Pre-Rapahelites Up Close: Some Snapshots

A large exhibit of Victorian art from Birmingham, England is touring the USA, currently parked at the Seattle Art Museum. Part of that exhibit is of paintings by Pre-Raphelite artists whose works are well-represented in Birmingham.

As I have mentioned from time to time, I'm not a big fan of hard-edge, highly detailed painting. I can respect it, and I prefer it to most modernist painting, but don't love it for the most part.

While visiting the exhibit I took snapshots using my iPhone of reference images followed by close-ups of Pre-Raphaelite painting on display. Some are shown below: click on them to enlarge considerably to view that painstakingly detailed work.

Gallery

The Blind Girl (1854-56) by John Everett Millais
Millais later painted more conventionally -- many portraits -- and eventually became president of the Royal Academy.

Note the many blades and other details on this fairly small painting.

Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851-59) by Ford Maddox Brown
Another fairly small painting.

Detail everywhere -- from the quilted garment to the wool and grasses.

Elijah and the Widow's Son (1864) by Ford Maddox Brown
A "finished study for a picture" Brown stated.

Being a study, it's not hard-core Pre-Raphaelite. But it's essentially a complete work and pleasing to me because detailing is less intense. Note the Hebrew writing around the door.

Work (1859-63) by Ford Maddox Brown
A well-known Pre-Raphaelite painting that yet again isn't large.

Even the tiny sign slogans are depicted.

Perspective on the boy' head seems a bit off, but hey, Pre-Raphaelite's weren't normally painters of action scenes.

Detail, detail, and more detail here in this small segment.

Medea (1866-68) by Frederick Sandys
Not strictly Pre-Raphaelite style aside from being hard-edge.

The painting's plaque notes the Japanese influence on the background.

Painting Shiny Metal: Rembrandt and Wootton

I recently wrote here about British artist/illustrator Frank Wootton (1914-1998) who was skilled at depicting light, shade and reflections on shiny metallic surfaces. Doing this convincingly requires skill and especially experience.

Just for fun, below I present some images by Wootton along with a few by Rembrandt who also was no slouch when it came to metal.

The Wootton images are photos of details of paintings I saw in the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, just north of London. Lighting conditions were poor, and protective material affected color and allowed reflections, so keep in mind that what you're viewing is an approximation.

Gallery

Man with the Golden Helmet - c.1650 (detail)
Note how Rembrandt deals with the effect of light on warm gold and cool steel.

Man in Armor - 1655
Here he deals with steel.  I'm not sure if the painting has been cleaned and colors are original or if the yellow hue is due to old varnish.

Old Man in Military Costume - 1630-31
An earlier painting, but one I find particularly impressive because he depicts brushed steel convincingly.

April Morning, France, 1918 - 1982 (detail)
This is a tiny part of a much larger Wootton painting and might be close to actual size when viewed on a desktop computer screen.  The aircraft is a Sopwith Camel with metal at the forward part of the fuselage.  Note how he shows reflections.  Also the effect of light on the gunsight in front of the cockpit windscreen.

Harts Over the Himalayas - c. 1967 (detail)
The darker zone is actually a shadow of Yr. Loyal Blogger on the protective glass or plastic.  The forward metaled area reflects the sky, the upper wing and the mountainous terrain below.

Honoring the Picture Plane: Sophistry in Action

"Honoring the picture plane" was a big deal when I was in art school, though the idea has lost some of its punch in Postmodern times. The gist of it was, since a canvas is normally a flat, two-dimensional object upon which things are painted, its nature is violated by attempting to depict three-dimensional things on it. More simply put: flat painting surfaces demand flat depictions.

What interests me nowadays is how seriously this was taken by intelligent people. My sophomore-year undergraduate art history course cast a deterministic process for Western art where the ultimate, end-of-history was abstract art as currently practiced by highly publicized New York City painters. I'm pretty sure our instructor, a senior staffer at the university's art museum, was largely influenced by Clement Greenberg (1909-1994).

The Greenberg Wikipedia link just cited has a sub-link to something called medium specificity, a fancy term for picture plane honoring that I hadn't been aware of.

Tom Wolfe in his often-hilarious way dealt with the business of flatness and abstraction in his 1975 book "The Painted Word." In it, he features the influence of important New York art critics, including Greenberg.

Here is a taste of Greenberg's writing from "The Role of Nature on Modern Painting," Partisan Review, January 1949. He was discussing the rise and importance of Cubism, but the passage below includes some of his thinking regarding flatness.

"By dint of their efforts to discover pictorially the structure of objects, of bodies, in nature, Picasso and Braque had come -- almost abruptly, it would seem -- to a new realization of, and a new respect for, the nature of the picture plane itself as a material object; and they came to the further realization that only by transposing the internal logic by which objects are organized in nature could aesthetic form be given to the irreducible flatness which defined the picture plane in its inviolable quality as a material object. This flatness became the final, all-powerful premise of the art of painting, and the experience of nature could be transposed into it only by analogy, not by imitative reproduction. Thus the painter abandoned his interest in the concrete appearance, for example, of a glass and tried instead to approximate by analogy the way in which nature had married the straight contours that defined the glass vertically to the curved ones that defined it laterally. Nature no longer offered appearances to imitate, but principles to parallel."

This is sophistry. Its premise and conclusion are that flat painting surfaces are determinative.

They are not. Great artists can and do whatever suits them on those innocent flat surfaces. They can paint flat color areas, they can create illusions of three-dimensionality, they can even go the collage route by pasting foreign objects on the canvas or board. Greenberg and his followers were placing art in a straightjacket through use of an arbitrary premise from which constrictive deductions were made.

Let's look at some examples.

Gallery

Number 1 - by Jackson Pollock - 1949
Greenberg was a huge Pollock fan, yet here was Pollock painting actual layers of colors atop a flat canvas.

Untitled - by Piet Mondrian
Mondrian, on the other hand, for many years painted very flat, not-curving images using only black, white and the three primary colors. Can't get more basic than that.

School of Athens - by Raphael - 1511
One-point perspective began appearing in Western painting in the early 1400s. "One point" refers to a single vanishing point, found here between the two figures framed by the most distant arch. Artists in Raphael's time were thrilled at this means of showing depth on a flat surface.  Eventually, two-point and three-point perspectives were discovered.

Canyon Green - by Franz Bischoff - c. 1915-25
Another way to portray distance is called "atmospheric perspective" which involves the greying-out of increasingly distant objects caused by particulate matter in the air.

Lady of Shalott - by John W. Waterhouse - 1888
Here Waterhouse uses both linear (mostly regarding the boat) and atmospheric perspective.

Ajax and Cassandra - by Solomon J. Solomon - 1886
The background pedestal has linear perspective. The figures are given three-dimensionality by use of light and shade to suggest their surface modeling.

Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère - by Édouard Manet - 1882
Manet's paintings often had a flatter look, though the small figures reflected in the mirror behind the barmaid diminish in size with distance, just as Raphael's did in "Athens."

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne - c. 1903
Cézanne attempted to reconcile depicting a 3-D world on a 2-D canvas with crude, though influential, results.

Church of the Minorities II - by Lyonel Feininger - 1926
Feininger was influenced by Cubism, but only superficially. Note the one-point perspective and the atmospherics in this painting.

Variation #1 in Orange - by David Leffel
An impressive, comparatively recent painting making zero use of Greenberg's ideas.

Louis Denis-Valvérane the Painter Who Also Was Vald'Es the Cartoonist

Louis Denis-Valvérane (1870-1943) was a Provençal painter and illustrator/cartoonist who is perhaps best known for his racy (at the time) cartoons in the magazine La vie Parisienne that he signed as Vald'Es.

Biographical information on him is almost non-existent on the Internet. Very brief items are here and here. A web site devoted to him is here. It is in French and contains a little more information, but mostly mentions aspects of Provençal nationalism.

Denis-Valvérane's paintings found on the Web tend to be somewhat mediocre in my opinion, but some of his cartoon work strikes me as being very good. Examples of each are shown below.

Gallery

Notre Dame du Romigier, Mairie de Manosque
A scene from Denis-Valvérane's home town.

Traveuax des champs - Working the Fields

Young Woman Reading a Letter to a Blind Man
The man's shirt and hands are done well.

Sailing Boats

Apparently it was expected in La vie Parisienne that it was good to show some female thigh above the stocking.

But that wasn't mandatory.

Hinting was also acceptable.

Flapper and apparent Sugar Daddy.

A two-part cartoon about young French women in the Roaring Twenties.

I like this one. Well-drawn, witty. Click on it to enlarge.

Isaac Israëls' Sketchy Style

Isaac Lazarus Israëls (1865-1934) was a Dutch painter and son of Josef Israëls, an important 19th century artist. His Wikipedia entry is here. He received some training by his father and at an academy, but otherwise was self-taught. From 1905 to 1915 he was in Paris and London, but spent most of his career in the Netherlands.

Israëls shed his academic style before he was 30. Thereafter, from what I can tell from images of his works on the internet, his style became quite sketchy, though he did not distort colors or proportions of his subjects. So he was a modernist to only a limited degree.

Gallery

Transport of Colonial Soldiers - 1883-84
They were probably headed to the Netherlands East Indies.  This was painted a year or two after Israëls left the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

Shop Window - 1894

Woman in front of Van Gogh's Sunflowers - 1917-1918

Carmencita

Two Hirsch Models, Ippy and Gertie Wehmann - c. 1916
Hirsch was a department store found in several European cities, including Amsterdam.

Gertie in a Fur Coat - c. 1917
Gertie, again.

Woman Walking on a Beach
Israëls painted many beach scenes.

Girl Sitting on a Beach
This seems to be from around 1930, judging by the hairdo and costume.

Artist in Atelier - 1918

Analytical Cubism Portraits

Wikipedia has this extensive entry dealing with Cubism. Early on, it states:

"Historians have divided the history of Cubism into phases. In one scheme, the first phase of Cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, a phrase coined by Juan Gris a posteriori, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1910 and 1912 in France. A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch." Those were "Early," "High" and "Late" Cubism, and the entry uses that concept to organize its discussion.

The peg I'm using for this post is the Analytical Cubism concept, whereby artists were supposedly presenting a subject by simultaneously using several different points of view in order to show it more completely than traditional art's single viewpoint.

I find it hard to believe the early cubists were serious in this regard. After all, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), an inventor of Cubism, was something of a prankster.

Consider the hypothetical case of an artist seriously making a Cubist portrait using perhaps half a dozen different perspectives. The result will probably be an image that is so fragmented that only the artist himself would know what segments of his painting or drawing came from which viewpoint. A viewer of the work might be able to identify how a few fragments originated, but would be at a loss to comprehend how the entire work was assembled.

In other words, instead of showing a more complete view of the subject, the result is that even less of the subject is understandable to a viewer than would have been the case for a traditional portrait.

Some examples of early cubist portraits are shown below.

Gallery

Pablo Picasso: Portrait de Daniel-Henry Kahnweiller - 1910
If you didn't already know what art dealer Kahnweiler looked like, could you form an accurate image of him using only the material presented in this "portrait?"

Pablo Picasso: Portrait de Ambroise Vollard - 1910
Here Picasso comes closer to depicting Vollard as others actually would see him.

Pablo Picasso: Girl With a Mandolin - 1910
Not strictly a portrait, as he made no attempt to break the subject's face into many fragments -- he just simplified/abstracted.

Albert Gleizes: Portrait de Jacques Nayral - 1911
Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), background here, besides being a painter, was a cubist theoretician who co-authored the 1912 book "Du Cubisme." He remained a cubist of sorts for much of his career, so unlike Picasso he should have been serious. But the example shown here simply has the subject's face and hands reduced slightly in the direction of faceting. Only other parts of the figure plus the rest of the setting are what most would consider cubist.

Albert Gleizes: Portrait de Mme H. M. Barzun - 1911
The same can be said regarding this portrait.

"Du Cubisme" was co-authored by Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), who I wrote about here. Metzinger was a cubist for a while but later works were far more representational. This painting is largely a matter of using simplified shapes and faceting, though a slight amount of perspective-twisting can be seen.

Jean Metzinger: Portrait de Mme Metzinger - 1911
When it came to portraying his wife, Metzinger fell back to the practice of faceting features and putting cubist decoration in the background as Gleizes did.
What the above gallery suggests is that even committed cubists often had to hold back from a hardline "analytical" approach when making portraits. Perhaps this compromise with purity had to do with the practical matter of portrait subjects wanting to be shown in a largely recognizable manner.