Towards the End: Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) -- Wikipedia entry here -- was a modernist painter generally classified as a Symbolist. Although he often engaged in modernist desiderata such as distortion and color alteration, he never practiced Cubism or pure abstraction, so far as I know. Aside from some landscapes, his subject matter was people.

I wrote about his early work here, and dealt with his 1906 take on Mrs. Schwarz here.

The present post deals with paintings Munch made during the last decade or so of this life, during which he was experiencing vision problems of varying severity.

Munch tended to paint thinly over much of his career, especially so during his later years. In part this might be because, stylistically, his paintings were often little more than sketches. Another possible factor would have been that by painting thinly, his expenses for paint were minimized for his generally fairly large canvasses.

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Uninvited Guests - ca. 1934

Annie Stenersen - 1934

The Lonely Ones - 1935

Henrik Bull - 1939

By the Window - self-portrait - 1940

Self-Portrait: Between Clock and Bed - ca. 1941

Towards the End: Klimt's Portraits

A few years ago I wrote about the early works of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). Now let's take a look at some portraits he made using a style different from that of his most famous paintings.

If you are interested in viewing the latter in person, the best place to go is Vienna, and once there, I strongly suggest visiting the Belvedere, which has his iconic "Kiss" (1907-08). More information regarding Klimt is here.

For what little it might be worth, I'm not enthusiastic about most of the people-related paintings he made during the last six or eight years of his life.

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The Black Feather Hat - 1910
No decorative detailing here. Perhaps Klimt was in the process of reconsidering his style.

Portrait of Mäda Primavesi - 1912

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II - ca. 1912

Portrait of Friedericke Maria Beer - 1916
Although painted several years apart, Klimt used a similar composition for these portraits -- the subject facing the viewer, taking up roughly the middle third of the painting with the rest occupied by decorative elements to varying degree.

Lady with Fan - 1917-18
For much of his career, Klimt painted "busy," detail-filled paintings. Here the contrast in colors between the subject's flesh and most of the rest helps pull the lady's image into dominance.

Paint sketch portrait  1917

Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Ria Munk III) -- 1917-18I include these two works because they show Klimt's technique from shortly before his death.  Very sketchy, so details had to emerge and get firmed up as he proceeded. Quite the opposite from how he must have worked in his early, academic-influenced days.

Towards the End: George Henry

George Henry (1858–1943) lived into his mid-eighties, and his career consisted of two stylistic phases with a transition point around the time he was 40. For this post, I'll consider the second phase as "towards the end" even though it lasted for decades. However, Henry (biographical link here) did his most interesting work during the first part of his career as a prominent member of of a Scottish group of painters known as the Glasgow Boys.

Henry's Glasgow Boys phase lasted into the mid-1890s when he and fellow "Boy" E.A. Hornell spent more than a year in Japan. Henry's paintings made there retained many characteristics of his Scottish works. Perhaps because of changing fashions and the need to support himself as an artist, Henry soon thereafter began painting in a more traditional fashion. So whatever modernist traits were used in Glasgow Boys art were largely abandoned and few others were incorporated to even a slight degree thereafter.

Below are examples of Henry's post- Glasgow Boys painting. Dates are included where known, but most seem to have been made between 1900 and 1930.

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Through the Woods - 1891
An example of Henry's Glasgow Boys era painting to set the scene -- not one of his better ones, however.

The Tortoiseshell Mirror - 1903
His Glasgow Boys paintings were set out of doors, but now he tries an interior scene.

Lady Margaret Sackville - ca. 1910
Henry also did portrait work to make a living.

The Reading - 1913
An interesting, and not characteristic Henry painting -- though the landscape in the background has his touch (see "Sussex Landscape" below).

Lady in Black - 1919

Brambles - 1920
Here Henry recalls Japan with a kimono-clad British woman. The treatment of the foliage weakly echoes his Glasgow Boys work.

Lady in a Green Dress

Poster art for the London Midlands & Scottish Railway

Sussex landscape - 1930
Henry painted landscapes while a Glasgow Boy. The color schemes were fairly similar to this, but the subject matter was depicted in a more decorative manner.

Lady with Goldfish
I'll guess this was painted around 1910 or 1915, and like it a lot. I think Henry made the woman's face interesting, and the toned-down color scheme is pleasing. It might have been improved by reducing the sharpness of detail for her left hand (it pulls the viewer's eye too far to the right).

Towards the End: Juan Gris

Juan Gris (1887-1927) died young, not long after his 40th birthday. I wrote a "In the Beginning" post about him, but found too few images to illustrate it properly.

Biographical information on Gris -- born José Victoriano (Carmelo Carlos) González-Pérez -- is here.

It seems that Gris never quite abandoned Cubism once he was converted to that branch of modernist painting. The images below that concentrate on the last year or two of his life are mostly in the so-called Synthetic Cubism vein, though there are dashes of other influences such as the "return to order," a post- Great War introduction of classical themes by modernist painters such as Picasso.

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Portrait of Pablo Picasso - 1912
An example of Gris' early cubist art. Gris had some technical education and preferred a tidier form of Cubism than Picasso himself used. Gris would establish a geometry-based structure for many of his works. In this painting, note the parallel lines flanking the buttons on Picasso's garment. At right-angles to these are some background lines in the upper-right part of the painting. Also note the vertical and horizontal motifs in that area.

Harlequin with Guitar - 1919
Painted towards the end of Synthetic Cubism's stylistic run. Gris included guitars in many of his paintings.

Bananas - 1926

The Painter's Window - 1925

Guitar and Sheet Music - 1926-27
Three late paintings featuring a guitar along with various objects defined by straight lines.

The Goblet - 1927

Bunch of Grapes and Fish - 1927
I found this in the Athenaeum site in its Juan Gris grouping. It has plenty of geometric character, but doesn't look like other Gris paintings. Is it truly a Gris?

The Reader - 1926
A human subject with a cubist touch in terms of the shading pattern on her face. Plenty of Gris-type geometrized (is that a real word? ...well, you ought to get its meaning) background material.

Woman with Basket - 1927
A women painted the next year, but entirely different in spirit. She looks classical like other modernists had been painting in the early 1920s. Comparatively few straight lines here, mostly found on the basket and in its vicinity.

Towards the End: Picasso

In January 2011, I wrote an "In the Beginning" post (here) featuring Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who the general public still seems to regard as the genius master of Modern Art.

Recently, I've added a complementary series, "Towards the End," dealing with an artist's late, rather than early work. So now seems to be as good a time as any to add the remaining bookend to Picasso's career.

Considering that he died aged 91, it's a little unfair to select a start-point ten or even 15 years before his death. So what I did was rummage through images of paintings made after 1950, when he was nearly 70. Below are some examples from what I found.

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Dora Maar au chat - 1941
I include this painting Picasso made when he was about 60 to serve as a benchmark for the later ones. "Dora Maar with Cat" sold at auction for one of the highest prices ever.

Villa in Vallauris - 1951

Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle - 1952

The Studio - 1955

Woman in Turkish Costume Sitting in a Chair - 1955

Les pigeons, Cannes - 1957

The Rape of the Sabine Women - c. 1963

Le peintre et son modele - 1963

Grandes têtes - 1969

Tête d'homme - 1972

True to his form, Picasso never went purely abstract; each painting includes a subject or subjects potentially identifiable via the captions.

To my eye, there was no real stylistic progression or sense of direction over the 20 years covered by the example images above. This ties into the thesis of my e-book "Art Adrift" that once the elements of modernist painting had been established by around 1920, aspiring modernists and even established ones such as Picasso had no real sense of what to do next.

Towards the End: Georges Braque

Georges Braque (1882-1963) is famous for having invented Cubism along with Pablo Picasso, as his Wikipedia entry indicates. I posted about Braque's early painting here, and the present post presents some of his late works.

According to the biography by Alex Danchev, Braque was pretty much the opposite of Picasso when it came to personality and approach to art. Braque was a quiet Zen-like soul, stayed married to the same woman, and painted like a careful craftsman rather than a too-wildly "creative" native of Málaga by way of Barcelona.

As best I can tell, Braque was always a Modernist of one kind or another. If he ever drew or painted in a strictly representational manner, evidence of that seems to have been lost or destroyed. However, once his Cubist phase ended and his recovery from a serious Great War wound was completed, Braque did introduce recognizable objects to his paintings, albeit in distorted fashion.

A few paintings from the last ten years of his life are presented below.

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La guitare (Mandore, La Mandore) - 1909-10
This Cubist painting is to remind viewers of what Braque is famous for.

Studio VIII - 1954-55
This item from a series was snapped up by modernist art collector Douglas Cooper.

Les oiseaux - Louvre, Salle Henri II - 1953
Braque was the first Modernist invited to tart up a Louvre ceiling. Not quite as inappropriate as Chagall's re-do of the Opera Garnier ceiling, but still....

L'oiseau noir et l'oiseau blanc - 1960
He make many paintings featuring birds in this last years. This was after a series featuring (usually black) fish.

The Weeding Machine - 1961-63
Perhaps his final painting.

Towards the End: Franz von Stuck

Franz von Stuck (1863-1928) was a leading figure in the Munich art world, both as a secessionist and as an establishment art instructor. Although he painted fairly conventionally when it came to portraits, much of his work can be classified as Symbolist. In his case, symbolism was usually in the form of Classical or Biblical subjects. His Wikipedia entry is here, and I posted about him here.

Stuck's Symbolist paintings tend to be dark, but he made some bright non-portrait paintings along the way, especially around the early 1920s. But he continued his dark Symbolism into the final years of his career, as can be seen below.

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Sin - 1893
Stuck's best-known subject is "Sin," of which he painted a dozen or so versions. I include this to set the scene, but you can click on the above link to my post about him to see other examples of his art from his heyday.

The Circle Dance

Judgment of Paris - 1923
Sorry about the small size, but that's all there is on the Internet. The two paintings above are part of the Frye Art Museum collection in Seattle and show a not-gloomy Stuck at work.

Badende Frauen (Women Bathing) - c. 1920
A bright, non-Symbolist painting from around the same time.

The Three Goddesses: Athena, Hera and Aphrodite - 1923
Again in the same time frame, but more to the traditional Stuck style.

Pygmalion and Galatea - 1926

Judith - 1927
These two paintings were done within a couple of years of Stuck's death at age 65. He seems to have been little influenced by the Modernist "isms" that came along after 1900, his final works not being greatly different in spirit from what he painted 20 or 30 years earlier. The two Frye paintings suggest influence of the simplified, flattened representational painting style that emerged for a while after the Great War. The bathing women seem to have an Impressionist touch.