Peak Art

When I was a commercial art student there was a very small group of emerging artists whose work astonished me. Those guys were so good I came to realize that I could never compete with their likes. So I dropped art after graduation and moved on to more technical fields including demographic forecasting and computer system programming.

One of those master illustrators was the great Bernie Fuchs. Another was Bob Peak (1927-1992). A web site about him run by his son is here and a short Wikipedia entry is here.

Peak seems to be best known for his movie posters such as these:

Notice anything?

What I note is versatility. Peak could work in a variety of styles and media and do fine work regardless. Below are more examples that I hope will give you something of the sense of professional awe I experienced in my student days and thereafter when I encountered his work.

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Two advertisement illustrations for Trans-World Airlines. These are in the Bernie Fuchs mode.

Poster art for My Fair Lady.

Portrait of Jimmy Carter used for a Time magazine cover.

Watercolor portrait of Louis Armstrong.

Portrait of painter and art instructor Robert Henri -- again rather Fuchs-like.

Advertising art: elegant, Deco-poster like.

As I said, versatile

Dodge's Crippled Retro Charger

American Automobile makers use "Retro" styling a lot. There are reasons why, of varying degrees of plausibility. One might be that by evoking beloved cars of yore, sentimental buyers might be lured from BMWs, Toyotas and other foreign-based brands to return to the Yankee fold of their youth. Or maybe stylists or management have simply run out of ideas for new styling themes.

Regardless, what is, is. In today's post, the "is" is the facelifted Dodge Charger that uses the same body as the Chrysler 300.

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There was an earlier Charger than the 1968 version shown here, but the '68s sported one of the finest American styling themes of that era. This was the inspiration for the 2011 Charger. Besides the flowing lines and the relationships between the various shapes, note the wedge-shaped indentations behind the front wheel well: this idea is what the 2011 retrieves.

This rear three-quarter view illustrates other aspects of the sensuous styling.

Chargers were used in the popular 1970s television series Dukes of Hazzard. I include this action photo because it was the best side view I could locate on the Web. What's important for us is the car's length. Without that length, the styling shown above could not be achieved.

Here is the 2008 model Charger. It uses the Chrysler 300 body with slight differences including the grille and fenderline "hop." Unlike the '68, it's a four-door sedan, no two-door coupe being made on the platform.

The 300 and Charger got facelifts for the 2011 model year. The most obvious Charger difference is the side, where the fenderline was altered and a 1968-like indented wedge was added.

Here's a rear 3/4 view. Compare to the 1968 shown above.

This is the key shot. Compare this to the side view above. Note how much more boxy the basic '11 body is -- due to short rear and (especially) front overhang. The underlying shape is not at all sensuous. In fact, that borrowed side indentation simply makes the car look stubbier than pre-facelift version.

I passed a 2011 Charger a few days ago on my commute to work and was struck by how awkward it seemed and how little the styling relationship was from the classic 1968 model. This is simply a case of Retro gone wrong.

Blogging Note

This post is for blogging and software geeks, and not necessarily for art-oriented readers.

Regular readers probably notice that I've had to suggest double-clicking on images to both enlarge and improve quality. The quality factor puzzled me because, at 2Blowhards, I always got clear images, provided the source image was fine. I also knew that other blogs on Blogspot had nice, clear large images. What was I doing wrong?

It turns out that it was my my error: I was adjusting the Blogger software produced HTML code without adjusting everything necessary to preserve quality.

Default Blogger takes images and sizes them to a set maximum. Because this blog focuses on images, I want them larger than what Blogger was providing. So I go into the HTML code and resize images to suit my needs. Often, the result was a bubbly appearance. Finally I shrugged off my habitual torpor and discovered that the Blogger-generated code included, buried in four or five lines of image-specific code, this: "s320" -- which seems to be a secondary size specification. And by changing s320 to s640 I could get clear images.

So from here on, s640 it is. I also went back and modified the HTML for some of the most popular older posts and I'll do others as time and inclination permit.

Apologies for not dealing with this problem sooner.

Alma-Tadema's New Springtime

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) is shaping up to be the new Andy Warhol.

That's so if you consider recent auction results. Last November his "The Finding of Moses" sold for $35,922,500 and more recently "The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 B.C." went for $29,22,500. Not bad for a once-forgotten artist whose paintings were selling for hundreds 50 or 60 years ago.

The Finding of Moses - 1904

The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 B.C. - 1885
The link above is to a lengthy Wikipedia entry. Plus there are books about Tadema, so I won't dwell on his career other than to mention that he combined great talent, research skills and a not-dour personality to reach great popularity in his lifetime -- a popularity that has been re-emerging since the 1960s.

One popular painting that's accessible to many Americans is "Spring" -- a star of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It's large (80 x 179.1 cm / 31.5 in. x 5 ft. 10.5 in.) containing a jumble of figures whose faces (if memory serves) are only about two or three cm. high.

To celebrate Tadema's newfound stature, below is Spring along with a few detail photos I took a while ago. You can try clicking to enlarge them, but the results will be somewhat fuzzy because those enlargements are much bigger than the original art. All the images pictured here can be enlarged.

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Spring - 1894

A slightly closer version of the preceding detail.

Raymond Hood: America's Most Competent Architect?

Many observers claim Frank Lloyd Wright to be America's greatest architect. Maybe. I think he was the most creative, but creativity doesn't have to be synonymous with greatness.

So if Wright is iffy greatest-wise in my book, then who might be another contender? I nominate Raymond Hood (1881-1934). And as the title of this post suggests, he has claim as America's most competent architect, even if the matter of greatness can be disputed.

I base my contention on Hood's ability to do outstanding work in several styles: traditional, Deco and modernist. Besides his skyscrapers, Hood also designed a resort and houses -- including his own traditionally-designed place in Stamford, Connecticut. Unfortunately, decently detailed biographical material is hard to find on the Internet; for instance, consider his puny Wikipedia entry here. Fortunately, some books dealing with Hood can be found, though no significant ones are recent.

Hood's career was short but brilliant, lasting about a dozen years up to his early death at age 53 when he was associated with the Rockefeller Center project. It's difficult to predict how he might have evolved had he lived another 20 or so years. Certainly the Depression would have curtailed his output, yet he would have been around in time for the start of the post- World War 2 building boom. My best guess, given the flexibility he exhibited in the 1920s and early 30s, is that he might well have out-Miesed Mies van der Rohe in the 50s.

Below are examples of Hood's work.

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Tribune Tower, Chicago - 1924
The Howells & Hood firm won the famous Tribune Tower competition, launching Hood's fame. Modernists sneered at it, preferring the entry by Finland's great Eliel Saarinen, father of noted architect Eero Saarinen.

American Radiator Building, New York City - 1924
The Tribune win quickly led to a commission for the American Radiator Building on the south side of Bryant Park. Georgia O'Keeffe made a notable painting of this building.

Rex Cole showroom, Brooklyn
Hood designed a few showrooms for appliance dealer Rex Code. The one shown was located in the southwest Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. That's a model of a General Electric refrigerator atop the building.

New York Daily News Building - 1929
Hood's Daily News Building was the first tall Modernist building in New York, though purists thought the vertical emphasis was slightly "dishonest" (in terms of their rigid ideology). That's the Third Avenue Elevated station at 42nd Street in the foreground.

McGraw-Hill Building - 1931
So Hood flipped the emphasis to horizontal for the McGraw-Hill publishing firm headquarters. This was more "honest" for the purists, who then complained the the Deco top decoration was (ugh!) decoration and therefore "dishonest." One just can't win when trying to please the hardcore, it seems. Actually, I never warmed to the McGraw-Hill -- that horizontal windowing motif made it seem stubbier than it really was. Like the Daily News, the McGraw-Hill was on 42nd Street, but towards the west side of town; the station seen here is for the 9th Avenue Elevated.


Even though I clearly like Raymond Hood a lot, there are other architects I find as appealing in different ways. I'll feature them from time to time in future posts.

Sir James Guthrie, Glasgow Boy

Sir James Guthrie (1859-1930) was one of the Glasgow Boys, a group of late-19th century Scottish painters influenced by French realist Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Like some other artists of middle-class origin in those days, his family sent him to university with the idea that he would practice law. And like the others he abandoned that line of education to take up art, though his art training came largely by self-education.

Regardless of how he mastered his skills, Guthrie became one of the most prominent Scottish artists of his time. By 1902 he was president of the Royal Scottish Academy and in 1903 was knighted.

The best place to find Guthrie's painting is Glasgow, of all places. Unfortunately for me, the last time I was in Glasgow I hadn't yet launched into serious study of art history and skated through Kelvingrove faster than I really should have.

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A Funeral in the Highlands - 1881-82

To Pastures New - 1882-83

Schoolmates - 1884-85

Old Willie, A Village Worthy - 1886

Summer House, St. Mary Isle - 1886

Maggie Hamilton - 1892-93

Molti Ritratti: Dame Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), poet, critic, female component of a trio of artsy siblings well connected to the English upper crust, did not escape the portrait painter's brush as can be seen below. Her Wikipedia entry is here.

Sitwell's depictions are of interest because several of the artists were her friends -- especially Pavel Tchelitchev (transliterations of his name from the Russian vary). Of more interest is that these artists were modernists of one stripe or another in a period where all artists were trying to figure what to do with modernism in the wake of that decade or so of all those "isms" cascading down from (mostly) Paris. Adding to the complexity of the situation, they were painting portraits -- meaning that the results had to relate in a least some small manner to their purported subject.

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Photo of Sitwell

By Roger Fry
As best I can tell from citations, both the portraits by Fry were painted 1918 or thereabouts. Fry was an art critic and theoretician (popularizing the term "Post-Impressionism") who also did portraits and some other works.

By Alvaro Guevara, c. 1919

By Pavel Tchelitchev - c. 1930
Tchelitchev is best known as a Surrealist, but that movement was still more literary and political than painting-oriented when Sitwell sat for this work.

By Windham Lewis
Lewis was England's best-known modernist portrait artist when this was painted (begin in 1923 but not "completed" -- her hands were never added -- until 1935).

By Pavel Tchelitchev - 1935
According to the link above, Sitwell was quite taken with Tchelitchev even though their approaches to sex probably destined the relationship to be on the Platonic side. Neither Tchelitchev portrait shown here (as well as others) depicts Sitwell in a remotely flattering light. But she apparently didn't mind. The image above seems to be a scan from a book.

By Feliks Topolski
This portrait is an exception in that it was made decades later than the others and when Abstract Expressionism was the flavor of the day.