Was Helen Worth All That Bother?

Helen of Troy, legends have it, was the most beautiful woman of her day who was the spark that set off the Trojan war. Actually it gets pretty complicated, as the Wikipedia link above indicates, but we'll go with the beautiful part.

Many artists over the years found it hard to resist the appeal of painting the most beautiful woman in the world, so "portraits" of Helen abound. A few are shown below along with some actresses who portrayed her in movies.

Gallery

The Abduction of Helen of Troy - Cesare Dandini (1596-1657)

Paris and Helen - J-L David - 1788

By Frederick Sandys - c.1867

By Sir Edward Poynter - 1881

By Evelyn De Morgan - 1898

The Private Life of Helen of Troy - book cover

Maria Corda in The Private Life of Helen of Troy - 1927

Rossana Podesta as Helen - 1956

Diane Kruger as Helen - 2004

I find it interesting that Helen often seems to be a blonde or otherwise has light brown or red hair (Poynter's version is an exception). I've never gone nuts over blondes (though I have nothing against them). But the artists who did choose to depict her as blonde almost surely had that preference.

What we have here is a demonstration of subjectivity in art. Clearly the casting directors and painters strained to select an appearance that was to represent the ultimate in female beauty. (Okay, I'm not so sure about Sandy's scowling redhead.) Yet these Helens differ. And even though they differ, there's not one I'd be inclined to abduct and haul off to Troy. However, if she had dark hair and gray eyes ....

Last-Ditch Car Styling

Sometimes there's a last spurt of flame before the candle dies, or so I recall hearing it said.

True or not, something similar sometimes happens with automobile companies that are about to flat-line. In this instance it's a final roll of the dice, betting what money the company has left on a flashy model that is either brand new or (more likely, given the cost factor) a major styling face-lift.

Where money is totally lacking, nothing much gets changed and the brand dies with nothing but a whimper. Badge-engineered British makes that died in the 1960s are a case in point.

This post deals with some American brands that went down fighting with regard to styling. They are: Hupmobile, which was gone by 1940; Graham, that ceased production in the 1941 model year and had a curious afterlife (see the link for details); Kaiser, the only halfway successful post-World War 2 new brand; and Studebaker which built the Raymond Loewy designed Avanti for a few years before dying in the mid-1960s while trying to sell its Lark-based sedans with facelift after facelift after facelift.

Here are these companies' last (or nearly-so) gasps:

Gallery

1939 Graham "Sharknose" coupe
The "Sharknose" (a popular name, not the official company version) Graham was largely designed by Amos Northrup as an attention-getting style in the pseudo-streamlined fashion of the 1930s. For some reason I rather like it, though it was not a sales success and the company continued its slide out of the industry.

Surrealist Man Ray in his 1941 Graham Hollywood
Not a publicity shot: he actually bought one when he returned to the USA after France fell and was living in the Los Angeles area. Aside from the hood and grille, the Hollywood used body panels from the Cord brand that failed after the 1937 model year. The Cord 810 and 812 models of 1936-37 are not included here because they represented the revival of a brand that had been discontinued a few years earlier.

1939 Hupmobile Skylark
Hupp shared Cord bodies with Graham, though few of the Hupmobile versions were built. The car depicted is a prototype with a front that looked Cord-like apart from the tacked-on headlights (the Cord had them hidden in the fenders). Production versions looked almost identical to the Grahams shown above.

1954 Kaiser
This is how the last American-built Kaisers looked. It was a major facelift of the 1953 version. Changes included the Buick-like grille, wraparound rear window and elaborate tail light housings. Production continued in South America for a few years with another facelift style.

1962 Studebaker Avanti
Studebaker announced the sensational Avanti almost 50 years ago, yet the styling could just as easily be for a 2011 model aside from a few details such as the windshield angle (a 2011 would have greater slope).

Choose Your Favorite Tarzan

Tarzan is one of a few characters that emerged from serialized magazine stories to legendary status, where the character is known to most people (whether of not the stories were ever read) and virtually accepted as a true historical figure. I suppose Sherlock Holmes trumps Tarzan in this field, but not by a lot.

As the link above notes, Tarzan appeared on film as early as 1918, some six years after his first magazine appearance and four years after the first book. The Tarzan comic strip had to wait until 1929. Although several artists labored in the Tarzan jungle, the best known were active in the 1930s and 40s.

The originator was Hal Foster (1892-1982) who is usually associated with the long-running strip of his own creation, Prince Valiant. Burne Hogarth (1911-1996) took over Tarzan in the late 30s and continued it until 1950 (with a couple years off).

So who was the better visual interpreter of Tarzan: Foster or Hogarth? Consider the following illustrations:

Gallery

By Foster
This is not from a strip, but indicates how Foster depicted the ape-man.

By Hogarth
An isolated view of Tarzan swinging through the jungle.

By Foster
Tarzan fights a lion.

By Hogarth
Tarzan fights a lion. Compare with Foster's version above.

The lion fight scenes demonstrate the difference between the artists. Hogarth is far more dramatic, Foster more static. Foster's Prince Valiant also was comparatively stately, even in the action scenes. Hogarth's scenes often had multiple bodies twisting in exaggerated action. Also twisting would be tree trunks and vines. If water was part of the scene it would likely be surging and splashing dramatically.

So whose Tarzan do I prefer? Foster's, of course. That's because his Tarzan is more believable as a human being.

Tarzan is a character that goes beyond plausibility. Foster keeps things normal enough that the implausible bits can be accepted. Hogarth takes the inherent implausibility and makes it even more so -- not that it ruined the popularity of the comic strip.

You opinion may differ, so express it in Comments. (Comments that I have to moderate. Be patient: your comment will appear eventually.)

Edd Cartier: Wry Sci-Fi Art

Edward D. Cartier (1914-2008) was an illustrator who specialized in science-fiction. I saw his work fairly often as a budding teenager during the era when sci-fi magazines had largely abandoned their pulp heritage and were appearing in digest or semi-digest format with better quality paper. By the time I reached my twenties I'd drifted from short-story sci-fi in magazines to paperback novels and Cartier faded from my view. That was quite a while ago.

So it surprised me to learn recently while exploring the Internet that Edd (he combined the "Ed" from his given name with his middle initial to derive his professional monicker) died fairly recently after attaining an old age riper than most of us can expect. He rated an obituary in The New York Times that provides a decent amount of detail regarding his life (link here).

As the obit notes, Cartier saw combat in Europe. He was badly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge (earning a Bronze Star along with the Purple Heart) and further wounded during medical evacuation. This didn't affect his wryly humorous take on bedrock components of science fiction illustrations of the day: spaceships, alien monsters, gorgeous women and the heroic men who save them from whatever fate authors could dream up.

Contrast this with illustrator Gilbert Bundy who, I as mentioned here, could not shake off his combat zone experiences and eventually killed himself.

The market for science fiction was not large when Cartier was active in the field, so he eventually found himself day jobs and, so far as I know, continued sci-fi on the side. Very sensible.

Below are examples of Edd Cartier's work beginning with one of his pulp mag illustrations for a Shadow story before World War 2.

Gallery

Illustration (cropped) for Shadow pulp magazine story, 1930s.

Magazine cover, 1940.

An example of Cartier's alien species.

Girl meets alien.

Mad scientist? Or just an old techie slaving over an even older adding machine?

Space explorer babe from 1952.

I really should do a comparative analysis, but for now I'll go with my gut feeling that Cartier had more ability than almost any other sci-fi magazine illustrator active in the 1950s.

So Government Sponsored Art is Necessary?

Here it is early August. Our postman is less burdened because junk mail mailers, knowing from experience that response rates are low during high summer, send out less junk mail. Blog-wise, this is a Friday post and experience has shown me that readership drops off for the weekend right about now and doesn't pick up until well into Sunday.

Doldrums time, in other words.

So I'll take advantage of the situation to write about something hardly anyone will be around to read: government-funded art.

Yesterday morning's Seattle Times editorial page offered this op-ed column titled "Disappearing federal funding for the arts threatens American soul" by a fellow named David Hahn who is identified as "a composer who lives in Seattle."

Hahn begins his piece with a few odd sketches of presumably imaginary just-folks artsy people who are already marginalized in American society. Following that is a riff about how the Roman Catholic Church (not a government, though some states were headed by clergy) funded all kinds of wonderful art-related things in centuries past. Then he comes to the crux of his meandering piece which I quote below to preserve in case the link disappears.

Art is not to be reserved for rich patrons. Somewhere there is a gardener who loves avant-garde jazz, a bus driver who loves opera, a cop who digs ballet and even takes dancing lessons, and a hotel service worker who spends her free evenings at the theater. Art answers questions about our condition, perhaps not directly, but in the way we individually relate and react to it.

Croatia, a country that has a per capita GDP that is half that of South Carolina, is willing and able to support scores of independent artists including actors, musicians, painters and filmmakers. These people are provided a salary on which they can live and in return, they are asked to pursue their arts — adorning the state and providing art for the people.

The United States has different priorities. More often than not, publicly funded art is the object of congressmen's ire and attempts to dissolve the already poorly funded National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA, with a $150 million budget, can use funds for only a very few arts groups, but at least the department is a symbol saying: "America cares for the arts." Given today's radical state of the budget debate in Congress, the NEA will likely soon be dissolved.

With the recent promises of budget cuts, the arts will again be undermined. The power and vital importance of the arts not only for our economy but for our individual and collective soul is being crushed.

While it's nice to be given the impression that artists are owed a living from taxpayers, perhaps a pause is in order to look what we are getting for our generosity. The public art pictured below for the most part probably wasn't funded by the federal government -- not directly, anyway. But it is the sort of public art we seem to get regardless of what level of government funds it.

Gallery

By Paul Horiuchi for 1962 Seattle world's fair

At a new light rail station

Under approach to University Bridge

At Seattle Center (the old world's fair grounds)

On University of Washington campus

Even I, contrarian that I claim to be, do not think all public art is bad; that Augustus Saint-Gaudens fellow cranked out some nice things from time to time.

But most of the public art I see nowadays strikes me as a waste of money. Contra Hahn, if the art shown above had never been created, I doubt that any poor, artsy soul would have been crushed by such non-events. And as for my poor, delicate, artsy soul? It gets crushed daily by the sort of expensive, pointless, publicly funded art that continues to pile up around town.

Nature, Enhanced

The Seattle Art Museum has an exhibit of 19th century paintings of western scenes on view until 11 September. There are Names from the Hudson River School represented, but the featured guy is Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902).

Bierstadt was born in Solingen in what is now Germany and moved to Massachusetts as a child. He returned for art training in Düsseldorf, not far from his native Solingen, but made his career in the United States painting nature scenes. A web site striving to catalog all his paintings is here.

What I found most interesting about the exhibit was that most of the paintings were dramatic exaggerations of what one actually sees when at the various sites depicted. I know those sites because I've spent most of my life on the West Coast and have traveled through many parts of the Mountain West as well as coastal areas.

But the audience for paintings by Bierstadt and the others lived far to the east of the painting sites, had never traveled out west, and therefore was ignorant of its reality. This was more true around 1860 when Bierstadt made his first sojourn; later in the century the west became better documented by photography.

Below is an example of the kind of exaggeration I noticed.

Mount Rainier - Albert Bierstadt - 1890
This painting sold at a recent Coeur d'Alene Art Auction for $2,143,000.

Mount Rainier as seen from Tacoma harbor
Bierstadt probably made his sketches approximately from this angle to the mountain, but a few miles closer to it on a ridge east of Tacoma overlooking the Puyallup River (which empties into Commencement Bay, where this photo was taken).

Suicidal Illustrators

By Gilbert Bundy (1911-55)

By Henry Raleigh (1880-1944)

By Pruett Carter (1891-1955)

Committing suicide must seem like a good idea for people at the time they do it. Depending on the circumstances, others find the reasoning sensible or not. I have nothing profound to say about the matter; this post simply notes that a few well-known (in their day) illustrators ended their lives this way.

Wikipedia, my usual go-to for biographical links, seems lacking when it comes to prominent American illustrators of the 1920-60 era. But why read Wikipedia when I can link to David Apatoff who has deep knowledge of illustrators?

Apatoff treats Gilbert Bundy in this post, describing Bundy's harrowing experience during World War 2 that was probably a major factor in his suicide a decade or so later.

In a recent post Apatoff offers a lighthearted take on Henry Raleigh's interest in the bare shoulders of 1920s and early 1930s women in party dresses at fancy occasions. But an earlier post deals with Raleigh's career, touching on his high living when he was one of America's best-paid illustrators and despair when illustration fashions changed during the later 1930s and he ran out of work and money. His solution was to leap from a window.

Charley Parker has a brief take on Pruett Carter here, but doesn't mention the end of the story. For that, read Fred Taraba's new book on illustrators (that I reviewed here). For unclear reasons, Carter shot and killed his wife and son, then shot himself. I find the first two killings inexcusable and the third one justifiable, given what he had just done.

I think that all of this is sad indeed, in part because I greatly enjoyed the art these illustrators made during their successful years. But top-notch illustrators such as these were as human as the rest of us, and life is seldom a smooth journey. Bundy, Raleigh and Carter seem to have seen both higher heights and lower depths than most of the rest of us.