I Saw the La Quinta Arts Festival -- And Survived!

I'm in the Palm Springs, California area while my wife is watching the tennis tournament at Indian Wells. I'm not at all into that game, so I'm keeping busy writing data display programs for my former employer (as a part-time employee till the end of June).

Saturday I took a break from the J computer language to take in the La Quinta Arts Festival, an event the sponsors tout as Number Three in the USA.

I don't often do art fairs because usually I don't find much of interest. But as I mentioned, I needed some diversion, so I arrived early to find a free parking lot, grabbed a coffee and Wall Street Journal at a fine coffee house in the Old Town, then waited in line and finally plunked down the $12 admission fee to enter. I spent about an hour there and took some photos to document what I saw. A selection is below.

The artists came from as far north as Washington's San Juan Islands and as far east as Florida. I estimate that most fall into the category of having some gallery representation, yet have yet to become well-known to the art consumption public. The quality was a notch above what one might find at a local art fair, so someone with a four-figure budget wanting a nice decorative piece for the family room could do well at the La Quinta.

Gallery

This is the setting -- a park in the La Quinta Old Town near City Hall. Those white tents house each artist's wares.

There were sculpture, woodwork, photography and other items besides paintings.

Some painting was abstract. I think the ones pictured here would make a decent decoration in an appropriately furnished room.

This artist seems to be able to supply several genres, but nothing that lit my fire.

This group is cartoony and rather silly, so far as I'm concerned. I wonder who buys this stuff and, more importantly, why.

If Botero can make a mint painting fat people, others will be willing to enter that game.

On the more representational side, here in desert country paintings of Indians can sell.

The artist in this tent does it all with palette knives; I saw him at work on a new painting. Poor me, I lack the imagination to appreciate what he's doing. I understand using a knife to do bits of a painting where appropriate. But the whole thing? ... Sorta like inscribing the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin; a marvel of sorts, but to what other purpose?

The French Impressionists made purple shadows respectable. This artist uses them a whole lot. This inspires me to write a post, but not necessarily about shadows.

Here is Michael Situ's tent. He tells me he's no relation of the increasingly famous Mian Situ, though both work out of the Laguna Beach area. That might be his wife in the foreground. The paintings are mostly plein air studies, but very nice and more finished than studies often tend to be.

General Motors Aerotrain: A Rider's Report

The photos above are of General Motors' Aerotrain, a mid-1950s attempt to put pizazz into rail travel and sell many similar locomotive-and-coaches combinations to America's ailing passenger railroads.

The Wikipedia entry here and this fuller account summarize the disappointing (to GM) tale of railroads that tried the demonstrator trains but refused to buy any production versions.

Basically, the Aerotrain was a flashy, automobile-styled locomotive pulling a string of coaches using some of the body stampings from inter-city buses GM was building at the time. By the way, that automobile reference is more real than one might think: the guy behind the design was Chuck Jordan, who many years later went on to head GM's styling operations.

The Aerotrain interests me because I actually rode one. I was a school kid at the time, and my dad bought a new DeSoto and we were traveling from Seattle by train to pick up the car at the factory. After stopping in Chicago to visit relatives, we took the New York Central to Detroit (the Wikipedia entry doesn't mention this run, the second link does), and lo! we got to ride the Aerotrain.

In retrospect, the best part of the trip was the green-uniformed, red-haired Southern stewardess who looked at totally blushing me with big blue eyes and asked if y'all needed anything.

The worst part, as both links mention, was the rough ride. An unusual suspension design is cited as the culprit. Maybe so. But I always thought the problem was that the bus-based coaches were simply too light. In any case, trying to walk while the train was at speed was difficult due to random lurching and bouncing.

Sometimes transportation concepts of the future have no future.

Robert Fawcett Biography

Robert Fawcett (1903-1967) was a highly respected illustrator who, perhaps due to his color-blindness, usually worked in black inks and compatible media. His major strengths were draftsmanship and composition supported by skill in doing the research needed to get details right.

Illustration-buff blog readers are probably already aware that a major
biography of Fawcett rolled off the presses not long ago (see cover image above). Although late to the scene owing to the fact that I got my copy only a week or so ago, this post is my brief review. (Fawcett has been getting a nice share of attention recently in addition to the book. For example, there was an exhibit of his work last year; Charley Parker mentions it here and includes some biographical information.)

Most of the biography is actually a substantial collection of Fawcett's work. There is a text supplied by the popular illustration blogger David Apatoff who mentions the book in this post.

Since Apatoff does very good work, I was pleased with what I read, but wanted more, more! I'm usually interested in human and situational factors in art almost as much as the art itself, provided such information is available. The comparatively limited amount of verbiage might have been due to (1) the publisher's desire to maximize the pictorial content within the book's page budget -- a reasonable choice -- or (2) David simply wasn't able to locate much information about Fawcett -- a real possibility given that the man died nearly 45 years ago.

As for Fawcett himself, he claimed to have studied neither anatomy nor perspective. Rather, he said that he learned to observe very carefully, and the ability to draw what he saw was sufficient for operating on the level he did. I wonder. Whereas I'm pretty sure that he couldn't name many bones and muscles, I doubt that he was naive regarding artistically important things going on "under the skin" so to speak. Moreover, I find it hard to believe that he didn't understand perspective up to and including the three-point variety. Perhaps he couldn't work out the details mechanically as an architect might, but he knew how to closely "fake" it.

Skilled as he was, Fawcett sometimes rushed his jobs. Here and there in the book I found featured male figures (usually clad in suits) that appeared stiff and simplified. The illustration below tends in that direction, but isn't as extreme as a few cases in the book.

Magazine illustration - 1958
This is not to criticize Fawcett; many of his illustrations were prodigiously detailed and superbly executed. Still, he was a busy man in the 1940s and 50s and needed to keep bread on his table, so occasionally he seems to have rushed things. It's these odd details of his thinking and work that make the book so interesting.

Early American Streamlined Locomotives, Part 2

The streamlined trains featured in Part 1 of this series were diesel powered. At the time -- the mid-1930s -- most American locomotives were steam-powered, so the easiest, cheapest means of hopping on the streamlining bandwagon was to give existing locomotives streamlined cladding. And that's what some major railroads did while waiting to convert to diesel power, a process that moved into high gear in the 1940s.

Two of America's richest and most famous railroads were the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The key passenger run for each was New York - Chicago, linking the nation's largest and next-largest cities.

The Central ran up the Hudson Rive to Albany and then west to Buffalo along the route of the old Erie Canal -- a passage with few hill or mountain obstacles. From Buffalo, trains went near the south shore of Lake Erie through Cleveland and Toledo in Ohio before cutting across northern Indiana to Chicago.

The Pennsy's route from New York went through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh before angling northwest to the Windy City. Unlike the New York Central's route, Pennsy trains had to cut through the Alleghany mountains -- a series of sharp ridge-lines and intervening valleys -- making use of tunnels to minimize the amount of grade to surmount. Western Pennsylvania is also hilly with winding rivers, so those obstacles also had to be cleared.

Thus the Central had an easier route topographically, but the Pennsy had a shorter one -- no dog-leg up to Albany before striking west. This made the railroads competitive when hauling the rich and famous on their premier passenger trains, Central's 20th Century Limited and Pennsy's Broadway Limited.

Let's look at some photos:
Gallery

Standard New York Central J2 Hudson-type locomotive
More information regarding that line's locomotives can be found here.

New York Central "Commodore Vanderbilt" - 1935
NYC's first steam streamliner was designed by Carl Kantola (with wind tunnel testing at Cleveland's Case Institute) and fabricated as a converted Hudson in the railroad's shops near Albany. The Commodore Vanderbilt was the second-string New York - Chicago run to the premier 20th Century Limited.

New York Central "Mercury" - 1936
This Hudson was given a streamlined cover by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. It served on NYC's Cleveland-Detroit run.

New York Central "20th Century Limited"
Ten J2s were given streamlined skins designed by Henry Dreyfuss and ran on the New York - Chicago run starting in 1938.

Pennsylvania Railroad S1
The Raymond Loewy-designed S1 was an experimental streamlined locomotive that appeared in the late 1930s. The center photo shows Loewy posing on his creation. The lower photo compares the S1 to one of the Pennsy's regular steam locomotives.

Pennsylvania Railroad T1
The T1 was another Loewy creation, but one that saw service starting in 1942. It was a cleaned-up version of a normal steam locomotive with an aggressive "face" that looks like it was not an optimal case of streamlining, though the rounded "splitter" form in front of the boiler must have had less air resistance than a regular flat boiler section did. The T1 was the last major steam-powered streamlined locomotive type built in America.

Rene Bouche: Fashion Illustration and Beyond

Fashion illustration master René Bouché (Robert August Buchstein) was born in Prague 20 September 1905 and died in England 3 July 1963, though his career was in Paris in the mid-late 1930s and the United States thereafter. The most detailed biographical information I could find is here.

Fashion illustration is pretty much an artistic ghetto, given that it's a sub-field of illustration, itself a second-class citizen in the art world. But being a fashion artist has its advantages. Vogue and other publications could bring you a lot of money provided they accepted a lot of your work and would even put it on the cover from time to time. Also, given the well-heeled nature of its readership, a reputation as a famous fashion illustrator might lead to portrait commissions and other paid jobs.

Bouché did exactly that, as can be seen below. He even did abstract painting and rubbed elbows with New York's Abstract Expressionism grandees. I find his abstractions lightweight, but you are welcome to judge for yourself if you click on this link.

As for his portrait work, he tended to follow his fashion illustration style with pleasing results. This link to "100 Years of Illustration" has out-takes from a Life magazine feature showing Bouché painting actress Tammy Grimes; two pictures from that set are below.

What couldn't Bouché do? No one really knows because he chose to limit his subject matter. But, somehow, I wonder how well he would have done as a Pulp cover artist, portraying combat, or drawing football players for Sports Illustrated.

Here is a sampling of Bouché's work.

Gallery

Fashion illustrations

Another fashion illustration, this of Givenchy outfits - 1957

Illustration for a Schweppes advertisement

Edward R. Murrow

Jack Benny
The CBS television network commissioned Bouché to make portraits of some of its leading performers to use in advertising. At the time (the 1950s) CBS was regarded by itself and much of the general public as being the "classy" network, so it used a classy artist for these portrayals. Younger readers: Edward R. Murrow was a famous newsman and commentator, Jack Benny was one of America's top comedians.

Actress Audrey Hepburn

John F. Kennedy - Time Magazine cover, 9 June 1961
Since Bouché did Vogue covers, Time must have figured that he was good enough to do a little work for them.

Painting actress Tammy Grimes - Life Magazine, 19 May 1961
Note that the final result (below) is not the same as the initial version (above).

Self-Portrait
This was probably done in the later part of his life.

Early American Streamlined Locomotives, Part 1

Perhaps it was aviation in the form of Schneider Cup racing airplanes that became progressively more streamlined during the 1920s (along with other high-speed aircraft) that made designer-engineers in other fields sensitive to the benefits streamlining offered in terms of increasing potential top speed and decreasing the amount of energy required to cruise at a given velocity.

As this Wikipedia entry indicates, operational streamliner trains began appearing both in Europe and in the United States by the mid-1930s. Though attempts were made to "clean up" the shapes of steam locomotives in the late 1920s, the early round of streamliners did not have steam locomotives; diesel was the engine of choice.

America's first streamlined trains that reached commercial use were the Union Pacific M-10000 and the Burlington Zephyr, both appearing in 1934 to great publicity.

The Zephyr had the engineer's cab at the very front of the locomotive unit, which placed the operators in grave danger in the event of a collision; the M-10000 had them placed higher and slightly more to the rear, a configuration found in most streamlined diesel locomotives of 1938-1960.

Another feature, shared by both designs, that didn't pan out was that the coaches were articulated, sharing a truck at each end rather than being coupled in the normal manner. This proved inflexible, so later streamlined trains returned to the proven system of joining coaches.

I find these early streamliners deliciously 1930s, and hope you enjoy the photos below and might even be inspited to do some Web exploring of the subject on your own. You can try clicking on most of the photos to enlarge.

Gallery

Pre-streamliner passenger train
This was photographed somewhere in Alabama in 1948. Steam locomotives were well on their way out by then, but I included this scene-setting photo because it could just as easily have been taken in 1930, before streamliners appeared.

Locomotive No. 1, a Norman Bel Geddes design - 1931
Although Geddes' design was never actualized, it might have helped inspire streamliners that hit the tracks a few years later.

Union Pacific M-10000 (left) and Burlington Pioneer Zephyr
America's first two diesel-powered streamliners pose side-by-side at Kansas City's Union Station.

The M-10000 is open for inspection in Denver - 1934
This shows the rounded tail of the train. The Zephyr had windows at the rear of its final coach making for a popular observation area.

M-10000 and Chrysler Airflow - 1934
Streamlining was an idea whose time had come by the early 1930s. Chrysler introduced its at-the-time radically streamlined Airflow about the same time as the M-10000 hit the tracks. This publicity photo was intended to call attention to the similarity of the otherwise disparate vehicles' front ends.

Full-length photo of the Zephyr - 1935

Art Establishment's View: Modigliani Book Reviewed

The February 26-27 2011 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal had this review of a biography of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). The reviewer is Lance Esplund, the articled titled "The Bad Boy of Montparnasse: In Modigliani, the anxiety and triumph of Modernism is reduced to a conventional sentimentality" and the book is "Modigliani: A Life" by Meryle Secrest (Knopf).

I'm calling this to your attention because Esplund strikes me as being comfortably camped in the Art Establishment compound, so it might be fun to pass along some things he writes in the piece. Here goes:

Just as much of a problem is her attempt to raise his stature as an artist. While Modigliani garnered popularity and income toward the end of his life, and his early death gave him a certain cultish luster, he was a second-tier Modernist. He was competent, never innovative; a follower, not a leader. Rejecting Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism and abstraction—all of which were blossoming around him—he instead moved backward through Cézanne, hiding in the past. Modigliani embraced the "look" of Modernism but not the liberation and synthesis of past and present that the movement encouraged.

Modigliani's art is a timid amalgamation of primitivism, African masks, Cycladic idols, the machine aesthetic, Art Nouveau and Old Master paintings. His famous figures—with their swan necks, almond eyes and old-world varnishes—are generalized, mannered and interchangeable. They appeal because they signify Modernist reduction yet stop short of abstraction; they simplify and distort without abandoning the comforts of 19th-century realism. They are an art in which style overwhelms specificity and substance and the anxiety and triumph of Modernism are reduced to a conventional sentimentality. The individual becomes a type, and a sitter's personality—even a nude's eroticism—is neutered. ...

When it comes to discussing and analyzing art, however, Ms. Secrest is often strident and off the mark. Chaim Soutine painted "hideous writhing canvases," and his "still lifes throb with the music of the universe." Cézanne's bathers are dismissed as "awkward, bulging figures"; Matisse made "pseudo abstractions"; and Mondrian is reduced to a painter of "blocks and diagrams." ...

Just as revealing is her positioning of Modigliani "at the end of a long line of masterful portraitists from Whistler and John Singer Sargent to Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux," which, seemingly unbeknownst to the author, situates her subject squarely among second-tier artists.

I really hate to spoil Mr. Esplund's day, but Yr. Faithful Blogger also thinks that Cézanne was a lousy draftsman, that Matisse was not an Abstract Expressionist and that Mondrian's later paintings indeed incorporate a whiff of the geometric. And on what basis does he establish his artistic league tables? -- why, the Modernist Narrative of Art History, of course. That is, since Sargent and Beaux -- skilled portraitists both -- were not on the same path as Picasso, Pollock and De Kooning, their work must by definition be second-rate. And I'm a little puzzled by his inclusion of Cassatt because she normally holds the status of Honorary Impressionist.

As for Modigliani, although his work doesn't much appeal to me, I can't quite see why Esplund is so eager to break is sword, pull off his buttons and drum him out of True Modernism. Esplund must be either (a) a True Believer or (2) afraid to think and see for himself.