Carlo Carrà: Futurist for a Short While

Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) was one of the first Futurist painters, Futurism being a 1910s Italian movement that, in painting, stressed depicting movement. Biographical information on Carrà is here.

From what I could tell from images of his paintings on the Internet, Carrà never painted strictly realist paintings. Some of his earliest works on the Web, painted when he was around age 30, seem Cubist-influenced. Then from about 1911-1915 he made Futurist paintings. Then he became associated with Giorgio de Chirico and his Metaphysical Painting concept. After that, Carrà tended to do cityscapes and landscapes using a simplified, rather rough style.

Examples of his work are below. I find none of them interesting or appealing.

Gallery

Nuotatori (Swimmers) - 1910

Marinetti - 1910-11
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti was the founder of Futurism.

Ritmi di oggetti (Rhythms of Objects) - 1911
This is Futurist because pace and movement are suggested by the title, yet the overall impression is Cubist.

Funerale dell'anarchico Galli Funeral of the Anarchist Galli - 1911
This painting and the following one are Futurist.

Il Cavaliere Rosso, (Cavallo e cavaliere) (The Red Rider) - tempera - 1913

Manifestazione Interventista (Interventionist Demonstration) - collage - 1914

Il cavaliere dello spirito occidentale (Western Horseman) - 1917
At this point Carrà is influenced by de Chirico.

La Musa metafisica (The Metaphysical Muse) - 1917

Le figlie di Loth (The Daughters of Lot) - 1919
Modernists were drifting into a neo- pseudo-classical style at the end of the Great War, and Carrà was keeping up with fashions.

Il faro (The Lighthouse) - 1928
But he still hadn't completely parted from de Chirico's influence.

Il Forte dei Cavalieri di Malta (Fortress of the Knights of Malta) - 1939
By the time this was painted, Carrà seems to have largely departed from doctrinaire Modernism, though was not quite fully free of modernist simplification.

Venezia (Venice) - 1957
A late painting. Crudely done: primitivism combined with lonely de Chirico emptiness.

The Carefully Observant Rowland B. Wilson

Rowland B Wilson (1930-2005) was an animator, an ad agency art director and a cartoonist. He is probably best known to the general public (of a certain age) for the cartooning, and that's what I'll feature in this post.

A brief Wikipedia entry is here. For more details you might want to read his Los Angeles Times obituary.

Although Wilson drew black and white cartoons for The New Yorker, his preference was for full-page cartoons printed in color -- a comparative rarity in the cartooning world. In Wilson's case, it was Playboy Magazine that provided that venue along with advertisements for New England Life, an insurance company.

Viewing a number of his cartoons on the Internet, the things that strike me about Wilson are: (1) his skill at creating believable personalities for his subjects, (2) the large amount of research he must have done to attire those subjects, and (3) the additional research expended to accurately detail the environments in which they were placed.

That is, the jokes were funny, but their context was far more believable than found in run-of-the-mill cartoons. Let's take a look.

Gallery

Playboy
The German planes are Albatros V's and the French fighter is a Nieuport 24 bis. I'm not sure about the escadrille symbol on the side because I couldn't find it in my heap of reference material. Escadrille SPA 48, an outfit that flew SPADs towards the end of the war, used a rooster, but the design was different. The inscription in the upper left corner is to fellow cartoonist/animator Bill Peckmann.

Playboy
The chandelier/window group in the background suggests the Eiffel Tower -- was that intentional on Wilson's part, or is it my fevered imagination?

Playboy
Da Vinci invents the Pizza. Note the earlier signature style.

Playboy
Note the Black Forest type setting and all that architecture.

Playboy
This shows off Wilson's skill in characterization, costumes and posing.

New Yorker
He must have researched Middle Ages crane designs for this cartoon.

New Yorker
Note the East 60s New York City neighborhood evoked by the background.

TV Guide
This was a popular magazine around the 1970s.

New England Life
All the New England Life ads in this campaign had the same caption. Also the setting of impending doom.

New England Life
Another example.

"Eric" et sa femme

Carl Erickson (1891-1958) was Vogue magazine's ace fashion illustrator in Paris from about 1925 to 1940 and continued his career at the American edition until his death. His wife, Lee Creelman Erickson also illustrated for the French Vogue and during the early-to-mid 1920s was more prominent than her husband.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find biographical information on Lee. But Eric (as he was called and soon used as his signature) is better documented. For starters, you might link here and here.

Lee's style was comparatively solid and literal, whereas Eric soon blossomed into his characteristic sketchy style. Underlying that sketchy style was a solid grasp of the forms he was interpreting. For that reason, I respect him even though the sketchiness usually was too extreme for my taste.

Gallery

First some images of Lee's work. This illustration is from 1925.

A 1926 illustration. Here and in the image above she signs her full married name.

Finally, an illustration from about 1933. At this point she signs using her married initials in a form similar to that of Eric (see below).

Photo of Eric at work. The bowler hat was habitual attire.

Illustration from around 1925. Here he signs his full name.

By 1929 he was using "Eric."  The style here is similar to that of his wife, but freer sketching is on the way.

I'm guessing that was made around 1931. I include it because it shows a car being loaded on a passenger ship. My impression is that fashion illustrators and others who are good at depicting people often do poorly when cars are shown. But here Eric gets the form and perspective correctly even though the car is simply indicated, not rendered. This tells me that he really knew his stuff.

A 1938 illustration showing Eric's mature style.

This was probably done in 1939 after World War 2 started, but before France was defeated. It's a railroad coach scene where the subject might be the woman's attire. Next to her is a French Army lieutenant.

A 1943 illustration made when the Ericksons were in America. Less sketchy than his usual wash illustrations, this is an excellent line drawing.

Another 1943 work, also excellent.  To my embarrassment, I do not recognize the subject of this portrait and cannot find that information on the Web: please comment if you know.

William Orpen's Great War Portraits

William Orpen (1878-1931), who I wrote about here, is best known as a portrait painter. Biographical information is here.

During the Great War, Orpen became a war artist attached to the British Army, painting scenes of combat areas and related subjects. Naturally, he also made portraits. Some of these were of enlisted men and junior or mid-level officers. Others were of leading officers and statesmen. In 1919, after the war was over, he painted a series of "unfinished" appearing portraits of leading Army and Royal Navy personalities. Perhaps he left these seemingly incomplete because he painted so many of them and lacked time to make them look finished. They mostly are signed, so Orpen must have regarded them as finished, and the sketchiness was probably intentional. I find these generally more interesting than his more traditionally-done military portraits.

Gallery

Winston Churchill - 1916
Andrew Roberts, in his recent biography of Churchill states that this was the portrait Churchill though best of himself. It was painted after he returned from the Western Front where he had commanded a battalion for several months.

Douglas Haig
Commander of the British Army in France during most of the war.

Hugh Trenchard
Trenchard became commander of the Royal Air Force when it was established in April, 1918. This painting from 1917 and the one of Haig are not "completed," though the use of full background color makes them seem more so than the paintings that follow.

John J. Pershing
This portrait of Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France is one of those seemingly incomplete portraits made in 1919.

Rosslyn Wemyss
Memyss became First Sea Lord (commander) of the Royal Navy after the war. Note how he is posed. The following two painting use similar poses.

Henry Wilson
Wilson became Chief the Imperial General Staff towards the end of the war and was a member of the anti-Haig faction.

T.E. Lawrence
Lawrence of Arabia.

Adrian Carton de Wiart
Carton de Wiart was insanely brave, losing an eye and arm in combat. This failed to prevent him from serving as a general in World War 2.

Ganga Singh
Singh was Maharaja of Bikaner, a general in the Indian Army and a member of the Imperial War Cabinet during the war. Sikhs have long been noted for their warrior qualities.

David Beatty
Beatty commanded battlecruiser squadrons 1914-16 including the battle of Jutland, and then the Grand Fleet, Britain's main naval force.

Giacomo Balla, the Oldest Futurist

Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), whose most famous painting Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio --Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash -- 1912, shown above, spent part of his career as a Futurist, Futurism being one of Italy's two main contributions to early modernist art (the other is Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical Art).

Balla's Wikipedia entry mentions that he had training at Turin academies and then went to Rome where he painted portraits and did commercial art to earn a living. At some point before 1900 he took up Divisionism, related to Claude Monet- style Impressionism. Then, as Wikipedia states (as of 1 January 2019):

"Around 1902, he taught Divisionist techniques to Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed. He was a signatory of the Futurist Manifesto in 1910."

So Balla's friendship with Boccioni and Severini, who were early converts to Marinetti's Futurism, seems to have led to his knowledge of and participation in that movement when he was about 40 years old. For a while. Hard-core Futurism and other 1900-1914 modernist movements had lost much of their fizz by 1920, and Balla's style drifted back towards conventional representation by the 1930s.

Gallery

Famiglia Carelli. Effetto sera - c. 1901
Divisionist-lite dual portrait, the title stating "evening effect."

Lampada ad arco (Street Light) - 1909 dated, though 1910-11
Perhaps Balla's earliest Futurist painting.

Accelerazione (Gaining Speed) - 1912
Note his signature at the lower left. He often signed his Futurist paintings FUTUR BALLA.

Velocità astratta + rumore (Abstract Speed + Sound) - 1912-13
This is actually a very early European abstract painting.

Velocità astratta (Abstract Velocity) - 1913
Some Cubist influence here.

Velocità d'automobile (Speeding Automobile) drawing - 1913

Expansion of Spring - 1918
Although Balla's signature includes FUTUR, he is drifting from Futurism.

Circular Planes - 1924
An abstraction -- now FUTUR has become FUT.

Fanciulla pensosa (Fanciulla Pondering)- 1932

Chiacchierì (Chatting) - 1934
Two conventional, nicely made paintings. The one immediatey above seems to show some Balla paintings in the background.