Up Close: Robert Lewis Reid's Fleur de Lys

While dashing through New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art early in September, I came across Fleur de Lis (c. 1895-1900) by Robert Lewis Reed (1862-1929). His Wikipedia entry is here, and I wrote about him here. The Met's website page on the painting is here.

At the time the painting was made, Reid was practicing the American version of Impressionism where broken color and visible brush strokes were combined with greater attention to drawing than in classical French Impressionism, and where key areas such as faces were painted more traditionally. Fleur de Lis has a similar feeling to some of paintings of women by Frederick Frieseke and Richard E. Miller.

Image of Fleur de Lis from the Met's web site.

My establishment / aide-memoir photo.  Note the difference in color due to artificial lighting in the museum and perhaps sensors in my camera.

Close-in photo. This is slightly cropped, and I also played around with the color which is still slightly more in the red direction than the colors in the museum's image above. Reid painted fairly thinly here, though parts of flowers and the subject's clothing show stronger brushwork. Note the blueish background color touches on the subject's face, hair and hands. Also bits of her hair color spotted elsewhere. This helps to unify the painting.

From Three Countries, Similar Style

Artists are often influenced by others. Or they steal outright ... but only from the best, it is said. Possibly styles are similar simply due to coincidence. The last possibility was probably most likely in the days before decent-quality color reproductions in books and magazines were common, especially for artists widely scattered geographically.

Paintings from three artists having a similar "feel" caught my eye recently, so I thought I'd give you a look and so you can decide for yourself if my conjecture makes sense.

The painters are George Washington Lambert (1873-1930), information here, an Australian working in London; Saturnino Herrán (1887-1913), information here, a Mexican painter who spent his short life in that country; and W. Herbert "Buck" Dunton (1878-1936), an American who I wrote about here.

Not all their paintings featured a strong, solid style, but the ones shown below seem to.

Gallery

Lambert: "The Sonnet" - 1917
He was painting in this style as early as 1907 ("Portrait Group, The  Mother"), so priority for this threesome goes to Lambert.

Herrán: "La ofrenda" - 1913

Dunton: "My Children" - 1920

While it is possible that Herrán and Dunton where familiar with Lambert's work, it seems equally possible that they were not. Another possibility is that all three artists were influenced by a fourth, earlier painter. Offhand, I can't think of who that might be. Let me know in comments if you have suggestions.

Sculptor Aristide Maillol's Flat Paintings

Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol (1861-1944) is best known as a sculptor, but began his artistic career as a painter and continued to paint off and on for much of his life (biographical information here).

What interests me about many, not all, of his paintings is that (1) they are flat, and (2) the heads of his subjects are either in profile or facing the viewer head-on. Admittedly, most of the paintings shown below were made before Maillol took up sculpture seriously, but even as late as 1940 he continued these characteristics.

One would think that a sculptor would be thinking more three-dimensionally, but it seems he was following the modernist desideratum regarding flat surfaces. On the other hand, late in his career, Maillol did make a number of drawings of his model/muse Dina Vierny that depicted her well-rounded form. Below are some of his flat paintings.

Gallery

In the Western Pyrenées - 1885
Although he used linear perspective, Maillol's use of color gives this painting a flat appearance.

Woman in White - 1890-91

Les deux jeunes filles - 1891

Enfant couranne - 1892

Jeune femme pensive au feuillage - 1893
This also has been dated 1894 and the subject has been said to be the future Mme. Maillol.

Mme. Maillol - 1895

La femme à l'ombrelle - 1895
Another painting with the same title featuring a women in the same costume is dated 1891-92, so this might have been painted then as well.

Dina á la robe rouge - 1940

Alfredo Ambrosi, Aeropittura Artist

Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi (1901-1945) -- Wikipedia entry in French here -- was not the most famous or best practitioner of Aeropittura, a late form of Futurism, but I thought it would be worth presenting some of his paintings here.

I posted on Aeropittura here and about Tullio Cruli, perhaps the best of the lot, here.

Gallery

Colosseo - Colosseum
Aerial view of Rome's Coloseum from the northwest.

Aero-ritratto di Benito Mussolini aviatore - Aero Portrait of Benito Mussolini, Aviator - 1930
Related to the upper painting of the Colosseum, but the city view is extended to around the Piazza Venezia where Mussolini's famous speech-site balcony was located.

Fiesta aerea - Aviation Meet - 1932

Prima crociera atlantica su Rio de Janeiro - First Trans-Atlantic Crossing, Over Rio de Janeiro - 1933
Italo Balbo, head of Italian aviation, led two long-distance formation flights across the Atlantic, the first to Rio in 1930, a later one to the USA in 1933.

Volo su Vienna - Flight over Vienna - 1933
This commemorates the Gabriele D'Annunzio-led 9 August 1918 Flight over Vienna, an exceptionally long-distance operation during the Great War.

Aero-ritratto di Gianni Caproni - 1938
Portrait of airplane designer and builder Giovanni Caproni.

Pronto per l'attaco / Canale di Sicilia, 1942 - Ready to Attack
A World War 2 scene.

Raymond Leech, East Anglian Vettriano

I recently stumbled across images of Raymond Leech (1949 - ) paintings. As this biographical sketch indicates, Leech is based in England's East Anglia and paints coastal scenes, some of which are found at the link.

But other Leech paintings strongly remind me of those by his Scottish contemporary Jack Vettriano (1951 - ) ... Wikipedia entry here.

What we have are steamy (to varying degrees) scenes featuring beautiful, often not fully-clothed women and men usually wearing suspenders (braces, in the UK) and often with hats. I don't know enough about Leech to say if he is following Vettriano's lead or got there first.

As for style, Vettriano paints in a slightly flat, simplified, almost-poster style whereas Leech is more "painterly," where brushstrokes are featured. Below are a few Vettiano examples followed by some of Leech's work.

Gallery

Vettriano

The Out of Towners

Narcissistic Bathers

The Purple Cat

Games of Power


Leech

Couple about to kiss

A Brief Encounter

An especially Vettriano-like painting.

Nightclub scene

Sunday Girl

Dancer (one of a series with same model)

Frank Brangwyn's Mural-Style Art

Sir Frank William Brangwyn (1867-1956) was largely self-taught, as this Wikipedia entry mentions. That supposed lack was no obstacle, because Brangwyn had a long, successful career. I wrote about his railroad poster work here.

He had a strong, interesting style suited to mural painting. An 1895 mural commission definitely launched the style featured below, but he was already heading in that direction. In the early 1890s he traveled to North Africa and Turkey, and the scenery there brightened his palette. He also began to paint in a flatter manner and introduce outlining, and important feature of murals that had to be seen and read from a distance.

Some of the images below are quite large, so click on them to view in even greater detail.

Gallery

Venetian Scene - 1906
An example of Brangwyn's signature painting style.

Buccaneers - 1892
This pre-1895 painting approaches his mural style, though stronger outlining is lacking.

Tank in Action - 3 panels - 1925-26
A later work showing British troops and a tank in action during the Great War

The Wine Press

Venice: Santa Maria Through Rigging

Music - 1895
"Music" and "Dance," below, were panels in Siegfried Bing's famous Galeries l'Art Nouveau in Paris that gave the name to that stylistic movement.

Dance - 1895
The other Galeries l'Art Nouveau mural. This is one of my favorite Brangwyn works.

Dance - detail - 1895
I find Brangwyn's use of color and outlining fascinating because I'm not sure if he had a system for this or whether it was intuitive.

Painted Maps, Then and Recently

My college art history course conveyed the Modernist Establishment party line that the practice of painting was teleological, that its ordained end was the Platonic ideal manifested by the New York School of Abstract Expressionist art. That's the message I got by the end of the school year. And it was confirmed by the many examples of that style displayed on the pages of Time magazine in the late 1950s.

Despite the publicity in Time and other publications, and the presence of abstract art enthusiasts and collectors such as Nelson Rockefeller (heavily involved with New York's Museum of Modern Art, 1932-79), some young painters failed to relish the prospect of painting abstraction after abstraction for the rest of their careers. So, even in the mid-1950s, some decided to do something different.

This change in direction was chronicled in the amusing, and still useful, account The Painted Word, a 1975 book by Tom Wolfe. Some dissident painters discarded the use of pure abstraction, but continued adhering to the supposed demand of fidelity to the flat picture plane.

One such painter was Jasper Johns (b. 1930) who chose to paint objects that were already flat. His most famous painting is that of the American flag. He followed this with paintings of numbers and alphabetical letters. Then he made a painting based on a map of the United States.

A better-known artist also liked to paint maps, though as background content rather than the main subject. That was Jan Vermeer (1632-1675).

Examples of works by Johns and Vermeer are below.

Gallery

Johns: Flag - 1954-55
This was the flag design current when the painting was made and there were only 48 states in the union.

Johns: Colored Alphabet - 1959

Johns: Numbers - 1958-59

Johns: Map - 1961
Names of states are incorporated, and the use of different colors for different states followed the practice of American terrestrial globes in those days as well as simple maps for schoolchildren. Johns chose to not use green (aside for Florida) and unlike published maps, used similar color groupings for clusters of states (the northwestern USA and the Middle Atlantic states, for example). He also included Canadian provinces and perhaps Mexican states using this scheme to fill out the canvas. Also note that the Gulf of Mexico is painted using both red and blue, whereas the Atlantic Ocean has those colors along with yellow and orange.

Vermeer: Soldier and Laughing Girl - ca. 1658
This Vermeer painting includes a highly detailed wall map of Holland (oriented so that north is to the right and west is at the top).

Vermeer: Woman in Blue Reading - ca. 1662-63
Another painting using the same map as backdrop.

Vermeer: Young Woman with Water Pitcher - ca. 1664-65
A different map of Holland here; north is at the top.

I wonder which artist's paintings will hold up better over time.

Sam Francis: A More Structured Pollock

Sam Francis (1923-1994) was a painter and printmaker whose career was largely based in California and to a lesser extent in Japan and Europe. Biographical information can be found here at Wikipedia.

The link (as of mid-May 2015) mentions that "Francis was initially influenced by the work of abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still. He later became loosely associated with a second generation of abstract expressionists, including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, who were increasingly interested in the expressive use of color."

That influence must have been indirect, because Francis apparently did not spend much time in New York City, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism and other modernist abstract painting schools. I suggest that he was also influenced by Jackson Pollock of drip painting fame. A photo (below) shows Francis in his studio with paint pots and canvases covering the floor Pollock-style.

Whereas Francis' paintings often featured drips of paint and running paints, they often didn't have the entire surface covered, as was Pollock's classical case. Segments of paintings were left blank, with the result that the images appeared to have greater structure than the typical Pollock wall-to-wall swirls of drip. The white backgrounds Francis used also served to highlight his selection of colors -- typically bright and cheerful.

I rate Sam Francis as an interesting footnote to an artistic school whose time has long passed and whose goals make far less sense now than they did when new.

Gallery

Self-Portrait - 1974

Sam Francis in his studio
Sorry, but I don't have a source for this photo.

unknown title

Untitled watercolor - 1958

Untitled (from Pasadena Box) - 1963

Untitled