The Book is Completed

After more time than I care to admit to myself, I finally wrapped up my art history book and sent it off to Amazon as an e-book that can be downloaded onto one of their Kindles, an iPad, or certain other devices.

Back when I was blogging at 2Blowhards, I thought I would write about artists active 1850-1945 who were ignored by mainstream art historians. I would feature how and what they painted, of course, but I also wanted to treat how they dealt with the increasing influence of modernism. As it turned out, that concept wasn't really tractable due to the difficulty of finding the information I needed given the amount of time and effort I was willing to expend on the project. And given the advent of the Great Recession, the idea seemed like a long shot for acceptance by a publisher in any case.

I finally came around to accepting the notion of doing an e-book, even though that would mean sacrificing the richly-illustrated content that I originally had in mind. About that time I also realized that it wasn't just traditional painters who were having problems with modernism. Even famous avant-gardists had reached a point where they didn't quite know what to do next. This crisis happened around the end of the Great War.

At that point, everything clarified in my mind, and the actual writing of the book suddenly became a simple matter of grinding out the words, all 56,000 of them. Here is the blurb material I submitted to Amazon:

* * * * *
Art Adrift deals with a crisis of modern painting largely ignored in art history books. What happened was that modernist painters essentially stopped making major innovations by 1920 because nearly every alternative to the rejected traditional styles of painting had been tried. Yet it was believed by modernists that to become famous, an artist had to be creative in the manner of Picasso and other painters behind the art movements that bubbled up in the early 1900s. The problem of having to innovate when innovation was barely possible led to a period of comparative creative stagnation of the avant-garde between the world wars.

The 1920-1940 period also was one in which artists who were not originally modernist had to ponder how much modernism, if any, they needed to incorporate in their work in order to continue their careers. This added to the sense of drift and uncertainty in painting.

And then there were skilled magazine and advertising illustrators, aware of modernism, who had to deal with editors and art directors concerned that images be acceptable to the general public.

All this is brought to life via verbal sketches of dozens of painters and characteristics of their paintings.

This book begins by describing how modernism arose during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in fields such as architecture and industrial design as well as in painting. A chapter is devoted to the modernist narrative of art history 1850-1920 from the perspective of 1960, when modernism and abstract painting were thought to be the end-state of artistic evolution. A complementary chapter describes what non-modernist painters were doing at that time, painters ignored in the other narrative. Chapters deal with the matter of creativity and characteristics of modernist paintings, setting the stage for most of the remainder of the book which deals with what happened between 1920 and 1940 in the world of painting. The final chapter treats the continuing lack of direction in painting from 1960 to the present following a brief period of domination by abstract art (something already tried as early as 1912).

* * * * *
In the final chapter I also hypothesize why artists moved into fields other than painting.

Due to lack of a large budget for permissions and the dangerous waters of copyright law, illustrations are restricted to chapter headings until such time as I can find a hardcopy publisher (if ever). So a fair part of the book is comprised of short introductions to painters along with brief discussions about what modernist stylistic elements they used or rejected. This is to build my case regarding innovation following the Great War. In the Preface, I suggest that readers resort to the Internet to view paintings of interest that are mentioned in the text. Not an ideal situation, but my main goal was to get some ideas out without waiting years for the ideal publication to appear.

If my subject intrigues you, take a look here and perhaps download the book. The price is $9.95 or its equivalent in other currencies Amazon deals in.

A Somewhat Deceptive Exterior

What they say about judgments based on books and their covers can be applied to buildings -- in some cases, anyway. For instance, I get the feeling that many places in Italy where residential streets are lined with buildings with drab, fading stucco exterior surfaces actually camouflage totally modern interiors. I know that to be the case for a Mestre hotel I once stayed in.

The same applies in a more limited sense in Dublin at a place called The Burlington Hotel. It is a large structure beyond the Grand Canal that roughly marks the edge of the old southern part of the city. The exterior, as can be seen below, is nondescript t-square and triangle modernism common in the 1950s and 1960s. Our room was in need of renovation, but not drastically so. After all, the hotel caters to tour groups such as ours as well as to people in town on business or for conferences, so maybe we weren't assigned the snazziest digs. But it was okay; no complaints from a guy who spent three years of his life in army barracks and troop ships.

What interested me were the public areas that differed considerably from the drab exterior. I don't know if these were part of the original package or added in later years. They certainly have the appearance of having been re-done in recent times.

Let's look:

Here is how the hotel looks from the street. A large parking lot with room for large tour buses connects the street with the entrance. Note the exterior's hotel room floors. It was probably at its best in the architect's presentation rendering.

The lobby presents a contrast. The reception desk is at the rear to the right. The rest of the scene is occupied by a lounge area. Nice polished stone floors, carpets, wood trim and other touches of a warm variation on modernism. Not nearly as stark as the exterior.

Yet another contrast. This is the restaurant. Many of the larger hotels I've experienced in the British Isles feature traditional (Edwardian?) style restaurants, and so does the Burlington. This room makes me suspect that it wasn't part of the original modernist package.

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.

Gallery

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.

Gallery

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:

Gallery

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.

Gallery

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.