Useful Paintings

The title of this post, "Useful Paintings," is the name I gave to a directory on my main computer. That directory contains out-takes of images I've been accumulating from various Internet sources.

(The Internet becomes increasingly useful as it expands and servers gain enough storage room to hold images greater than a megabyte in size. When I started blogging at 2Blowhards, we tried to keep image size down to 50K, which forced me not to use certain images that I truly wanted to include.)

I currently have directories devoted to "Painters," "Illustrators" and "Modernist Painters" with sub-directors by artist's name. Each main directory contains a "miscellaneous" slot holding too few images by any artist to justify a devoted directory. As images accumulate, from time to time an artist will be promoted to his own sub-directory. I've been finding that I have less need for buying art books chosen mostly for their images (rather than for textual information; the Internet allows me to have a very good art reference collection at virtually no cost in space and coin).

That "Useful" directory contains images that provide me information regarding use of color, brush technique, and other artistic factors. Some are included simply because I like them and there's less need to dig around to locate them elsewhere.

You might notice that all the images shown below depict beautiful women; that's because I like paintings of beautiful women and that directory is almost entirely filled with images of paintings of them.

I'm thinking that, from time to time, I'll do similar posts showing other images from that directory. Hope you don't mind beautiful women.

Gallery

Étude du femme - John White Alexander - c.1890

Erubescent - Casey Baugh

Asidua del Moulin de la Galettte - Ramon Casas - 1891

My Daughter Dieudonnée - William Merritt Chase - c.1902

Deguisement - Virgilio Costantini

Stanhope Forbes at Low Tide

A painter whose work I'd like to see more of in person is Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947) who was the anchor of an artists' colony not far from Land's End. I visited England last summer and tried to come up with a plan to include Cornwall in the itinerary. But with only six days to work with between my wife's Wimbledon experience and a jaunt to Paris, I couldn't pull it off. She wanted to see Stratford, Bath, Stonehenge and Brighton and I had set up a get-together with frequent commenter "dearieme" at the fringe of the lower Midlands. Maybe next time.

Forbes' brief Wikipedia entry is here and a bit more biographical information can be found here, here and here.

This BBC item says that the painting shown above, his "Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach" (1885), is one of the most important works in the Plymouth Museum. And it is a fine piece of work. I know this because I've seen it even though the closest I ever got to central Plymouth was the freeway interchange to the road coming down from Dartmoor. By some miracle it was in San Francisco a few years ago where I chanced upon it and was mightily impressed.

One thing that impressed me that a casual view might miss was Forbes' treatment of small, background figures. He defined faces, clothing and other "details" with a few well-chosen brush strokes using carefully selected colors. I wished I could be even half that good.

The original painting is fairly large, as is the image above if you click on it to enlarge. Even so, the image is much too small to view what I just mentioned. The only solution is to buy a large, good reproduction if you can't make it farther west than Oxford or Bath on your next trip to England.

New Objectivity as Echo

In the shattered aftermath of the Great War and the emergence of Modernism during the first 20 years of the 20th century, painters were faced with a What The Devil Do We Do Next situation. Various this's and that's popped up including a German movement called New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit).

It was rather ill-defined, as this Wikipedia entry indicates. There was the gross (pardon the pun) , crudely-drawn work of George Grosz. And then there was the calmer, less anger-fueled work of Christian Schad, who I'm likely to return to in future posts.

Schad fell into the distorted, cartoon-like New Objectivity practice, but not very far. What I find interesting is that his work sometimes resembles early paintings by untrained or poorly trained American painters. I doubt that he was aware of this American art, so what we have is simply a striking coincidence and not inspiration. Take a look:

Graf St. Genois - Christian Schad, 1927

Man Holding a Large Bible - Anni Phillips, c. 1826

Bettina - Christian Schad, 1942

Girl With Bird and Cage - Unknown artist, c. 1735-40

Sundblom's Buttery Illustrations

Haddon Sundblom (1899-1976) is one of those illustrators whose work I greatly respect and almost, but don't quite, love.

His Wikipedia entry offers a too-short sketch of his career. At least it makes the point that a number of other competent illustrators worked at his studio and were influenced by him; this is one of his important claims to fame.

Leif Peng has dealt with Sundblom on his blog, and you might want to click on these links.

What maintains Sundblom's fame (among illustration buffs, anyway) is the work he did for Coca-Cola. He painted many illustrations of Coke-enjoying people for print, poster and billboard advertising. But the big thing was his Santa Claus series and, to a lesser extent, the "Frosty" character -- a smiling elfin creature always posed by a bottle or glass of the beverage.

Here are examples of Sundblom's work, with a slight emphasis on his earlier illustrations.
Gallery

We might as well start with a Santa. From what I've read, Sunblom began to use himself as his model as he aged into the part.

Here's Sundblom when he was older and in synch with his Santas.

And, just for the record, here is a Coke ad, probably from the 1940s.

Now for some non-Coke illustrations, this being an ante-bellum Southern scene.

A 1920's illustration.

Also from the 20's.

Magazine cover art.

This is a later painting, probably done in the 1940s when he applied paints thicker and smoothly, a practice he was following by the mid-1930s.

Magazine work from 1933.

I respect Sundblom for his skill in portrayal and, especially, for his way of handling paint in a pleasing thick, buttery manner.

Yet something bothers me just enough that I can't place Sundblom with contemporaries such as Dean Cormwell, John La Gatta and Mead Schaeffer. Maybe it had to do with stereotyping or pigeonholing by clients and art directors. Perhaps it was Sundblom's preference. In any event, the result was that little of his work had drama or "bite" of any kind. To some degree this is like fellow Chicago illustrator Andrew Loomis whose style was somewhat similar and whose subjects were more pleasant than edgy or dramatic. This is not to say that I favor drama and edginess -- though a whiff of something like that either in subject matter or painting technique appeals to me for some reason.

Art That Needs Assistance

The Wall Street Journal comes up with interesting art news every few weeks. The latest item worth passing along is "The Art Assembly Line" by Stan Sesser in the 3 June 2011 issue (link here).

Its lede brings to mind a post I wrote back in January regarding artistic skills:

Alexander Gorlizki is an up-and-coming artist, known for paintings that superimpose fanciful images over traditional Indian designs. His work has been displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Denver Art Museum and Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, among others, and sells for up to $10,000.

Mr. Gorlizki lives in New York City. The paintings are done by seven artists who work for him in Jaipur, India. "I prefer not to be involved in actually painting," says Mr. Gorlizki, who adds that it would take him 20 years to develop the skills of his chief Indian painter, Riyaz Uddin. "It liberates me not being encumbered by the technical proficiency," he says.

Sesser goes on to mention other currently active artists who make use of assistants in their work. This has been common for sculptors all along, thanks to the demands of large-scale fabrication and its requirement for specialized, non-artistic skills.

But the practice has been rare for painting in recent times. As Sesser notes,

For centuries, the use of assistants and apprentices was standard in the art world. Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Rubens relied heavily on the assistants in their studios. With the rise of the Impressionists, however, the idea of a studio practice, which maximizes incomes by using assistants, fell into disfavor. Artists were supposed to be pouring out their personal visions onto the canvas—not instructing employees on how to do it.

By the time Pop art came into fashion in the mid-20th century and Andy Warhol began cranking out silkscreens and lithographs with the help of workers at his well-publicized Factory, opinion began to swing back the other way. "The value of a work of art is not invested in the hand that made it, but in the intention and the realization," says Robert Storr, dean of Yale University's School of Art.

This last point makes me cringe. I can accept it when dealing with architecture and even sculpture. But painting should be the artist's own work because, but its nature, it is something one person can do without help. (I'm happy to quality this for exceptionally large paintings such as murals where the primary artist can leave the grunt-work bits to others.)

The statement also strikes me as the "art is whatever" attitude all too present present in this Modernist era. Let's reconsider the abandonment of the concept of High Art, because I think we've reached the point where it is desperately needed.

Back to Sesser, this regarding Jeff Koons:

At the other end of the spectrum is Mr. Koons, who runs his vast, high-ceilinged studio with an efficiency that discourages personal interactions. Everyone has an assigned task, from painting a section of a canvas by following elaborate diagrams to mixing dozens of paints to produce exactly the right color. Large paintings are lifted up a wall by electric hoists; in one room on a recent afternoon, two painters worked silently on a canvas at floor level while two others painted the upper part from a scaffold. There's a hierarchy of supervisors, including a studio manager, a painting supervisor and several assistant managers. It brings to mind an assembly line, but the 56-year-old Mr. Koons, who is married to one of his former assistants, bridles at the analogy of a factory. "People get misconceptions that it's about production, like a machine," he states. "But I've thought for a year about almost everything before starting to make it."

Mr. Koons, whose use of assistants is widely known, says he supervises the work intently: "I'm here Monday through Friday and I try to travel as little as possible. The paintings are as if I made every mark myself." Mr. Koons says he doesn't mentor his artist employees, and they don't bring paintings into the studio to show him. "This is about production of the work," he says. "I want them to stay focused on the work here."

Even though painters abandoned use of assistants as the 19th century wore on, the practice was continued in commercial art. For example, Norman Rockwell used an assistant to do the tedious work of transferring his drawings from preliminary sheets to a canvas where the artist could begin to apply his paints. This clearly is a minor level of help, because the assistant did neither the preparatory drawing nor the final painting.

A case where assistants' work appeared in the final product was the newspaper comic strip in its classical 1930s and 1940's form. Cartoons were printed much larger than they are today, and adventure strips often included a good deal of detail such as those of room interiors and streetscapes serving as background for the action. Assistants often did those backgrounds. I've read of a few cases where the main artist left all to assistants save the character's faces.

Comic book and graphic novel production can follow similarly. Often the lead artist "pencils in" the images and an "inker" uses brush and pen to realize the final images.

So yes, art is often a cooperative endeavor. But sometimes this can be taken too far.

Molti Ritratti: Sarah Bernhardt

The Divine Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was certainly divine enough to inspire painted portraits along with many, many photographs. Her Wikipedia entry is here and a search for images on Google or Bing will offer many aspects of her.

Unfortunately for us, photos of her taken when in her physical prime are too staged to give much of an impression of her personality. By the time photography became flexible, she was already in her 50s.

So it was left for the painters to capture her spark. Below are some examples I culled from the Web.

Gallery

Here is a photo to set the stage.

By Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse

By Georges Clairin - 1871

By Georges Clairin - 1876

By Hans Makart - 1881

By Louise Abbema

By Theo van Rysselberghe - 18881

By Giovanni Boldini

By Jean-Léon Gérôme - 1895

By Alphonse Mucha - 1896

Huge, Unsuccessful Transport Aircraft

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.