Herb Kane, Illustrator of Hawaiian History

Herbert "Herb" Kawainui Kane (1928-2011, last name pronounced KAH-nay) was an illustrator of Hawaiian-Danish descent who abandoned a career in commercial art in Chicago to return to Hawaii and create paintings illustrating Hawaiian history. Plus, he instigated the building of replica catamarans that duplicated voyages by Hawaii's Polynesian settlers. For more details on his career, here is his Wikipedia entry.

I'll present some of his views on art and illustration in a follow-up post and focus here on the art he created.

Kane was basically an illustrator in the sense that he tried to convey the appearance details of people, man-made objects and nature as they were in times past. This required a good deal of research along with personal knowledge of sailing techniques and acquaintance with Hawaiian and Polynesian culture. Therefore, in his paintings tended to be "hard-edge" (not "painterly") in style so that he could present as much detailed information as possible. Exceptions were allegorical works dealing with Hawaiian gods and legends.

My own taste runs to adding a dash of the painterly. For example, I tend to be less fond of depictions of aircraft that include lots of little dots representing rivets than of pictures showing non-center-of-interest parts of an aircraft slightly out of focus (such as they would be seen in person).

Nevertheless, I find Kane's approach both suitable for his purposes and satisfying from a visual standpoint. Below are images of some of Kane's work. Original-size versions are much more impressive than what you see here; click images to enlarge for slightly better views.

Gallery

Wa'a
One of a series Kane painted of Polynesian sailing craft.

Ka'anapali 200 Years Ago
This beach on western Maui is now lined with resort hotels.

The Arrival of Keoua Below Pu'ukohola
The rival king to Kamehameha approaches the stone temple and soon will meet his death.

Kamehameha Landing
Kamehameha and his army landing on Oahu near Waikiki Beach. Note the swivel cannon on Kamehameha's craft and the Western style sailing ship in the background.

Kamehameha at Kamakahonu (detail)
The aged king at what is now Kailua-Kona.

Moment of Contact
Captain James Cook's ships meet native Hawaiians off Kauai, 1778.

Pele
The Hawaiian goddess of fire and vulcanism.

Hula Holoku
Multiple views of a hula dancer wearing a holoku gown. I find this image charming.

Molti Ritratti: Salome

Salome was quite the gal, as this Wikipedia entry indicates. Dancing, sexiness, murder and other factors contribute to rich grounds for artists to exploit. I was even about to use the work "beauty," in the last sentence but did not. That's because no one since her days has had any idea what she looked like. The best we have is the image on the coin shown below, and it isn't very inspiring.

This lack of information was never a barrier to artists who were handed subject matter to spare plus unlimited freedom to imagine her. Below are some examples of her depiction in approximate chronological order.

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By Titian

By Caravaggio

By Henri Regnault

By Gustave Moreau

By Pierre Bonnaud

By Ella Ferris Pell

By Aubrey Beardsley

By Robert Henri

By Franz von Stuck

By Lovis Corinth

By Nelson Shanks

And which Salome has the most appeal? Beats me. I'll take any of them except, perhaps, the image from Beardsley (nice drawing that it is). And the one on the coin.

An Earlier "Painter of Light"

Thomas Kinkade (b. 1958) used the slogan "The Painter of Light" for many years while building his artistic sales empire. The image above is an example I snatched from the Web; it even has a Kinkade stamp asserting that it's the real thing. Most of his twilight-plus-glowing-windows paintings are rural or semi-rural scenes, but he also does some urban scenes such as the one above. He also can be a better painter than one might gather from seeing originals and giclées in galleries, but a guy has to earn a living.

There being not much totally new under the artistic sun, I hereby offer some paintings of Paris street scenes by Édouard Cortes (1882-1969):

Cortes' Paris paintings interest me because of his attention to detail. Note the Citroën by the cyclist in the image immediately above: he didn't just dash off a generic car shape.

Will Cotton: Sweets Painter

A representational artist who has been getting attention of late is Will Cotton (b. 1965). For instance, Rizzoli released this book dealing with his art in November, and his cover painting for a Katy Perry album prompted this Artinfo piece.

Why the fuss? Take a look:

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Cotton Candy Katy - 2010
The original painting measures 72 by 84 inches; that is, 6 by 7 feet or 183 by 213 cm. The image above has been cropped at the top (it was painted for the cover of the CD album mentioned above, and album art requires a nearly square format).

Photo of Will Cotton's studio
Note the size of the work in progress.

Will Cotton and Katy Perry
Behind is a painting of her titled "Cupcake Katy."

Chocolate Forest - 2001

Nude in chocolate landscape

Taffy Forest - 2007

Ice Cream Venus - 2010

Ice Cream study

As you might have noticed, Cotton's theme is candy in various guises. Some paintings feature nothing but close images of solid or flowing chocolate. And because Cotton wants everything to look really real, he builds landscape maquettes using the real thing. This led him to become a serious maker of chocolates, now a sort of side job.

Another impression from the images is that his work seems photographic, even though it's actually oil paint on linen canvas. This effect is partly achieved because Cotton paints on huge canvasses, this giving him room to deal with details in a smooth, not-so-painterly way.

Speaking of photography, whereas he does use reference photos, Cotton is quite able to draw very well on his own, as the final image above indicates.

Not everyone cares for hyper-realistic beautiful women in candy environments. Leah Ollman's piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Art review: Will Cotton at Michael Kohn Gallery" (link here) contains the following:

Cotton’s name is often uttered in the same breath as Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, painters who also emerged in the '90s with work that flaunted its political incorrectness in regard to the female nude. Yuskavage and Currin undermine erotic conventions in their own idiosyncratic ways, while Cotton merely plays into them in a manner that’s more pedestrian than provocative. In a catalogue essay for Cotton’s previous show here, in 2005, art historian Robert Rosenblum posits that the opposing poles of avant-garde and kitsch (famously articulated by Clement Greenberg) merge in these saccharine visions, but to me, the paintings look only backward, not forward. Cheesecake has been replaced by cupcakes, as per the gastronomic trend, and the subjects’ girly, cutesy sex appeal now disingenuously credits itself as post-feminist. None of Cotton’s choices speaks of subversion or criticality, and his rococo froth is only minimally clever. Exhausting familiar sexist correspondences between women and fantasy, desire, indulgence and consumption, the work exploits a single gimmick to the point of sugar shock.

So she states that some people link Cotton to Yuskavage (crude autoerotic images of women) and Currin (gross, cartoon-like exaggerations of female anatomy); I see no connection at all. As for Ollman, just why must (by implication) art be tied to "subversion or criticality" to be considered worthwhile? To me, this attitude, along with slavery to political correctness and other foibles, is a major defect in the mindset of postmodernist art.

Yes, Cotton's paintings lack "serious" themes and psychological "depth." But they're extremely well crafted and fun to look at (for some of us, anyway). That said, I hope that Cotton has a few paintings hidden away in the storage area of his studio that place those gorgeous gals (and other figures) in real world settings as a test of his skills.

Another thought: Those 19th century paintings of odalisques and harem scenes were, in their way, as fantastical as Cotton's candy-related settings. In all cases, the artist was seeking an excuse to show off his skills for depicting female beauty. So Cotton can be seen as following in a time-honored fine-arts tradition.

Todd White: SpongeBob to Party Time

Todd White worked on graphic character development in the early days of the SpongeBob SquarePants animated cartoon television program. Then he went on to an apparently successful career making satirical cartoon-like paintings.

I've been noticing his work in galleries in California's arty, affluent Carmel-by-the-Sea for several years now, and the current issue of Carmel magazine (a locally-focused glossy magazine that appears quarterly or thereabouts) contained this article about him which inspired me to write this post.

A sketchy Wikipedia article on White is here, and the biography on his web site here.

White's images are distinctive and can be witty. But they perhaps are best taken in small doses -- something true for the works of many artists who make numerous paintings of similar subjects in a consistent style. For a large dose of White's paintings, here is a page of examples on his web site. And below is a sampling plucked from various Internet sites:

Gallery

Set 'Em Up Joe

Writers Block

Drinking Boas
Many of White's paintings are bar scenes which gives him license to depict loostened emotions and behavior.

Heaven Beside You

Ballads and Bruises
These two paintings edge slightly closer to straight-up representational depiction. I wonder what would result if White dropped the cartoonishness once in a while.

While I'm perfectly willing to change my mind as time goes on, at this point I don't consider White to be a fine arts painter, his gallery presence aside. Rather, I think of him as someone who could have made a splendid career as a cartoonist for the likes of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair in the 1925-1940 era. Being born 80 years after his time, he has done a good job of surviving in an era not quite suited for him.

Molti Ritratti: Otto v. Bismarck by Lenbach

The "Molti Ritratti" set of posts usually deals with views of a single person as painted by several artists. But this time, I'm pulling a semi-switcheroo. It's still a case of a single subject, but this time all the paintings are by the same artist.

The subject is Otto von Bismarck who more than anyone else can be said to have created the German Empire from a scattering of lesser states. The artist is Franz Seraph von Lenbach (1836-1904) who was an important and successful Munich School painter. A plaza in the city bears his name and his house is now an important museum. A major collection of Lenbach works in the United States can be found here.

So why did Lenbach paint so many portraits of Bismarck? (I forget when and where and how many, but once I came upon an estimated number, probably somewhat greater than a dozen. Seems to me that source or perhaps another mentioned that Bismarck did pose for Lenbach, but that Lenbach also made extensive use of reference photos to supplement the sittings. This seems to make sense, but keep a grain of salt handy.)

When I was in the army, someplace in each unit's facilities would be a chain-of-command photographic portrait collection starting with the President and working down through the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Army, Army Chief of Staff, commanding general of the army to which the unit was assigned, various unit commanders, perhaps a post commander and so forth. This sort of thing is found in many kinds of government agencies in the USA and probably elsewhere; it's what bureaucrats do.

I don't know that German bureaucrats and officials in the late 19th century did. Yes, photography was available, but it seems likely that someone as important as the Kaiser or his Chancellor should deserve more than just a photo. Which is one possible reason for Lenbach's Bismarck commissions. No doubt some such commissions were from nobles or major political figures. But lacking a catalogue raisonné for Lenbach, it can be troublesome to locate all of his Bismarck portraits and their provenance starting points.

Gallery

I find it interesting how much variety Lenbach was able to introduce in the form of costuming and even poses. No doubt this was influenced by what sort of commission he was working under. Even so, some near-duplicates are known to exist: the text in this link to the Walters Art Museum notes that the Baltimore painting is like one in Munich's Lenbachhaus.

Paul-Albert Besnard: Adventuresome Careerist

Paul-Albert Besnard (1849-1934) was French turn of the 20th century artist who gained most of the important Establishment honors while being ever-so-slightly adventuresome in his style of painting. For some background on this, his Wikipedia entry is here.

I had never heard of him.

No doubt that was partly because, like most largely traditional painters of his time, he became an unperson once the Modernist Establishment came to the academic and art-critical fore. Still, in the more than six years I've been blogging about art, I've spent a lot of time reading art history and biographies of artists. Plus, I've visited the Musée d'Orsay and other important museums with good 1850-1920 era collections. And still, Besnard's name and art never stuck in my mind.

According to the link above, Besnard paid attention to the various modernist movement of his time, starting with Impressionism, and borrowed a bit here and there while backing somewhat away from his academic training. The same could be said for many other contemporaneous artists whose names are better known today. Where Besnard stands out is that he was able to gain all sorts of official recognition up to and including a seat in the Académie française

Here are examples of his work.

Gallery

Garnet Joseph, Viscount Wolseley - 1880

La Parisienne - 1885

Madame Roger Jourdain - 1886

The Eclipse - 1888

Madame Georges Rodenbach - 1897

Decoration for a ceiling

Actually, Besnard was pretty good, as nearly as I can tell from viewing digitized images instead of actual paintings. His style varied over time, and his paintings are more intellectually stimulating than purely decorative alternatives would have been. One gripe I have is that he tended to suppress facial detail in places (note some of the figures in the final image above). Most viewers, I believe, want to see a face with recognizable details rather than blurred-over eyes and so forth.