Santa Barbara: Smaller Museum, Useful Collection

Some museums are more comprehensive than others. Nevertheless, some specialization is necessary due to inevitable budgetary limitations. And then there is the factor of donations of art over the years.

Other specialization is voluntary. For example, New York's Museum of Modern Art, as its name states, focuses on modernism in its various guises. And the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York set in motion a de-acquisition program a few years ago in order to focus on art of the recent past (scroll down in the link for more information).

I suspect most art museums fall into the former category with some added policy steering by whoever is running things at any given time. The result of all this is a museum's character as perceived by visitors. For instance, the largest art museum in my neck of the woods is the Seattle Art Museum. The downtown building has some paintings from 1500-1700, a lot of modernist art and a decent collection of art by Northwest "mystic" painters such as Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. What is almost completely missing is 19th and very early 20th century art, though some bequests might improve matters eventually. The Portland Art Museum down the freeway in Oregon is much stronger for that period.

Another west coast museum in an even smaller metropolitan area that has some nice late 19th and early 20th century paintings is the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, described in the link. Its web site is here, a link to its European collection is here and the American collection link is here.

The collection links are worth exploring because they contain thumbnail images of many (most? all?) the works in each collection; I saw a number of these recently while visiting Santa Barbara. To me the most impressive work that I don't illustrate below is William Merritt Chase's portrait of his wife, a large painting that might or might not be finished -- detailing other than the face is somewhat sketchy.

Here is a sampling of items in the collection. Aside from the Monet, none are well-known, but they provide viewers a decent idea as to what some famous artists were doing.

Gallery

The Manhattan Club (Stewart Mansion) by Childe Hassam - c.1891

Steaming Streets by George Bellows - 1908

Les bles murs by Jules Bastien-Lepage - 1884

View of Paris from the Trocadedro by Berthe Morisot - 1872

Waterloo Bridge by Claude Monet - 1900

Notre Dame Dorée by Maurice Utrillo - 1911

2nd Blog Birthday

Today marks two years since the first post of this blog appeared.

The start was slow, daily pageview tallies were in the 40-80 range for the first six months. But the pace picked up and now pageview counts are nicely in the 1,000-1,500 range (viewing drops off around any Saturday) and the cumulative amount as of this posting is about 360,000.

It's getting to the point where I'll allow advertising. That will make both Google and my wife happy and will help subsidize the research that goes into many of the posts you read here.

So a hearty thank you to all you readers, be you regulars or occasionals, for motivating me to keep the blog rolling.

In the Beginning: Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 - 1912
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) painted little after completing the iconic work shown above. Instead, he focused on playing chess, advising art collectors and creating non-art assemblages that he claimed were art, setting the stage for all that wonderful Postmodernism we've been subjected to for the past 50 years.

But his past, those pre-"Nude" days, are largely terra incognita so far as Standard Narrative Art History is concerned. Perhaps that's because it might damage Duchamp's reputation if

this image was widely known and associated with his name.

What you see is a detail of the painting below.

Portrait d'Yvonne Duchamp-Villon née Bon - 1907
I spotted it recently while visiting the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.

Roadside Encounters: California, Winter 2012

I like to travel by car. I've driven in every state of the USA except Alaska. And I've driven in a number of countries in western Europe. (Though not in central or eastern Europe: I worry about encountering a "Danger, Bridge Out" sign written in languages I don't know such as Hungarian or the Slavic ones.) I even drove a jeep once in Korea many years ago when children played in the streets and much of the traffic was by oxcarts. But I let Sergeant Kim do all the driving after that because I was afraid I'd kill someone.

Car travel allows one to see a good deal of local detail while covering reasonably long distances in a day if need be. And it's usually easy to pull over to get a good look at something interesting.

Below are a few things I came across while traveling in California last winter.

Gallery

Senator Theatre, Chico, California
The Senator was built in 1928 when Art Deco or Moderne was the rage. Actually, the most Deco feature is the tower -- the roof is typical California tile and those arches at street level also hark more to Spanish Colonial than Deco.

1930s Packard - Chico, California
Not far away I noticed this late-1930s Packard with a nicely restored custom body. It is used by a nearby hotel.

City Hall - Nevada City, California
Nevada City is in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The city hall's Art Deco style is somewhat out of synch with the rest of the streetscape, yet charming to look at. The link suggests that it was a 1930s New Deal funded structure.

On side of shop, Malibu, California
Malibu is an affluent coastal strip city that's home to surfers and entertainment industry personalities. The sign shown above is probably meant to be humorous; well, that's the way I took it.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism

Although there might be some earlier instances, abstract painting entered the artistic scene with a rush shortly after 1910. This occurred in Europe, though American artists were part of the abstract pack, even proclaiming their own "ism."

The "ism" was Synchromism and the artists were Morgan Russell (1886-1953) and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) whose Wikipedia entry is here and other biographical information is here. In the present posting, I deal with Macdonald-Wright.

Synchromism itself is rather hard to pin down, as this Wikipedia entry suggests. Its theoretical basis seems to have music as its model and is an attempt to analogize its scales, harmonies and so forth with respect to colors in paintings. As a movement, Synchromism was pretty much over by 1920, though for a while it had influenced other artists including Thomas Hart Benton who is better known for his American Scene works. In any case, art history currently regards it as a minor movement: of the two books on my bookshelf listing art movements, one mentions Synchromism and the other does not.

Macdonald-Wright was interviewed for an oral history project when in his early 70s: the transcript is here. Below are some remarks taken from it. Besides Synchromism, he notes that Americans were considered barbarians in Europe and expresses the opinion that Picasso was not a good artist.

The link includes the following statement: "Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 1964 Apr. 13-Sept. 16, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution." Tags are SM for Macdonald-Wright and BH for the interviewer, Betty Lochrie Hogue.


* * * * *
BH: I wanted to ask you more about Morgan Russell and the Synchromy movement. It has often been compared to Orphism. Would you care to comment on that?

SM: It has nothing to do with Orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of Synchromism of the Bernheim Jeune exhibition of 1913, or of the Nue [sic] Kunst Salon Exhibition in Munich of the same year would realize that we poked fun at Orphism and at Delaunay in spite of the fact the Delaunay was a good friend of mine. But the artists of that time did that. We had nothing whatever to do with it.... They linked us up with it for a very simple reason, which I think every American who has been to Europe and has spent any time thinking about what happened to him over there would recognize. And that is, that we were Americans and ipso facto if we were Americans we were barbarians. And ipso facto, if we were barbarians, we couldn't do anything original and naturally being in France where the gods of art had their being, we would have to be some way influenced by the French. So we were put in under that and in that catalogue we stated very specifically in the first lines of it that we called ourselves Synchromists in order that we not be dragged into a movement of which we had no possible relationship at all.

BH: About the only similarity was they were both moving toward abstraction?

SM: They were both color. Delaunay had a very delicate sense of color, a very charming sense of color. Delaunay was probably right in the French tradition of its most magnificent decorative quality, just as Braque was afterward. But I consider Delaunay, in spite of our arguments (and we've had even fisticuffs at different meetings with Delaunay; we liked each other very much) -- I considered Delaunay and Braque to be the two greatest men of that particular movement. I don't consider Picasso to be a great artist in any sense of the word.

[Morgan] Russell and I both studied with a man by the name of Tudor Harte in Paris. He was an Englishman, perfectly stark-raving mad, a man very much interested in color. The three of us (that is Tudor Harte, Russell and I) were experimenting in color which we worked on from (you might call it) a chrome psychological basis.... He [Russell] was a man who had a great --, what should I say? -- intuitive grasp of color possibilities. He himself painted, but he was probably the worst painter who ever lived. And he couldn't use his own theories at all, although they were, in the main, pretty solidly established. He worked it by relating the color spectrum of the 12 notes to the chromatic scale on the piano; and from that he would separate by interval -- the same interval would separate the piano that produces diatonic scale.

That's what Tudor Harte considered he was doing. Making a scientific variation on certain theories of Helmholtz's. Only he thought he went still further than Helmholtz by -- what shall I say -- making it available so people could make practical application of color from the standpoint of painting and harmony.

BH: This certainly was important to you and Russell in your painting because it was shortly after this that you propounded Synchromism, wasn't it?

SM: Yes. Well, 2 or 2 years after that, yes.


* * * * *
Here are examples of Macdonald-Wright's work from various points in his career:

Wright at the unveiling of his Santa Monica, California library mural - August 25, 1935

Abstraction on Spectrum (Organization 5) - c.1914-17
A pure Synchromist painting.

Airplane Synchromy - 1920
Here non-abstract elements appear.

Earth Synchromy - c.1925

Portrait of a Woman - 1925

Portrait of Riza Royce - 1932
Note the whiff of Synchromism in the background.

Oriental Synchromy

Portrait of Willard Huntington Wright - 1913-14
Wright's brother who is best known by his pen-name S.S. Van Dyne of the Philo Vance detective novel series. This painting was done while Macdonald-Wright was in the thick of his early Synchromism.

Raigo - 1955
A later abstract painting in the Synchromist spirit.

So far as I am concerned, abstract paintings are essentially decorative despite what the movement's apologists might claim. In that context, I find Macdonald-Wright's purely Synchromist works pleasing to look at, having nice, pretty colors. Things go downhill in paintings where he tries to graft Synchromism with Cubism ("Airplane") or representational elements. I think the Synchromism simply gets in the way, not enhancing the visual experience as its theory would have it.

The New Salvador Dali Museum

I'm writing this near Tampa Bay on the west coast of Florida while visiting friends. I've never been here before, so sightseeing has been the priority. One site was the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg.

The collection is reputed to be the best outside Spain, assembled by a wealthy Dalí fan over a period of decades starting in the early 1940s; click on the link for details. What's new is the building, which opened 11:11 a.m. on 11 January 2011 -- for any numerologists out there, that translates to 11-11-1-11-11.

The collection includes a few of Dalí's huge later works. But what interested me was how many paintings there were from his teenage years and elsewhere in his pre-Surrealist days. I consider the museum worth a visit if you're a Dalí fan or even just somewhat interested in him and his work. Be aware that the admission price is a little on the high side, 19 dollars.

Photography was not permitted on the gallery floor, so what you see below is what I could take.

Gallery

Museum exterior with Dalí signature

Other views of the exterior

Dalíesque display between the gift shop, café and ticket desk

Chauffeur wearing diver's helmet
Dalí once tried to give a talk dressed in a diving suit and nearly suffocated.

"Mermaid" in back seat
The passenger compartment is filled with a plastic "shower stall" of sorts where from time to time water sprays down on the mermaid mannequin. Thanks to the "shower stall" plastic and the car windows, there are layers of reflection of posters on the opposite wall mostly obscuring the mannequin. Quelle Surrealisme!!

What They Say and What We See

I don't get many unsolicited emails. Where I can, I usually unsubscribe. A few sources I let linger on for a while due to cussedness or idle curiosity on my part. I recently received one from somebody named Aron Packer who apparently operates an art gallery in Chicago; he was touting an upcoming show. I was about to zap it when the thought struck me that I was being handed a nice bit of blog material -- and if there's one thing a blogger needs, it's new material to blog about. The big, fat juicy blog fodder? -- some notes about artists in that upcoming show.

One of that things that induces a gag-reaction from me is arty talk, either verbal or written. The worst is art-gush, and even long descriptions and analyses of paintings can something elevate my reaction from glazed eyes to incipient gag. I'm of the school of thought shared by Harley Earl, the legendary creator of styling at General Motors, who shut styling staff members up by announcing that if a design or design feature required explanation, it couldn't be of any use in a production car; its merit had be be visually obvious.

This being an art and design blog, I have to write about the images I display. But I try to keep things short, dwelling mostly on technical matters and minimizing or ignoring social or psychological factors that might (or might not) have driven the artist to do what he did.

And I try to avoid the gushy, pretentious verbiage of the kind that Packer included in his email. Though I understand that he was engaging in marketing to a target audience of art critics and other writers on art who probably do not share the biases I just mentioned.

Here is what was written about Paul Lamantia:

"Of all the strategies, notions, and approaches to modern art, for Lamantia there was never a choice, but a desire to follow a certain direction, that came in the form of an obsession. That obsession was with his dreams and visions, and the need to record and communicate his feelings about them. It is difficult because the work is always changing. It is in a constant state of flux where narrative and psychological possibilities are set in motion and clairvoyant and hallucinatory occurrences can become painted realities. There is no fixed approach to these aesthetic problems Lamantia has created for himself. The works are structured in a subjective state within certain compulsive confines meant to draw the viewer into the dream. It is not always possible to make the illusion accessible to the viewer. The intention is not to illustrate, but to translate them into something real in the form of meaningful images. There is no preconceived planning of visual invention or execution of materials. This method creates artistic challenges and needs that may only be satisfied by exploring new ways to express one's vision and to express one's aesthetic problems. To base the work on conceptual or formal values would be a misinterpretation. The paintings and drawings are meant to be introspective events and should be experienced on an emotional level."

Below is an example of Lamantia's work I found on the Web.

Other examples look fairly similar, so I suspect that the business about dreams, visions, obsessions and much of the rest is simply marketing blather from the point of view of the artist (who would likely strongly deny it was marketing blather). My take is that the guy simply likes to paint that sort of semi-surrealist stuff and has evolved a style that sells well enough to for him to usefully supplement any retirement income following a 25-year stint as a public schools art teacher.

Next, Packer writes about Brett Eberhardt:

"The imagery in Eberhardt’s paintings invite the type of reflection that occurs when one slowly observes one’s surroundings and realizes the human activity, both intentional and unintentional, that led to the current physical state of an interior space and the objects within it. It can be a beautiful thing, this combination of intentional and unintentional actions accumulated over time. The result of use and wear can be unpredictable, even mysterious, making what was once a plain white wall an abundantly rich surface and subject. This change that occurs over time and activity have a lot in common with the sequence of events that take place when building a painting. His painting process starts as a very controlled deliberate act, but over time becomes an embrace of all that painting has to offer, including those unexpected occurrences that can be so crucial to the life of a painting. Although he is after a convincing rendering of the subject, Eberhardt is not interested in creating a slick artificial surface or a hyper realistic image. The construction of the image with paint comes at the forefront and serves as a compelling record of his activity and process, a combination of intention, accident, deconstruction and reconstruction. It is important that these images are constructed with this material, not simply to elevate the subject, but for the discovery and possibilities of the medium used to construct the image."

Above is an example of Eberhardt's work. The text strikes me as pretty much an elaborate and dramatized discussion of the process most painters go through when executing a painting -- hardly a struggle of cosmic dimensions in most cases. After all, Eberhardt seems to be basically painting still lifes of one kind or another. All the verbal drama seems to be just more marketing.

Please note that I'm all in favor of marketing art and artists. I also happen to think that something less extravagant than what I quoted above ought to work just about as well as Packer's verbal pyrotechnics.