Paul Allen Collects Flying Objects

Let's say you were co-founder of a tiny start-up company selling a version of the computer language Basic that would run on grossly underpowered small computers with hardly any data storage capacity. And after 20 years that puny company would grow to dominate a new, huge industry by virtue of its operating systems and office productivity software. Which made you filthy rich.

What, then, do you do with your money?

You could have a huge yacht built for yourself. You could buy some professional sports teams -- a basketball team in Portland, Oregon and in Seattle a soccer team and a football team. You could invest in stuff. But aside from that yacht, what about spending on fun things? How about a museum near the foot of Seattle's Space Needle devoted to rock music and science fiction? Done; what else? How about buying a selection a World War 2 vintage aircraft, meticulously restoring them to flying condition and creating a museum for them?

So that's what Paul Allen of Microsoft fame did. His aircraft museum is in a converted hangar at the south end of Paine Field in Everett, Washington. (The north end of the airport hosts Boeing's huge factory that builds 747, 777 and 787 airlines, many of the latter currently parked engineless near Allen's museum.)

It's called the Flying Heritage Museum and here is a page from its web site with a short explanation of how it came to be.

The planes actually do fly on occasion. Not long ago I saw its P-51 Mustang and Supermarine Spitfire cavorting over Lake Washington before the start of unlimited class hydroplane races. A few planes, while flyable, are never flown. That's because they are the only ones of their kind known to exist.

The museum web site has plenty of fine pictures of the collection, but below are some photos I snapped in an attempt to provide a tourist's view. It was a rare sunny Seattle day, so light pouring through the windows made it almost impossible to get top-quality exposures.

Gallery

P-47, Fw-190 and B-25
Here is a general view of part of the museum.

B-25 bombardier compartment
A head-on view of the B-25 Mitchell at the right of the first photo. Note how complete the restoration is: bombsight, machine gun ammunition belts and so forth. Something I had never been aware of is the windshield wiper on the bombardier's optically flat center windshield, this for improved perfomance of the bombsight.

Messerschmitt Bf 109 E-3
E-series 109s came on line in time for the Battle of France in 1940 and fought in the Battle of Britain.

Hawker Hurricane Mk XII A
Although more Hurricanes flew in the Battle of Britain than Spitfires, there are fewer survivors. This was probably because the Spitfire was more glamorous and saw first-line service throughout the war, whereas Hurricane production ceased in 1944.

P-40C Tomahawk
Most P-40s I've seen are later versions which are longer, have different cockpit glazing and sometimes Merlin engines rather than their initial Allisons. The similar-looking B and C series and derivatives were in combat in 1941-42 with the British in North Africa, the AVG "Flying Tigers" in China and the U.S. Army Air Forces at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in the Pacific. Combat capability aside, I always thought that early P-40s such as this one were the best-looking of the lot.

Polikarpov I-16 Type 24 Rata
Allen's Rata was the first I've ever seen. I was surprised any remained, though it seems that more than half a dozen actually still exist. They were used by Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, Chinese fighting the Japanese invasion and by the Soviet air force in the weeks following Hitler's 1941 invasion.

Adaptive Artists: Dean Cornwell

With this post I started an occasional series dealing with illustrators who preserved their careers by adjusting their style to suit changing illustration style fashions.

Now I consider Dean Cornwell (1892-1960), who is usually ranked among the top illustrators of the first half of the 20th century.

Cornwell reached prominence around 1920 and was hugely successful working in oil using a "painterly" style where brushstrokes are strong and visible. This style gradually fell out of favor during the 1930s when flashy watercolor work became the rage. In turn, this fashion was replaced in the wartime 1940s by sober oil paintings that had a more "finished" appearance where painterly qualities were subordinated.

It was in the 30s that Cornwell decided it was time to "play Shakespeare" (my term for wanting to become accepted as a legit fine artist) and began painting murals -- a quest that didn't net him much or any profit. He continued illustration to make ends meet, so adapted to the non-painterly approach of the 40s. As far as I know, he didn't buy into the 1950s "big head"/gouache style.

I'll be writing more about Cornwell later. If you want considerably more information right away, I suggest you get a copy of Illustration Magazine's issue number 23 that features Cornwell.

Here is an example of his work from the 20s and one from the 40s.

From 1921.

From "The Robe" - 1947.
I fully understand that you gotta do what you gotta do, and there was no way Cornwell could have survived had he continued the style of the top picture. That said, I really like his 1920s work and find later illustrations such as the lower picture undistinguished, generic work almost any competent illustrator of the time might have produced.

Freiherr von Habermann: Some Paintings and a Story

Freiherr Hugo von Habermann (1849-1929) is something of a mystery to me. I've viewed some of his works, yet haven't found much in the way of biographical information about him. The best I can locate on the web is this outline in German.

To summarize the information on the link (as best my meager German allows), he was born 14 June 1849 in Dillingen an der Donau in Bavaria. Both parents were of Bavarian nobility, hence his title of Baron. His family moved to Munich in 1858 and he entered Munich University to study law in 1868. The following year he saw works of Courbet, Manet, Hals and Rembrandt in an international art exhibition, inspiring him towards art. His studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war, serving as an officer in a reserve unit. While stationed at Ingolstadt Fortress in 1871 he pondered his future and decided to abandon the law for art and entered Munich's Academy of Fine Arts that November. In 1878 he became a master-student under Karl von Piloty, director of the Munich Academy. He teamed with Bruno Piglheim and Fritz von Uhde to found a private art school in 1880, but it wasn't successful. The association of these three artists has been retroactively considered by some as the birth of the Munich Secession movement that flourished in the 1890s; Habermann became the second president of the group, following Piglheim. In 1905 he became a professor at the Munich Academy, retiring in 1924.

Although he painted allegorical and Biblical scenes, Habermann is best known for his paintings of women -- sensuous depictions especially.

Irene Beran - 1921

The portrait above is of interest because Rudolf Beran, son of the subject, wrote this fascinating history of his family and Habermann's painting.

Below are other examples of Habermann's work.

Gallery

Porträt einer jungen frau (Portrait of a Young Lady)
No date, but the style suggests it was done early in his career.

Mädchen im Grünen (Girl in Greens) - 1888

Bildnis einer jungen dame (Portrait of a Young Woman) - 1889
Maybe it's the expression he caught, but for now I like this painting best of all his works.

Schleiertänzerin (Dancer with Scarf) - 1895
Another interesting painting; too bad the dark background is starting to crack.

Liegender Modellakt (Reclining Nude Model) - 1907

Fifty That Changed the World -- A Tiny Bit

A pet project of London design icon Terence Conran is the Design Museum (Wikipedia entry here and web site here).

It's not far off the tourist track, being located across the Thames and a short ways downstream from the Tower of London (walk across the Tower Bridge and hang a left (sort of -- you have to zig and zag a little to get back to the riverside).

I bring this up as incidental background to the series of books the museum produced over the last few years. The graphic at the top of this post shows covers of four of them. Their titles can be generalized as "Fifty Xxxxs That Changed the World" where the "Xxxxs" is Dresses, Bags, Chairs, Hats, Shoes and Cars.

The books are small in format and short in pages. There is a skimpy introduction and the fifty selections are presented in spreads -- text on the left-hand page and an illustration on the right.

But what seriously bothers me is the Changed the World business.

I see this phrase far more often than it merits. A case can be made that anything changes the world in some degree by its presence, absence or actions. But that trivializes the concept to the point of uselessness. At the other extreme might be strike by an asteroid or large meteor. Most of us would agree that the Great War and World War 2 changed the world, as did the domestication of the horse and fire, the invention of the wheel and the airplane, and other events that affected the lives of millions.

But handbags? dresses? hats? C'mon; don't be silly. A more accurate title might be "Fifty Xxxxs That Are Pretty Interesting."

As an aside, there are those admonitions that are usually directed towards naive youth. Major in this or that subject in university, get a job in such-and-such field and you, too, can Change the World! If I ever get the power to Change the World, one of the first things I'll do is abolish that phrase.

Artists With Rare Last Initials

In this post we are now getting oh-so-close to something like numerology. But hey! -- it's late August and blog readers are probably off on vacation, so why not write a truly inconsequential post while waiting for their return?

I was glancing over the part of my bookshelves containing books about individual artists and noted that I had none for last names staring with "N" and only one staring with "O" (Thornton Oakley, if you're curious). Later that day I was in Barnes & Noble and passed by their books sorted by artist's name and saw none for "N." Hmm.

I found this item noting that N and O respectively ranked seventh and fifth in terms of citations in the 11th edition of the "Concise Oxford Dictionary," 2004 revision. So those letters seem to be popular enough so far as English words are concerned.

But when it comes to names as recorded in the 2000 U.S. census we find that N ranks 16th and O 18th with respective percentages of 1.65 and 1.39. The letter "M" is in first place at 10.48 percent, which makes it about seven times as common as N and O.

Data for other countries would obviously differ. For example, "V" ranks 19th in the report linked above, but surely would rank far higher in the Netherlands.

Another potential research problem is that many artists are not known by their given and family names. This is especially true for Italians where first names and nicknames are the monickers that often stick in art history.

All that aside, were my casual bookshelf observations all that far off?

Probably not. I skimmed through the "Oxford Concise Dictionary of Art & Artists" (Third Edition) making a rough tally of artists mentioned in biographical paragraphs (including passing mentions of relatives of the primary artist who also practiced art). My counts for N and O were 37 and 32 while M tallied at 170 (not counting artists known as "The Master of ..."). So M was about five times as common as N and O.

My copy of Walter Reed's "The Illustrator in America 1860-2000" (2001) has an index of artists. Its M-N-O block tallies are 43, six and ten, so M's are about five and a half times more common than N's and O's -- similar to the other results.

Conclusion? Artists with last names beginning with the letters N and O are not common. But it's because such last names are comparatively rare and not some cosmic connection between name and artistic success.

Where Do We Put the Skyline?

Here in the United States, central areas of cites tend to be zoned for high-rise office, apartment and condominium buildings. This reflects pre-zoning practices in places such as New York City where new, larger buildings replaced older structures as market conditions evolved. Zoning laws and, later, preservation rulings have tended to preserve certain older buildings, deservedly or not.

In any case, almost no really large North American city that I can think of has an extensive "old town" district comparable to what can be found in Europe. Yes, a few preserved areas exist including parts of Charleston and Savannah in the South, Boston's Beacon Hill and Back Bay neighborhoods, and Québec's district within the wall. There might be a few others, but they don't come to mind as I write this.

From what I glean from photos I randomly notice, American practice is followed in much of the developing world where skyscrapers sprout like mad. Shanghai's Bund is still recognizable, but it is encroached by a field of megastructures across the river in Pudong.

That leaves Europe which, as I noted, has some major cities with large preserved areas. But how many large European cities actually have extensive areas that are largely untouched by skyscrapers or other significant modernist structures?

[Scratches head, rubs chin] Umm. There's Copenhagen, where much of the skyline in the old part of town is as flat as the terrain. And Vienna, which has a few modernist buildings inside the Ring -- but no high-rise buildings in that area. Both of these cites do have skyscrapers. But high-rise, modernist-style buildings are not permitted in the old city centers; they are segregated in areas a few miles away.

Below are examples of cities where tall, modernist buildings are found and not found in old city centers.

Gallery

The Paris most tourists experience is the part of the City near the River Seine. The river is, of course, the low point and the ground rises to the north and south where can be found other areas that attract visitors -- Montmartre and Montparnasse. With one exception, there are no skyscrapers here. Otherwise, the only seriously large modernist building is the Centre Pompidou, the museum of modernist art. Skyscrapers are found in the La Défense district to the west, as can be seen in this photo.

That one exception is the building from which someone probably took the top photo. It's the Tour Montparnasse, completed in 1969, and clearly seen in the photo above. It so horrified Parisians that the idea of La Défense was born. Those tall building in the background are near the periphery of the city to the south, and there are neighborhoods in the city outside the main tourist zone with large (but not very tall) modernist apartment houses.

Vienna's main skyscraper district is off to the east by the Danube River and there are other suburban areas with skyscrapers and large modernist buildings.

The same holds for Prague. The above photo was probably taken through a telephoto lens, making the eastern high-rise district seem closer than it is. In the foreground are the Vltava (Moldau) River and the famous Charles Bridge.

Frankfurt (am-Main) also has a cluster of skyscrapers, but unlike Paris, Vienna and Prague it is situated close to the old city center (or what was left of it after World War 2 bombings).

You might have noticed that in the picture sequence, the skyscraper district gets closer and closer to the old city center. In London, skyscrapers are scattered through the heart, especially in The City, its financial district, shown here.

Pimenov's Moscow Dreaming

The scene above is "New Moscow," painted in 1937 by Yury Ivanovich Pimenov (1903-77).

It's summertime: the sun shines and the convertible's top has been lowered. Driving is a young lady with a stylish dress and a hairdo that might have been fashionable in Moscow at the time and not all that far behind what Parisian women would be wearing.

This is in the era of Socialist Realism where artists had to toe the Communist Party line and present it in a manner accessible to the "masses." So presumably Pimenov is putting a gloss on the results of the first Five Year Plan, showing a level of material comfort found in Moscow right now in 1937!

There are other cars on the street along with some buses. Perhaps some new, tall buildings in the background. I don't recognize what street is depicted (can anyone help?), but it probably isn't far from Red Square.

Very prosperous looking. And very bourgeois for a socialist paradise.

Hmm. Summertime 1937 in Moscow. What else might have been happening that bright, bourgeois day? Oh yes. On the 12th of June that year the famous Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was found guilty of "espionage" in one of Stalin's purge trials and shot in the back of his head a few hours later.