Sir William Orpen: Portraits, Women and War

I had hoped to do a posting on William Orpen (1878-1931) several years ago when I was part of the 2Blowhards blogging team, but co-blogger Friedrich von Blowhard claimed dibs on Orpen. Time passed and 2Blowhards closed down as a going concern (though as of when I write this, it can still be accessed) and Friedrich had never got around to doing that Orpen post.

Orpen's Wikipedia entry is here if you want biographical information. His background was somewhat unconventional, being a Protestant born in the Dublin area and sympathetic to Irish independence. His service as a war artist, as was true of many others in that work, was psychologically upsetting, though his effort led to his knighthood. Orpen died age 52 after a several months stay in a nursing home. It is suggested in this book (page 43) that Orpen was suffering second-stage syphilis.

His work was uneven, some paintings being sketchy with an expressionist overtone. On the other hand, his portrait work (aside from a number of quirky self-portraits) was usually very good. This was reflected in his earnings, which in the 1920s, were on the order of a million dollars a year in 2012 money.

Orpen's works are seldom seen here in the United States. A few years ago I did come across two portraits at the Fioli Mansion on the peninsula below San Francisco. They were nicely done.

Here are some examples of his work.

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Zonnebeke - 1918
One of the paintings he did as a war artist.

A Bloomsbury Family - 1907-09
Note the funny expressions on the faces of the children. The area on the lower right is cracking badly; click to enlarge.

Self-Portrait - "Ready to Start" - 1917
This apparently was painted around the time Orpen was to set off for the Western Front. For some reason, although he was a master draftsman, Orpen was almost never able to depict the British helmet correctly. This is one of his better efforts.

Self-Portrait - 1924
The regress of the mirror images is an interesting stunt, but I'm including this image because the palette suggests some of the paints he was using.

Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart - 1919
Carton de Wiart was a supremely colorful character as his Wikipedia entry indicates. He lost an eye and an arm in combat, was awarded the Victoria Cross, was a prisoner of war in Italy, represented Churchill in China and told off Mao Tse-Tung, among many other exploits. Orpen's portrait make Carton seem deceptively mild despite the small scowl.

Augustus John - 1900
Born the same year as Orpen, a fellow Slade School student and equal or superior as a painter of portraits, John also out-ranked Orpen as a seducer of women.

Grace Knewstub - 1907
Grace later became Orpen's long-neglected wife.

Gertrude Stanford
I'm not sure when this was painted, though the sitter's hairdo and clothing suggest the 1920s.

Mrs. St. George - c.1912
Evelyn St. George was Orpen's long-time mistress. Her social connections help advance his career.

Santa Barbara Biltmore: Inside Story

I sometimes wonder how many modernist hotels can be called lovable. Some are enjoyable because they function well or perhaps are in a really nice setting. But even though I might have fondness for them, I can't say I love them.

Certain older hotels are a different story, and it has to do with their architecture and interior decoration. One thing that was largely lost once modernism became the religion of architecture was a connection to deep levels of human psychology; pure geometric forms of glass and metal do not suggest comforting shelter to the extent traditional architecture does.

To illustrate the non-modernist side of this coin, consider the Santa Barbara Biltmore. Well, that's not its actual name: it is actually the Four Seasons Resort The Biltmore Santa Barbara. And it's not actually in Santa Barbara, but in Montecito, a ritzy town just east of there.

The hotel website is here and the Wikipedia entry here. As Wikipedia indicates, the hotel was renovated a few years ago with an eye to restoring the Spanish Colonial style building as reasonably as possible to its appearance at its 1927 opening.

Almost every time we drive into the Santa Barbara area, my wife insists that we stop by the Biltmore (most locals don't use the Four Seasons name), and I put up no resistance to the request.

Below are some photos I took of some of the the public areas during our latest visit.

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The guy you see is Yr Faithful Blogger, camera in firing position.

Here is a direct shot of the hallway shown in the mirror above. In the far distance is the check-in desk with a map mural behind it.

Through the lounge window is the main dining area. Originally it was a garden, but it was roofed over many years ago. The recent restoration resulted in changes to the dining area, but not reversion to garden status.

The same lounge from a different angle; the window to the dining area is at the right.

The two photos above show some of the objets d'art found in the lounge.

Objects at the end of the hall shown in the first photos. In the mirror can be glimpsed the concierge desk and a mural of early Santa Barbara.

J. Allen St. John and the Worlds of Burroughs

The illustration shown above is from the 1921 publication of "Tarzan the Terrible" by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). I remember it from my childhood. My father had come across a copy of the book which he read as a boy. I recall it being exciting and scary in parts: would Tarzan survive the scrape he was in?

The illustrations printed on slick paper were placed here and there amongst the text. I suppose I must have thought that they were okay, but incidental to the story. Still, upon seeing the one where Tarzan's Jane is being carried off by Mo-sar, recognition instantly clicked on and memories flooded in.

The Illustrator was J. (James) Allen St. John (1872-1957). A short Wikipedia entry for him is here and another short biographical note here.

St. John received formal art training and made a living painting portraits and other works until he began producing cover and interior illustrations for Burroughs' hugely successful adventure books about Tarzan, John Carter of Mars and others. His Burroughs work was not exclusive: he did not illustrate either the first Tarzan or first Carter books, but did most of the rest. Late in the game Burroughs, who liked St. John's work, brought in his own son to provide covers and other illustrations. In the meanwhile, St. John taught art and painted cover illustrations for the "pulp" magazine trade.

St. John's works were influential for other adventure and fantasy illustrators. However, since around the 1950s, most practitioners have taken the Frank Frazetta route of highly exaggerated depictions of humans. People in St. John illustrations were usually normal looking, though definitely fit.

Below are some examples of St. John's work for Burroughs books.

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Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar - cover art - 1918

AT the Earth's Core - cover - 1922

Pellucidar - cover art - 1923

The Chessmen of Mars - cover art - 1922

The Warlord of Mars - cover - 1919

My take? First, illustration fashions of the times need to be factored in along with the subject matter. Around 1920, cover art was usually done in oil paints, permitting the artist to create fuzzy edges and be temped to overwork the surfaces of objects (including people) being depicted. St. John did all this and reproductions of his paintings often strike me as having too-fussy brushwork, though this isn't very evident viewing the small-scale images above. Perhaps the actual paintings, being larger, look better. Nevertheless, this style of painting was acceptable for illustrators in the period 1910-25 when St. John was doing his best-known work.

On the other hand, I find most current fantasy illustration to be too mannered in a superhero groupthink vein. No serious improvement over St. John's pioneering work, in other words. A few contemporary illustrators seem to be operating in the middle ground between St. John and the Photoshop set. I need to give all this more thought and perhaps write more posts on adventure/fantasy illustration.

Sergei Bongart: Forceful Painter, Forceful Teacher

Only because the timing fell into place given my various other commitments (including a lot of travel the past few months), I recently was able to attend a couple of free painting demonstrations at the Daniel Smith paints factory / art supplies store in south Seattle's industrial zone.

Both demonstrators said that they were instructed in the ways of something called Russian Impressionism. The term seems slippery, if a short Google session is any guide. For example, one hit dealt with a book dealing with Russian painters influenced by the French Impressionists; presumably this took place as early as the late 1870s. Another hit was for a Phoenix-area gallery with a collection of Soviet non- Socialist Realist paintings of 1940-1960 vintage. A third hit was to this page, which seems pretty comprehensive and dates the movement to 1930-1980.

On a more concrete level, the demonstrators had the habit of tucking a roll of paper towels under one arm to facilitate quick brush-cleaning. This practice was used by Sergei Bongart (1918-1985) and apparently continued by a number of his former students, one of whom taught the guy who did the first demonstration.

Bongart's Wikipedia entry isn't very useful, so check out this link to his widow's Web site for more biographical information.

The day after attending the second demonstration I was visiting the shop at the Frye Art Museum and noticed the book whose cover is shown above. Its Amazon link is here, but for once Amazon's price (about $150 per copy at the time of this posting) was greater than the shop's $95 tag (the publisher's price). Even though the cost was a lot more than I like to spend for any single book, I bought a copy.

It's a pretty good book. Plenty of illustrations and information about Bongart's life and teaching; besides selling his paintings he seems to have been a demanding, yet popular art teacher, having his own school.

Where the book falls down is the part dealing with his escape from the Soviet Union to the West. Bongart was born in Kiev in the Ukraine half a year before Lenin's Revolution. He seems to have been a prodigy and so studied art in the main Kiev art school. The Ukraine was quickly overrun by the German armies in the summer of 1941 and Bongart found himself behind the German lines for the next couple of years. Not explained is how a healthy 23-year-old hadn't already been conscripted by the Red Army. The book's chronology of how he left Kiev and wound up in Bavaria at the end of the war confused me completely. Passages treating the sequence of his dealings with American, German and Russian soldiers and officials do not jibe with my understanding of how the war unfolded 1943-45. This had little to do with his art, but I found it very annoying because the story would have been interesting on the personal level had it been related coherently.

Since this is an art blog, let's move on the Bogart's paintings which, like his teachings, are forceful.

Gallery

Bongart with actress Jeanne Crain - 1962
Bongart was a gregarious guy who made friends easily -- including people in the movie business, starting with James Cagney.

Still Life - c.1960
Bongart believed that if one could paint still lifes (especially those containing variations of the same basic color), one could paint anything. So his students usually started in the studio with a carefully composed still life setup before them.

Autumn Scene
He painted lots of landscapes, but I couldn't find many good examples on the Web.

Man with Turban - c.1965

Man with Cigar - c.1961

Girl with Red Shawl - c.1975
Bongart painted commissioned portraits, but didn't enjoy such work. The examples above might have been from demonstrations or maybe were simply recreational works.

Bongart liked to exaggerate color and paint in an athletic manner, thrusting his paint-loaded brush to the exact (in his mind) place where its color would relate to or modify those already on the canvas or panel. The resulting works tend to be a bit too sketchy for my taste, but I respect them because they are usually interesting to view and incorporate more accurate drawing than many modernists utilized. Bongart was no fan of modernism, by the way; I'll probably post some of his remarks on the subject later.

Mihaly Munkacsy, Yet Another Expat Hungarian

The small image above (it's the largest I could find with proper coloring) is of a painting called The Prisoner (1869-73) that I regularly encounter in Seattle's Frye Art Museum. It's by Mihaily Munkácsy (1844-1900; born Michael Lieb). His Wikipedia entry is here and describes how a version of the prison scene (it has several alternative titles) launched his career. Like Philip de Laszlo the portrait painter and Zsa Zsa Gabor the actress and personality, Munkácsy had to leave his homeland to solidify his career. In his case, it was Paris where he married well but died from the effects of syphilis complicated by depression and mental illness.

A selection of his paintings is below. Munkácsy usually painted in a strong, painterly manner that was not academic, yet wasn't really influenced by Impressionism or other modernist movements of his times. Also note the staging of some of the paintings. I use the word "staging" deliberately because the characters portrayed are arranged as they might be for a theater drama -- linearly and facing the audience to some degree or in profile; few backs are seen.

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The Convict - 1869-73
This is from the National Gallery of Hungary, a sketchier version of the painting at the Frye.

The Condemned Cell II - 1880
A later, greatly elaborated version of the prison scene shown in the images above.

The Blind Milton Dictating "Paradise Lost" to His Daughters

A Willing Helper

Christ Before Pilate - 1881

Head of a Pharisee - 1881

Woman With Brush Wood - 1873

Portrait of Princess Soutzo - 1889

In the Beginning: Jean-Gabriel Domergue

Jean-Garbiel Domergue (1889-1962) claimed to be the inventor of the pinup illustration. Apparently he never saw covers of American girlie magazines of the late 1920s, but maybe he had another criterion for staking his claim. In any case, the image above shows his version of a pretty girl that had evolved by the 1940s; by that point, nearly every female face he painted looked pretty much like what you see. Skeptics can Google on his name and then select Images if you need more evidence.

If I'm sounding grouchy it's because I do not like Domergue's evolved, standardized image. What makes me even more grouchy is that some of his earlier work was pretty nice -- very 1920s. Shall we take a look?

Gallery

La danseuse du corde - 1925

Emmy Magliani poster

Pierrette au masque - 1928

Woman with Greyhounds - 1930

Germaine-Yvonne Frank, ballet dancer - 1931

Femme assoupie

Femme en noir a Venice

Cannes poster - 1939
Here Domergue's ultimate style can be seen emerging.

Molti Ritratti: Circe

As an artist, what's not to like about the subject of Circe, a beautiful enchantress whose hobby is turning men into animals (some women might object to the "turning" part). Adding more dramatic spice, the Homeric character Ulysses and his crew arrive at Circe's place during the course of the Odyssey and he and Circe square off. For a more detailed, scholarly account of Circe, click here.)

Depictions of Circe, with or without Ulysses, began centuries ago and continue up to the present age of digital illustration. The selection below is centered in Victorian times but includes several outliers.

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By Francesco Maffei - c.1650

By George Romney - "Lady Hamilton as Circe" - c.1782
Emma Hamilton while living in Naples entranced Lord Nelson when his squadron patrolled the Mediterranean. The painter Romney had also fallen under her spell and this painting of her as Circe is one of many he made of her.

By Wright Barker - 1889

By Gustave Adolphe Mossai - 1904

By Franz von Stuck - "Tilla Durieux as Circe" - 1913

By George Grosz - 1927
Grosz is perhaps best known for his crudely done politically-themed works. This one is unusual because he introduced a classical theme to the normally contemporary setting of his objects of scorn.

Now for my current favorites...

By Charles Hermans - 1881
A contemporary (for the artist) Circe setting with the Ulysses stand-in getting the worse of it.

By J.W. Waterhouse "Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses" - 1892

By J.W. Waterhouse - "Circe Invidiosa"
Waterhouse painted at least one more Circe, but it lacks the drama of these fine images that I consider among his best.