The Layered World of Sergio Cerchi

I really need to see an actual painting by Florentine artist Sergio Cerchi to be sure of what he's doing. This site suggests that his paintings are built atop collections of panels. But just looking at images of the on the internet, I can't rule out the possibility that those seeming panel edges are simply lines painted on a normal artists' canvas.

Another difficulty I'm experiencing with this post is that information regarding Cerchi on the internet is almost nil. For instance, nowhere have I found his birthdate. What we know is that he has spent all or nearly all his life, training and career in Florence and that he has a strong interest in music as well as art. Here is his own web site. It's a bit hard to navigate, but clicking on his photo leads to a brief self-statement. Otherwise, there are many examples of his work.

Cerchi interests me because he seems knowledgeable about history and art history. Plus, he is skilled at depicting people and giving them a sense of psychological mystery in many cases. His use of rectangular elements is quirky, but adds additional interest for the viewer. Also, many of his works are square, often having a one-meter format, the same as Gustav Klimt used for his Attersee landscapes.

Gallery

Appuntamento

Il Drago

Quixote II

La Passeggiata

Samurai

Diana

Eva

Leda

Ventaglio II

Butterfly

Cielo

Gerald Murphy's Precision Modernism

Gerald Clery Murphy (1888-1964) went to Yale and was a member of some of the best clubs -- DKE ("Deke") and Scull and Bones. His father owned New York's posh Mark Cross store, and Murphy himself later was its president. He and his wife Sara famously led an extravagant expatriate life in France during the 1920s.

During that time, Murphy became a serious amateur artist. Amateur, in the sense that he made few finished paintings while not having to depend on making art to earn a living. Nevertheless, his carefully structured, hard-edge, modernist-inspired works were nearly all of very high quality for his genre.

The Wikipedia entry about the Murphys is here, and more can be found here.

Images of most of Murphy's paintings are below. Some are lost or destroyed, so only black-and-white photos of them remain. I consider "Boatdeck," "Razor," and "Watch" to be his best.

Gallery

Turbines - 1922 (lost)

Boatdeck - 1923 (lost)

Boatdeck as displayed at the Salon des Independents - 1924

Razor - 1924

Watch -1925

Bibliotheque - 1926-27

Cocktail - 1927

Portrait - 1928 (lost)

Wasp and Pear - 1929

Up Close: Some Sargent Brushwork

John Singer Sargent's reputation continues to rise.

For example, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art now has a room with several fine examples of his portraiture, as the above photo I took in September shows.

One of his paintings on display is the dual-portrait of Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes and Edith Minturn Stokes. The museum has this to say about it.

And this is what they actually looked like around 1897 when Sargent painted them. Both were age 30 and married when they were 28.

Here is the establishment photo I took. For once its colors aren't grossly far from those in the photo the museum took of it, shown above. However, my photo is slightly skewed towards the red. Getting accurate results when photographing in museums is a matter of luck, I've found. The source of trouble is the artificial lighting.

My close-up of Edith. Sargent slightly exaggerated the height of his two subjects in the same manner fashion illustrators ply their trade.  He does capture the uneven setting of her mouth, but the eyes seem a bit odd and the light and shading of her nose also seem a little off. Viewed from a normal distance, these quirks matter little. You can see that Sargent touched up the background in places close to her head.  Also, her collar does not wrap around her neck, but he apparently didn't think it worth the trouble to tidy up that defect.

I took this photo to show how museum lighting can reveal some of the surface texture of a painting.  The facial close-up also has some reflections of museum lighting off edges of Sargent's brushwork. He seems to have used oil-rich paints, but as the image above suggests, he didn't paint thickly. It's possible that some of the effects seen here are due to varnishing brushwork, rather than the basic painting. The canvas patch on the right shows up strongly here, though it is evident in the museum photo if you look closely.

Some André Derain Landscapes

André Derain (1880-1954) is probably best known for joining with Henri Matisse in creating Fauvism in the early years of the 20th century. But that was as far as he got along the modernist path -- using plenty of bright colors not always associated with the actual subject matter. He did make use of noticeable distortion, but did not follow Braque and Picasso into Cubism. So far as I know, he did not make abstract paintings: he always featured a recognizable subject.

Some background on Derain can be found here.

Derain was prolific, so this post features only landscapes to indicate changes in style. So far as I can tell, his paintings always included several of the modernist traits of form distortion, simplification of forms, flattening of the picture plane, and color distortion. The number of traits used and their intensity varied for any given work.

Gallery

Banks of the Seine at Chatou - c.1899

Jardin aux environs de Chatou - c.1900
These are early Derain paintings made before Fauvism.  Colors are only slightly more intense than they were in reality for the upper painting. At this point, he is mainly simplifying and flattening.

Landscape Near Chatou - 1904
This is a Fauvist painting.

Pont sur le Lot - 1912
While Derain was fiddling with a few Cubist ideas, he easily dropped back to his pre-Fauve pattern.

La route - 1932
Here he actually uses perspective to partly puncture the picture plane, though flatly painted areas mitigate that to a degree.

Vue de Donnemarie-en-Montois - c.1942
Painted during World War 2, this is about as close to traditional painting as Derain ever got. Only the foreground simplification suggests his modernist impulses.

Up Close: Alfred Maurer at the Huntington

Alfred Henry Maurer (1868-1932) began as a representational painter influenced by James McNeill Whistler and then switched to various schools of modernism before committing suicide.

I wrote about Maurer here. A more recent article about him in The Wall Street Journal is here.

Earlier this year I came across a Maurer from his early period on display at the Huntington Library in San Marino, near Pasadena California. The Huntington has a good collection of late 18th century British paintings, but there is also a useful collection of American art from the decades around 1900.

Below are two examples of Maurer's work from 1901 that were shown in my previous post about him along with photos I took of the Huntington painting.

Gallery

An Arrangement - 1901
This seems to be Maurer's best-known painting from that time.

Girl in White - 1901
Another 1901 painting, perhaps of the same model.

Woman in Interior - 1901
This is the Huntington painting, also from 1901. The model might be the same woman as in the previous images. Disregard the hair color and consider the face.

Woman in Interior - 1901 (detail)
Close-up photo of the painting above.

Eric Fischl and Photoshop

Eric Fischl (1948 - ) is for me an important post-modernist artist because he broke from abstraction and moved to realist paintings of people in psychologically ambiguous situations. Plus, his work was commercially successful while being generally accepted by the New York art world.

Fischl's Wikipedia entry is here, and here is his web site that contains many examples of his work.

Due to his need to portray people in those psychologically ambiguous situations I referred to, he needed capture-the-moment body poses and gestures difficult or impossible to obtain from live models. Beyond that was the need to get correct effects of light and shade on his subjects. So Fischl necessarily was drawn to the use of photography for reference material. This is what classical illustrators usually were doing by the 1940s.

Another consideration was composing scenes. Again he borrowed from illustration by creating overlays, one to a subject, and moving them around to establish the ensemble best fitted for artistic and story-telling purposes. Early in his career he made use of glassine to create finished works on that support material.

In recent years Fischl has been relying on digital photography, using Photoshop to manipulate the positions of subjects to achieve what he feels is a satisfactory compositions. He credits his wife, landscape artist April Gornik, for getting him using that software.

A 2012 exhibit at the San Jose (California) Museum of Art dealt with his use of photography. The museum's website page dealing with the exhibit is here.

Here are a few examples of Fischl's use of photography for his painting.

Gallery

This is an example of a Photoshopped image.  I don't have an image of a completed painting for comparison.

Years before using Photoshop, Fischl began using conventional photography.  This is a key photo taken at a beach near Saint-Tropez, France about 1984.  The pose of women in the center was later used by him in several works.

Above are a digital image and a completed painting from his 2002 Krefeld Project. This seems to be pre-Photoshop.

Phototshoped composition and final painting, "The Gang," 2006. The woman in the foreground is April Gornik.

Gaston La Touche's La Belle Époque

Gaston La Touche (1854-1913) did not receive expert art training, but his ability and the influence of Impressionist painters and other sources led him to a successful career as a painter and illustrator. As his Wikipedia entry mentions, in 1909 he was named an officer of France's Legion of Honor. More extensive biographical information is here.

La Touche painted a variety of subjects, but often depicted scenes from the ongoing La Belle Époque. He was happy to include fireworks displays and liked masked balls as subjects.

His technique was not hard-core Impressionist. It was rather more like the American Impressionist approach of combining accurate drawing and wispy brushstrokes at the times he was in an Impressionist mood. As best I can tell, La Touche painted using oils, though several of his works viewed over the internet seem as though they were done using pastels.

His paintings don't interest me much, but I nevertheless think they are worth showing you.

Gallery

At the Opera

Dinner at the Casino - 1903

In the Opera - c.1890

L'Entracte - 1908

L'intrigue nocturne

The Ball

The Champagne

The Joyous Festival

The Promenade