Waif Art

I'm sure waifs are fine people. Salt of the earth, they.

However, despite their charm and other exemplary qualities, I can't get enthused about paintings featuring waifs. Don't necessarily hate those works, mind you -- it's just that I can't seem to move my appreciation needle into the positive zone.

Back during the 1960s waif art was dominated by Walter Keane who painted waifs of various types in assorted settings who stared with large, sad eyes directly at the viewer. Except that Walter Keane didn't actually do all the paintings or maybe didn't do any, his signature notwithstanding. It was his wife Margaret who did the grunt work. Perhaps her waifs were tying to tell us something that eventually required a court of law to sort out. (The Wikipedia entry on Walter offers some of his side of the issue, in case you might be interested.)

Waif art has been around longer than the Keanes, confirming that there indeed is and has been a market for it. So I straighten my back, click my heels and give that market a hearty (if uncomprehending) salute and turn you over to a galley of waifs dating as far back as the 19th century.

Gallery

By Margaret Keane

The Youngest Daughter of J.S. Gabriel - Alfred Augustus Glendening
Probably not a true waif, though the house looks pretty rustic -- or seedy, even.

Waifs and Strays - Joseph Clark, 1882

The Sand Artist - George Luks, 1905

Pas Mèche - Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1882

Roger Fry: A Critic Who Painted

Roger Fry (1866-1934) was the influential art critic who coined the term "Post-Impressionism." He also was a competent painter. For information about his life and career, Wikipedia has a summary here.

What I find interesting about Fry is not that he both created and wrote about art. I think that it can be useful for a critic or an historian to have hands-on knowledge of his writing subject. For example, Paul Johnson, who wrote a large, decent-selling book about art a few years ago also paints at the amateur level. I can even cite myself -- "trained" in art, but never practicing it as a career.

No, what interests me most about Fry's art and writing about it is that while he promoted modernism to some degree in his writing, he didn't stick with the program when painting. Examples of his paintings are below. During roughly 1910-20 he tried to paint "modern." By the 1920s he slid away from modernism and his works became increasingly traditional.

I'm not sure why. During the 20s modernism hit a slow patch where it was gaining stature with establishments and publics while the artists themselves collectively couldn't quite figure out what to do next. So perhaps Fry figured that modernism had exhausted its possibilities so far as his own painting was concerned. I read a biography of Fry a few years back, and can't recall if this matter was even dealt with. Since I sold the book to Powell's bookstore in Portland a while ago, I'll never know. If any readers have the answer, please let us know in Comments.

Gallery

Virgina Woolf
Fry became a member of the Bloomsbury Set. He painted Woolf and she wrote a biography of him (not the one I read).

River with Poplars - ca. 1912
A landscape in the modernism spirit.

Nina Hamnett
The Wikipedia entry above states that Fry had an affair with Hamnett (her entry is here). This portrait and the one shown below are in the modernist vein.

Edith Sitwell

Bertrand Russell - ca. 1923
Here Fry's modernism is oozing away. Yes, the image embodies some modernist-approved simplifications. The near-obligatory flatness in honor of the picture plane is absent.

Clive Bell - ca. 1924

Self-Portrait - 1928
The two portraits above illustrate a bit more slippage. Fry never reached the general style of Sargent, Sorolla or Laszlo, but these works are at some remove from how he depicted Woolf.

September in Sussex - 1933
Another landscape, this painted not long before his death. It bears a touch of the exaggerated solidity practiced by American Regionalists such as Grant Wood. But only a very slight touch; modernist influence is largely absent here.

Artists and Writers Time-Warped

The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern liked it, John Podhoretz at The Weekly Standard didn't (no link available). Me? I seldom go to movies. But when I do, it's usually because of the concept or subject. The last Woody Allen movie I remember seeing was his 1975 "Love and Death," demonstrating that I'm not a big fan. But his latest flick, "Midnight in Paris" (IMDb link here) intrigued me due partly to its time-travel gimmick and mostly because it includes writers and artists of Paris in the 1920s, a period I've read a fair amount about (that's the movie's Zelda Fitzgerald at the left in the photo above). So I went.

Read Morgenstern's review for details about the movie. I'll just name-drop. There are major speaking parts for Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, lesser ones for Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí (who is obessing on the concept of "rhinoceros"), Luis Buñuel (in need of movie ideas), Man Ray, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (she attempts suicide at one point), T.S. Eliot, Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas (the last three in a secondary time-warp), and a singing part for Cole Porter.

The casting director did a good job finding actors who could be made up to look a lot like the originals. Since you can't win 'em all, there were some compromises. For example, Picasso might have been a bit too tall and slender, and Man Ray definitely was too tall. But you watch it and find more near-misses, though that probably won't interfere with your experience.

A character in the 2010 part of the movie is a know-it-all who disputes facts with the guide at the Rodin museum; that one hit pretty close to home. The guide, by the way, was played by France's femme No. 1, Carla Bruni.

There also were some temporal ambiguities. Hemingway was encountered after his first novel (1926) but before he wrote much more. Dalí was in Paris in 1926, but Surrealism was largely a literary movement at that time, its better-known painting/visual aspect was only starting to emerge even though much is made of it in the movie. Those points and others make it difficult to pin down just when in the 20s the action takes place. But again, that's minor because Allen is trying to evoke a short, rich era rather than any particular time within it.

So if you like arts and letters and have more than passing knowledge of Paris and the 1920s, you'll likely find much in this movie to enjoy.

Renault Streamlined Cars - 1934

I wrote about automobile streamlining in both the technical and stylistic senses here and here. Now I'd like to mention a body style introduced by Renault at the October 1934 Paris auto show that was a first tangible step in the streamlining direction, a step roughly in line with what a few American manufacturers were doing at the time. (I exclude the larger step made by Chrysler with its Airflow that was introduced for the 1934 model year.)

I said "tangible step" because effort was made to go beyond essentially cosmetic streamlining features such as fender skirts and slightly inclined radiator grilles such as appeared a year or two earlier; I'll explain in the photo captions below.

One side-detail I find interesting is the fact that Renault was able to afford to put these changes into production, given their total output in those days -- about 55-60,000 cars per year. And that production was divided amongst three different body/chassis types: the low-end "Quatre," the mid-high range "Stella," "Nerva" and "Viva" lines (variations on the same package) and the semi-streamlined "Grand Sport" shown below. I don't have enough data at hand, so my guess is that French cars, small and large, were relatively more expensive than American equivalents. Otherwise, how could Renault and other firms remain in business and keep up with the technological and styling theme times?

Let's look at the Renault Grand Sports that were designed in 1933 or thereabouts.

Gallery

Here's a 1935 Nerva Grand Sport at one of the concours popular in France at the time. Note the sloped, V'd windshield, the sloped grille and the blending of the headlights into the fenders. These features surely improved aerodynamic efficiency somewhat. The sides of the car had partial streamlining despite what the swoopy fender line might suggest.

Another concours, this featuring a convertible version of the Grand Sport (note the English spelling of "Grand").

This side view shows that even though traditional fender profiling was preserved, fenders and running boards were in low relief compared to nealy all contemporary automobiles.

The view from above is useful because it shows that the front, hood and top were indeed noticeably more aerodynamically efficient than previous designs featuring vertical fronts, detached headlights and so forth.

This is a fragment of a publication I include to show what the rear windows looked like. Click to enlarge.

Compare the Renault to this 1935 Hupmobile. The Hupp also features embedded headlights and a sloping grille and windshield. However, the latter is a three-pane "wraparound" style rather than a two-pane vee. The sides of the Hupp are high-relief, typical styling practice until near the end of the decade.

This is Studebaker's Land Cruiser for 1934. Its curved rear and multi-pane back window design is in advance of nearly all 1934 competition and in the same spirit as the Renault. The rest of the car is conventional.

Harry Beckhoff: Starting Small

When I'm out having a cup of coffee I usually grab four or five extra paper napkins to make use of while I'm sipping. Sometimes I'm making lists of potential blog topics or, if I already have a subject in mind, I might outline or list items I could include.

Other times, I might sketch car designs or poses nearby people assume. And I've found that fine-point ball point pens work just fine on napkins provided there is more than one napkin layer (some cushioning helps prevent the pen from gouging through the paper).

These drawing are small, seldom exceeding two inches (5 cm) in the longest direction. And because they're small, I can't get hung up with details -- a good practice that counteracts tendencies to make images more "complete" than they should be.

Harry Beckhoff (1901-1979) was an illustrator who worked in thumbnail sketch mode. He didn't make large, sweeping-gesture sketches and then boil them down to production size. Instead, he had his thumbnails enlarged and then traced them as the basis for the final job.

Leif Peng mentions this unconventional practice in this post about Beckhoff. Another take on him is here. Otherwise, there seems to little information about him on the Internet.

I find Beckhoff's work charming, and hope you too will like the following examples.

Gallery

This is the only thumbnail I could discover on the Web, but it gives us a pretty good idea of what Beckhoff was up to.

Nearly everything he did had a touch of humor. This was supported by his technique which was a blend of cartooning and straight illustration.

I don't have titles for most of the examples, so I'll invent my own where I can. This one I call "Snow-Fallen."

Here Beckhoff presents an interest dramatic situation: fill in the blanks.

Perhaps this is half of a spread, but it still works as an illustration.

This is a 1950 illustration for a Collier's story titled "The Third Level." It shows New York's Grand Central Terminal with one fellow 40 years out of synch with the other fashions. Might have been an interesting story.

Here's a early 1940s vintage illustration I'll call "Running Late."

Kroyer's Tranquil Denmark

Denmark has been an essentially tranquil place since Lord Nelson turned his blind eye to his commander's signal flags and devastated the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. Even the German invasion of April, 1940 was nearly bloodless.

So too was the work of one of Denmark's most famous painters, Peder Severin Krøyer (1851-1909). His Wikipedia entry notes that he was born in Norway to an unstable women and a nameless father, dying in Copenhagen aged 58 of the effects of syphilis after becoming largely blind. Perhaps that disease coupled with his own unstable personality drove his beautiful, talented wife Marie into the arms of another man and divorce from the painter. Although Denmark may be tranquil, it seems not all Danish lives follow suit.

Nevertheless, Krøyer's subjects centered on portraits, beach scenes and social get-togethers of various kinds, often set in Skagen, an artist summer colony town at the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula in mainland Denmark.

I find Krøyer's paintings skilfully done and pleasant. They don't interest me much beyond that, but perhaps you might like some of them; take a look at this sampling.

Gallery

Sommeraften på Skagen Sønderstand - Summer evening on the Skagen beach - 1895
This is perhaps Krøyer's most famous work.

Hip, hip, hurra!
This is a study for the 1888 painting.

Danish bar interior

Ved frokosten. Kunstneren og hans hustru med forfatteren Otto Benzon. Skagen. Peder and Marie lunching with Otto Benzon, Skagen
Marie was the subject of a number of paintings while the marriage was going well. She also appeared as a member of the cast of social scenes, as can be seen here.

Photo of Peder and Marie Krøyer
I include this so that you can judge how well Krøyer was able to capture Marie.

Marie Krøyer - 1889

Marie Krøyer - 1890

Sommeraften ved Skagen - Marie in Skagen, summer evening

Albert Kahn: Versatile Architect

Perhaps I wrote too soon. I've always liked the work of architect Raymond Hood and made a modest case for him here, stating "I base my contention on Hood's ability to do outstanding work in several styles: traditional, Deco and modernist."

So what did I do a few weeks later than pick up a book I bought in Detroit a few years ago and thumb through it. What I saw was strong evidence that there was another guy who could (or maybe guys in his firm under his direction could) do what Hood was doing at a similar level of competence for a lot more structures. He was Albert Kahn (1869-1942). His Wikipedia entry that includes a list of his buildings is here.

One difference between the two architects is that modernists generally embraced Kahn more than Hood thanks to the industrial buildings he did during Detroit's boom days. They featured simplified shapes and little or no decoration, catnip to functionalist theorists circa 1925. His traditionally styled works ... well, they were conveniently set aside.

For what it's worth, Henry Ford had his anti-semitic moments, yet hired this rabbi's son to design his most important factories.

Here are some of Kahn's buildings.

Gallery

Dodge Brothers plant, Hamtramck - 1910

Angell Hall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor - 1922

General Motors (Durant) Building, Detroit - 1922

Fisher Building - 1927

Albert Kahn House, Detroit - 1907

E. Chandler Walker House, Windsor, Ontario - 1905

Cranbrook (George Booth) House, Bloomfield Hills - 1907

Edsel Ford House, Grosse Pointe Shores - 1926


The Edsel Ford House, conceptually a cluster of Cotswold cottages, is open to the public and well worth the effort to get there. (It's in one of Detroit's poshest suburbs, so rent a car and enjoy checking the neighbor's digs en route.) Most of the rooms are decorated in late 1920s style. Exceptions are bedrooms used by Edsel's sons which were redecorated in a Moderne mode around 1940.