Guglielmo Ciardi: Mostly Venice Scenes

Guglielmo Ciardi (1842-1917) was Venice-born and spent most of his career there busily painting scenes of the city's canals and the adjacent lagoon. When taking a break from that, he made mountain scenes of the nearby Alps. His Wikipedia entry is brief, and a quick Google search revealed little more.

Ciardi's paintings are well made and pleasant to view. His subject matter and treatment of it -- especially the lagoon scenes -- are repetitious. But that's the groove most commercially successful artists follow: first create a viable visual "brand" and then use it to gain further sales and bread on the family table.

The lagoon is obviously flat, and so it the nearby countryside, so I find it interesting seeing how Ciardi dealt with the placement of the horizon line in his images. A modern tourist using a camera or cell phone tends to show mostly sky when photographing that sort of setting. Unless clouds and other sky features are the real subject matter, the wise photographer or artist will try to include as much foreground as possible while maintaining an attractive composition.

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Vele in Laguna - 1880
The tourist zone of Venice is visible in the distance, while the subject is boats with large, triangular, orange sails.

A Sailing Boat on the Canale della Giudecca - 1881
More of a study or perhaps a technique experiment -- but he did sign this.

Lagoon scene
More orange sails.

Laguna a San Giorgio
Here we are, closer to the Campanile, and the brushwork is "painterly" again.

View of St Mark’s Basin with the Punta Della Dogana
Still more orange sails, but the brushwork is more polished. It's possible, even likely, that the brushwork variations are related to when these images were painted. Unfortunately, their dates are not available.

Afternoon on a Venetian Canal

Venice canal scene
Skillful contrasting of simple and complicated areas.

Grand Canal from the Rialto bridge
Ciardi seemingly seldom included close-up views of people, such as we find here.

Conca di Sappada con le Terze - 1897
Finally, a signed sketch of a mountain scene.

Potsdamer Platz Berlin: Life, Death and Sterile Rebirth

World War 2 was not kind to Berlin, especially Potsdamer Platz, site of a major intersection in the central part of the city. Some background can be found here and here.

RAF and US 8th Air Force bombing along with perhaps some Russian artillery near the end of the war caused a great deal of destruction. Postwar, the division of Berlin into occupation zones resulted in the border of the Russian Zone crossing through the plaza. The 1961-1989 Berlin Wall followed that trace. The result was the obliteration of Potsdamer Platz as it had been prewar.

Following Germany's reunification, the neighborhood has been rebuilt in Modernist form. I was there in 2018 and found it an ugly, sterile place.

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Aerial view taken 1929, facing roughly southwest.

A 1925 photo looking south. Northern German architecture was rather heavy-handed, yet I find the scene here lively and interesting.

A similar view from 1929.

Cafe scene from the same year.

A winter 1933 view of the just-completed Columbus Haus designed by Erich Mendelsohn. Modernist-oriented architectural critics praised it, but I think it is no great aesthetic triumph and ruins the ambiance seen in the previous images.

View towards the southeast, apparently from the roof of Columbus Haus, 1933.

A 1939 view of Potsdamer Platz.

Aerial view from around 1949. The vegetated area at the left is the Tiergarten. To its upper-right is the Brandenberger Tor and Unter den Linden -- in the Russian Zone. Below, also in the Russian Zone, are several city blocks where structures were completely razed. Farther down is a hexagonal park element: Leipziger Platz. Immediately to the left of it is Potsdamer Platz. Just above the intersection is the ruined Columbus Haus, also in the Russian Zone.

View of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz. The street towards the right side of the photo is Leipziger Straße and the dead zone on either side is Leipziger Platz.

Potsdamer Platz as seen recently from Leipziger Straße, via Wikimedia. As mentioned above, I find it sterile. Very unlike the gemütlich Potsdamer Platz of yore.

Tadema's Women of Amphissa Up Close

I've shown close-up views of some Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) paintings here and elsewhere. But given his talent and stage-setting ability, why not more?

The excellent Clark museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts has a nice example of his work. It is "The Women of Amphissa" (1887); the museum page for the painting is here.

Below are some iPhone photos I took of it when I visited the Clark last September. Click on images to enlarge.

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An image of the painting found on the Internet.

My establishment shot, showing how it appeared to the camera under the gallery's lighting conditions. Tadema was something of a miniaturist, and you can glean a sense of its scale by comparing its size to the plaque fragment to the right of it.  Some detail photos are below.

Women's Eyes by Kees van Dongen and Russell Patterson

I wrote about Dutch Modernist painter Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) here, and American cartoonist Russell Patterson (1893-1977) here.

Some of their works exhibit a certain similarity. Namely, from time to time they depicted young women as having extremely mascaraed eyes. Patterson did this a lot more than did van Dongen because his job required cranking out a much larger volume of images.

Van Dongen got there first -- his mascaraed lovelies began to appear around 1910, whereas Patterson's were a Jazz Age and Depression-era thing. So: Did Patterson borrow from van Dongen? I do not know: probably no one does. But living and working in New York City starting in the mid-1920s, it's possible that he might have seen some van Dongen paintings or perhaps images of them in publications.

Let's take a look:

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Van Dongen: La femme en blanc - 1912

Van Dongen: The Blue Hat - 1910

Van Dongen: La Coquelicot - c. 1919

Patterson sketch

Patterson illustration

Patterson illustration

Joseph Edward Southall's Tempera Paintings

Joseph Edward Southall (1861-1944) used tempera as his main medium, unlike most Fine Art painters who favored oil. Some background dealing with his art and politics is here.

Southall's compositions are generally fairly static and his subject matter traditional. Images are "flat" in both the Modernist and Mediaeval artistic senses. I am tempted to use the term "decorative."

That said, his works are pleasing, if not awe-inspiring.

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Sigismonda Drinking the Poison - 1897

The Sleeping Beauty - 1903

Anna Elizabeth Southall - 1911
That's a self-portrait of Southall himself at the left.

Along the Shore - 1914

Belgium Supported by Hope - 1918
Related to the Great War that ended late that year.

Ariadne on Naxos - 1925

Fishermen and Visitors - 1931
Those visitors are quite fashionably dressed: an interesting painting.

The Great Bridge at Cahors, France - 1940
The Internet-sourced date confuses me. I doubt Southall would have been in south-central France any time that year due to the war and the country's fall to the Germans in May-June (though Cahors was in Vichy France). Note the trees in leaf, a May-October thing. Therefore, if the date is correct, the painting was made in his studio or else the painting was made, say, in 1938 or 1939 when France could be visited casually.

John Held, Jr.'s Woodcut Style

John Held, Jr. (1889-1958) was one of my favorite cartoonists when I was young. I even did a variation of his style while on the staff of my high school yearbook. In retrospect, Russell Patterson was his equal, perhaps his superior, in capturing the 1920s Jazz Age in cartoons.

Held's Wikipedia entry is here, and here is my 2014 post dealing with him.

As my post indicated, there was more to Held than 1920s flappers and sheiks. An aspect of his work that I find curious is the set of woodcut (and woodcut-like) cartoons he made for the New Yorker magazine and perhaps other venues. One curiosity is that the subject matter -- 1900-vintage, not sophisticated 1920s and 30s New York City settings -- always struck me as not in synch with the New Yorker's character. I suspect that the reasons they appeared at all was because (a) Held was famous, and (b) he and New Yorker editor Harold Ross were high school friends in Salt Lake City.

Held must have liked doing wood/linoleum cuts, and justified the historic subject matter as in keeping with the medium.  Also, there was strong contrast with the style of his cartoons dealing with current (Jazz Age) subjects.

And me? I do not like them. But maybe you might, so here are some examples:

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The set above includes the woodcut style and the cartoon style for which Held is famous.

Anna Held once famously had a milk bath.  This seems to be a scratchboard simulation of a woodcut (note his signature).

Held was Mormon.

More Daniel Sayre Groesbeck Images

Daniel Sayre Groesbeck (1878-1950) was an illustrator with a nice touch whose work is scarce on the Internet. Much of that has to do with the fact that for a chunk of his career, he had the role of what is now called "concept artist" for movie studios. In particular, he was a good friend of, and worked for, the great Cecil B. DeMille. Since the illustrations he made for DeMille and others were essentially private commissions, they (almost?) never saw the light of day in his time. Much of what see today is from the catalog of an exhibit of his work at the Santa Barbara art museum from 2001.

I wrote about Groesbeck here. A Muddy Colors post dealing with him is here, and examples of his work done in Siberia and East Asia is here.

The images below are a supplement to the better works I posted earlier. Most are related to movies. Still, they are worth a glance.

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Reap the Wild Wind - 1942 film

Siberian Tax Collector

Samson (Victor Mature) - 1949

Delilah (Hedy Lamarr) - 1949

The Plainsman - 1936 film (Jean Arthur)

The Unconquered - 1947 film

The Unconquered - 1947 film

The Unconquered - 1947 film (Gary Cooper)

Gone With the Wind - 1939 movie

Scarlett O'Hara (Olivia de Havilland) dressed for the ball - Gone With the Wind
Perhaps the best work in the collection above.

Landing of Cabrillo - 1924
This painting was cleaned a few years ago, but most Internet images are of the pre-cleaned version.  Here I used the tools on my iMac to simulate the cleaning. (The darker version can be seen on the link above to my earlier post.)