Huge, Unsuccessful Transport Planes

There's something about size that appeals to the rational, technically-oriented mind. In certain circumstances, that is. Circumstances where economies of scale seem applicable. The problem is, size cannot become infinitely large or even "seriously large" without the object in question becoming unaffordably expensive or key components demanding features beyond the state of their engineering art.

An instance of the first case is the "paper battleship." Naval planners during the period, say, 1910-1940 would prepare concepts of future battleships. This might begin with the idea of using really large main armament -- an 18- or even a 20-inch shell, perhaps. But the rest of the vessel would have to be scaled to support such armament. And the price of such a ship might consume much of the navy's construction budget; a class of three or four ships would be prohibitive, not to mention the tactical and strategic consequences if one of those super-battleships was sunk. The Japanese Yamato class came close to this potential overkill and the United States planned, then cancelled, its Montana class which was more a super Iowa than a Yamato.

For aircraft, there are several problems related to large scale. The Boeing 747 in its early days and the new Airbus 380 forced upgrading of various airport facilities and earlier, relatively large aircraft such as the DC-3 airliner led to the replacement of grass landing fields with airports with concrete runways.

A more serious problem has been that aircraft engines weren't capable of reliably supplying the power required by huge (for the times) airframes. This problem became acute by the early 1940s when piston engines became increasingly complex and unreliable as power requirements grew. In short, their technology was reaching its natural limits. The solution was gas turbine engines, but it took 10 or 15 years for their technology to reach the point where power, fuel economy and reliability converged to where they could be used on commercial aircraft.

Just for fun, below is a gallery featuring ultra-large transport or cargo aircraft from the period centered on the late 1940s. Some were powered by those maxed-out piston engines and one used the new, trouble-prone turbine technology. I also dealt with large aircraft a while ago in this 2Blowhards post.

Gallery

Douglas C-74 Globemaster
Several aircraft have sported the "Globemaster" name: this was the first. Only a few were built as it was succeeded by the pudgy, double-deck C-124 that saw considerable use. I once flew in one of the latter from Kimpo airport near Seoul to Tachikawa airbase in Japan many years ago. An interesting feature seen on the C-74 that must have caught the fancy of Douglas designers is the double bubble pilot / copilot canopy arrangement that gives the plane a bug-eyed look. This was also used on Douglas' XB-43 "Mixmaster" prototype bomber. All very futuristic, but impractical for cockpit operational coordination.

Convair XC-99
The XC-99 was derived from the B-36 bomber. Pan American even considered ordering some, but decided to stick with more practical planes such as the DC-6 and Boeing Stratocruiser (which itself had engines that weren't paragons of reliability). Only one XC-99 ever flew.

Lockheed R6V Constitution
This was a Navy job. As the link notes, hardly any were built.

Martin JRM Mars
Another Navy transport, this a seaplane. The original Mars had twin tails. A few were built and saw service. If World War 2 had lasted another year in the Pacific, there might have been more in service.

Bristol Brabazon
Britain's Brabazon was spawned by a government committee, as were several other prototypes and minimal-production airliners (the main exception was the Vickers Viscount) that seemed nifty at the time but didn't even match the needs of government-controlled airlines. The Brabazon's development was long and it had no real chance of seeing airline service.

Saunders-Roe Princess
Flying boat airliners had pretty well seen their day by the end of World War 2, but that didn't prevent the British giving the concept one last stab in the form of the Princess. One more instance of too much, too late.

Arts and Crafts Disneyland

Most folks expect noontime at Disneyland to be bright and sunny, I suppose. Alas for them, Southern California does have a rainy season during the winter months. The weekend before Christmas and early Christmas week this year, Los Angeles experienced days of rainfall that at times was very heavy. And we were there.

Given that I get to Disneyland about once per decade and further given that things in the park change slowly, I was able to skip most of the rides and focus on something really important: staying as dry as possible.

It turned out that a nice place to avoid the rain is the ten year-old Grand Californian Hotel in the Downtown Disney area just west of the Disneyland and Disney California Adventure Park entrances.

There are other Disney hotels nearby that are basically near-generic, nondescript modernist style with Disney touches and shops to brighten things up. Not so the Grand Californian. It's based on those fine Arts & Crafts style National Park lodges at Yosemite in California and here and there elsewhere in the West. Here are some photos I took while drying off.

These views are of the registration desk area and the main lobby.

This was taken from a seat in one of the hotel's restaurants, one with a story-telling theme.

One corner of the lobby has a children's diversion area: note the scaled-down Adirondack-like chairs and rockers.

Grownups are not forgotten. This is a lounge where one can get coffee and beverages of increasing hardness. Those little white spots near the rim of the ceiling light fixture are three-circle Mickey Mouse symbols (head and two round ears): there's no escaping the mouse on Disney property, even in a lounge mostly for adults. Also note the painting on the left-hand wall. This room has several paintings with a circa-1900 feeling, including:

The latter image is slightly cropped.

These are slightly cropped images of some of the California Impressionist style painting located along corridors in the hotel.

All those paintings shown above bear no artist signature. My guess is that they were done by Disney art staffers, many of whom are no slouches and fully capable of creating works with a 1900 cast.

Coastal Calm: Jerry Van Megert

A contemporary artist whose work impresses me is Jerry Van Megert. Last year I posted about him here on the 2Blowhards blog, and two of the photos below are from that article.

As I mentioned on 2Blowhards, I could find little about Van Megert himself, and that remains the case. He was born in Oregon in 1938 and educated there. His main work is portraiture, but I haven't yet found any example of this on the Web.

If you want to view actual Van Megert paintings, a good place is the lounge at The Lodge at Pebble Beach. That's a Van Megert painting on the far wall.

Here is a slightly cropped view of that painting.

Further detail: click to enlarge and examine Van Megert's technique.

A view of the coast between Big Sur and Carmel. This is also in the lounge and on the same wall as the previous painting.

The Lone Cypress
This image of the Pebble Beach landmark is from the web site of Coast Galleries, which offers Van Megert's paintings and prints.

Van Megert's color scheme -- can I call it "clay-like"? -- isn't exactly locked into what an artist or even an ordinary viewer is likely to see when visiting the stretch of the California coast running for 60 or so miles south of Carmel. This frees Van Megert from the iron grip of the powerful California scenery that usually forces California landscape paintings to look somewhat alike no matter who does the painting. So what we see above is definitely California and equally definitely Jerry Van Megert.

A Lot of Picasso Goes a Short Way

Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice Cream Cone - 1938
The Seattle Art Museum has been running an exhibit of Pablo Picasso works from the Musée National Picasso in Paris. It's a larger-than-average show for the museum and they've promoted it heavily.

My wife has been gently hounding me to take her to see it for some time now, but we've been traveling a lot and only got around to doing the deed yesterday.

Crowds were large. I'd assumed that we'd simply waltz in, wave our museum membership cards at the ticket desk and then troop through the exhibit. Instead, we had a two and a half hour wait before our appointed entry-time slot. A chat with a museum staffer revealed that it was the holiday season (and perhaps the impending January 17th show closing) that was bringing in the masses.

When our turn finally came, all I could manage was a fast walk-though, pausing only in the section featuring photographs of Picasso, his women and other friends. The paintings and sculptures ranged from at least his Blue Period through the rest of his career, including the painting at the head of this post. I didn't notice very early works (which I'll be writing about soon).

Contrarian that I am, I can tolerate Picasso only in extremely small doses. Even the small-ish Picasso museum in Antibes, France was an overdose so far as I'm concerned. What I saw in Seattle was room after room, wall after wall of what I consider truly awful, pointless doodling. Doodles that, thanks to the public relations genius of Picasso and perhaps his art dealers, were often quickly painted with the potential for easy sales at good prices -- a situation beyond dreams for most artists.

Finally came the moment of climax and revelation. The Picasso exhibit's exit happened to empty into the museum's small collection of 15th - 18th century art. From crude, distorted Picasso, viewers confronted images that they could relate to as human beings -- setting aside any matters of artistic quality.

So why was there such a large crowd? Did most or all the attendees genuinely like Picasso's works? Did they come simply because Picasso is famous? Might they have come because -- formally or informally -- they acquired the notion that Picasso was A Great Master Who Must Be Loved -- Or Else! (I kid about the "Or Else." Sort of.)

It's possible that there have been studies dealing with art appreciation and how people with different degrees of art knowledge come to their current tastes. Perhaps I'll make time to do a Web search on this or maybe a reader already knows and might post a comment. In my case, Picasso was an artist that "everyone" (who counted, based on my reading when I was high school and college age) asserted had significance and greatness. So I bought into that perspective even though I found only a tiny number of his works likable.

I finally came to trust my instincts, which is why I hardly paused during my stroll through the rooms of the Seattle Picasso show.

In the Beginning: Henri Matisse

Just because you study under a famous painter doesn't mean any of it will rub off on you.

Consider Henri Matisse (1869-1954) who received some of his training from William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. By his late twenties Matisse was leaving strongly representational art behind on his march to Fauvism and colorful points beyond.

Since the point of this "In the Beginning" series is speculation as to how modernist artists' style might have evolved absent modernism, we need to take a look at Matisse's more representational works that have survived. (I could locate only one work on the Web dated before his 25th birthday; might others have been destroyed or otherwise lost?)

Still Life With Books - 1890
Matisse claimed that this was his "first" painting. I couldn't find a larger image.

Woman Reading - 1894
Shown is Caroline Jobau, his mistress at the time and possibly pregnant.

Village in Brittany - 1895
Again, this is the largest image I could locate: apologies.

The Maid - 1896
Still representational, but more simplified than earlier works. Click on the image to get better quality.

The Dinner Table - 1896-97
Just about Matisse's last gasp at representational painting.

Carmelina - 1903
Colors are now becoming flatter, but not yet Fauve-wild. Again, click for a better image.

The White Plumes - 1919
For a few years before 1920 some modernist painters including Picasso and Matisse briefly backed away from the spasm of "isms" of preceding years. The result was some paintings in a noticeably simplified sort of representationalism.

Absent modernism, how would Matisse have fared? Given his training, the time spent copying masters (images not shown) and the very limited evidence shown above, I think that he had the potential to become a good representational painter. Impossible to say whether he might have become great.

Weimar Cities

The Autumn 2010 issue of City Journal contains this article titled "Weimar Istanbul" by Claire Berlinski. Her thesis is that certain cities experienced strong busts of artistic creativity not long before all gets swept away by one disaster or another: these she terms Weimar Cities.

She states:

There is a spookiness to living in a city at the epicenter of an impending political catastrophe, a mood of dread but also of astonishing vitality—economic, creative, artistic. It is a distinctive mood and, to anyone acquainted with history, a familiar mood.

There is, it seems, such a phenomenon as a Weimar City.

What is a Weimar City? It is a city rich in history and culture, animated by political precariousness and by a recent rupture with the past, vivified by a shocking conflict with mass urbanization and industrialization; a city where sudden liberalization has unleashed the social and political imagination—but where the threat of authoritarian reaction is always in the air.

Her archetype is Berlin during the Weimar Republic era (1919-33), and she believes that Istanbul, where she has lived in recent years, is another example as Turkey drifts away from Mustafa Kemal's reforms and towards Islamic fundamentalism.

Other examples she cites are antebellum Charleston, Moscow and Petrograd in 1917, circa-1900 Vienna, 2002 Buenos Aires and Summer of Love San Francisco.

I find this concept intriguing and highly romantic. But I am not persuaded.

In the first place, the spur of knowing that doom is almost certainly in the offing doesn't happen all that often. Moreover, the future is always uncertain. This uncertainty might affect some sensitive, artistic minds even in comparatively calm times. And it can affect minds of average folks when events turn more sour than usual, but not necessarily disastrously; the United States since the economic crisis of 2008 is a case in point. Even in the best of times, the future is uncertain and the thought of it potentially stress-provoking; consider unease of living in one's times as chronic.

I agree that residents of Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1900 likely sensed the empire's decline and wondered how matters would play out once the elderly emperor Franz-Josef finally died. But did folks in Weimer Berlin in, say 1927, see doom in the future? Economic conditions were better than in the early 1920s. True, the Republic was a mess, but there was no strong reason to believe that anything would change much -- that Germany might well continue stumbling along as it had since the end of the Great War, risking disaster yet not quite encountering it. And, if there was to be fundamental change, it wasn't clear what sort of change might occur.

A second factor is that vibrant cultural and artistic periods lasted for decades in many places without much threat or actual occurrence of disaster. For example, England had a strong literary culture going back to the 18th century and continuing well into the 20th. Italy was strong in painting and sculpture from the 14th century through the 18th. Paris ruled the world of painting from the 18th century till nearly the middle of the 20th. The United States became an artistic powerhouse during the 20th century while its political and economic states were far more tranquil than those of other major countries.

Berlinski's citations of Charleston and San Francisco do not strikes me as compelling. Even though the South Carolina city held the spark that set off the Civil War, the conditions that set off that spark brewed up in conjunction with the 1860 presidential election and its result. That is, it's not like a strong sense of doom had been festering for years. And there was no general doom at in the San Francisco case (though I do think the place was approaching the tipping point from being a fun place to live to the weirdness and harshness I feel whenever I now visit it). At best, the peril in the air had to do with the Vietnam war and the threat young men had of being drafted into the army. Even that was a strong factor for those comparatively few young men of a certain age and draft number, and not young people in general.

All this is not to deny that something such as a Weimar City situation can't exist. I can see parallels between Weimar Berlin, 1900 Vienna and the two Russians cities. (Regarding the latter, I'd set the stress situation as longer term than just 1917. There was plenty artistic ferment starting the late 19th century and failure in the Russo-Japanese war resulted in a murky outlook for the czarist regime thereafter, contributing to a "Weimar" condition.)

In sum, what we are dealing with is subjectivity. How to define artistic, cultural, economic, etc. ferment along with the somewhat amorphous conditions that supposedly spark things. And where is a set of counter-examples of ferment without stress and stress without ferment, assuming such definitions can be made? Weimar Cities, therefore, might make for interesting speculation but are not likely to be a useful analytical or predictive tool of thought.

Cars With Broad Shoulders

Longer, lower, wider and, therefore larger and heavier, was the general trend for American automobiles during the 1950s and 60s. Yes, "compact" cars were introduced around 1960, but these too tended to grow over time. (This isn't a strictly American thing. Consider the Honda Civic, a very small car in its first version and now just a notch smaller than its "standard size" sibling, the Honda Accord.)

The present post deals with the "wider" aspect of that growth. Some designs simply had fenders bulge out. But for a while there was a fashion of having "catwalks" on either side of the passenger compartment -- flat extensions between the side windows and the drop-off zone of the fender/side of the car. This will be made clear in the illustrations below.

I recall reading someplace back in that era that such catwalks, if they had an outer ridge, would serve to nest or cradle the passenger compartment "tumblehome" (that's a styling term for the part of the passenger compartment with the roof and windows).

The visual result was often pleasant. Moreover, the wide sides in theory could have contained substantial steel beams for side-collision protection. But fuel crises starting in 1973 and later fuel mileage regulations forced automobile designers to reduce the size and weight of vehicles. An easy way to reduce weight is to narrow a car, and that practice pretty well ended the fashion of wide catwalks.

Here are examples of broad-shouldered cars from that era.

Gallery

These first two photos offer a before-and-after perspective on standard size cars and their side treatments. At the top in a 1949 Ford, the car I consider the End of Evolution -- all styling since then being essentially relatively minor advances and variations. The lower photo is a of 2010 Chevrolet Malibu. Note that the sides on both cars don't project far from the windows.

1961 Pontiac Tempest

1962 Buick Skylark
The Tempest and Skylark shared the same basic body, so styling details were superficial elements General Motors used to visually distinguish brands.

1964 Ford Thunderbird
This Thunderbird's shoulders are more rounded than catwalk-like, but the ridge near the top of the fender stiffens the appearance of that section of the car.

1963 Mercury Monterey
Here is a particularly strong example. We see both a catwalk and ridge setting off the tumblehome.

1965 Chrysler New Yorker
The same might be said of this Chrysler, though the catwalks seem a bit narrower than the Mercury's.

1968 Lincoln Continental Mark III
This Continental appeared towards the end of the catwalk era; again they are narrow.