Really Large War Paintings in the Arte Moderna

There is a gallery in Paris' Louvre that, if memory serves, has nothing but huge easel paintings.  Painting huge was not unusual during the 19th century.  However, that largely fell out of fashion during the 20th, aside from murals (exceptions include Robert Rauschenberg's "F-111" and Chuck Close's monster portraits).

Following the Risorgimento, when Italy was transformed from a geographical place to a political entity, a degree of nationalism was generated. Not to be outdone by the French, some huge paintings were commissioned that commemorated battles of the Italian unification effort and subsequent conflicts. A few of these can be seen in Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Web site here).

I visited the Arte Moderna recently and took some photos of huge war paintings by Giovanni Fattori (1825-1908) and Michele Cammarano (1835-1920). I included a bit of the surroundings so that you might get a sense of the scale of these works. Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

La battaglia di Custoza [fought 1848] - Fattori, 1880

La battaglia di San Martino [better known as Solferino, fought 1859] - Cammarino, 1880-83

La battaglia di Dogali [fought 1887 in Abyssinia] - Cammarano, 1896

Aeropittura: Futurism Takes to the Skies

Hitler's Nazi Germany tried to wipe out modernist "degenerate art" and replace it with Aryan naturalism. Stalin's Communist Soviet Union discarded post-Revolutionary art "isms" in favor of Socialist Realism's farm tractors and heroic workers. And Mussolini's Fascist Italy? Modernism was just fine with Il Duce's crowd, and plenty of modernist artists were just fine with Fascism.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurism was the prime home-grown modernist movement in Italy, and its focus on dynamism was in synch with the dynamism that Mussolini attempted to impart to Italian society after he assumed power. Futurism was pushed along over time via manifestos and other means of rejuvenation. Around the end of the 1920s, one form of this emerged in something called Aeropittura -- aviation pictures.

Perhaps the best of the Aeropittura painters was Tullio Crali, who I wrote about here. There were others, and I think it might be interesting to look at some of their works along with a couple of Cralis.

Gallery

Aeropittura - Barbara (Olga Biglieri) - 1938

Assalto di motori - Tulio Crali

Bombardamento aereo - Tulio Crali - 1932

Battaglia aerea - Renato Reghetti (detto Di Bosso) - 1936

Volo sul paese - Giulio D'Anna - 1929

Aeropittura - Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) - 1932

Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseso - Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) - 1930

Studies Displayed at the Louvre

Paris' Louvre is considered one of the finest of the world's art museums. It is huge, with many hundreds of works on display. Even so, paintings and sculptures made after 1850-70 or thereabouts must be sought elsewhere in Paris. What can be seen in the Louvre includes such famous works as the Venus De Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace (currently under restoration), David's monumental painting of Napoléon's coronation, not to mention Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

A typical first or even second time traveler to Paris is likely to visit the Louvre for a couple of hours and then retreat in physical and mental exhaustion, having seen perhaps half of the galleries. Because I am more interested in post-1850 painting than what the Louvre has to offer, I tend to gravitate to the bookstore rather than stalk the galleries. The last time I was there, my wife had a few paintings that she really wanted to view, but they were in galleries on the top floor in parts of the museum remote from the five-star offerings. Plus, she was having trouble following the map of the place, so I had to take on the guide task.

As a result, I stumbled onto a number of interesting paintings from the first half of the 19th century, including a couple of small-scale studies for the huge paintings over in the Denon wing. These are shown below via images of the final results plus my snapshots of the studies.

First up is The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.

Next is Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix.

And to wrap this up, here are costume studies by Delacroix.

More Frank Duveneck Studies

Frank Duveneck (1848-1919) was an American painter who was influential in certain circles in the late 1800s. I wrote here about illustrator Greg Manchess being influenced by Duveneck's method of making studies for final paintings. The Wikipedia entry on Duveneck is here and a site devoted to him is here.

As with most artists' studies, Deveneck's seem to have been dashed off fairly quickly, though some have evidence of greater effort. The latter make use of a "square brush" technique whereby each brush stroke can (and often does) indicate a plane of the subject. Manchess tends to use a square brush style, so it was Duveneck's similar handling that served as inspiration.

Below are some examples from Duveneck.

Gallery

Guard of the Harem - study - 1879
This is on display at San Francisco's de Young museum. The subject's body and clothing are depicted loosely, but the face receives a careful square brush treatment.

The Music Master - 1879
Hardly any square brushwork here.

Seated nude - c.1879
But more here, especially on the subject's face and left arm.

Elizabeth Boott - study - 1886
Despite her father's disapproval, Boott wanted to marry Duveneck, and they did. The title (which might not be a formal one) suggests this was painted before they were wed.

Elizabeth Boott Duveneck - 1888
Here is Duveneck's portrait of his wife, completed around the time she died. An account of Deveneck and Boott's relationship is here. Note that square brushwork is not evident in this finshed work.

Seeing the Girl and Her Earring

Perhaps the hottest item on the traveling art show circuit this year is Jan Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring." It's normally housed in Mauritshuis in The Hague, Netherlands, but the museum is undergoing renovation, so apparently that was considered a good reason to send some of its best paintings on the road. "Earring" is currently on display in San Francisco and then will move on to Atlanta and, finally, New York City. I saw it in San Francisco recently.

The painting is around 350 years old and suffered some wear and tear as well as a restoration that wouldn't pass muster today. It went through another restoration in 1994. I failed to study the painting at really close range (the price one pay's at a popular exhibit that attracts lot of viewers), but my impression was that its surface was in pretty good shape.

As for the most recent restoration, here is some information and here is an interview with the man who directed it.

And it seems that there is more than one way to do a restoration. Nowadays it's possible to do the deed digitally, as this site indicates.

Below are before and after images of "Girl with a Pearl Earring." I'm not sure about the source of the "before" image -- there were dozens of duplicates on Google. The "after" image was taken from the Mautishuis web page, so I assume it is a correct representation. Click on the "Before" image to enlarge; the "After" is at maximum size.

Gallery

Before

After

Restorations are necessary at times. The question is whether or not they represent a "necessary evil," given that the hand of the restorer is not the same hand that painted the original version. I suppose we have no choice but to take the validity of restorations on faith.

Stape's Practical Painting Blog

For all I know, there must be a mega-gazillion art blogs lurking out there on the Internet. I trip across some when I'm trolling for images to post here. But for better or worse, I usually don't bother following them.

Once in a while I do spot a blog I find really interesting or otherwise useful, and when I do, I add it to the Links list over in the right column. Such is the case for Stapleton Kearns' blog which has been around for about four years in its present form. Kearns is a full-time painter specializing in landscapes that are solidly crafted and worthy of your attention. Here is detailed biographical information on Kearns.

Kearns' blog deals largely with practical information and advice about painting, probably an outgrowth of his experience teaching at workshops. His post tally is now more than one thousand, the bulk appearing 2009-11. I think it's worthwhile to sift through the earlier posts because they deal most thoroughly with issues than matter most to him.

To give you a taste, here is a post from 2009 dealing with art education.

* * * * *
NOW LISTEN TO ME CAREFULLY, THE PURPOSE OF AN ART SCHOOL IS TO PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT FOR ITS INSTRUCTORS.

I am aware that the situation is improving and there are a few places that do produce better trained young painters. I also know there are some fine teachers out there who do lead their young charges through a fine course of instruction. Now I know that over in the graphics department students learn useful skills. But I feel these fine instructers are still very much the exception, if you take a walk through the studios of most art schools, colleges and Universities the work is appalling. Most of the art schools out there are foisting a deceit on their pupils. By making their students believe that all they need to know is already within them, if they just have the self awareness to find it, the student is taught, its all about them. That, for many young scholars today is an attractive idea, they do like being told how special and individual they are. In many art schools today the teachers will tell a student that there is no way to even teach art, and they will be contaminated by studying works by another artist with the end of improving their own. The contemporary art school changes the educational event from really wicked difficult, to one of self admiring introspection that any student can do. Now they can fill those classrooms! The art schools of America graduate more students in a year than there have been artists in the history of our nation. If the hairdressing schools of America produced as few hairdressers they would be shut down for robbing their students. It can be argued that art is subjective and shouldnt be measured for its results the same way as say, engineering, but isnt hairstyling kind of subjective as well?

Often enough in the fine arts department the students are coddled for four or more years, and then released into the real world where the are served a harsh awakening that it's not just about them out there. I have often seen young would be artists confronted with this reality go back for a masters degree, to get more of the training that didn't make artists out of them in the first place. If you really unpack this with them, you find out they intend to teach. The best of them will, and the best of their students will be teachers as well . There are plenty of teachers out there who have never made a living as artists and their teachers and their teachers' teachers didn't either. They have in fact only contempt for those of us out here who actually do it as a vocation. The sudden rise of popularity of the new ateliers across the country and in Italy is a response to a small but growing number of students who would like to make a living painting and have figured out they will need to know a lot about painting in order to do it. I believe that small but growing atelier movement probably holds the promise of a new American art.

* * * * *
I notice that Kearns has cut back on posting frequency, but you might consider checking for new material from time to time once you've digested those first 400 or so posts that contain the most meat.

Viewing Nicolai Fechin

For those of you who can get to Seattle by 19 May, consider visiting the Frye Museum which has an exhibit of paintings and drawings by Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955).

Fechin's Wikipedia entry is here and I wrote about his Taos, New Mexico house and studio here. But if you have time to go to only one link, go here to Matthew Innis' blog for biographical information plus details concerning Fechin's palette and technique (the latter Innis regards with horror).

Fechin's basic style changed little from the time he completed his training, though individual works fell within a range of "painterlyness" (I made that word up, I think) from kinda finished to pretty sloppy, the more finished examples being commissioned portraits. While I can't say that I love Fechin's paintings, I find them interesting and instructive.

The archetypical Fechin painting featuring a human subject follows a formula. Skin, especially the female face, is depicted smoothly; Innis states that Fechin would wet his fingers with his tongue and finger-paint the smoothness. Subjects' hands were more likely to be done in a sketchy manner, while nude bodies fell somewhere between. Backgrounds are typically highly sketchy and painterly to the point that they often seem like the New York school of Abstract Expressionist art from the 1950s. Sometimes recognizable objects appear, other times not. Being somewhat lazy myself, I wonder if Fechin adopted this kind of background treatment to avoid having to get bogged down painting details.

The exhibit at the Frye was an excellent opportunity to examine a large number of Fechin paintings and draw some conclusions of my own. Below are a few examples of Fechin's work to set the scene; the lower two were on display.

Gallery

Konstantin Mihailovich Lepilov, artist - 1909

Portrait of My Father - 1912

Eya in Peasant Blouse - 1933

The upper two paintings are of men, so the faces are not smooth, in contrast to the lower portrait of Fechin's daughter. In many of his works, Fechin's application of paint ranges from thin to thick. In the portrait of his father, you can see thinly painted sketch lines and washes supplemented by built-up areas for the background and flesh. The Lepilov portrait is also fairly early and follows the same pattern, Eya's portrait was made more than 20 years after his father's, and is more typical,

Images of Fechin's paintings fail to convey the actual appearance more than in most cases because his work usually contains passages of heavy impasto than can be hard to discern. In the case of Eya, if you click on the image to enlarge, you might be able to notice extremes of thick and thin paint in the lower right quadrant of the painting. In some cases, Fechin painted thickly with a brush, and at other times, use of a palette knife is evident. Innis says that he would apply with a brush first and then swipe with the knife at an angle to the brushstroke.

Innis also asserts that Fechin's techiques resulted in his paintings being in bad shape even before they were finished. Whereas I do not doubt that, nearly all the works I saw at the Frye seemed to be in good condition. Given Fechin's use of both washes and impasto on completed paintings, such works would probably be a nightmare to restore, so I contend that many have aged well.

Greg Manchess Scores Again

Greg Manchess paints everything from murals to sci-fi and fantasy book cover illustrations. And he has developed into a master of the bold-stroke school of oil painting. I have dozens of images of his work stashed away on my iMac for both inspiration and regret that I could never be as good.

He blogs on Dan Dos Santos' Muddy Colors group blog, which is well worth following if you are interested in contemporary illustration. Not long ago Manchess posted about a demonstration piece he made for a class he was giving. I found the work astonishing.

This is the image he posted. It shows Elsa Lanchester in her "Bride of Frankenstein" movie role. Note Manchess' bold use of blue-green as the main facial color and the contrasting orange-brown on the hair and part of the background (this is not far from normal skin color when toned with white). But the feature that really grabbed my attention is the small areas of warm color below Lanchester's right eye. Without that, the composition would fall apart.

Color is one thing. But what about value (dark-light)? I ran the image through iPhoto to create a black-and-white version. Sure enough, it works well too, which is another factor in creating a satisfying painting. Plus, having colors express values isn't always easy to do, yet Manchess dashed off this painting in less than two hours, including time to fix an area that got smudged by (of all things!) a cat.

As a final test, here is the photo Manchess probably used for reference. His color-based values scheme holds up well when compared to this.

Thomas Anshutz

Thomas Pollock Anshutz (1851-1912) was a painter and art instructor who studied under and later worked with the better-known Thomas Eakins. Anshutz's Wikipedia entry is here.

He became the lead instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after Eakins left. His students included Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, Everett Shinn and John Marin, all of whom are better known than him today. Nevertheless, Anshutz was a skilled painter whose lack of acclaim might in part be due to his not buying heavily into modernist artistic ideology (if his paintings are any evidence).

Gallery

The Ironworkers at Noontime - 1880

Woman Writing at a Table

Figure Piece - 1909

Lady with Bonnet

The Incense Burner - c.1905

A Rose - 1907
These last two paintings seem to feature the same model.

F.C.B. Cadell's Nearly Faceless Faces

F.C.B. (Francis Campbell Boileau) Cadell (1883-1937) was a member of the Scottish Colourists, an informal group active in the early decades of the 20th Century. I wrote abut him here, and his Wikipedia entry is here.

In August when I was browsing Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery, I got to see some of his paintings in person for the first time. Although it's actually pretty obvious even when inspecting reproductions, for some reason it struck me at Kelvingrove that many of Cadell's paintings feature sketchy treatments of facial features. He might have done this so that faces would not grab viewers' attention from the entire painting. Or perhaps he had another reason; I don't know what was on his mind.

Below are images of some Cadell paintings found on the Internet with close-up photos of facial detail I took at Kelvingrove.

Gallery

Reflections (Girl in Blue) - c.1912

Reflections - c.1915

A Lady in Black - c.1925

The Orange Blind - c.1925

Norman Rockwell and Chiaroscuro

I should have noted the source at the time, and didn't. But I did read someplace that Norman Rockwell (1894-1978, Wikipedia entry here) lighted his subjects from the direction of the viewer, this minimizing use of shadows. I hadn't thought of that before.

And that's true. Though not entirely.

Many of Rockwell's cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post were indeed front-lighted, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps he explained somewhere, but I don't recall having seen an explanation. (Let us know in Comments if there is one.)

Perhaps it had to do with the tastes of the editor and art director, though this is unlikely because Rockwell used this lighting scheme before and following major changes in senior editorial positions at the Post in the years around 1940.

Another possibility is that Rockwell thought he could complete his work faster if he didn't have to spend time working out shadow patterns and their coloring. Or maybe he figured that even a little chiaroscuro (light-shade treatment) would detract from the story he was trying to tell in his illustration.

That said, he was willing and able to use lighting from other angles. Below are examples of both cases.

Gallery

Saturday Evening Post cover illustration - 19 November, 1938

Saturday Evening Post cover illustration - 26 July, 1941

Saturday Evening Post cover illustration - 25 December, 1950
These three illustrations show Rockwell's use of front lighting; all happen to be for Saturday Evening Post covers. The bottom illustration includes images of Rockwell himself (with a pipe in his mouth) along with friends and neighbors.

Alcott's Jo - Woman's Home Companion - December, 1937
This is probably a story illustration. Note that Rockwell chose to have a window with bright, though from overcast, exterior light behind his subject. At the same time, he had to fudge real-world lighting by painting Jo's face as though light was shining directly upon it even though it should have been shaded from the comparatively strong light coming through the window. Perhaps there is also an interior light source, say from an oil lamp, though that is not clear from details in the image.

The Lineman - illustration for AT&T advertisement - 1947
Plenty of shading here.

Saturday Evening Post cover illustration - 29 April, 1950
This illustration has been cited (alas, once again I forget where) as an instance where Rockwell introduced a complicated lighting scheme. And it was for a Post cover, of all things.

What They Say and What We See

I don't get many unsolicited emails. Where I can, I usually unsubscribe. A few sources I let linger on for a while due to cussedness or idle curiosity on my part. I recently received one from somebody named Aron Packer who apparently operates an art gallery in Chicago; he was touting an upcoming show. I was about to zap it when the thought struck me that I was being handed a nice bit of blog material -- and if there's one thing a blogger needs, it's new material to blog about. The big, fat juicy blog fodder? -- some notes about artists in that upcoming show.

One of that things that induces a gag-reaction from me is arty talk, either verbal or written. The worst is art-gush, and even long descriptions and analyses of paintings can something elevate my reaction from glazed eyes to incipient gag. I'm of the school of thought shared by Harley Earl, the legendary creator of styling at General Motors, who shut styling staff members up by announcing that if a design or design feature required explanation, it couldn't be of any use in a production car; its merit had be be visually obvious.

This being an art and design blog, I have to write about the images I display. But I try to keep things short, dwelling mostly on technical matters and minimizing or ignoring social or psychological factors that might (or might not) have driven the artist to do what he did.

And I try to avoid the gushy, pretentious verbiage of the kind that Packer included in his email. Though I understand that he was engaging in marketing to a target audience of art critics and other writers on art who probably do not share the biases I just mentioned.

Here is what was written about Paul Lamantia:

"Of all the strategies, notions, and approaches to modern art, for Lamantia there was never a choice, but a desire to follow a certain direction, that came in the form of an obsession. That obsession was with his dreams and visions, and the need to record and communicate his feelings about them. It is difficult because the work is always changing. It is in a constant state of flux where narrative and psychological possibilities are set in motion and clairvoyant and hallucinatory occurrences can become painted realities. There is no fixed approach to these aesthetic problems Lamantia has created for himself. The works are structured in a subjective state within certain compulsive confines meant to draw the viewer into the dream. It is not always possible to make the illusion accessible to the viewer. The intention is not to illustrate, but to translate them into something real in the form of meaningful images. There is no preconceived planning of visual invention or execution of materials. This method creates artistic challenges and needs that may only be satisfied by exploring new ways to express one's vision and to express one's aesthetic problems. To base the work on conceptual or formal values would be a misinterpretation. The paintings and drawings are meant to be introspective events and should be experienced on an emotional level."

Below is an example of Lamantia's work I found on the Web.

Other examples look fairly similar, so I suspect that the business about dreams, visions, obsessions and much of the rest is simply marketing blather from the point of view of the artist (who would likely strongly deny it was marketing blather). My take is that the guy simply likes to paint that sort of semi-surrealist stuff and has evolved a style that sells well enough to for him to usefully supplement any retirement income following a 25-year stint as a public schools art teacher.

Next, Packer writes about Brett Eberhardt:

"The imagery in Eberhardt’s paintings invite the type of reflection that occurs when one slowly observes one’s surroundings and realizes the human activity, both intentional and unintentional, that led to the current physical state of an interior space and the objects within it. It can be a beautiful thing, this combination of intentional and unintentional actions accumulated over time. The result of use and wear can be unpredictable, even mysterious, making what was once a plain white wall an abundantly rich surface and subject. This change that occurs over time and activity have a lot in common with the sequence of events that take place when building a painting. His painting process starts as a very controlled deliberate act, but over time becomes an embrace of all that painting has to offer, including those unexpected occurrences that can be so crucial to the life of a painting. Although he is after a convincing rendering of the subject, Eberhardt is not interested in creating a slick artificial surface or a hyper realistic image. The construction of the image with paint comes at the forefront and serves as a compelling record of his activity and process, a combination of intention, accident, deconstruction and reconstruction. It is important that these images are constructed with this material, not simply to elevate the subject, but for the discovery and possibilities of the medium used to construct the image."

Above is an example of Eberhardt's work. The text strikes me as pretty much an elaborate and dramatized discussion of the process most painters go through when executing a painting -- hardly a struggle of cosmic dimensions in most cases. After all, Eberhardt seems to be basically painting still lifes of one kind or another. All the verbal drama seems to be just more marketing.

Please note that I'm all in favor of marketing art and artists. I also happen to think that something less extravagant than what I quoted above ought to work just about as well as Packer's verbal pyrotechnics.