Aha! So It Was Actually A Copy

Last winter I wrote about Disneyland and featured the national park lodge style Grand Californian Hotel.

Besides the decor, I included some photos of paintings that I assumed were done by Disney artists to enhance the early 20th century atmosphere of the place. This is one of the photos:

It turns out that the painting actually is a copy of this:

The Idle Hour - John Hubbard Rich - 1917

You can tell it's a (nicely done) copy because the patterns on the wall and Kimono don't exactly match and, more important, the copy doesn't have the artist's signature in the upper right hand corner.

Too bad the Disney folks didn't credit the source using a plaque or other device.

On the other hand, the Disney version is slightly stronger and less impressionistic. To me, this makes it a better painting than the original. (I know this was probably heretical to mention, but I can't help myself.)

Mackintosh Watercolors

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) the famed Art Nouveau era architect was better appreciated in Vienna and elsewhere in central Europe than he was in his native Scotland. The coming of the Great War which snuffed out contact with his admirers, along with the rise of what became known as International Style architecture, led to the collapse of his career, such as it had been.

He and his wife, the designer Margaret MacDonald, scraped by during the war and then, thanks to an inheritance from her mother, explored places to live that would be less expensive than London and better for dealing with her asthma. So they began an exploratory trip in 1923 that resulted in a move to the South of France.

From 1924 to 1927, when Mackintosh's cancer became evident, they lived on the Mediterranean coast in Port-Vendres which is about 10 miles (16 km) north of the Spanish border and not all that far from Salvador Dalí's stomping ground.

By this time Mackintosh had become a full-time watercolorist. Besides the coast, he frequented the nearby eastern tail of the Pyrenees with its combination or terrain and picturesque villages whose buildings must have appealed to his architectural sense.

Below are examples of this work.

Gallery

The Boulders

Mont Alba

Port-Vendres, La Ville

The Little Bay, Port-Vendres

La Llagonne

I've only seen reproductions and not originals. But what I see is pleasing. It pleases me because of the hard, faceted, structured look and the strong compositions (Mackintosh was an architect, after all). Not what one thinks of when the concept "watercolor" comes up.

Sir William Beechey: Forgotten Portrait Painter

I can't find him indexed at The Athenaeum or Art Renewal Center. In fact, I had never heard of him until I was browsing galleries in the Portland [Oregon] Art Museum and came across a portrait by him.

My ignorance nothwithstanding, Sir William Beechey (1752-1839) was highly successful in his day though overshadowed in history by his flashier contemporaries Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) and Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830).

The Wikipedia entry for Beechey linked at his name above notes that he had 18(!!) children over a period of about 30 years by his second wife. As a demographer, I find this statistic fascinating: that approaches the maximum possible, even with two children perhaps having been twins. It has been years since I researched this, but as I recall, some women reportedly have had more than 20 births -- including some multiples per pregnancy.

As for his art, Beechey was certainly competent at portraiture, as the images below indicate. Had it not been for Raeburn and Lawrence with their greater painting flair, he probably would have been better known today.

Gallery

King George III

Lord Nelson

Miss Abernathy

Kitty Packe

Lady Beechey and Her baby

Kroghs: The Other Norwegians

If asked to name a Norwegian painter, the name of screamin' Edvard Munch is what most people would come up with if they could dredge up the name of any painter from that corner of Europe at all.

Given that mainstream art history of the era 1870-1914 is so Paris-centric, it's surprising that even Munch was able to elbow his way into notoriety. This is not a good thing because artistic talent isn't and wasn't genetically Gallic; excellent painters were sloshing their brushes in turpentine and leaning forearms on mahl sticks elsewhere, even in remote Christiana (as Oslo was named at the time).

Which brings me to the family Krogh, father and son (plus a lesser-known grandson who I'll leave out of this discussion). Both Kroghs were painters well known in their native Norway who married attractive wives who led frisky lives in other men's beds. Those curious for details can consult the following links, though I'll add a tidbit.

The elder and more prolific painter was Christian Krogh (1852-1925) who married affair-prone Oda (1860-1935) and begat Per (1889-1965).

I didn't know this until researching this post, but Per was a muralist whose most noteworthy work adorns the chamber of the United Nations Security Council. The mural was a gift from Norway to the U.N. and I wonder if the Norwegian Trygve Lie, Secretary General in 1952, the year the gift was made, had a hand in the transaction.

Per married Cécile "Lucy" Vidil (1891-1977) who went on to become the off-and-on mistress of the Romanian painter Jules Pascin (1885-1930) who dissipated himself, leaving his wife and Lucy to tidy up his artistic estate.

Now for a glance at the Krogh's art.

Gallery

Christian - Portrait of a young woman
I don't have a date for this, but by its look it likely was painted early in his career.

Christian - Oda - ca.1888
The wife.

Christian - 17 May 1893
Constitution Day celebration.

Christian - Lofotbrev - Letter from Lofoten - 1896

Christian - Women

Per - Grand Hotel Oslo mural - 1928
Click on it to enlarge.

Per - United Nations Security Council chamber mural - 1952

Per Krogh was part of the Paris avant-garde artistic social scene and, judging from the few examples of his work that I could find on the Internet, was one of those painters with realist leanings who added modernist-inspired touches to maintain credibility in his social milieu. Given the honors presented him in Norway, I hope there was more to him than the hack-work U.N. mural and the modernist-mannered one in the Oslo hotel.

Christian was better -- good even, though his choice of everyday subjects tugs against our tendency to evaluate paintings by the importance of their subject-matter.

In the Beginning: Grant Wood

"American Gothic" is an iconic painting. It's so iconic that I won't bother wasting precious, hand-crafted, organic pixels reproducing it here.

Its creator, Grant Wood (1891-1942 -- he died the day before his 51st birthday), painted other familiar works that got him pigeon-holed as an American Regionalist (or some similar label). His Wikipedia entry sketches his career but is woefully short on images: for those, use Google or Bing.

The stereotypical Grant Wood painting, be it portrait or landscape, has a solid look to it. There also is simplification and stylization; these are exhibited to a much greater degree in his landscapes than in his other work (murals excepted).

Wood's classical style didn't emerge until after a 1928 visit to Munich. Prior to that, he was mostly influenced by French Impressionism. He visited Europe four times in the 1920s when he was already in his thirties. I suppose he might have visited there sooner, but for the inconvenience of the Great War. I couldn't locate any pre-1920 paintings on the Internet nor in two books dealing with Wood, so the "early" works shown below represent what he was painting before his style changed drastically in his late thirties.

Gallery

Paris scene - 1920s

Paris scene with omnibus - 1920s
These two paintings are typical of his urban scenes. He also painted landscapes using a similar dabby style. I could find no examples of portrait-type paintings done during this period, though he surely must have been doing some studies and experiments in those days because his 1930s faces and figures are skillfully made.

Landscape - 1930
This retains some of his sketchy 1920s practice. But he was painting solid, crafted images by 1930, so perhaps this originally was simply a sketch or color study and not a finished work even though he signed it.

Stone City, Iowa - 1930
I include this as an example of Wood's mature landscape painting.

The Perfectionist - 1936
And here is one of his portraits. The joke is that one of the lady's buttons is not completely fastened.

Iowa Cornfield - 1941
This was painted the year before Wood died of cancer. It is a partial reversion to his 1920s style.

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.