Arthur Beaumont, Mentor to R.G. Smith

The image above is the painting "Famous 4 Minutes," a depiction of the crisis point of the Battle of Midway during World War 2 when three of a group of four Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed in a dive-bombing attack. The artist is R.G. (Robert Grant) Smith (1914- 2001), a man with the unusual credentials of being a professional engineer as well as an accomplished artist -- and one of my favorites in the aviation art genre. More information about Smith is here.

Smith credited his growth as an artist to attending informal plein-air classes given by Arthur Beaumont, for many years the U.S. Navy's main artist.

Beaumont (1890-1978), born Arthur Edwin Crabbe in Norfolk, England, emigrated to the USA from Canada in 1908. He changed his name to Arthur Beaumont-Crabbe in 1915 and to Arthur Beaumont in 1919. Information about him is hit-and-miss on the Internet. Two easy-access sources are here and here. This site has detailed information regarding Beaumont's formal art training, but its performance was flaky at the time I drafted this post. I got both the welcome page plus an error message when the site opened. But one can still click on the biographical link to the left to get to the details.

What really counts is Beaumont's art. He painted mostly in watercolor (Smith tended to use oils), and favored a loose style while making sure to incorporate nothing but correct details of ships and equipment.

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Flank Speed

Together We Served

USS Los Angeles

USS Columbus

It is interesting that Smith learned a good deal of painting lore from Beaumont without falling into the generally sketchy, overly dramatic style Beaumont practiced. Perhaps the reason is his background as an engineer who worked on general-arangement drawings was well as presentation art for Douglas (El Segundo) during the 1940s and 50s under ace designer Ed Heinemann.

As for Beaumont, I have to say that I don't particularly care for his paintings. Besides the dramatic poses and heavy seas he often favored, I think something as solid and well-defined as a large naval vessel needs to be shown with a little more of those attributes than Beaumont usually gave them. To me, Smith's ships are more convincing.

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.

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Into the World Came a Soul Named Ida - 1929-30

Self-Portrait - 1935

The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1943

The Vermonter - 1965-66

A Face from Georgia - 1974

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:

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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.

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Bachelor's Walk, In Memory - 1915
This shows flowers being placed in memory of a nationalist shot by British troops

In the Tram - 1923

The Liffey Swim - 1923
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.

O'Connell Bridge - 1927
Four years later, he features the Liffey again in a view from the main bridge crossing it. Further distortion of subject matter.

High Spring Tide - 1939
By the late 30s Yeats's style evolved to something like Impressionism where scenes were made up of tangles of brushstrokes of various colors.

Grief - 1951
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.

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.

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From "Side Glances"
I could not find a caption for this cartoon. I include it to show Galbraith's post-New Yorker style.

Caption: "Darling, I'm sorry I called you a tramp."
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.

Caption: "I haven't taken any interest in politics since Jimmy Walker retired."
James J. ("Jimmy") Walker was New York City's bon-vivant mayor 1926-32 who had to resign due to scandal.

Caption: "I never told her about the depression. She would have worried."

Caption: "And if Roosevelt is not reelected, perhaps even a villa in Newport, my dearest sweet."

Caption: "Now if Jimmy boy doesn't try to steal this next scene, Yvonne will buy him a great big ice-cream cone."
I think this is the best-drawn of the lot. The poses and details strike me as being spot-on.

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).

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BBC Scotland building

Science Centre and IMAX building, plus a tower

How the BBC and Science Centre relate

Opposite direction: bridges and Scottish TV building

The Clyde Auditorium: locals call it "Armadillo"

The new stadium under construction near the Auditorium

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.