Moïse Kisling: Silplified Solidity

Moïse (Mojżesz) Kisling (1891-1953) was born in Kraków, Austro-Hungarian Empire, but moved to France in 1910 and remained there for the rest of his life aside from a period of time in the U.S.A. around the time of World War 2. Kisling because a French citizen due to his serving in the Foreign Legion during the Great War and being wounded. These and other facts can be found in this fairly brief Wikipedia entry.

Although Kisling maintained a base in Paris, he spent much of his time in the Riviera. He was sociable, with many friends in the School of Paris collection of artists as well as other modernists. His sociability was perhaps outshone by his wife, Renée (1896-1960), daughter of career cavalry officer Jules-Chalres-Émile Gros. She was not pretty by most standards, but compensated via her personality.

As for his art, Kisling didn't exactly plunge into modernism. Instead, his paintings depicted real people and objects, but in the simplified yet rounded, solid style that was widely used during the 1920s and 30s. To that degree, Kisling was comparatively conservative. Moreover, his style did not evolve much during those years, finally changing a little by the 1940s as can be seen below.

Gallery

Portrait of André Salmon - 1912

Paysage de Provence - c.1919

Kiki de Montparnasse - 1925

Renée Kisling - 1928

Nu alongée sur l'herbe - c.1930

Portrait of a Young Woman

Self-Portrait - 1937

Nu assis - 1942

Sylvia Mann - 1943

Photo of Kisling with model - c.1935

Wallace Herndon Smith: 1930s Semi-Modernist

Wallace Herndon Smith (1901-1990) lived much of his life in St. Louis, Missouri, but managed to attend all the right schools (Lawrenceville School, Princeton University, École des Beaux-Arts) and have a career in architecture (for a while) and (mostly) painting. Better yet, his artistic life involved no desperate existential struggles. That was because he was born to riches. A biographical sketch is here and a link to a published biography is here.

Apparently Smith is a subject of some regard in his native St. Louis, but not elsewhere. I suspect that is because he wasn't a very good artist.

I wrote a book that focused on the painting scene between the world wars (see link in the panel to the right). Basically that era was one of confusion and indecision. Avant-garde artists had almost completely exhausted the possibilities of anti-traditional painting, whereas many other artists felt they had to come to terms with Modernism, but usually were not sure how best to do this. The result tended to be sketchy paintings with distorted subjects and perspective, often using flat areas of sometimes distorted color.

Smith took up painting in the late 1920s, going along with this halfhearted Modernist approach. The results were generic works that I find lacking in skill and personality. In closing, I need to confess that I don't like paintings of this kind by more acclaimed painters. It's to some degree a matter of my personal taste regarding style. Anyway, below are many of the few examples of Smith's works that I could find on the Internet.

Gallery

Street Scene, France

Venice Scene

Landscape with Factory

Harbour Springs, Michigan

Paris, Early Morning - 1950s

Guanajuato - early 1970s

Jean Hélion: Apostate Abstractionist

Jean Hélion (1904-1987) gained artistic notoriety during the 1930s as an abstract painter. Then he threw that overboard in the early 1940s when abstract painting was in the process of becoming the dominant avant-garde style. That took intellectual and economic courage, because most of his contemporaries were heading in the opposite direction.

His Wikipedia entry is here and his obituary in The New York Times here, the latter indicating how he managed to escape captivity during World War 2, making it all the way from Stettin on the Baltic Sea to New York City. The two sources agree that one of his wives was Peggy Guggenheim's daughter Pegeen, but disagree as the his total number of wives.

Even though Hélion rejected abstraction, he remained Modernist in his depiction of representational subject matter. That is, he usually considerably simplified shapes, used flat areas of paint and distorted perceived colors. I go into a good detail of such practices in my e-book on art.

Gallery

Photos of Hélion early in his career and later

Untitled No. 19 - 1933-34

Composition abstraite - 1934

Ile de France - 1935

L'homme à la cravate tordue - 1943

Nude with Loaves - 1952

Blue Roofs, Paris - 1958

Luxembourg Gardens, Indian Summer - 1960-61

Triptyque-du-dragon - 1967

Turner Prize Finalists 2012

For the United Kingdom's avant-garde art world, the Annual Big Deal is the Turner Prize, named after the 19th century painter J.M.W. Turner, who many art historians regard as a precursor of modernist art because of the semi-abstract quality of large areas of many of his later paintings.

The Turner Prize is only one of several important scheduled events that reveal the present Modernist Art Establishment take on what art ought to be. But for what it's worth, here is a link to the 2012 prize finalists with the winner identified.

I find it interesting that only one of the four finalist works involved graphic art. The other three involve Installation, film and video (as best I can tell from the citations). None of the finals painted in oil.

This serves to help confirm the speculation in the final chapter of my book, Art Adrift, that self-styled avant-gardists had to abandon painting for other media because there was little room for major innovation in painting after 1920 or thereabouts.

Reacting to Modernism: Walter F. Isaacs

My old stomping ground, the School of Art at the University of Washington, held an exhibit featuring three former faculty members including its first chairman Walter F. Isaacs (1886-1964). I went to see it because two of the artists (Ray Hill, 1891-1980 and Boyer Gonzales, Jr., 1909-1987) were there when I was. But I was most anxious to see Isaacs' work because he was active during a period that interests me greatly: 1920-1945.

Why those years? Because they were the time following the surge of art movements (Cubism, Fauves, Futurism, Blaue Reiter, etc., etc.) in the years just before the Great War. Following the war many avant-garde artists experienced a what-do-we-do-next? realization as the number of new movements fell off drastically. Meanwhile, artists trained traditionally had to come to terms with modernism because the art market seemed to be drifting in that direction and the matter of bread on the table could not be totally ignored. So many artists struggled stylistically, and it is the art they created while struggling that interests me.

Isaacs was raised on an Illinois farm, but other than the fact that he attended college somewhere, I have no information about what he did from the time he left the farm until he enrolled at Chicago's Art Institute in 1914 when he was about 28 years old. He then went on to teach at what is now Northern Colorado University in Greeley, but left to study in France in 1920. In 1923 he was hired as art professor at the University of Washington and headed the art department until his 1954 retirement. While at Washington he continued to travel to Europe in order to experience what was still the world's leading art.

Below are photos I snapped while viewing the exhibit. They are definitely of the quick-and-dirty sort, uncropped, shot with the lens set to wide-angle so that the focusing is (mostly) okay. The exhibit designers were astute enough to hang a series in chronological order; these are the first ones shown.

Gallery

From 1920s

From 1930s

From 1940s

From 1950s

From 1960s
It seems that Isaacs was never truly avant-garde. In fact, his work seems to lag about ten or 15 years behind what passed for cutting-edge during the confused decades from the start of the Great Was until the end of World War 2. For instance, note that he seems to have avoided Surrealism, the most prominent movement of the 1930s, and that he failed to surrender to pure abstraction, if the images in the exhibit are any guide.

Nevertheless, his paintings are influenced by modernism. Shapes are simplified and the appearances feature flatness, not depth.

Self-portraits
The portrait at the left was done in 1909 when he was in college. The center one dates from around 1930 and the right-hand one is thought to have been done in Paris in 1928 or thereabouts.

Mildred Isaacs - 1931

Babette Hughes - c.1942
Isaacs became more conservative or traditional when painting portraits, though the modernist characteristics of simplicity and flattening are still evident.

I have no proof, but the paintings shown above suggest that Walter Isaacs was most comfortable painting in the slightly-modern mode he practiced from 1920 into the 1940s. His later works strike me as being a bit forced, as if his role as art department chairman required him to keep up with both the times and the work of younger faculty members who were more comfortable with modernism.