Multi-Colored Cars

For quite a few years now, the typical new car comes painted in a single color. But from the 1920s through the 1950s and even beyond, many cars came painted with two or more colors, two being the most common variety by far. They were called "two-tone paint jobs" back in those days.

The purpose of using more than one color to paint a car is purely aesthetic, even cosmetic. Color choices might make a car appear a little taller or shorter or even longer, depending upon where the colors were applied. Or features such as fenders or aspects of body shape might be highlighted.

Why did two-toning fall out of favor. I don't know for sure, but offer two reasons that make sense to me. One reason had to do with a reaction by American automobile stylists against the excesses of the late 1950s when tail fins sprouted and three-tone paint jobs appeared. In the 1960s car design became more restrained and single-tone paint helped reinforce the new seriousness.

Another reason, more appropriate to the 1970s and later, was related to the movement to improve efficiency and lower the cost of building cars. In the 1950s, for example, car makers offered many options that a buyer could select or reject -- radio, air conditioning, type of transmission, powered versus hand-crank windows, bumper guards, and many more including choice of paint from a list of currently available colors. The number of such options reached the point that the number of possible combinations became astronomically large. Potentially each car on the assembly line would differ in some way from all the others. This was abetted by the fact that many buyers ordered a car with the exact set of options they wanted rather than accepting a car available on the dealer's lot.

A practical result of all this customization was a decrease in quality because workers had to vary their tasks according to the whims on a car's options tag. And it was difficult to make sure that required parts were available when needed.

By the 1980s American manufacturers were following the Japanese practice of offering a limited selection of options packages. One result was that a buyer usually couldn't get his exact set of desired options when selecting a car. Another was that manufacturers could build vehicles more efficiently with better quality results.

By eliminating two-tone color schemes, car companies greatly reduced the number of combinations moving along assembly lines. Consider: Assume four accessory packages and ten available colors -- that's 40 combinations. Adding an unlimited selection of two colors from the list would result in hundreds of combinations.

That said, let's harken back to the days when multicolor cars were common and take a look:

Gallery

1954 Pontiac

1947 Buick
These are examples of two-toning during its post- World War 2 heyday. The Buick has its top's color extending down a raised section of the hood. The Pontiac's top color does not cover the upper part of the doors, though Chryslers of that vintage had the top color extending down to a chrome strip mounted just below the bottoms of the side windows.

1956 Dodge

1956 Packard Caribbean
Here we have three-tone paint jobs. Actually, these were more limited than one might think; typically the colors were black, an off-white and a bright color of some kind. This prevented ugly color clashes that might make a company's cars look ridiculous and it simplified manufacturing. The Packard shown here is painted white along with two other colors. Most Packard Caribbeans of the 1955 and 1956 models years were like the Dodge, using black, a white and something else.

1933 Studebaker
In the 1920s and early 30s two-tone applications were similar to that of the Studebaker shown here, fenders having a different color than the body -- though the top of the body often shared the accent color of the fenders..

1929 Ruxton

1930 Ruxton
Here are two Ruxton survivors from the 300 or so ever built. These have multi-tone paint jobs, the colors selected and patterns designed by the prolific, highly talented Joseph Urban. The car at the top is in the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, and seems to sport at least four colors. The one below is in the Blackhawk Museum in the San Francisco Bay area and I count six colors on it.

1925 Citroën B12
Finally we have a Citroën with a color scheme by modernist designer Sonia Delaunay. The only photo I can find is in black and white, so I don't know how many colors were used -- at least four or five -- or what they were.

Our Very Own Thomas Kinkade

The photo above is of a Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012) print on a wall of our living room. You are no doubt wondering why it is there and why I'm bothering to write about it.

The reason I'm writing about it is because Kinkade died not long ago, thereby providing a journalistic "hook" for the story of why the print is on our wall.

First, for those not familiar with Kinkade, here is his Wikipedia entry and here is his obituary from The New York Times. The Kinkade organization's site deals with the image here.

Now for the story.

About five years ago my wife and I were staying in Monterey, California. Having checked out of our hotel, I drove up the hill from Cannery Row and then turned left to head through downtown to Highway 1. A block or so later I noticed a large, wooden Victorian style house perched farther up the hill away from the street with its various decorative bits painted in a variety of colors. Near street level was a sign reading "Thomas Kinkade National Archive."

That puzzled me. I knew who Thomas Kinkade was and I knew that the Unites States government has a system of National Archives, but the juxtaposition of his name and archives made no immediate sense. So, spotting an open area along the curb, I parked the car and then we climbed the steps and entered.

As you probably guessed, this "National Archive" was part of Kinkade's vast commercial empire, part sales operation and part gallery. The gallery aspect was interesting in that it contained some original paintings, not just giclée prints. Moreover, not all the paintings featured thatch-roofed cottages with gently glowing windows at twilight. It seems that Kinkade had attended the Art Center College in Pasadena, a top-notch professional school and did a fair amount of plein-air painting with an impressionist touch before and even after he struck gold with his signature style and subject matter. My take at the time was that some of these paintings were pretty good -- I liked them better than his main commercial work -- but they weren't outstanding, either.

Anyway, we toured the "Archive" and before leaving, the young sales guy who was at our heels the entire time mentioned that Kinkade only made one painting in Seattle (we'd told him where we were from). He flipped through one of Kinkade's books and showed it to us. My wife was taken by it because it was a recognizable Seattle scene and ordered a framed print that arrived a few months later.

If you ever visit Seattle you can go to the exact spot where he made the painting. The block at the northwest corner of First Avenue and Pine Street contains two local landmarks one is a hotel called The Inn at the Market (referring to the famous Pike Place Market area down the block). The other is the original store of the Sur La Table kitchenware chain, visible at the right of the painting. If you walk down Pine Street on the right side you will find the entrance to a courtyard leading to the hotel entrance and some shops. Kinkade's spot was two or three yards (metres) out in the street from the courtyard entrance. This put him slightly beyond parked cars, running the risk of being struck by street traffic.

Note one composition error that he could have avoided: a green object to the left of the Public Market sign has its bottom aligning with the West Seattle shoreline in the background.

It's not an image I would have purchased. I'm indifferent to even Kinkade's best work. But since my wife likes it, I'm okay with it.

The Unpretentious Clarence Gagnon

My childish artistic temperament favors dramatic and flashy paintings. Well, not extreme paintings of that kind, but paintings tending in that direction. Despite that, I don't mind quieter paintings, provided that they are interesting and well-done.

That would be the case for many of the works of Clarence Gagnon (1881-1942), a Québecois painter contemporary of the better-known Group of Seven. Rather than abandon civilization for painting sprees in the northern Ontario wilderness as most of the Seven did, Gagnon's preferred inspiration was village and country life along the St. Lawrence River.

A sketchy Wikipedia entry on Gagnon is here and his National Gallery biographical sketch is here.

With few exceptions, Gagnon's paintings dealt with scenes of Québec, this despite spending half his adult life in France. While living in France, he would paint pictures dealing with Québec rather than French scenes.

The images below don't have much flash and dash, but I hope they will interest you.

Gallery

Près de la Bai-Saint-Paul - c.1914

The Ice Bridge, Québec - 1919-20
During severe winters, the St. Lawrence River could freeze over to the point that people, horses and sleds could be supported. This allowed crossing without the need of a boat. (The nearest bridges were far upriver.)

Village in the Laurentian Mountains - 1925

Laurentian Village - c.1924

Horse Racing in Winter, Québec - c.1925

Evening on the North Shore - 1924
The title refers to the north shore of the St. Lawrence River where Bai-Saint-Paul and Gagnon's favorite painting grounds lay.

New Chihuly Museum

Dale Chihuly (born 1941) is probably the most famous living artist sculpting in glass. He happens to be a local boy, born in Tacoma and graduating in Interior Design from the University of Washington's School of Art where we overlapped for a year or so but never met.

Tacoma has had a museum devoted to glass art and some of Chihuly's works for several years. Seattle just got into this act, opening the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum a few days ago. Its web site is here. Chihuly's own web site is here and his Wikipedia entry here.

My knowledge about sculpture of any kind is limited, so I have nothing to say about Chihuly's work. I wasn't even very interested in visiting the new museum, but my wife dragged me in while we were at the Seattle Center (site of the 1962 Century 21 world's fair) for other reasons. I wasn't packing my camera, so the photos below were grabbed from various Internet sites.

Gallery

Flashy photo of museum gallery, a Chihuly work and the Space Needle

Exterior view shortly before opening

Views of some of the exhibits

I think the museum is nicely done. The interior features a number of elaborate works mostly from the early part of his career. Outside is a garden where glass sculptures and plants coexist. My garden-loving wife was highly enthused about the juxtapositions, so I'll take her word for it.

Mabel Alvarez, Borderline Modernist

The fine portrait shown above is a 1923 self-depiction by Mabel Alvarez (1891-1985), aunt of Luis Walter Alvarez (1911-88), winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968.

Her Wikipedia entry is here and another biographical sketch here.

She was born Hawaii when it was a kingdom, but moved to the mainland while young, spending most of her life in California. The biographical notes indicate that she was interested in spiritual matters and the color theories of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the Synchromist painter I discussed here. Apparently she had an affinity with green for a number of years. Alvarez has also been associated with the California Impressionism school, though she did few or no landscape paintings. She is better classed with the Group of Eight, southern California artists who maintained an association from 1921 till 1928.

Alvarez was a modernist of sorts whose paintings made use of the modernist vocabulary to a sometimes greater -- but usually far lesser -- extent. As can be seen below, people portrayed in the paintings seem to be exclusively women.

Gallery

The Italian Model - 1924

Dream of Youth - c.1925
Here Alvarez channels Symbolism.

Anabella
The hair style suggests this was painted in the early 1940s.

Girl Seated in the Garden
I'm guessing this dates from around 1930.

Ladies with Parasols - 1958
A comparatively late painting showing Synchromist influence.

In the Garden - 1925
Aside from the self-portrait at the top, I find this to be the most appealing work.

Portrait of a Woman
Another hard to date painting, but probably from the 1940s.

Self-Portrait - 1945
She would have been about 53 and aging gracefully.

Alvarez is hard to pin down, for me anyway. Most of what I've found on the Internet is pleasing, though I prefer it when images have solidity rather than a flattened Impressionistic character.

Frantisek Kupka: Stylistic Gadfly

Just about any artist aspiring to become a professional faces the task of deciding what style or school to follow. This was particularly difficult for painters of the early 1900s who decided to commit to modernism in general, but faced a bewildering flurry of new schools and movements to choose from. So it was for Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957, Wikipedia entry here).

Kupka was born in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and trained in art in Prague and Vienna before moving to Paris 1894 where his training concluded. He spent the rest of his long life in France. As it happened, his career-defining thirties decade largely coincided with the rise and, in many cases, decline of movements such as Fauvism, Blaue Reiter and Cubism. And in his early forties there was Futurism and the first abstract movements.

What to do?, he might well have asked himself. And his answer was to try as many movements as he could. Below are some examples of his work.

Gallery

Admiration - c.1899
This might have been an illustration because Kupka worked as an illustrator while establishing himself as a painter.

Self-Portrait - 1905
Not a traditional portrait, yet not modernist either. More of an advanced sketch or study. His left arm seems oddly positioned.

Portrait of the Artist with His Wife - completed 1908
A better version can be found on the Internet, but its size in kilobytes is too great to justify. I tried to adjust the colors from a smaller version, but they aren't right. In any case, this paintings seems stylistically a little older than 1908. Compare to the other 1908 painting below.

Lipstick - 1908
Now Kupka is into a mild form of expressionism. A watercolor from the same year, Profil de gigolette, looks even more like something Kees van Dongen might have painted.

Ruban Bleu - 1910
The colors are Fauvist, but the underlying drawing is still representational.

Mme. Kupka Among Verticals - 1911
Pure abstraction began appearing at this time. So Kupka has now almost caught up with the leaders of the avant-garde pack. Except he puts a representation of his wife in the upper-center.

Disks of Newton - 1912
This is in the Orphist/Synchromist mode of abstraction that burst forth around 1912.

Vertical and Diagonal Panes - c.1913
Another early abstraction, but using a different geometrical basis.

The Machine Drill - 1929
Charles Sheeler was starting to create industry-inspired images at about the same time. This Kupka painting indicates movement, so it also can be interpreted as a dying ember of Futurism.

Blowing Blues II - 1936
Kupka painted a number of paintings showing this sort of swirling, curving abstract design from around 1914 until much later in his career. Detours such as "The Machine Drill" seem to have been rare, so far as a Google searches indicate.

Macdonald-Wright's Takedown of 1930s WPA Art

The New Deal era WPA art project and similar government-sponsored employment schemes for artists long ago became something of a sacred matter for many art historians and art followers in general. A number of artists who had reputations at the time or later gained fame participated in the projects. Examples include Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Marsden Hartley and Jackson Pollock (a link to names is here). Many of these projects involved murals on walls of public buildings; an example is shown in the image above (by Jacob Elshin, University Station post office, Seattle - 1939).

Like most other government spending programs of the Great Depression, the arts programs were criticized at the time as wasteful uses of taxpayer money. But that criticism melted away once World War 2 started and the arts programs began to be terminated.

Since I call this blog "Art Contrarian" I thought I might as well present a strongly contrarian view of the art programs that I recently stumbled across. It's a view by an insider who had responsibility for projects in southern California.

That insider was Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) who was one of the first painters to paint in a purely abstract manner. I recently posted about him here. Information about and views of one of Macdonald-Wright's own murals can be found here.

Macdonald-Wright has his say in an oral history interview: the link is
here. You might not agree with his point of view, but he has a strong one and it's pretty entertaining, given the usual solemnity when the subject of art is introduced. I need to add that 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. The SM in the transcript is Macdonald-Wright and BH is Betty Lochrie Hogue, the interviewer. Extracts follow, but note the final exchange:

* * * * *
BH: Do you think that this Project did any good for painting in California at the time?

SM: I think it set back art all over the United States a hundred and fifty years.

BH: You do, really?

SM: I do! I think it was absolutely the worst thing that could possibly have happened.

BH: Why?

SM: Because they got five thousand and one hundred useless, untalented people in the place who went in saying they were artists, and nobody cared because what they wanted to do was to give money away. They had over 5,000 people, and when the Project ended in -- what was it, 1940? I guess it was about 1940 more or less, those people kept right on painting. And vast numbers of those people that you see exhibiting in galleries now are the same people. That's what's the matter with art....

There were competent artists, as I say, in this thing. I had some extremely competent artists here. This Feitelson was one of them, for instance. He's one of the finest draftsmen we have in the country. And the man who was the head of the mosaic department, Albert King, is more than competent. We had very competent men as far as that's concerned. And I immediately made them heads of departments so as to give them a little time to do some of their own work, something of that kind. But the general run of those people would have been better off if they'd starved to death as far as art is concerned. Eddie Cahill, who was the National Director at that time, said to me years afterward . . . . I happened to be back in New York, I think it was in 1955 when I was on my to Paris. I was having dinner with him, and he said, "Well, Stanton, now that this is all over, and it's all over for a long time, fifteen years, what is your real opinion of the Project?" Of course, he was a man who was dedicated to it, he was a sociologically-inclined baby, he was an institutional slave by temperament, a very sweet fellow. I said, "Eddie (his name was Holger but we all called him Eddie), I think it set art back a hundred years." He never spoke to me after that. I never came in contact with him again.

BH: Well a lot of people were actually eating who might not have been at the time . . . .

SM: Well I don't know of anybody who was eating that wouldn't have been that should have been eating at all. I think they would have been much better off and so would the world had they not eaten. I haven't much of the sociologist in me and my heart doesn't bleed very easily for those people. If you had been around there you would have realized what I mean by it. They spent most of their time complaining bitterly because we hadn't gone directly in with Russia . . . .

BH: Oh really!

SM: Most of them were what we would call (due to the law which they passed that nobody can call a person by their name) at that time Communists. They spent most of their time trying to get everybody that wasn't a Communist out of the place and to fill it up with Communists. And from what I hear, and this is not an opinion of mine but, from what I've heard from the National Director, most of the New York Project was made up of those babies. And that doesn't only go for New York but practically every other city, except this one out here. And I had my hands full to keep those people from taking over the whole work. Two or three of them even got to the point where they painted murals and sneaked in a picture of a hammer and sickle here and there on them.

BH: For heavens sake!

SM: And I had people watching those things all the time and I had a brigade of whitewashers there that would go right out and wipe that mural off the wall or cover it up with something. I had to do that how many times. Because at that time the public wasn't as thoroughly inured and used to and indifferent to those Communistic pastimes as it is now. They would welcome it now probably.

.... [W]hen I closed the door on that Project, as far as I was concerned I washed my hands not only of the dirt of Government indoctrination but also of the dirt of most of the pictures that were painted in it.

BH: Well, the fact that the Federal Arts Project gave such an impetus to him [Donald Hord] makes me think of something that you said in this little booklet which you loaned us and which I had microfilmed the other day. It is such an expressive statement. I'd like to read this one sentence you wrote. It is from an address that Mr. Wright made over the radio in Santa Barbara in October of 1941, on the occasion of opening a new gallery under Donald Hord's directorship. You said, "Let us also remove our criticism from out the ages of a spurious and grandeloquent jingoism. Let us recognize that our own consciousness of youthful vigor encouraged by the Federal Arts Project, has without the shadow of a doubt, raised the average standard of American painting. But let us not confuse topics with technique, and let us take a slightly longer time-view of our qualities than have been recently found in the writings of our critical tycoons." I thought it was very good that you made that remark. I presume you were referring to our consciousness of regionalism and having to stand on our own feet in painting coming out of the Project?

SM: Mrs. Hoag, I was working for the government at the time. I'm always loyal to the person I work for.