J.C. Leyendecker's Lighting from Below

J.C. (Joseph Christian, "Joe") Leyendecker (1874-1951) was one of the most famous American illustrators during the first four decades of the 20th century. The most important general-interest magazine in those days was the Saturday Evening Post, and Leyendecker's count of cover illustrations for it was in the same ballpark as that for Norman Rockwell, the top illustrator 1920-1960.

Leyendecker's Wikipedia entry is here, another biographical entry is
here and a site with more examples of his work is here.

Leyendecker had a distinctive style featuring crisp delineation of shapes along with hatching and cross-hatching on his subject's surfaces. This made attempts at imitation too obvious for rival illustrators to try, reinforcing his distinctiveness. Moreover, Leyendecker stuck close to his signature style for most of his career, unlike Dean Cornwell, Mead Schaeffer and other prominent illustrators who modified their styles as illustration fashions and demands of art directors shifted over time.

The Leyendecker dazzle distracted my attention from a tactic that he occasionally made use of. Thumbing through a collection of Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations recently, it suddenly struck me that he was using a light source positioned below the level of his subject's heads in some of his work. The effect of such a light source is nothing unusual for illustrating evil villains and other pulp fiction dramatic scenes. But Leyendecker was using it for elegant subjects.

Consider: a low light source can cast the shadow of a lovely woman's nose upward over the region of one of her beautiful eyes. Painting this effect while maintaining the attractiveness of the subject can be tricky to pull off, yet Leyendecker managed it.

Here are examples of his work that incorporate this form of lighting.

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Saturday Evening Post cover - 3 December, 1904

Saturday Evening Post cover - 25 December, 1926

Illustration for Arrow shirt advertisement - 1932

Arrow Shirt advertisement - 1930

Illustration for Arrow collar advertisement - 1920s

Artist to Admiral, Admiral to Artist

This is about an oddity, a random happening that occurred (oddly enough) for contemporaneous families.

Let's start with Augustus John (1878-1961), best known as a portraitist who sired children by his wife and other women. His second son (by his wife) was Caspar John (1903-1984), who went on to become First Sea Lord (1960-63), attaining the rank of Admiral of the Fleet in 1962. In the Royal Navy, First Sea Lord is the highest position that an officer can attain.

Then there is Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves (1872-1948), Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet (1934-36). As his Wikipedia entry indicates, Reeves was a key figure in the development of carrier-based aviation. On a lesser note, he has been credited as the first football player to wear a protective helmet. Unlike Caspar John, Reeves did not lead a navy, but his position was that of top operational officer.

Reeves' oldest son, Joseph Mason Reeves, Jr. (1898-1973, biographical snippet here, became an artist (although he too served as a naval officer, though briefly). He trained at the University of California and, after the Great War, in Europe. Unlike Augustus John, he and his work are not well known today. Below are a few examples of his paintings I found on the Web.

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Marjorie Moore

Portrait of a young woman

Seated woman

Woman in evening dress

Woman in red shawl

Like John, Reeves seems to have done a good deal of portrait painting. The examples I found were all of women. I rate his work as adequate, but just barely.

William John Leech: Irish Painter in Brittany

William John Leech (1881-1968) was an Irish artist who spent much of his life painting elsewhere. Although there is at least one book about him, biographical information on the Internet is thin; some sites are here, here and here.

Leech had a long career, and the following paintings are, or seem to be, from the later part of it when he was based in England and painted there and in the South of France. But these are not the works of his that I prefer.

Chloe Abbott - 1965

Boats on the Stour - c.1960

Shipping, Billingsgate

Farm Gate

The paintings that impressed me when I visited Dublin recently were done in Brittany and often featured his stunning wife (for a time) Elizabeth Saurine. The reason I was impressed might well have been Elizabeth. Here are some from that phase of Leech's career:

Les Soeurs de Saint-Ésprit, Concarneau - c.1911

Girl with a Tinsel Scarf - c.1912

The Sunshade

Portrait of Elizabeth (Mrs Kerlin, neé Lane) - c.1910

A Convent Garden in Brittany - c.1913
Perhaps Leech's best-known painting. Information about it is here.

In the Beginning: Thomas Hart Benton

Above is "The Wreck of the Ole 97" painted by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) in 1943. The exaggerated solidity and twistings of subjects and the strong colors are virtual trademarks of the artist's style. But like most mature styles, it was not evident during his formative years.

Justin Wolff's recent biography of Benton indicates that the mature Benton style did not emerge until the early 1920s. Before that, he experimented with a number of styles, hoping to find his artistic "voice." And it seems that he continued to experiment in later years, though those works were probably intended for his own use.

What I find interesting is that Benton explored an especially wide range of styles before hitting paydirt. Let's take a look:

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The Artist's Sister - 1913
This painting is entirely traditional, showing that despite his later anatomical antics, Benton was capable of honestly depicting a subject.

The Fish Hatchery, Neosho - 1912
Yet in the previous year he was already tentatively experimenting with modernist stylistic elements.

Bubbles - c.1916
He fell under the Synchromist spell of Stanton Macdonald-Wright for a while.

Upper Manhattan - 1917
Then he backed away from pure abstraction to modernist form-simplification with a touch of Synchromist coloration.

Rhythmic Construction - 1919
Amongst his ziggings and zaggings, Benton included this stab at abstraction. Note the hard-edge look and hints of shapes and colors he would soon turn to in his more representational work.

Self-Portrait with Rita - 1922
This is one of the earliest paintings showing Benton's signature style. Rita Piacenza was his new wife.

Concept Cars: Forward to the Past

Back in the 1950s, 1960s and even through the 1980s American car makers created show cars that supposedly pointed to new directions in automobile style. One popular term for such a "concept car" (a term used a lot nowadays) was "car of the future."

But things changed for a while around 2000. Several concept cars appeared that were Retro, pointing to the past rather than the future. Those show cars weren't strictly old-fashioned; rather, they were modern aside from styling cues borrowed from designs from decades earlier.

Why did this happen? In part, Retro was fashionable -- in production were such designs as the Volkswagen New Beetle and the Audi TT sports car. Soon to appear were a Ford Thunderbird with styling cues based on the 1956 T-bird and the Chrysler PT Cruiser that hearkened to hot rods based on mid-1930s sedans.

Another factor might have been that the US auto industry was doing well enough that companies could afford to create a few show cars that diverged from the usual practice of presenting features planned or considered for production in the next few years.

Here are some of those Retro cars of the future:

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Chrysler Atlantic - 1995

Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantique
Only three Atlantiques were ever built, but the design is considered by many as one of the high points of Bugatti style. The Chrysler version pulls the body elements into a more integrated package, the strongest holdover from the 57SC being the shape of the side windows. The overall effect strikes me as being aggressively fussy, but nevertheless likeable.

Chrysler Chronos - 1998

Chrysler D'Elegance - 1953
The Chronos is inspired by early 1950s Chrysler show cars designed by Virgil Exner. It comes closest to the D'Elegance: note the grille, the side window cutout pattern and the treatment of the rear fender and its extension forward along the side. The D'Elegance also served as inspiration for the Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia sporty car produced from the late 1950s into the 1970s. A significant difference for the Chronos is that it's a 4-door sedan rather than a 2-door coupe.

Ford Forty Nine - 2001

Ford - 1949
I'm not sure what J Mays and his styling crew were thinking when they came up with the Forty Nine. That is, it's not clear to me if they had some sort of future production model in mind at the time; if they did, nothing seems to have come of it. The Forty Nine is rather bland, but so was the 1949 Ford. If I were in charge of the Forty Nine project, I would have insisted on putting a 1949-style spinner on the front, because that's what defines the original in my mind.

Buick Blackhawk - 2001

Buick Century - 1939
From what I read, GM styling supremo Harley Earl was disappointed in some of the visually weak grilles appearing on GM cars at the end of the 1930s. Surely the 1939 Buick front end was one of the weakest. So I'm wondering why the Blackhawk styling team selected that grille for their concept car. My best guess is that they thought it blended well with the body shaping. And they were probably right, though the addition of a front bumper would likely have diminished the grille's visual strength.

In the Beginning: Mark Rothko

The image above has neither subject-matter nor title. It's a "Color Field" abstract painting by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) who made his artistic mark by creating it and similar works. His Wikipedia entry is here.

Before Rothko entered the Color Field genre, he drifted along with other artists of the interwar period in a search for creative results when the real modernist creative spadework had already been completed. I discuss this problem in my e-book "Art Adrift." Rothko eventually succeed to a degree, in that his Color Field paintings featured geometrical shapes (usually rectangles) that had lost part of their geometrical character because edges were blurred, indistinct. (Earlier artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich painted their geometry in the old, tried-and-true hard-edged fashion.)

Here are examples of Rothko's pre-Color Field work.

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View of Portland (Oregon) - c.1928
This is the most naturalistic painting that I could find. He situated himself on the hill to the west of downtown Portland and faced east. That's the Willamette River in the middle ground and Mt. Hood on the horizon to the left of center.

Untitled (three nudes) - c.1926-35
Highly uncertain date for this. As best I know, Rothko never followed the Cubist route, but instead relied on distorting subject's shapes to a considerable degree and colors to a lesser extent while observing the modernist diktat of "honoring the picture plane" (avoiding the appearance of depth). These remarks apply to most of the paintings below.

Woman Reading - 1933

Self-Portrait - 1936

Contemplation - 1937-38

Entrance to Subway (Subway Scene) - 1938
Here Rothko edges away from the flatness requirement. Nearer objects overlap more distant objects and nearer objects are larger than distant objects (I'm referring to people in this case). However, flatness is retained to a large degree because Rothko paints his subjects as if they were flat, cardboard cut-outs, no doubt preserving his modernist credentials.

Norah Neilson Gray: Solid Scot

I was wandering through the galleries in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum a few months ago and came across the painting shown above (click to enlarge). The reproduction does not do justice to the original. For a lower-quality impression, below is an aide-memoir photo I hurriedly shot. Note the differences in color, possibly related to local lighting conditions.

The painting stood out from the others arranged near it, perhaps partly due to its size, but more because of how decisive was the application of paint. Its title is "Little Brother" (1920-22) and the artist was Norah Neilson Gray (1882-1931); her Wikipedia entry is here.

Gray is been grouped under the "Glasgow Girls" label (an analog to the better-known "Glasgow Boys" active in the 1880s and 1890s). I posted on the "Girls" here and about Bessie MacNicol, another outstanding member of the group, here.

MacNicol's paintings are more Impressionist-influenced and seem fussy compared to Gray's typical use of crisply defined color areas to portray her subjects. Here are more examples of her work.

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The Belgian Refugee - c1915

Scottish Women's Hospital

Salopian Cup and Chinese Vase

Self-Portrait - 1918

Self-Portrait
This self-portrait reminds me of the work of Romaine Brooks.