In the Beginning: Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935), who dropped "Frederick" early in his career, was one of the best known and most successful American Impressionists. An extensive Wikipedia biography is here, which indicates that Hassam was largely self-taught, receiving instruction sporadically, and began his career as an illustrator.

Hassam was able to visit Paris while still in his twenties. Therefore, he was aware of the French Impressionists and perhaps Postimpressionist stirrings in the Parisian art world. Combining his virtual lack of academic art training, the need to make illustrations fairly quickly, and his exposure to Impressionism, Hassam was a fast, prolific producer of images then can fairly be termed sketchy. This was true for most of his career after around 1890, though when the occasion called for it, he could tighten up his technique. Examples include watercolors featuring architecture and oil portraits or studies of female nudes.

The present post features paintings Hassam made in the mid-to-late 1880s and very early 1890s. While they contain greater or lesser hints of Impressionism and sketchiness, they are distinctly different from his strongly Impressionist-style paintings of, say, 1910-20.

Gallery

Allies Day, May 1917 - 1917
When the subject of Childe Hassam comes up, this is the kind of painting that often comes to mind. It is Impressionist, but of the American variety where more attention is paid to value (light-dark), and the structure of subject matter is more carefully depicted than was the wont of Claude Monet in his later years.

Old House in Dorchester [Massachusetts] - 1884
Painted not long after Hassam first visited Europe. The siding boards of the building are clearly shown, but the foreground grasses are freely painted.

Boston Common at Twilight - 1885
Perhaps his best known non-Impressionist work. It can be seen at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Rainy Day, Boston - 1885

Rainy Day, Boston - 1885
Two wet Boston scenes. Below, you will find similar treatments of Paris.

A City Fairyland - 1886
Again, in Boston.

Paris Street Scene - 1887

Grand Prix Day - 1887-88

Cab Station, rue Bonaparte - 1887

Hackney Carriage, rue Bonaparte - 1888
I've walked the rue Bonaparte many times, but can't place the locations of these paintings on that street. Either my memory is poor, or a few changes might have happened over the past 125 years. (I just checked Google Maps and didn't notice the walls shown in the paintings, so I suppose that changes were indeed made.)

April Showers, Champs-Élysées - 1888
Hassan clearly enjoyed painting rain-soaked streets, but he tightened up when it came to the woman, omnibus and horses.

Lower Fifth Avenue [New York] - 1890
The subjects are crisply outlined, but their interior coloring was influenced by Impressionism.

Diego Rivera's Cubist Period

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (1886-1957) usually known as Diego Rivera, remains Mexico's best-known artist nearly 60 years after his death. Much of Rivera's art from around 1920 onwards featured political subjects. Since I happen to believe that politicized art distracts viewers from aesthetic content (paintings become elaborate political cartoons), I have never been a Rivera fan.

His earliest works tended to be non-political because he seems to have been sharpening and evolving his artistic skills until he reached his early 30s. He spent about a dozen years in Europe -- Paris, mostly -- starting in 1907, and knew many of the modernist artists who created the onslaught of stylistic "isms" in the early 1900s. This included Cubism, a practice he adopted for about three years, and the subject of this post.

Wikipedia's Rivera biography is here. A discussion of his Cubist phase can be found here. Rivera's Cubist paintings was the subject of a museum exhibit in Dallas a few years ago.

Here are some of Rivera's works from that period.

Gallery

The Flower Carrier - 1935
An example of Rivera's mature style. There are political implications here, but they are less overt than usual.

Girl with Artichokes - 1913

The Adoration of the Virgin - 1913
This image and the one above it have hints of Cubism, but are largely representational with other modernist elements thrown in. I like them better than his more purely Cubist works.

Oscar Miestchaninoff - 1913
Cubist faceting is more prominent here, but use of "multiple perspectives" is still absent.

Portrait of Zinoviev - 1913
Now we find face-on and profile views, here for a portrait of a Russian artist.  A muted Braque-Picasso color scheme also intrudes.

Two Women - Angelina Beloff and Maria Dolores Bastian - 1914
Many facets, but not much in the way of varying viewpoints.  Apparently Rivera could do Cubism superficially, but had a hard time going all the way.  Perhaps he realized that Cubism's central premise was silly in reality.

Young Man with Stylograph - 1914
Another derivative experiment by Rivera.  No worse than many Cubism-inspired painting of that time.

Ramon Gomez de la Serna - 1915
The subject is shattered Cubist-style, but the woman in the upper-left corner is garden-variety modernist.

Zapatista Landscape - 1915
The rifle is not cubified: Rivera's homage to revolutionary times back home in Mexico.

Maternity - Angelina Beloff and their son who died in 1918 - 1916
Plenty of facets and even some Fauvist coloring.  Rivera abandoned Cubism not long after this painting was made.

János Vaszary: Traditionalist Gone Modern

János Vaszary (1867–1938) was a Hungarian painter who was contemporaneous with Gustav Klimt, a fellow Imperial who also could paint convincingly in many styles. That is, both began painting in an academic manner, yet switched to forms of modernism by the mid-to-late 1890s.

A brief Wikipedia entry on Vaszary in English is here. The Hungarian language entry is here, and has more detail though the computer translation to English can be hard to follow. This site includes many tiny images of Vaszary's works that can be enlarged somewhat.

My take on him is that he was very talented, but let modernist ideas get the best of him after he turned 40. The later works are both simple and sketchily done, and so aren't very interesting. In a caption below I mention the paintings I liked best.

Gallery

Self Portrait - 1887

Self Portrait
The first self-portrait was made when he was about 20 years old.  I have no date for the second one, but I'll guess that he was in his 40s when this was painted.

Primate Kolos Vaszary (his uncle) - 1895
Basically traditional in style, though the brushwork is fairly free.

Golden Age - 1897-98
Some reproductions of this have a more golden coloring.  This shows that Vaszary was perfectly capable of painting in the academic style.

Woman with Black Hat - 1894
Even before painting Golden Age and his uncle, Vaszary was experimenting with modernist ideas.

Woman in Lilac Dress with Cats - 1900
This seems more like an illustration than a fine-art painting.

Woman in Front of Mirror - 1904

Fancy-dress Ball - 1907
These two paintings exhibit strong brushwork.  I find them the most interesting of the images posted here.

Nude
Kees van Dongen was an influence for a while.

At La Cigale
La Cigale was a Paris night spot that Vaszary must have frequented while in town.

Woman in profile with black hat - c. 1930
Another trace of van Dongen here.

Portrait of a Lady - c. 1925-35
I think the right arm isn't drawn correctly; in any case, it looks odd.  Here Vaszary was drifting in a representational direction.  I don't have a name for the subject, so cannot guess whether or not she wanted to be depicted mostly naturalistically or if the style was Vaszary's choice.

Norman Wilkinson: Sea, Sky and Other Stuff

Norman Wilkinson (1878-1971) was a master poster artist (I wrote about that aspect of his career here). He also carved out noteworthy careers in other fields of art, especially painting marine and naval scenes. His Wikipedia entry is here and another link sketching his work is here.

Below are examples mostly of his marine and naval paintings. Unless he was commissioned to feature a particular ship, his sea paintings featured a lot of water and sky, whereas ships, land and other objects usually occupied small amounts of art canvas real estate. That seems sensible, given the visual vastness of oceans and seas -- something Wilkinson was intimately familiar with, having served in the Royal Navy.

Gallery

Scene with ships
This exhibits a poster style, but I don't know if it was actually used for a poster.

Yachts off the Needles, Isle of Wight
A contrasting, more painterly style.

The 'Revenge' Leaving Plymouth to Meet the Armada - 1912
This is an illustration.

Hawker Harts of 601 Squadron - c. 1936
The sky is vast and the Harts are small.

The Pilot
Nowadays, pilot boats are usually a lot bigger and fancier than this.

Dublin and Holyhead - 1905
This is a poster illustration for the London and North Western Railway. I include it here because the style is closer to his marine paintings than the style he usually used for posters.

HMS 'Lion' Battlecruiser
This has a poster-like style.  Lion was Admiral Beatty's flagship at Dogger Bank and Jutland.  I'm guessing that this painting shows Lion on the way to her 1924 scrapping.

Fitting Out RMS 'Queen Mary' at Clydebank - 1936

HM Troopship 'Queen Mary' at Anchor in the Second World War
Thanks to her high speed, the Queen Mary was in little danger of being torpedoed by a German submarine.  Her companion Queen Elizabeth went straight to troopship duties before ever carrying commercial passengers.

Action off the River Plate, 13 December 1939, Pursuit of the 'Graf Spee'
The commerce-raider Graff Spee was a heavily armed large cruiser (and not really a "pocket battleship," as she was called at the time).  She was finally hunted down by three British cruisers and damaged to the point where her captain had her scuttled.

Japan Signs Her Own Death Warrant, Attack on Pearl Harbour, 7 December 1941

Coronation Review, 15 June 1953
I'm sorry to say that the next coronation review probably won't be as impressive as this one was.

Zinaida Serebriakova's Sweet Smiles

Zinaida Yevgenyevna Serebriakova, née Lanceray or Lancere, (1884-1967) generally worked in oils and pastels creating pleasant portraits and scenes. No politics to speak of. Ditto irony. And mega-ditto profundity. In other words, there is a lot to like in her oeuvre.

Her fairly detailed Wikipedia entry is here. More biographical information is here, and an article discussing the many paintings she made of female nudes is here.

Serebriakova, before her marriage, had a good deal of art training that built upon her family's artistic background. Even though modernism in general and the various Parisian "isms" that were popping up in the early 1900s were known to her, she accepted little of their stylistic offerings.

One thing about her paintings that I found interesting and charming was a sweet little smile she placed on many of her subjects. I'm pretty sure that she had such a smile herself, but find it a bit curious that so many others had the same.

Gallery

Self Portrait: At the Dressing Table - 1909
This was the painting that launched her career.

Self Portrait - c. 1911

Bather - 1911
Thought to be a self-portrait.

Boris Serebryakov - 1908
Her husband, who died in 1919. This left her with four children, only two of whom were able to leave Russia and join her in Paris after the Communist takeover. He is not wearing a sweet smile in this painting.

Harvest - 1915
Even some Russian peasants are smiling almost sweetly.

N. Geydenreyh in Blue - 1923
She was a ballerina.

Sandra Loris-Melikov - 1925

Z.N. Martynovskaya - 1961
A late painting, but the characteristic smile still appears.