Gil Cohen: Populating Aviation Art

I chanced upon the above book recently, for some reason never having heard of Gil Cohen even though I'm aware of quite a few other artists of the Aviation Art genre. That might be because Cohen normally doesn't paint aircraft that are airborne. Moreover, his focus is on people associated with aircraft, not the planes themselves. (The only other artist who quickly comes to mind for following the same path is James Dietz.)

The most detailed Internet biographical information that I could locate on Cohen is here. In brief, he was born and raised in Philadelphia (on South Street, for those of you who know the town). His art training was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art School, now the University of Arts, where he later taught part-time for 20 years while carrying on with his career as a professional illustrator. Much of his illustration work was for men's magazines, though he also did book covers for romance novels and some general-interest titles.

This is spelled out in the book, which I found interesting. Besides outlining his career and describing (and showing) the steps he takes when doing his aviation paintings, he discussed the origins of each of the paintings in the book along with accounts relating to his thought process when planning the depictions. My main gripe regarding the book is that, because his paintings tend to be panoramas, they are spread across the inter-page gutter and sometimes important details are lost.

Below are examples of Cohen's work; click to enlarge (some will and others won't).

Gallery

Magazine cover: Male - May 1967
Most of the male mag illustrations he did strike me as being rushed. But then the pay probably didn't justify all-out efforts. This one is more finished than many of the others.

Photo of Cohen and Robert Rosenthal with painting
The painting is titled "Rosie's Crew / Thorpe Abbotts, 1943" (2001), showing Rosenthal and his flight crew gathered just before a bombing mission over Germany. For more information on Rosenthal's outstanding Army Air Forces career, click here.

"Coming Home / England, 1943" - 1990
A surviving aircrew at the end of a mission.

"After the Mission" - 1993
Even though aircrews were exhausted and perhaps more then a little shaken after a bombing mission, they had to go through a debriefing process for the benefit of intelligence officers who were looking for any changes in German air defenses as well as potential flaws in Eighth Air Force practices.

"Requiem for Torpedo Eight" - 2004
The scene is the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet (CV-8) on 4 June 1942, the crisis point of the Battle of Midway. The torpedo bombers of Squadron 8 attacked the Japanese fleet at low level and were all shot down. Only one man survived, Ensign George H. Gay shown piloting the TBD Devastator beginning its takeoff run.

Exploratory-Line Illustrators

This is an expansion of a topic I wrote about last year in this post about David Stone Martin. Martin is best known for a kind of scratchy, exploratory pen-stroke illustration style that was popular in the 1950s and for a while thereafter. Read the post linked above for my take on him.

But Martin wasn't the only one employing exploratory lines. Nor can it be said that he invented the style.

Take a look at some examples while I continue this narrative.

Gallery

By David Stone Martin
To set the stage, here is a drawing by Martin. He illustrated many covers for jazz albums, but I'm not sure whether or not this drawing was one that became part of a cover.

Ben Shahn - Scotts Run, West Virginia, 1937

Ben Shahn - illustration, 1957
Ben Shahn worked as a painter and illustrator during his career. The 1937 work is fairly typical of what he was doing at that time, combining paint with thinly drawn linework. It is likely that Martin was aware of Shahn's style while his own was evolving. The 1957 piece shows that Shahn was still using that style of line. And why not? It was trendy in 1957.

By Robert Weaver
Robert Weaver also made use of a Shahn-inspired technique during the 1950s and later. Like Shahn, he didn't mind putting a political twist in his choice of subject matter.

By Tracy Sugarman
I am not familiar with Tracy Sugarman, only having come across examples of his work while researching this post. Again, the style is similar.

Harvey Schmidt - book cover

By Harvey Schmidt (probably)
Harvey Schmidt is best known as the composer of the off-Broadway show "The Fantasticks" that ran for decades. However, Schmidt began his career as a commercial artist using a style similar to those of the men mentioned above. Unfortunately, I could find almost nothing of his on the Web other than what you see above. That might be because he mostly or entirely dropped commercial art once The Fantasticks became a big hit.

Molti Ritratti: Aline Masson by Madrazo

Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta (1841-1920), son of the artist Frederico de Madrazo (1815-94), although a Spaniard, was born in Rome and spent much of his career in France. Biographical information about him on the Internet is sparse: his Wikipedia entry in English says almost nothing, though his Spanish entry is better.

Madrazo was no third-rater, so far as Spaniards are concerned; the Prado museum in Madrid has a room devoted to his work. I'll try to get around to showing more varied examples later, but for now I'll focus on paintings he made of what seems to have been of his favorite model, Aline Masson.

I find it somewhat interesting that we know Aline by name, because many models used by famous artists are anonymous, such as those I wrote about here.

Let's take a look Mlle. Masson as seen by Madrazo.

Gallery

La modelo Aline Masson

Aline Masson in Blue

Aline Masson in a White Mantilla

Aline fixing a hat

Aline Masson Leaning Against a Sofa

Woman in white and pink

The Love Letter

Upside-Down Bathtub Car Styling

For most of the 1930s and into the early 1940s automobile stylists assumed that the car of the future would feature teardrop streamlining.

It turns out that Harley Earl, General Motors' styling supremo from the late 1920s to the late 1950s, decided that the teardrop motif wouldn't do for his restyled 1948 and 1949 models. And in those days, GM styling ruled because the corporation claimed half the U.S. car market.

Due to either ignorance of Earl's plans or stubbornness, a few car makers went ahead with teardrop-inspired designs featuring "fastback" upper styling and fenders flush to the car's body and extending from headlamp to taillight. Some European car companies did the same thing.

Earl's styling judgment eventually failed him starting with the 1957 model year Buicks and Oldsmobiles. But he was on target in the late 1940s, deciding that teardrop styling resulted in cars with a distinctly bloated, awkward appearance; his 1948 and 1949 restyled lines were much more graceful and sold well. Competing lines that opted for the teardrop approach tended to look like bathtubs turned upside-down.

Gallery

Packard - 1948
The 1948 Packard was a major facelift of a fine 1942-vintage design. The most visible change was replacing distinct front and rear fenders with an awkward single fender bulge extending the length of the body. Sales were good the first year, but rapidly deteriorated thereafter.

Hudson - 1948
Hudson's postwar restyling was probably the most successful of the examples pictured here. That was partly because the cars really were low and partly because the crease along the side of the fender helped further lower the car's appearance.

Lincoln Cosmopolitan - 1949
The 1949 Lincolns used two different bodies. The one shown at the top of this advertisement was shared with Mercury. Its fender line stepped down from front to rear and counteracted the potential side bulk common to most cars of that period. The other car was the Cosmopolitan which had a larger, Lincoln-only body. Most Cosmos featured a "bustle back" style where the top stepped down to a distinct trunk at the rear. But for 1949 some Cosmos featured a "fastback" rear roofline in the teardrop fashion, and that's what's shown at the bottom. Fastback Cosmos sold poorly and the variant was scrapped.

Nash Airflyte - 1949-50
To me, the Nash was the archetypical upside-down bathtub design. Besides the heavy, rounded top, wheel openings were minimal and that made the sides look more ponderous than they otherwise might have been. But covered wheel wells were what streamlining was all about back around 1945 when the design was being worked up.

Ford (France) Vedette - 1952
The fenderline of the Vedette is a scaled down version of what is seen on the upper Lincoln in the ad shown above. But some Vedettes had a fastback roofline yielding the awkward appearance seen here.

Borgward Hansa 2400 Sport - 1952-59
Yet another bathtub design, though its heaviness is mitigated a bit thanks to the large windows.

Standard Vanguard - 1952
The British were capable of making some attractive large sedans in the postwar years, but their small ones tended to be unfortunate designs. The Standard Vanguard shown here was truly an awkward, ugly little beast thanks to its short length combined with its roofline and fender styling. I never saw Vedettes or Hansas when I was young, but some Vanguards were sold in Canada and I viewed them in all their ugliness when visiting Vancouver.

Gallen-Kallela's Portrait Art

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) was a Finnish artist and nationalist who was deeply involved in the movement for independence from Russia. These activities as well as follow-on work after independence curtailed most of his artistic production in the last 15 or so years of his life. Biographical information can be found here.

Gallen was a talented painter who tried a variety of styles during his active career, and I might get around to featuring those in a later post. For now, I'd like to focus on his portrait and near-portrait work which was more limited in its variety.

His very earliest paintings were traditional, but his student sojourn to Paris exposed him to the modernist ideas that were bubbling up in the wake of Impressionism. Later on, he visited Germany and saw Expressionist works first-hand. Moreover, he hobnobbed with Expressionist and Symbolist painters such as the Norwegian Edvard Munch.

Here is a sampling of Gallen's portraiture.

Gallery

Boy and Crow - 1884
This isn't really a portrait, yet nevertheless is an astonishing piece of work for a 19-year-old. If you ever find yourself in Helsinki, run, don't walk, to the Ateneum and see for yourself how technically accomplished it is.

Ida Aalberg - actress - 1893
Now we skip to his post-student days.

Symposium - 1894
Pictured left-to-right: Gallen-Kallela, Oskar Merikanto, Robert Kajanus and Jean Sibelius.

Rodolf Rittner - German actor - 1895

Edvard Munch - 1895

Mary Gallen at the Lake of Lintula - 1904
Mary was his wife.

Maxim Gorki - 1906

Eino Leino - Finnish poet - 1917

Kirsti Playing the Cello - 1917
Kirsti was his daughter.

Vanity Fair Does Jack Vettriano

I normally don't bother reading Vanity Fair magazine, but my wife does. Once in a while she'll call my attention to an article about a subject she thinks might interest me. So it seems that the July 2012 issue had a short piece about the Scottish painter Jack Vettriano. A link to the article is here. (I wrote about him most recently here.)

Here are two out-takes from the article:

* * * * *
In fact, Vettriano, anointed “the people’s painter” by the British press, is a man in full command of his fetishes, and he doesn’t mind sharing them with the world. He likes tough, voluptuous Ava Gardner-style brunettes: “Blondes,” he says, “have too much sweetness.” He favors earlobes and necks over the standard T&A. “I’ve painted maybe three or four breasts in my life,” he notes. He is morbidly fixated on lips and nails, lacquered a glossy blood red, and on eyelashes heavily coated with mascara. “I once tried applying it on a girl myself, but my hand was shaking—I got too excited.” Stilettos are required (he bid at auction on a pair of Marilyn Monroe’s), as are garters and some form of corsetry (as his Devotion and The Perfectionist make abundantly clear). “Every woman who knows me knows I will give them underwear for Christmas, and it won’t be conventional,” Vettriano advises. He has fixed ideas about stockings too; hosiery (as seen in Dancer for Money and countless other pictures) must be sheer black and fully fashioned with wide thigh tops, retro back seams, and reinforced heels.

* * *
At least Vettriano skeptics cannot accuse the prolific artist of sloth. “I like to look at a painting and see labor,” notes Vettriano, who usually works from photographs he himself has staged and shot. His virtuoso effects of moisture and light on flesh, sand, hair, and metal, which often recall the look of vintage Hollywood movie posters or pulp-fiction covers, are accomplished by dragging a small stiff brush through semi-dried, still-tacky pigments—a technique he modestly likens to blending makeup. Not surprisingly, Vettriano venerates the Ruskinian craftsmanship of midcentury American pinup master Gil Elvgren and, “dare I say, Norman Rockwell.” For Vettriano the idea that his easel paintings, which cost between $48,000 and $195,000, are more accurately classified as illustrations is meaningless. “I don’t make a distinction between painting and illustration, and we shouldn’t get hung up on arguing the difference.” He is more acerbically opinionated about the conceptual approaches of such acquisitions-committee darlings as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, both of whose hands-off methods he considers “morally corrupt.”

* * * * *
To bring readers unfamiliar with Vattriano up to speed, here are examples of his work.

Gallery

The Billy Boys

The Out of Towners

Games of Power

Yesterday's Dreams

Only the Deepest Red

A Valentine Rose

Angel

One Moment in Time

This analysis is going to be somewhat tricky to write and, in any case, should be regarded as preliminary. That's because (1) one reader of this blog who I greatly respect definitely does not like Vettriano's work, and (2) I've never seen a Vettriano painting in person -- only via images in prints, books and the Internet.

To begin, Vettriano's paintings are not subtle. They tend to have a simplified, poster-like appearance where strong colors are used. Most paintings have areas of flat, solid colors, though there are areas with modeling as well. Generally speaking, a Vettriano doesn't seem to have much in the way of painterly interest, so viewers who savor brushwork don't have much of it to work with.

On the other hand, I suspect that Vettriano's painting will have far better staying power than works by nearly all post-1960 modernists. That is because his images tell stories (or hint at stories, usually); he gets the "illustrator" rap for that aspect of his work. Yet most of the pre-1850 masters, when they weren't painting portraits and landscapes, were also illustrating stories of one sort or another. Furthermore, Vettriano's images have an odd, sometimes unsettling psychological aspect that viewers notice. This is a human connection absent from much contemporary painting. And I contend that connections to a painting via understandable human experiences and emotions are what will make it of interest to future generations. In-jokes, irony, allusions to early 21st century popular culture or politics and other staples of contemporary art lack the vital ingredients Vettriano puts into his works.

Architectural Theme, Victoria

Victoria, the capital of British Columbia province in Canada, is celebrating its 150th year. One might think that the much larger mainland city of Vancouver would be the capital, but it was late to the game, being incorporated in 1886.

Few decent-sized North American cities manage to maintain a consistent architectural theme, though downtown Santa Barbara's Spanish Colonial architecture comes to mind. Victoria doesn't have a consistent theme, but in recent years some large, new structures have picked up the chateau style of the city's famous Empress hotel. As the link indicates, the Empress was built by the Canadian Pacific transportation company, being opened in 1908 and expanded since then.

Two recent structures echoing the Empress' chateau theme are the Delta Victoria Ocean Pointe Resort and Spa and the Hotel Grand Pacific located nearby facing the Inner Harbour.

Gallery

This is the Empress. The original section is to the center-right.

Not a very good picture, as I was taking it from the ferry boat when leaving town. The Grand Pacific is the tall building on the right. The dome to the left is part of the Legislative (formerly Parliament) Building.

This is the Delta resort. A de Havilland Beaver aircraft and harbor taxi are in the foreground.

Farther west, in the Outer Harbour area is this condominium building whose name I can't seem to locate. It's architecture isn't chateau style, but I'm including it here because, while it's not traditional, I find it interesting to look at. A modernist purist critic would find it cluttered, but to me the clutter and variation in fenestration give the structure an oddly appealing sort of "organic-industrial" appearance.