Gary Larson: Best Single-Panel Cartoonist?

What's considered funny varies from person to person. I find Gary Larson's "The Far Side" cartoons such as those above hysterical: my wife doesn't get them. Nevertheless, she's happy to say "Hi" to Gary and his wife if we cross their path while taking an evening stroll. (The Larsons live in a nicer neighborhood than ours, but only three blocks away from us.)

A lengthy Wikipedia entry on Larson is here.

I'd better qualify this post's headline. By one-panel cartoons, I'm restricting the meaning to syndicated newspaper cartoons, but needed to keep the headline short so didn't elaborate. Single-panel magazine cartoons such as in the New Yorker are another matter, and my top names there would include Charles Addams and Peter Arno.

I enjoyed The Far Side because of the quirky humor, the unexpected situations and his cast of occasionally-reappearing characters and stereotypes. Added to this was his drawing style -- clear and not cluttered layouts coupled with amusingly designed, often dumpy humans, not to mention animals and other creatures with personality. Text and illustration often provided the viewer with several things to chuckle over and not just a punchline.

Consider Gary Larson a cartoonist totally in synch with the times in which he was active.

Koloman Moser Did It All

Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the leading lights of the Vienna Secession and probably the most versatile of the lot. He designed furniture, posters, stained glass windows and household objects besides doing a little painting. Moreover, the work he did was generally of very high quality (with an exception noted below).

Biographical information on Moser can be found here and here. There are books about him as well; check Amazon or another web site for details.

Here are a few examples of his work:

Gallery

Poster design (not used) for first Secession exhibit - 1898

Poster design - "Read!"

Frommes calendar - 1899

Secession Exhibition poster - 1902

Window, Steinhof chapel - 1905

Cruet stand - 1904-05

100 Crown banknote, Austria-Hungary Bank - 1910

The Three Graces
For some reason Moser was not adept at painting, or so I think. This one is better than most, but still rather messy compared to the clean, well-designed posters, bookmarks and other graphic work he produced.

Lawren Harris: Strong Canadian

Lawren Harris (1885-1970) came from a rich family. That's helpful if you want to make painting your career. And was Canadian. For some reason that's not so helpful if you want to become a world-renowned painter.

At least Harris had the advantage of being a member of Canada's most celebrated artistic ensemble, the Group of Seven, a collection of painters he subtly helped financially during their early, struggling years.

Since I started blogging six years ago at 2Blowhards I've been forced by the requirement to come up with new posts to broaden my art history horizons beyond the Received Modernist Narrative that I experienced in college. What I discovered were a good many very good painters who had the art-historical misfortune to ply their trade outside of Paris for much of their careers.

So it is with Harris. I have trouble distinguishing "good" and "great" in everything from spaghetti sauce to portraiture -- at a certain point the evaluation becomes more subjective than ever. Let me just say that I think Harris was very good. And versatile, too. See below.

Gallery

Mt. Lefroy - 1930
Harris painted many landscapes in this vein -- in the same spirit as his near-contemporary Rockwell Kent.

The Corner Store - 1912
An early painting. He also did a number of townscapes.

Pine Tree and Red House - 1924
Later on he came up with this blend of townscape and snowy/icy scene. Hard to avoid for a Canadian painter unless you're based in Victoria.

Mrs. Oscar Taylor - 1920
Harris could paint portraits too. This one has a whiff of modernist simplifying, but not enough to overwhelm the subject (as so often happened with other artists of the time).

Dr. Salem Bland - 1924
Another solid portrait.

Paul Allen Collects Flying Objects

Let's say you were co-founder of a tiny start-up company selling a version of the computer language Basic that would run on grossly underpowered small computers with hardly any data storage capacity. And after 20 years that puny company would grow to dominate a new, huge industry by virtue of its operating systems and office productivity software. Which made you filthy rich.

What, then, do you do with your money?

You could have a huge yacht built for yourself. You could buy some professional sports teams -- a basketball team in Portland, Oregon and in Seattle a soccer team and a football team. You could invest in stuff. But aside from that yacht, what about spending on fun things? How about a museum near the foot of Seattle's Space Needle devoted to rock music and science fiction? Done; what else? How about buying a selection a World War 2 vintage aircraft, meticulously restoring them to flying condition and creating a museum for them?

So that's what Paul Allen of Microsoft fame did. His aircraft museum is in a converted hangar at the south end of Paine Field in Everett, Washington. (The north end of the airport hosts Boeing's huge factory that builds 747, 777 and 787 airlines, many of the latter currently parked engineless near Allen's museum.)

It's called the Flying Heritage Museum and here is a page from its web site with a short explanation of how it came to be.

The planes actually do fly on occasion. Not long ago I saw its P-51 Mustang and Supermarine Spitfire cavorting over Lake Washington before the start of unlimited class hydroplane races. A few planes, while flyable, are never flown. That's because they are the only ones of their kind known to exist.

The museum web site has plenty of fine pictures of the collection, but below are some photos I snapped in an attempt to provide a tourist's view. It was a rare sunny Seattle day, so light pouring through the windows made it almost impossible to get top-quality exposures.

Gallery

P-47, Fw-190 and B-25
Here is a general view of part of the museum.

B-25 bombardier compartment
A head-on view of the B-25 Mitchell at the right of the first photo. Note how complete the restoration is: bombsight, machine gun ammunition belts and so forth. Something I had never been aware of is the windshield wiper on the bombardier's optically flat center windshield, this for improved perfomance of the bombsight.

Messerschmitt Bf 109 E-3
E-series 109s came on line in time for the Battle of France in 1940 and fought in the Battle of Britain.

Hawker Hurricane Mk XII A
Although more Hurricanes flew in the Battle of Britain than Spitfires, there are fewer survivors. This was probably because the Spitfire was more glamorous and saw first-line service throughout the war, whereas Hurricane production ceased in 1944.

P-40C Tomahawk
Most P-40s I've seen are later versions which are longer, have different cockpit glazing and sometimes Merlin engines rather than their initial Allisons. The similar-looking B and C series and derivatives were in combat in 1941-42 with the British in North Africa, the AVG "Flying Tigers" in China and the U.S. Army Air Forces at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in the Pacific. Combat capability aside, I always thought that early P-40s such as this one were the best-looking of the lot.

Polikarpov I-16 Type 24 Rata
Allen's Rata was the first I've ever seen. I was surprised any remained, though it seems that more than half a dozen actually still exist. They were used by Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, Chinese fighting the Japanese invasion and by the Soviet air force in the weeks following Hitler's 1941 invasion.

Adaptive Artists: Dean Cornwell

With this post I started an occasional series dealing with illustrators who preserved their careers by adjusting their style to suit changing illustration style fashions.

Now I consider Dean Cornwell (1892-1960), who is usually ranked among the top illustrators of the first half of the 20th century.

Cornwell reached prominence around 1920 and was hugely successful working in oil using a "painterly" style where brushstrokes are strong and visible. This style gradually fell out of favor during the 1930s when flashy watercolor work became the rage. In turn, this fashion was replaced in the wartime 1940s by sober oil paintings that had a more "finished" appearance where painterly qualities were subordinated.

It was in the 30s that Cornwell decided it was time to "play Shakespeare" (my term for wanting to become accepted as a legit fine artist) and began painting murals -- a quest that didn't net him much or any profit. He continued illustration to make ends meet, so adapted to the non-painterly approach of the 40s. As far as I know, he didn't buy into the 1950s "big head"/gouache style.

I'll be writing more about Cornwell later. If you want considerably more information right away, I suggest you get a copy of Illustration Magazine's issue number 23 that features Cornwell.

Here is an example of his work from the 20s and one from the 40s.

From 1921.

From "The Robe" - 1947.
I fully understand that you gotta do what you gotta do, and there was no way Cornwell could have survived had he continued the style of the top picture. That said, I really like his 1920s work and find later illustrations such as the lower picture undistinguished, generic work almost any competent illustrator of the time might have produced.

Freiherr von Habermann: Some Paintings and a Story

Freiherr Hugo von Habermann (1849-1929) is something of a mystery to me. I've viewed some of his works, yet haven't found much in the way of biographical information about him. The best I can locate on the web is this outline in German.

To summarize the information on the link (as best my meager German allows), he was born 14 June 1849 in Dillingen an der Donau in Bavaria. Both parents were of Bavarian nobility, hence his title of Baron. His family moved to Munich in 1858 and he entered Munich University to study law in 1868. The following year he saw works of Courbet, Manet, Hals and Rembrandt in an international art exhibition, inspiring him towards art. His studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war, serving as an officer in a reserve unit. While stationed at Ingolstadt Fortress in 1871 he pondered his future and decided to abandon the law for art and entered Munich's Academy of Fine Arts that November. In 1878 he became a master-student under Karl von Piloty, director of the Munich Academy. He teamed with Bruno Piglheim and Fritz von Uhde to found a private art school in 1880, but it wasn't successful. The association of these three artists has been retroactively considered by some as the birth of the Munich Secession movement that flourished in the 1890s; Habermann became the second president of the group, following Piglheim. In 1905 he became a professor at the Munich Academy, retiring in 1924.

Although he painted allegorical and Biblical scenes, Habermann is best known for his paintings of women -- sensuous depictions especially.

Irene Beran - 1921

The portrait above is of interest because Rudolf Beran, son of the subject, wrote this fascinating history of his family and Habermann's painting.

Below are other examples of Habermann's work.

Gallery

Porträt einer jungen frau (Portrait of a Young Lady)
No date, but the style suggests it was done early in his career.

Mädchen im Grünen (Girl in Greens) - 1888

Bildnis einer jungen dame (Portrait of a Young Woman) - 1889
Maybe it's the expression he caught, but for now I like this painting best of all his works.

Schleiertänzerin (Dancer with Scarf) - 1895
Another interesting painting; too bad the dark background is starting to crack.

Liegender Modellakt (Reclining Nude Model) - 1907

Fifty That Changed the World -- A Tiny Bit

A pet project of London design icon Terence Conran is the Design Museum (Wikipedia entry here and web site here).

It's not far off the tourist track, being located across the Thames and a short ways downstream from the Tower of London (walk across the Tower Bridge and hang a left (sort of -- you have to zig and zag a little to get back to the riverside).

I bring this up as incidental background to the series of books the museum produced over the last few years. The graphic at the top of this post shows covers of four of them. Their titles can be generalized as "Fifty Xxxxs That Changed the World" where the "Xxxxs" is Dresses, Bags, Chairs, Hats, Shoes and Cars.

The books are small in format and short in pages. There is a skimpy introduction and the fifty selections are presented in spreads -- text on the left-hand page and an illustration on the right.

But what seriously bothers me is the Changed the World business.

I see this phrase far more often than it merits. A case can be made that anything changes the world in some degree by its presence, absence or actions. But that trivializes the concept to the point of uselessness. At the other extreme might be strike by an asteroid or large meteor. Most of us would agree that the Great War and World War 2 changed the world, as did the domestication of the horse and fire, the invention of the wheel and the airplane, and other events that affected the lives of millions.

But handbags? dresses? hats? C'mon; don't be silly. A more accurate title might be "Fifty Xxxxs That Are Pretty Interesting."

As an aside, there are those admonitions that are usually directed towards naive youth. Major in this or that subject in university, get a job in such-and-such field and you, too, can Change the World! If I ever get the power to Change the World, one of the first things I'll do is abolish that phrase.