Streamlined Battleships

During the 1930s the industrial design profession was clawing its way into viability. One device pioneering practitioners such as Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy relied on was flashy, self-funded designs intended to catch the eye of newspaper and magazine editors.

And those days were the era when modernistic design often incorporated streamlining as a theme. It even reached the point where Loewy came up with a streamlined pencil sharpener.

If aircraft and pencil sharpeners could be streamlined, then why not battleships? After all, streamlining could lead to either faster speeds or more efficient cruising, depending on the situation. And maybe streamlined cladding, if done right, might deflect enemy shells.

Otto Kuhler, best known for his streamlined locomotive designs, did the battleship design shown above as a just-for-the-hell-of-it proposition.

This, from a 1941 Revere Copper and Brass advertisement, is another version of a streamlined battleship. I don't know who designed it.

The problem is, whatever advantages streamlining might offer, the examples shown here would not have been combat-worthy in World War 2.

In terms of armament, they are more similar to the pre-Great War USS Florida (BB-30) shown here than to World War 2 equivalents. American battleships of 1912 vintage were spare designs with turreted main batteries and smaller, anti-torpedo boat guns mounted in the hull. The tall cage masts supported observation compartments where spotters noted where shells were hitting and passed aiming corrections to fire controllers below. Florida's masts also supported searchlight batteries. Aside from the masts and related equipment, the newly-operational Florida could have been streamlined in the Kuhler manner had that concept occurred to naval planners and architects in those days.

This is the USS South Dakota (BB-57), commissioned in 1942. When new, its topside bristled with anti-aircraft guns and more and more were added as the war progressed. Streamlining is clearly antithetical to the need for strong protection from aerial attack.

I'm no naval architect, so I'll only note that the design in the Revere ad has a hull shaped more like that of a powered yacht than those of fast battleships of the early 1940s which featured a more vertical prow near and below the waterline.

Another problem is that the turret armament is impractical. In the first place, five real guns couldn't be fitted into those turrets. In the second place, five guns would make for extremely awkward ammunition handling even if that many guns could be crammed in.

Those streamlined battleship designs were never anything but futuristic fluff. Yet streamlining was in the air in the late 1930s and the notion might have been briefly considered by a few naval planners. If it had, then it was quickly rejected in the interests of practicality under combat conditions.

Koester: Rembrandt of Ducks

Being a one-trick-pony is something usually looked down upon. But what if that single trick is done with genius? Something to be said for that, thinks I.

Consider the painting below.

It's an audience favorite at Seattle's Frye Art Museum. And in fact it's really nicely done. In person, those duck feathers look almost buttery in their painterly smoothness, a real tour de force.

The artist is Alexander Max Koester (1864-1932), and here are a few more of his duck paintings.

Koester was born near Cologne and studied at the Karlsruhe Academy of Art. He moved to Munich and later to the Tyrol, painting landscapes and Tyrolean peasant life. But he was best at ducks. Especially white ones.

William Wontner, Faux Orientalist

William Clarke Wontner (1857-1930) Liked to paint beautiful English women who usually were costumed in an oriental manner. Nothing seriously wrong with that: as any magazine rack will attest, pretty girls rule, and in late 19th century Europe Orientalism continued to be a popular painting genre.

Apparently Wontner had a good thing going because he painted many images in one-third length portrait fashion. Seen in isolation, this isn't in itself a problem, but his formula becomes obvious when several are seen at the same time. Take a look:

An Emerald Eyed Beauty

The Elegant Beauty

The Fair Persian

The Turban

Valeria

Wontner didn't follow that formula exclusively. Below are images that feature some variety.

Lady of Baghdad

The Jade Necklace

Wontner treated flesh and fabric with skill. He also avoided the "classical" version of the female face that was fashionable over much of the 19th century in some artistic corners. That is, the faces he painted are more like what we encounter daily. Moreover, he included hints of individuality and personality.

Lacking is any sense of psychological or narrative depth to his subjects: it's largely a case of decoration. And there's the matter of his models being obviously English rather than from Persia, Baghdad or whatever part of the Middle East the costuming suggested.

Apart from technique, it's hard to take Wontner's work seriously, pretty though it (and his subjects) might be.

"You had to have been there..."

The early decades of modernism in painting featured innovation and experimentation. I have nothing against these so long as the results don't congeal into dogma -- which they did to some degree, unfortunately.

When reading about painters active in the early 20th century, I am struck by how often Paul Cézanne is cited as having been an important influence on artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. For my part, when in my brainwashed-by-modernism days, I never cottoned to Cézanne's paintings. And even now I have difficulty understanding just what it was that so inspired those other artists.

After years of puzzling over this, I'm coming to the conclusion that it was a case of "You had to have been there."

When reading history, one usually knows the outcome and this affects one's perception. But of course the actors in that history were prisoners of their time and had to make do while ignorant of future outcomes. And their frames of reference can be hard to understand by those of us from later times; it can be difficult indeed for us to strip away what we know and put ourselves exactly in the place of Picasso, Matisse, et. al., when confronted by Cézanne's works.

To illustrate this, consider special effects in science fiction movies. Actually, the following example won't work for readers under age 45 or thereabouts, but it's the best I can come up with because I can personally relate to it, not having seen Avatar.

Here are some space ships depicted in sci-fi movies over a 40-year span:

Flash Gordon serial - 1936 or 1938

The Day the Earth Stood Still - 1951

Destination Moon - 1950

2001 A Space Odyssey - 1968

Star Wars - 1977

Yes, these aren't in motion, so the main visual effects are missing. But the moving images become increasingly realistic over time. Space Odyssey images were sensational in their day, as were those for the earlier Destination Moon in 1950. But the technological leap that had the greatest impact was that of the original 1977 episode of Star Wars. In it, space ships were not static from a viewing angle (as in Space Odyssey), being made to maneuver realistically while not appearing to be the models they actually were (in contrast to the Flash Gordon example). Since 1977, models in matte environments have been replaced by computer graphics, but the visual difference has been relatively minor.

I haven't seen the 1977 Star Wars since it was new. At the time I found the effects stunning. I suspect that if I saw it again now they would seem less impressive. Moreover, I imagine that a teenage boy of today would consider the effects ho-hum: nothing special at all. That hypothetical teenager is my likely position regarding Cézanne compared to Matisse whose position was analogous to mine when I first viewed Star Wars.

Reacting to Modernism: Walter F. Isaacs

My old stomping ground, the School of Art at the University of Washington, held an exhibit featuring three former faculty members including its first chairman Walter F. Isaacs (1886-1964). I went to see it because two of the artists (Ray Hill, 1891-1980 and Boyer Gonzales, Jr., 1909-1987) were there when I was. But I was most anxious to see Isaacs' work because he was active during a period that interests me greatly: 1920-1945.

Why those years? Because they were the time following the surge of art movements (Cubism, Fauves, Futurism, Blaue Reiter, etc., etc.) in the years just before the Great War. Following the war many avant-garde artists experienced a what-do-we-do-next? realization as the number of new movements fell off drastically. Meanwhile, artists trained traditionally had to come to terms with modernism because the art market seemed to be drifting in that direction and the matter of bread on the table could not be totally ignored. So many artists struggled stylistically, and it is the art they created while struggling that interests me.

Isaacs was raised on an Illinois farm, but other than the fact that he attended college somewhere, I have no information about what he did from the time he left the farm until he enrolled at Chicago's Art Institute in 1914 when he was about 28 years old. He then went on to teach at what is now Northern Colorado University in Greeley, but left to study in France in 1920. In 1923 he was hired as art professor at the University of Washington and headed the art department until his 1954 retirement. While at Washington he continued to travel to Europe in order to experience what was still the world's leading art.

Below are photos I snapped while viewing the exhibit. They are definitely of the quick-and-dirty sort, uncropped, shot with the lens set to wide-angle so that the focusing is (mostly) okay. The exhibit designers were astute enough to hang a series in chronological order; these are the first ones shown.

Gallery

From 1920s

From 1930s

From 1940s

From 1950s

From 1960s
It seems that Isaacs was never truly avant-garde. In fact, his work seems to lag about ten or 15 years behind what passed for cutting-edge during the confused decades from the start of the Great Was until the end of World War 2. For instance, note that he seems to have avoided Surrealism, the most prominent movement of the 1930s, and that he failed to surrender to pure abstraction, if the images in the exhibit are any guide.

Nevertheless, his paintings are influenced by modernism. Shapes are simplified and the appearances feature flatness, not depth.

Self-portraits
The portrait at the left was done in 1909 when he was in college. The center one dates from around 1930 and the right-hand one is thought to have been done in Paris in 1928 or thereabouts.

Mildred Isaacs - 1931

Babette Hughes - c.1942
Isaacs became more conservative or traditional when painting portraits, though the modernist characteristics of simplicity and flattening are still evident.

I have no proof, but the paintings shown above suggest that Walter Isaacs was most comfortable painting in the slightly-modern mode he practiced from 1920 into the 1940s. His later works strike me as being a bit forced, as if his role as art department chairman required him to keep up with both the times and the work of younger faculty members who were more comfortable with modernism.

Alphonse de Neuville: War Art Master

When I wrote about combat art a while ago I mentioned that I thought that the best of the examples shown was a painting by Alphonse de Neuville (1835-1885). Actually, as I sit typing this post, I can't think of an artist who did that kind of job better. But if I do come across a better combat artist, I'll let you know.

Here are examples of his work dealing with the Franco-Prussian War:

Gallery

Les dernières Cartouches - 1873
This is Neuville's most famous painting, depicting surrounded French troops fighting at the point where their last cartridges are about to be expended.

Attaque, par le feu, d'une maison barricadée et crénelée - 1875
Aside from some corpses, not many men are to be seen in this urban skirmish.

Défense de la porte de Longboyau - 1879
Neuville liked to paint lots of men at dramatic moments. And he seldom failed to include wounded and dead soldiers.

Bivouac devant le Bourget, après le combat du 21 Décembre 1870 - 1872
A moment of calm following a battle near where Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis 57 years later.

Le cimetière de Saint-Privat (18 Août 1870) - c.1881
Once again German troops are about to breech a French defense in the war that cost Napoleon III his throne.

Scène de combat dans une église - c.1881
Neuville loved to include a lot of atmosphere; note the smoke from gunpowder.

Un porteur de dépêches: Sainte-Maries-Aux-Chênes, près de Metz (Septembre 1870) - c.1881
A comparatively calm scene where a French courier disguised as a peasant is brought before Prussian officers. Because he is not in uniform, he likely will be executed.

A Cavalryman - 1884
Neuville also painted studies of various soldiers.

Neuville's Wikipedia entry is here. And there is a recently published book about him.

I see that Amazon lists it, but I bought my copy through their French site (amazon.fr). It has plenty of reproductions including some full-page detail views. The text is in French and mostly comprised of quotes from reviews of his works along with some of his family correspondence. I considered the pictures more than enough to justify the price.

As for seeing his works in person, the Metropolitan in New York has one, but I suspect it isn't on display (let me know if I guessed wrong). You can see some of his work in Paris at the Musée de l'Armée, but otherwise you'll probably have to rent a car to track down his most important paintings elsewhere in France.

Turner Prize Finalists 2011

It's Turner Prize time in Britain. This year's winner hasn't been announced yet, but the four finalist are known.

As the link above notes, the prize is given for recently completed works usually in the postmodern Concept Art genre. Examples of finalists' work are shown below.

Gallery

What to Ask for Others - Karla Black - 2011

A Library of Leaves - Martin Boyce

Man - Hilary Lloyd - 2010

The Resurface - George Shaw - 2011

I'm not sure why Shaw's painting made the grade. That's because (1) it's an actual painting and (2) there isn't much concept to it. I suppose the concept part is that he focuses on drab, commonplace subject-matter that a viewer is supposed (I assume) to read meaning into.

Black seems to be following the Marcel Duchamp path of designating whatever the self-proclaimed artists designates as art. Lloyd's piece is projected images, possibly video, though I can't rule out the positioning of the projectors as part of the Installation. Boyce's work can be considered some kind of sculpture.

The works of the latter three are the usual grist that can be found in the Tate Modern. I don't consider most of it art.

My problem is that the term "art" has been watered down (Duchamp's legacy) to the point where anything can be called "art." But if anything runs the risk of being "art," then art is nothing special and the term becomes meaningless.

Something created by a human being that pleases the eye might be considered art; this removes art a step from the proclaimed "art" by the self-proclaimed "artist" noted above. I'm willing to accept this as small-"a" art which this blog deals with it a fair amount.

Then there's capital-"A" Art which I define for the purpose of this post as the traditional Fine Arts.

Turner Prize art mostly falls in the first and (to some extent) second categories just mentioned. Sad to say for the Turnerites, such art has little likely long-term future in the sense that viewers a century from now probably will be less able to grasp the Concepts than the average viewer-in-the-street can today.

I find the Turner Prize both sad and silly. Its main worth is that it demonstrates how far Establishment art has fallen as modernism continues its aimless course.