Molti Ritratti: Ida Rubinstein

Ida Rubenstein (1885-1960) was a Russian ballerina whose distinctive appearance appealed to painters even at a time when she could easily be photographed. Her Wikipedia entry is here, and it states that because her formal ballet training was limited, she was never first-rate in her field; she compensated by virtue of her stage presence.

Let's take a look.

Gallery

Ida Rubinsteitn as Phaedra - 1923
Here is a photograph taken a few years after the paintings below were completed.

By Leo Bakst (Ida as Cleopatra) - 1909
Bakst was the ace costume designer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

By Leon Bakst - c.1910
Here is another Bakst take on Rubinstein, a portrait rather than illustrating a costume concept.

By Valentin Serov - 1910
Serov was a master of Russian portraiture. Most of his works were naturalist, but this Rubinstein shows him drifting into modernism shortly before his death.

By Antonio de la Gándara - 1913
Gándara was a fashionable artist based in Paris, so this portrait was probably painted while the troupe was there on tour.

By Romaine Brooks - 1917
Brooks had a three-year affair with Rubinstein, and this is one of the paintings from that time.

The Art Dictator's Art

Aleksander Gerasimov (1881-1963) was an important Socialist Realist painter. As his Wikipedia entry states, "His heavy-handed leadership of the Union of Artists of the USSR and the Soviet Academy of Arts were [sic] notorious..."

More details on his career can be found here.

I am no fan of centralized authority in any form, so I offer the following Gerasimov paintings, technically well-done though some of them might be, as examples of what gets produced under authoritarian circumstances.

Gallery

Lenin on the Tribune - 1930

Stalin at the 18th Party Congress

I.V. Stalin and K.E.Voroshilov in the Kremlin After the Rain - 1938
This painting won Gerasimov an important prize, though it's hard to understand why. Maybe Stalin liked the way his likeness was painted.

Portrait of the Ballet Dancer Olga Lepeshinskaya - 1939
A welcome break from Socialist Realism.

The Meeting of F.D. Roosevelt and the Shaw of Iran - 1944
This would be related to the Teheran Conference of 1943. So the subject is political, but in no way glorifies the Soviet regime.

Peonies - 1952
In his spare time, Gerasimov set politics and Socialist Realism aside to do a little Post-Impessionism for his own purposes.

LeRoy Neiman: Post-Career Thoughts

LeRoy Neiman died 20 June 2012. I really haven't thought of him in years except when I happen to notice one of his prints for sale in an art gallery. I suppose I would have been more aware if I'd kept up with Playboy magazine where his work appeared for literally decades. Alas for Playboy, I lost interest at some point in my twenties when it finally sank in that a girl in person is far better than a retouched photo of one in a centerfold.

The Wikipedia entry for Neiman is here and his own web page is here.

As Wikipedia indicates, Neiman had solid art training and the work he produced following his Playboy breakthrough had many fans. His original works and reproduction sell well and at good prices. Fortunate is the artist who can earn a good living from his toil.

A large share of Neiman's work had to do with sports, so I'll show a few examples here.

Gallery

Sandy Koufax

Orlando Magic

Scramble
What do I think of his work? I never liked it.

My reaction to any art is personal to the point where I can't pin down from where my prejudices emerged. For what it's worth, in a nutshell, I find Neiman's work too colorful and the application of paint too random (or sloppy?) for my taste.

This is despite underlying drawing being essentially correct. I've stated before and will surely state again that, given good drawing, an artist can get away with quite a lot so far as other aspects of a painting or illustrations are concerned. But for me, Neiman pushed those "other aspects" too far.

Who was Frank H. Desch?

I'm not an exhaustive researcher, but I do make an effort to come up with at least a little background information regarding painters, illustrators, cars, planes and whatever else I write about here.

But this post is one instance where I came up virtually dry.

The subject is a man named Frank H. Desch. He was born in Philadelphia in 1873 and died in 1934 and was an illustrator who apparently worked in fine art painting on the side.

The two Internet sources about him (I only drilled through the first couple of Google pages, I confess) are here and here. Both seem to be sites oriented towards collectors. The first one offers a book or catalog of Desch's known works. But the price is $40, which greatly exceeds my research budget for an artist who doesn't greatly interest me. So his career will remain a mystery unless a seriously knowledgeable reader is able to help us out in a comment.

That said, Desch had talent, as his fine arts work indicates.

Gallery

These are examples of his illustration work before 1920. It is pretty generic of the era.

The four paintings above are painted in what might be called "American Impressionist" style. The one at the top looks like a Richard E. Miller painting from the same period. Coloration is influenced by classic French Impressionism, but the subjects are clearly defined. This was something American painters preferred to do rather than create an overall effect á la Monet and those he influenced.

The two final paintings are non-Impressionist. The garden scene has the appearance of an illustration, but it's probably not magazine cover art because the woman's head is where the publication's name would usually appear. The bottom work by its style appears to be a commissioned portrait. The upper part of the subject is carefully rendered, though her hand and the lower part of her dress are more casually done.

Edgar Payne: Master California Impressionist

Edgar Payne (1883-1947) is one of my favorite painters of the California Impressionist school. That's because his paintings have strong composition supported by equally strong brushwork appropriate to his subjects.

Wikipedia has a reasonably detailed entry for him here.

Besides his art work, Payne collected his views on art in his book "Composition of Outdoor Painting" that was first published in 1941 and is still in print. I bought a copy several years ago, but have yet to work my way through it. It contains useful information, but be warned that the first 30 or 40 pages are verbal hand-waving about art and the artist. Obviously Payne considered these matters important, but to me his ramblings are a waste of both paper and the reader's time.

Another book, and one I consider well worth adding to one's library, is "Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey" which is an extremely well illustrated catalog for a current exhibit of his work.

Speaking, of Payne's work, let's take a look:

Gallery

Rugged Slopes and Tamarack - 1919
Payne is best known for paintings such as this. Where a specific place is not in the name of the paintings, it's likely that Payne created the image from sketches done at different places and combined the details.

The Sierra Divide

The Rendezvous (Santa Cruz Island) - 1915

Laguna Coastline

Sycamore in Autumn - c.1917

Along the Riviera, Menton, France - 1922

Brittany Fishing Boats - c.1924

Sunset, Canyon de Chelly - 1916

Are Newspapers Over-Designed?

Aside from buying a Wall Street Journal two or three days a week, flipping through a free USA Today from the hotel when traveling and barely glancing at the local paper each morning (until football season, when I hit the sports page harder), I spend a lot less time reading newspapers than I used to. Years ago, I was so into newspapers that I had the New York edition of the New York Times mailed to me daily.

Nowadays I mostly rely on the internet for news, avoiding television almost entirely. Obviously, I'm not alone in this. Newspaper circulation has been declining for many years in the USA, and so have ratings for the major broadcast network news programs.

Newspapers have been fighting the trend, but declining circulation has yielded declining advertising revenue. Fewer ads means smaller papers as publishers try to maintain a profitable advertising - news hole page relationship.

There's another thing newspapers are doing that has annoyed me for several years. I'm writing about it now thanks to this item on James Lileks' blog. Besides blogging, Lileks is a columnist at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and writes books on the side.

Here is what he said:

* * * * *
I think a lot about newspapers every day, partly because I work for one, partly because I’m revising a novel set in the glory days of a medium-sized newspaper in a medium-sized metropolitan era that has four. Four papers. I invented one for the books, the Citizen-Herald; it’s obviously not the Star-Tribune, since that exists in the books as well. When I think what the pages of the Citizen-Herald might have looked like, I realize one of the things that did papers in:

Good design.

Or rather, design, period. Big headlines, explanatory decks, good pictures, careful layout, splashy graphics - everything that presents the content takes away from the content. If you have a thick news hole and you’re putting out a tab with 60 pages, chock full of ads, you have the luxury to play, to stretch, to impress. But the model for the Citizen-Herald is the old Star newspaper in the 30s and 40s, a wide-swinging scrappy trolley-reader broadsheet that captured the jostle and bustle of the town in almost molecular detail. Eight to ten stories on the front page, at least. Twice as much on the inside. Sure, half of it was inconsequential - chatter and trivia, minor mayhem on the road next to a squib about an election in Malay, but it presented the impression of a world so vibrant it could barely be contained in the thin columns of newsprint. A good newspaper isn’t one you read front to back; a good newspaper is one you regret you didn’t read front to back, because it’s simply impossible to read it all.

The Star was like that - the big stories at the top of the page, pictures of giveaway kittens or a kid in a cast because he fell off a roof, Loop shootings, auto wrecks on the parkway, holdup in a cafe, each story getting smaller as you went down the page, until the bottom items were a two-line piece on Siamese imports, and an ad for Sanitary Bread.

* * * * *
An example front page is below.

The design feature that bothers me the most is increased use of large, color photographs on the front page (the example above is smaller than many I've seen). To me, it's a waste of space that could be devoted to news.

Like Likeks, I am so old-fashioned!

Alajalov: Illustrator or Cartoonist?

When Constantin Alajalov (1900-1987) painted the 22 June 1935 cover for The New Yorker magazine, employment prospects for college graduates were uncertain. I'm drafting this post mid-June, at the tail end of this year's graduation ceremony season, and a similar situation holds. In both cases, there was serious economic under-performance. But in 1935 college graduates were a much smaller share of the 22-year-old or thereabouts population, so supply-demand factors were more in their favor back then even though times were tough.

Alajalov (name accented on the third syllable) was a popular illustrator from the late 1920s into the 1960s, best known for magazine cover illustrations he created for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. Biographical information on the internet is sparse. And even inaccurate: his Wikipedia entry states that the Russian Revolution happened in 1916 -- 1917 was the actual year. The most useful link that I could find is here. There are some books from the 1940s dealing with illustrators containing sections about Alajalov, but this recent, similar kind of book by Fred Taraba might be easier to locate.

Taraba mentions that Alajalov was a fine-art painter and muralist as well as an illustrator. He and other sources stress that Alajalov would take a good deal of time and trouble to make the settings of his illustrations as accurate as possible. I think this care was essential because his signature work seems more cartoon-like than straight illustration. Yet the cartoonishness lies mostly in the way he depicted the faces of his subjects. And like a good cartoon, those faces reveal the character and current thought or emotion of those subjects. Further, the settings and situations he depicts match or come close to matching the experience of his viewers. Taraba notes that Alajalov tailored these elements to fit the average readership of The New Yorker (big-city, supposed sophisticates) and the Post (Middle America).

A final thought before turning to more examples of Alajalov's work. In his heyday, aside from The New Yorker and some 1920s publications such as Life and Judge, most mass-circulation magazine illustration for stories and non-fiction articles was naturalistic. So during much of his career, Alajalov's approach was largely unique (I have a major exception in mind, and will write about him at another time). Today, to dredge up a cliché, the shoe is on the other foot: comparatively little magazine illustration is naturalistic, the bulk being cartoon-like in one way or another.

Gallery

The New Yorker - 28 October, 1939

The New Yorker - 1 March, 1941

The Saturday Evening Post - 2 May, 1959

The Saturday Evening Post - 31 December, 1949