowd scenes.

Brodsky: Lenin at a Rally of Workers - 1929
Another crowd scene. Again I don't know the date of the occasion being depicted. It, and the scene in the first image, might even have been inventions by Brodsky, showing typical events of 1917-23.

Brodsky: Day of Constitution - 1930
Crowd again.

Brodsky: Mikhail Frunze - 1929
A portrait of a revolutionary figure who met a controversial end. Click here for biographical information on Frunze.

Brodsky: The Execution of the Twenty-Six Baku Commissars - 1929
This took place during the civil war between the Reds and the Whites.

Roberts: Rasputin - 1959
Rasputin's Wikipedia entry is here.

Roberts: Assassination of Stolypin - 1959
For information on Pyotr Stolypin, click here.

Lenin Addressing Troops - 1959
This might be Lenin's famous arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd.

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.