Eric H.W. Robertson: Both Traditional and Modernist

Scottish painter Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson (1887-1941) is essentially a cipher, so far as information about him on the Internet is concerned. In fact, most of what I could find regarding him was on this Wikipedia entry dealing with his first wife, Cecile Walton (1891-1956), daughter of the Glasgow Boy, Edward Arthur Walton.

The link above mentions that he was trained in architecture, but shifted his attention to painting. From the evidence of a photo of him in uniform in the link along with a painting (see below), Robertson served in some capacity in the Great War. Finally, it seems that he was a heavy drinker, this affecting his peculiar marriage arrangement and quite likely his artistic career.

So why am I bothering to write about Robertson? Because he is one of those painters who flipped back and forth between traditional painting and various degrees of modernism -- sometimes even working those styles at around the same time. Moreover, I find many of his images appealing. Others seem to be of the same mind because, even though there is essentially no biographical information, the Internet has a fair number of images of his paintings.

Gallery

Spring - 1913

Beauty Luxuriant - ca. 1919?

Shellburst

Robert the Bruce and de Bohun

The Daughters of Beauty (part)

Cartwheels - ca. 1920-21

Dance Rhythm

Cecile - 1922

Wynne Walker (the artist's later wife) - ca. 1924

Arthur Bowen Davies: Inconsistent Modernist

This post about Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1928) is rather brief because I couldn't find many useful examples of his work on the Internet.

It seems that Davies, obscure today, was well-known and made a good living as an artist. Plus, it seems he had an interesting life, having one legal wife along with another, secret, de facto one, both with his children. This and his artistic career are well-covered here, here and here.

From what I've seen, I'd rate Davies as a Symbolist -- his painting owned by New York's Met featuring unicorns, and many other works dealing with dancers. Especially during the 20th century's 'teen years, he plunged into modernist styles, though not deeply or completely. Apparently this cut down his sales, so he shifted back to more clearly representational paintings in the 1920s.

For what my opinion might be worth, I saw no Davies painting that struck my fancy.

Gallery

Unicorns (Legend - Sea Calm) - 1906

Air, Light, and Wave - ca. 1914-17

Figures in a Landscape

The Dancers
This is in the Phillips Collection for some reason.

The Dawning - 1915

Dancers
I think this is a Davies, but the Web information on it is sketchy.

Italian Hill Town - Ca. 1925
Here he is back to representational painting.

Heliodora - 1926

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.

Jean Metzinger and His Variously Styled Women

Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger (1883-1956) is usually associated with Cubism, though seldom ranked as highly as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris in that aspect of modernism. However, Metzinger, along with Albert Gleizes, attempted to codify cubist practices and generate a theory of Cubism in their book Du "Cubisme" that appeared in 1912.

There are lengthy biographical articles on Metzinger on the Internet. His Wikipedia entry is here. Another long essay that is richly illustrated can be found in two places: here and here.

I must confess that I was unaware of Metzinger until very recently when I began searching for cubist portraits. Although he is hardly unknown to art history, it seems that he has been somewhat bypassed in the Modernist Establishment timeline that culminated in Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. Perhaps this was because he reverted to a restrained version of modernism by the 1920s, failing to take up Surrealism or full-blown abstraction.

Metzinger seemed to enjoy portraying women. With that in mind, I summarize his career in the series of paintings featuring women in the Gallery section below.

Gallery

Femme assise au bouquet de feuillage - 1905

Femme au chapeau c. 1906
Metzinger was in his early 20s and trying out modernist styles. In these two paintings he is experimenting with Divisionism, a Postimpressionist approach.

Le goûter - 1911
Some sources credit this as Metzinger's breakthrough Cubist painting. Braque and Picasso had been painting in the Cubist style for two or three years at this point.

La femme au cheval - 1911-12
The title says this is a woman with a horse -- but I'm sure you could tell that already by simply looking at the image.

Danseuse au café - 1912
Note Metzinger's use of light in this painting and the two previous ones. These are in the spirit of Analytic Cubism, but the bland colors favored by Picasso and Braque in this cubist phase are ignored. Instead, we see the effect of light sources on the cubistically reassembled objects. One result is a feeling of depth, rather than the flattened picture plane favored by other cubist painters. I find this very interesting.

Les Baigneuses - 1912-13
A cubist landscape with bathing women that also features light shining on subjects.

Femme à la dentelle - 1916

La tricoteuse - 1919
These two paintings reflect the late-style Synthetic rather than earlier Analytic Cubism. Metzinger soon abandoned Cubism for many years.

Jeune femme pensive aux roses rouges - 1923
After the Great War many modernists recoiled from the "isms" that had been created in the years leading up to the conflict. Some, like Picasso, returned to more hard-core modernism. Others retained some representation of subjects, but included modernist affectations such a a flattened picture plane, simplification of shapes and so forth. Here Metzinger relies mostly on simplification.

Salomé - 1924
And here he uses both simplification and distortion as modernistic effects.

Femme debout - 1935
In the mid-1930s Metzinger continued to paint women in the then-fashionable simplified, solid-appearing manner.

Nu au hortensias - 1935
A touch of Cubism possibly returns here in the form of the unusual light-shade pattern.

La baigneuse (nu) - 1936-37
Here Metzinger flattens the picture plane somewhat.

Yachting - 1937
Hints of Cubism in the background, but the interesting treatment of the woman is non-cubist.

Portrait de femme en vert - c. 1940
A highly designed composition with a flattened picture plane, simplifications, some color distortion. Yet the drawing of the woman's head is so strong that those details are ignorable.

Nu couché - 1946
This postwar painting continues Metzinger's Cubism-lite that was seen in Femme en vert above.

William L'Engle, Well-Connected Interwar Modernist

William L'Engle (1884-1957) graduated from Yale University in the field of naval architecture, but became a painter instead. A chronology dealing with L'Engle's career is here.

Although L'Engle was capable of painting in a traditional representational manner (see the portraits below), he became a run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road modernist of the 1920-1940 variety that I describe in the book Art Adrift. Not that his paintings were bad; he was a competent artist. But they were typical of his times, where many painters had to decide whether or not to accept modernism, and if they did, to what extent they would embrace it.

Like many of his contemporaries, L'Engle never quite settled on a distinctive, personal style. Instead, he drifted along, following the American modernist fashions of his day.


* * * * *
Update - 8 February 2015 -- The images on the original post were removed at the request of their copyright holder who also requested that I remove the link to the official L'Engle web site, to which I complied. I retained the image captions so that interested readers can track them down using Google image search.

* * * * *

Gallery


Self-Portrait - 1914
The "L'E" symbol on many of the images here is probably related to a source claiming copyright, which I hereby acknowledge, if that is so.


Portrait of Lucy - 1919
Lucy was his wife, and also an artist.


Cranberry Pickers - 1926


Trapeze Artists - 1926


Martha Graham Dancer - 1927


Madeline and Thelma - 1930


Paintings on front and back of panel.


Building New York - 1935


Cuban Scene - 1938


Nightmare, or the End - 1954


Sacrifice of Abraham - 1957
Painted the year of his death.

Prudence Heward: Canadian Semi-Modernist

Prudence Heward (1896-1947) suffered from ill health for much of her life and died aged 50. Biographical links are here and here. The first mentions that she came from a wealthy family and received art training in both her native Canada and Paris.

Heward was of a generation of painters that interests me greatly because they completed training around the time that modernist painting was becoming respectable while at the same time having largely exhausted its ideological (anti-previous styles and subjects) possibilities. So there was no clear path for painters who saw themselves as being "creative," while other artists were forced to decide how much modernism they should incorporate in their work for marketing and prestige reasons. This is discussed in my book "Art Adrift."

Below are some examples of Heward's work in chronological order followed by some commentary.

Gallery

Anna - 1927

Girl on a Hill - 1929

Rollande - 1929

Farmhouse and Car - 1933

Landscape - c.1935

Girl in a Yellow Sweater - 1936

Autumn Hills - c.1941

Portrait of Mrs. Zimmerman - 1943

Heward was appropriately conservative and Canadian in her time. The portraits made in the late 1920s are largely realistic while incorporating a dash of simplification and solidity fashionable in those days. The landscapes, done a few years later strike me as containing as dash of Group of Seven and Emily Carr, as might be expected for a painter active in the Canadian art scene. The 1936 painting of a girl in a landscape combines the characteristics of the previous images. The final painting shows a bit less simplification than her 1920s portraits and is in line with what some other artists were doing during the early 1940s. I have to rate Prudence Heward as a competent, derivative artist. But then, don't most of us fall into that category?