Monday, October 1, 2012
Blogging Note
Viewers today might be noticing that the formatting of this Web page is looking pretty screwy in places.
That's because I finally got around to "monetizing" Art Contrarian. In other words, advertising should be appearing here once Google works whatever magic they work and it actually happens.
In the meanwhile, Google gremlins (probably software 'bots) are fiddling with the format in anticipation that my application will be approved and ads start cascading in.
Ivan Albright: One Style Fits Forever
Ivan Albright (1897-1983) didn't paint every painting he made using the same style, but his best-known ones have nearly the same look. Moreover, they hewed to that look for much of his career. One of the subject labels for this post is "Adaptive Artists" and I'm using Albright as a counter-example, an artist who didn't seem to adapt much at all once he found a style that pleased him.
For whatever it's worth, Albright's paintings don't please me. While I appreciate that they are representational in an exaggerated sort of way, I find them morbid and ... what's the correct term-of-art? ... oh yes: icky.
Some paintings from different parts of his career.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Dublin Nouveau
The Art Nouveau architectural/decorative movement of roughly 1890-1910 had considerable impact in several cities in the northern half of Europe: Prague, Riga, Brussels, Budapest and Paris quickly come to mind as boasting notable structures designed in that idiom.
One place Art Nouveau passed by was Dublin, Ireland. Now there might indeed be an Art Nouveau style building someplace in the town, but if there was, I missed it during three full days of traipsing around the city in August.
All was not lost! A helpful guidebook directed us to Dawson Street and the Café en Seine, a pub gloriously decorated with Art Nouveau style objects.
Take a look at some photos I took:
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Jack B., the Other Yeats
The grave in my photo above is that of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), author, poet and sometime politician. It is in the yard of a Protestant church in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, Republic of Ireland. You might well have heard of him.
But I'm not sure many readers outside of Ireland know of his brother, Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) who, like their father, was a painter (Wikipedia entry here and further biographical information here). I wasn't aware of him until I visited the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin a short while ago where significant space was devoted to his works, perhaps in part because he was appointed Governor of the organization in 1939.
Yeats earned a living by illustration and cartooning until he was well into his 40s, though he began exhibiting paintings around 1906, according to Wikipedia. By the 1920s, while in his 50s, his style became increasingly influenced by Modernism, though he never quite embraced pure abstraction, so far as I can tell from a Google search of his images.
Here are some paintings from various parts of his career.
This shows flowers being placed in memory of a nationalist shot by British troops
Two Dublin scenes painted the same year (the Liffey is a river flowing through the heart of Dublin). Yeats' style is becoming more free with less attention paid to shapes of the objects depicted.
Four years later, he features the Liffey again in a view from the main bridge crossing it. Further distortion of subject matter.
By the late 30s Yeats's style evolved to something like Impressionism where scenes were made up of tangles of brushstrokes of various colors.
Further evolution to the point that objects are difficult to distinguish at all.
Despite the great local attention devoted to Yeats' paintings, I found them unappealing messes, in particular those done from the late 1920s onward. But then, my ancestry is Irish at the very margin, so perhaps that's why I don't "get" his art.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Galbraith's Pampered Women
William Galbraith Crawford (1894-1978) was a cartoonist / illustrator who left many examples of his work, but little trace of his personal life if Google search results are any indication.
Walt Reed in his book "The Illustrator in America" states that Crawford (who signed his work "Galbraith") was Born in Salt Lake City and attended Brigham Young University for two years before going on to the Art Students League and other art schools. Much of his career was devoted to the "Side Glances" single-panel newspaper cartoon that he took over from George Clark in 1939.
I am more partial to some cartoons he did for The New Yorker magazine in the 1930s that featured glamorous young ladies who were often being kept by rich, older men. My reason is that Galbraith did a really nice job of drawing them.
Below are some examples. The first one is a World War 2 vintage "Side Glances" panel. The others are crude scans I made from my copy of "The New Yorker 25th Anniversary Album" from 1950. Even though the images are more than 70 years old, I assume that Condé Nast holds the copyright, and therefore is given credit here.
I could not find a caption for this cartoon. I include it to show Galbraith's post-New Yorker style.
For some reason (probably having to do with the image as it appeared in the book as opposed to the magazine) we have a waffle background pattern. The best that I, not a scanning jock, could manage.
James J. ("Jimmy") Walker was New York City's bon-vivant mayor 1926-32 who had to resign due to scandal.
I think this is the best-drawn of the lot. The poses and details strike me as being spot-on.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Sterility-on-the-Clyde
Glasgow, Scotland experienced rapid growth in the 19th century due to its emergence as an industrial center. A major industry there was (and to a lesser extent today is) shipbuilding along the River Clyde. The Clyde also served as a shipping point for other goods produced in Glasgow. But that too has declined, sections of the river's banks becoming stretches of underused warehouses and other structures related to commerce. The result of this decline is the extensive urban renewal I witnessed in August.
As is usual elsewhere, this renewal has been in the form of stripping an area nearly bare of previous structures and replacing them with dull open spaces dotted with Modernist structures that are visually and scale-relatedly unwelcoming to human beings. They are either simple Modernist boxes or "dramatic" shapes that are presumably intended to be large-scale sculptures.
Here are some early morning photos I took while tracking down the location of the car rental firm I needed to get to the next day. From end-to-end, the distance from the first to the last structures shown is probably around half a mile (less than 1 kilometer).
I suppose all this is an improvement over decaying warehouses or whatever used to sit next to the Clyde, but I find it depressing. The real Glasgow lies a short distance north of the river and to me it's an enjoyable place to visit. If you ever travel to Scotland, give it a try.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Gerald Festus Kelly, Traditional Portrait Artist
The photo above is of Sir Gerald Festus Kelly (1879-1972) painting Edith Teresa Hulton, wife of the 8th Lord Berwick, with the (circa 1923) finished painting shown below it. As you might see, Kelly was a skilled realist and, as his Wikipedia (entry) indicates, had a successful career. Unlike most artists of his time, he had a strong, elite, formal education, attending Eton and Cambridge before heading to Paris to study art.
Despite his social connections, skills and success, Kelly seems little known today. After I finished scooping up examples of his work for this post, I noticed that the earliest one was painted when he was about 40. No doubt earlier works can be located, but it makes me wonder what he was doing artistically before 1919; Wikipedia offers no clue.
Kelly's career overlapped and then extended beyond those of Philip de Laszlo (1869-1937), John Lavery (1856-1941), and William Orpen (1878-1931) who stepped into the British portrait scene after John Singer Sargent phased out that aspect of his career. This placed him at a time when Modernism was rapidly gaining ascendancy in the intellectual class, and traditionalist painters such as Kelly were dismissed as dull-witted copyists of nature. Snap conclusion: born at a fairly good time to have a decent commercial career but a bad time in terms of artistic reputation-building.
Examples of Kelly's work are shown below. Not shown are some not-safe-for-work nudes. To view those, you'll have to Google on his name and switch into "Images."
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An unfinished portrait. There's another one farther down as further fodder for readers interested in technique.
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The Roman numeral indicates that this was one of a series of paintings.
Again, one of a series.
Wikipedia indicates that Kelly was a favorite of the Royals. This painting of Queen Elizabeth was made shortly after her husband, George VI, became King.
The composer in his later years; Kelly also painted him earlier.
I include this to show how Kelly worked up at least some of his portraits. Like the "Jane" above, he was of the do-the-face-first school rather than following the practice of continually working over the entire canvas surface to retain "balance."
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