Molti Ritratti: Georgette Magritte

Rather than posting a usual Molti Ritratti where views of one sitter by many artists are displayed, I thought I might as well show several views of the same subject painted by a single artist. So today we feature Georgette Magritte, wife of Belgian Surrealist René (1898-1967) who used her as a model for many of his works. Salvador Dalí's wife Gala had the same gig, but Georgette is far less well known, so why not give her a break?

According the the Wikipedia link above, Magritte met Georgette when he was entering his teens and (other sources say) again in 1920, this leading to their 1922 marriage. Magritte had formal art training 1916-18 while the Great War raged and didn't do his army service until later. This was because his part of Belgium was occupied by the Germans in 1914 and remained under their control until the war ended.

Georgette was about two years younger than Magritte. Pretty and photogenic, she apparently didn't mind being her husband's model and muse. After Magritte took up Surrealism in the late 1920s (and perhaps even before), images based on Georgette's modeling were not always intended to be portraits. For example, one has her nude from the waist down and from the waist up is the front half of a fish.

Below are some photos of Georgette along with a few of Magritte's paintings that were either actual portraits or images using her as a model.

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Georgette and René at the time of their marriage

Georgette - 1929
The photo is probably reversed; she should be looking to the left.

Georgette - c.1935-38
One source has this as from 1938, but 1935 photos show her in the same dress and hairdo.

Nu allongé - 1923

Drawing of Georgette - 1924

Georgette double portrait - 1935

La magie noir - 1935

Portrait of Georgette - 1937

Portrait of Georgette - early 1940s

Based on post-1930 photos of her, when Magritte's aim was to do an actual portrait of Georgette, he usually took care to accurately depict her.

Las Vegas Interiors, Mod and Trad

Once upon a time, the gambling center of the United States was Las Vegas. Alas for Vegas, there are now plenty of other places to find slot machines, gaming tables and such -- often in the form of casinos owned by Indian tribes. This means that Las Vegas has to offer more than gambling to survive.

Restaurants and live entertainment were in place long before serious competition for the gambling dollar emerged. To these were added fancy retailing (I've lost count of the number of Gucci shops in town) and flashy architecture and interiors in non-casino areas of major casino-hotels. Accepting it for what it is, Las Vegas can be an entertaining place to spend a week even though you don't gamble a cent.

Some properties feature themes such as pirates, desert oases, Italian palaces and more. A few are basically modernist, but jazz things up because that's what Vegas patrons have been trained to expect.

Let's take a peek at a few photos I shot recently:

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Entrance to retail passage at the Bellagio
I love the Bellagio and walk this passage a lot because it leads to valet parking and skybridges for crossing streets to Caesars or the Paris. The shops? Lovely to gaze at, but well beyond my price-point.

Atrium at The Palazzo
This space, off the gambling floor, is surrounded by shops.

Shopping mall at Caesars Palace
There's a new atrium here, but this photo shows the older area, curved passages lined with shops and a fake-sky ceiling.

Palio coffee shop at the Bellagio
I grab a cuppa almost every morning that I find myself in the Bellagio. Prices are high, but the Siena atmosphere appeals even though I've never been in town when the horse races are held.

Bar in The Palazzo
As you noticed, The Palazzo is traditional. But this bar tucked at the side of the retail area is modernist, though in a decorated, non-purist way.

H&M store in the Caesars Palace shopping mall
This used to be a F.A.O. Schwarz toy store, but the Swedes selling inexpensive rags took over Schwarz's space in the older, passage-oriented part of the mall shown a few photos back. Up on the side wall is a DJ playing really loud rock music -- so loud I had to wait in the hall while my wife and daughter checked out the wares.

Crystals shopping mall at CityCenter
The huge, new CityCenter project is a collection of buildings designed by a bunch of well-known modernist architects. I consider it a failure in several ways, but will save that discussion for another post. Shown here is part of the interior of Crystals, the ritzy shopping area in the project. Like the Palazzo bar, modernism in its pure form had to be compromised in favor of increased detail to add visual interest to what otherwise would be a pretty dead space (imagine flat, white walls instead of the faceting seen here). Postmodern architecture often follows this same path of jazzing up purist forms without employing traditional decorative detailing.

Restaurant in Crystals
Another example of decorative postmodernism is this Crystals restaurant-bar. The use of wood and the enclosed feeling of the wooden elements make it more "organic" than geometric; I wonder if Mies van der Rohe would approve.

Noel Sickles: A Cartoonist Who Could Draw Really Well

The key words in the title of this post are "really well." All cartoonists by the nature of their game have to draw. Some (I won't mention names) can hardly tell which end of a pencil is pointy. But a few, by the time they hit their stride, were top-notch draftsmen who maintained a high level of quality despite a highly demanding deadline environment. Examples from the classic era of comic strips include Hal Foster ("Tarzan" "Prince Valiant"), Burne Hogarth ("Tarzan") and Alex Kotzky ("Apartment 3-G").

And there is another class of top-notch comic strip artist, cartoonists who were skilled enough to do commercial illustration at the "slick" magazine level. John Cullen Murphy ("Big Ben Bolt" "Prince Valiant"), Frank Godwin ("Connie" "Rusty Riley") and Alex Raymond ("Flash Gordon" "Jungle Jim" "Rip Kirby") did this to a limited extent, but remained in comic strips. Then there was Noel Sickles (1910-82) who switched completely from strips to slicks (and other publications).

The Wikipedia link above is limited, so if you want to pursue Sickles' career in depth, I recommend this book which contains his "Scorchy Smith" panels along with many examples of his post-Scorchy work.

So how well could Sickles draw? Take a look (click to enlarge most images):

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Scorchy Smith panel out-take

Servicing AVG (or perhaps 14th Air Force) P-40, China

Colonial scene

Cold War scene

Life magazine cover

Comp sketch

Comp sketch

Oh, did I forget to mention that Sickles was versatile?

Pene du Bois' Solid, Simplified Images

Guy Pène du Bois (1884-1958) studied art 1903-04 at the New York School of Art with Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent, among others, under Robert Henri.

Hopper gained the most permanent fame from today's perspective whereas Kent and Pène du Bois were fated (again from today's perspective) to respectively become archetypical 1930s and 1920s representatives of American painting. Which is slightly ironic in Pène du Bois' case, because he spent much of the 20s in France.

A short Wikipedia entry is here, but for useful depth regarding Pène du Bois, read this article.

I find his paintings frustrating to look at. That's largely because of his simplification of facial detail -- eyes are sometimes depicted by a small slash of black paint -- and the sad fact (for Pène du Bois) is that most viewers tend to focus on a face if one is present in a painting.

What was going on, I think, is that he was caught up with the challenge of modernism, as was true for many of his contemporaries. There were several approaches taken in those days, but Pène du Bois opted for depicting people by means of simplified, solid images. This was in contrast to striving for flattened images in supposed conformity to the picture plane, an alternative favored by artists of a more theoretical temperament. My take is that Pène du Bois pushed the simplification option a little too far.

Here are examples of his work.

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The Arrivals - c.1918

Dining Out - 1919

Woman with Cigarette - 1929

Country Wedding - 1926

Opera Box - 1926

Carnival - 1927

Woman in Brooklyn - after 1929

Blue Armchair - 1923

Pène du Bois was quite capable of making representational depictions, but examples are hard to find on the Web; the image immediately above is one of the few I found that go in that direction. Examples I've seen off-line suggest that he tended to set modernism aside when painting family and friends.

Jazz-Age Murals in Las Vegas

For the past three weeks posts on this blog have been appearing on their regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday publication schedule. That's because, speaking of schedule, I can schedule publication of posts ahead of time and let kindly Google do the rest.

Me? I was in California and Las Vegas and wrote not a single post while there; a backlog was worked up before I left home. But I did take some photos to thrill and amaze you. Coming soon are views of architecture and interior decoration, but for now I offer some blurred shots of a few murals that I spied while on my annual non-gambler casino crawl.

For those of you who have never been to Las Vegas or haven't visited since the mid-1990s, The Strip (Las Vegas Boulevard, which isn't actually inside the LV city limits) is comprised of a host of large casino-hotels, most of which are designed around a theme. Examples include The Palazzo, The Venetian, Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, Paris, Luxor, and New York - New York to name a few whose names convey their theme. Such complexes are costly to build in part because of the décor that is crucial for conveying the theme.

The photos below are of some murals that are really quite minor details contributing to the atmosphere of each place. The first two were taken in the New York - New York, the other two in the Wynn, which is luxurious but has no obvious theme attached to it. Both sets have a 1920s feeling in terms of subject matter and style. Take a look:

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Paul Rand, Graphic Designer

A very cursory web search didn't point to the actual source of the above quotation, but the agreement is that it indeed came from graphic designer Paul Rand (1914-96), a dominant player in that field for decades.

Of course, there were some who used it as a departure point for other ideas such as "Don't try to be good, just original" and "Try to be both original and good." Me? I'm with Rand. The modernist emphasis on creativity (= originality) has led to some bad side-effects including the nearly invisible amount of true instruction I received as an undergraduate art student (apparently they thought training would kill creativity). If one tries to be good doing art, a useful dab of creativity has a decent chance of creeping in.

Back to Rand. A website dealing with him is here. It contains a biography, a large collection of photos of Rand and many examples of his work, some of which are shown below.

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Some logotypes Rand designed

Direction magazine cover - March, 1939

Direction magazine cover - Spring, 1943

Book cover - 1958

Unused logotype for Ford - c.1960

My take on Rand is that he was indeed a master of his trade. That said, I think his strongest work was in the field of logotypes and graphic corporate identity.

A good deal of the rest of his work was in the odd, spotty graphics that were most popular from the late 1930s into the mid-1950s. Other designers followed Rand's lead, and a fair amount of it was found in page designs and advertisements that were intended to look "sophisticated." This style is evident above in the images of magazine and book covers. I find it for the most part too unstructured and insubstantial for my visual comfort.

In contrast, Rand's corporate symbology was usually solidly structured incorporating strong design elements. It was highly influential: I recall a student project where I tried to come up with a simple, modernist logo for Miller Beer that of course was a design failure.

Speaking of design failures, Rand's attempt at redesigning the classic "Ford oval" falls into that category. Ford was wise to shelve his proposal. Even the best designers have their off-days, it seems.

F.C.B.Cadell: Scottish Colourist Who Used Black

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937) was one of a four-man group known as the Scottish Colourists: his wikipedia entry is here.

The Colourists (I'll use the British spelling in this post) were influenced by Post-impressionism and perhaps Fauvism. They succeeded the previous-generation Glasgow Boys (scroll down) who were influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Cadell was socially well-connected, living for a number of years in a fashionable Edinburgh neighborhood (Ainslie Place) a few blocks from the west end of Princes Street. He tended to live higher than his inheritance and painting sales could support and was essentially broke when he died from cancer and liver disease aged 54. What little tangible estate he had (probably mostly in the form of unsold paintings) was willed with a few stated exceptions to his housemanager/companion Charles Oliver. Unlike the other Colourists, Cadell enlisted for the Great War and was twice wounded.

As for his mature art, his subjects ranged from portraits to interior scenes to still lifes to plein-air works. Some pre-war paintings were done in a loose style, but his later work tended to be carefully composed with defined edges.

For one known for color, his works tended to feature significant areas painted in pure black and much of the rest were flatly painted in pure or tinted grays. These served as contrast to other colors that then stood out. In a number of interior scenes from the 1920s he included a Chinese Red chair as a prop that provided a considerable color jolt.

I have yet to see a Cadell in person, so will assume that their general appearance is colorful. Here are examples of his work. They are in rough chronological order (he seldom dated his work), and some titles might be conjectural.

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Ben More from Iona - c.1913
This was from his first visit to the island. Cadell went there many times in the 1920s and early 30s.

Afternoon - 1913
An interior scene painted when his style was relatively loose.

The Black Hat - c.1914
From the same period. He used a black hat as a prop for many of his portraits of ladies.

Portrait of a Lady in Black - c.1921
This is one of his better-known paintings. Post-war, he tightened his brushwork and incorporated flatly painted areas. A good deal of black is used here while the rest of the color is limited to pastel shades.

The Embroidered Cloak - c.1923
This painting used a similar color scheme to the one shown above.

A Lady in Black - c.1925
Still more similar colors.

The Orange Blind - c.1927
Blacks and grays set off the orange, gold and blue-green.