John Beauchamp: Depression-Era Muralist

For some reason 1930s Depression-era art attracts my attention. I can't say I actually like it, so maybe that attraction might be because some of it was still around in the form of murals in public buildings such as schools and post offices when I was young, and seeing them triggers some kind of recognition reaction. But I really don't know.

I want to call your attention to two murals by John W. Beauchamp (1906-1957) because they include some interesting distortions.

This is called "Rachel Silverthorne's Ride," a 1938 public works mural in the Muncy, Pennsylvania post office building. Some background information is here (scroll down).

Although Beauchamp was trained in art, distortions are easy to find in this mural. Note the man holding the horse's bridle. By his size relative to the horse, he should be several feet in front of it. Note that his right leg is also large and distant compared to the animal's right foreleg. Could this be artistic license to stress the man's importance to the scene? Might it have been a composition consideration? Beauchamp is long gone and cannot tell us.

Another distortion seems more like a case of bad drawing. Look at Rachel's leg. It seems out of proportion or perhaps it's something to do with the way the rest of her is drawn.

Here is "The Arts, Education and the Sciences" from around 1943 (not all that long after the Depression) now in the Commission Chamber of the City-County Building of Helena, Montana. It and two others were originally commissioned by the owner of the Mint Cigar Store and Tavern of Helena. More details are here (scroll down for images by Beauchamp).

The photo I found on the Web was taken from below, so that alone might make things look a little odd. Even so, several of the heads of figures in the foreground strike me as being the same size as or smaller than those in the background. Examples are the artist at the left and the men wearing white at the right. Similar cases can be found in the other two murals pictured in the link, so I suppose Beauchamp had his reasons for doing what he did.

Myron Perley: Illustrator Without a Biogrphy

I recently came across some advertising illustrations for the 1931 Pierce-Arrow luxury automobile line by Myron Perley (1883-1939). Those years of birth and death are all that I can find about him. Next to nothing on the first few pages of Google searches and nothing at all in my books with reference material.

Even the illustration work known to be by him or attributed to him is in short supply on the Internet. Which is too bad, because Perley seems to have been competent at his trade, though perhaps not one of the great illustrators.

Gallery

1931 Pierce-Arrow Town Car illustration

1931 Pierce-Arrow Sport Phaeton illustration

1931 Pierce-Arrow Sport Phaeton photo
Here I juxtapose a Purley illustration with the model he depicted.

1931 Pierce-Arrow Convertible Coupe illustration

1931 Pierce-Arrow Convertible Coupe photo
Another such juxtaposition.

1931 Pierce-Arrow Roadster illustration

Listerine advertisement illustration - 1925
A dozen or 15 years earlier, Perley did other Pierce-Arrow illustrations as well as illustrations for advertising other makes of cars. And as with this Listerine ad, he provided illustrationa for non-automotive companies.

If anyone has some biographic information on Perley, let us know in Comments.

Théo van Rysselberghe's Brush with Pointillism

The Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926) is usually classified as a Post-impressionist, perhaps even a Pointillist. That seems to be a fair assessment if one is following the modernist version of art history. I'm more inclined to think that he is more difficult to pigeonhole.

Here is van Rysselberghe's Wikipedia entry. It is much more comprehensive than many other artist biographies I've linked to recently, so you might as well refer to it for details of his life and career.

So far as van Rysselberghe's painting styles are concerned, I would say that he began his career as a conventional representational painter, circa the early 1880s. That is, his style was more free, more painterly than what hard-core academic painters would use. As the entry above indicates, he discovered Impressionist painting and then the Pointillism of Seurat and soon becoming friends with others working in that style. However, van Rysselberghe usually tempered Pointillism, especially when painting portraits or otherwise incorporating people in his images. That is, faces were painted using more conventional brushwork. Many such paintings were made in the early 1900s when he was drifting away from Pointillism, so perhaps those faces served as part of the transformation mechanism. After 1910 his paintings were still brightly done, but had returned to more conventional brushwork. Van Rysselberghe does not seem to have indulged in any of the avant-garde styles that appeared in the decade or two before the Great War.

Gallery

Émile Verhaeren - 1892

Émile Verhaeren Writing - 1915
Setting the scene, here are portraits of a good friend of van Rysselberghe painted 23 years apart. The 1892 painting is strongly Pointillist, even extending to the subject's face. The later portrait is essentially conventional.

Butcher shop in Tangiers - 1882
Van Rysselberghe made three trips to Morocco, a place that fascinated him for several years. The work above seems to be more than a quick sketch, but is less detailed than some of his larger Moroccan paintings of that time.

Moonlit Night in Boulogne
A Pointillist landscape. I cannot find a date for it, though it was probably painted around 1899.

Madame van de Velde and Her Children - 1903

Femme au miroir - 1907
These are examples of paintings with Pointillist or Divisionist backgrounds and where subjects got a more conventional treatment,

White Peonies - 1913

Self-portrait - 1916
Here van Rysselberghe is returning to conventional representation.

Summer Resting - 1922
This was painted a few years before he died, when female nudes were a favorite subject for him.

New Book: Automobile Styling

I've been busy of late, and apologize for not replying to comments. For one thing, I've been traveling a lot this winter season, my wife wanting to get away from gloomy Seattle.

Also, I was writing another book.

That's the cover, and it's an e-book that can be found here. It can be downloaded to an iPad, Kindles, and perhaps other devices.

My thesis is that after a period of rapid, focused change in appearance during the 1930s and 40s, what followed has been largely a case of changing styles or fashions that were influenced to some degree by outside forces such as technological changes and government regulations.

Here is an excerpt:

* * * * *Harley Earl’s legendary design taste seems to have failed him in his last few years as GM styling supremo.

The tepid public response to GM’s 1957 senior line resulted in a set of garish, panic-induced 1958 facelifts that a younger Earl likely would not have tolerated. My belief is that Earl’s success from the end of the 1920s to the mid-1950s was based on his ability to formulate a valid concept of styling evolution.

As noted, he strove to have cars seem long and low even if they physically were not. Indeed, automobiles did become longer and lower during his reign. He probably saw that car bodies would become integrated with passing attention given to aerodynamic streamlining and greater emphasis on visual streamlining. This too came to pass. Towards the end of the 1940s he must have considered jet planes and rocket ships as perhaps the next evolutionary direction, and for a time this seemed to work as well. And his judgment regarding styling trends might have remained acute enough that, by the mid-1950s, he perhaps realized that airplane and spaceship themes were not going to work well because they were impractical in terms of street and highway based everyday use. If this was his thought, he was correct yet again.

Earl’s real problem by 1956 or thereabouts was that he could not think of any valid new evolutionary styling path. And he could not do so because no such path existed. So he floundered, not being able to deal with a directionless styling environment.
* * * * *
Unlike my other e-book "Art Adrift," this book is richly illustrated because I was able to make use of advertising and other publicity material issued by the automobile companies.

I hope the car buff readers will enjoy it.

Molti Ritratti: Duke of Wellington

Some of my Molti Ritratti (many portraits) posts dealt with subjects who lived before the invention of photography. Others lived in the photographic era and had comparatively few portrait paintings made of them. Then there is the interesting situation where most of the subject's life was lived before photography, yet an image or two might exist. Such was the case for Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), subject of this post. The same is true for Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), a near contemporary of Jackson.

The two led lives that mirrored each other in some important respects, though Jackson was born into humble circumstances of immigrant parents from Ireland, whereas Wellesley (his father spelled the family name "Wesley") was of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Both men became generals and fought important battles (New Orleans for Jackson and Waterloo for Wellington). Both became the political leader of their country (Jackson as President, Wellington as Prime Minister). And both sat to a number of portraits.

Below are images of Wellington.

This is a daguerreotype taken in 1844, if the information I found on the Web is correct. Wellington would have been about age 75.

This portrait is by John Jackson, a painter who was well known in his day, but is obscure enough that I hadn't heard of him before. The painting was probably made not many years before Jackson's death in1831.

These portraits were painted by George Hayter, yet another painter new to me. Hayter also painted Queen Victoria and other notables. The upper painting was made in 1839. I have no date for the lower one, but from Wellington's appearance it might have been done near the time of the Jackson work.

Here is one of the better-known Wellington portraits. It is by Francisco Goya, painted in 1812 as Wellington was nearing his final defeat of French forces in Spain.

The final three portraits are by Sir Thomas Lawrence, the leading English portraitist of the early 19th century. The one at the top is the best-known, and usually used when a depiction of Wellington is needed. It was painted around 1815-16, not long after Waterloo. The middle painting was commissioned in 1820 and probably completed within a year or two of that date. It looks suspiciously like it was to some degree a copy of the earlier painting (for instance, note the similarity of the nose shadows). I have no date for the final portrait, though from Wellington's appearance it was made after 1820 and before Lawrence's death in 1830. It strikes me as inferior to the first two.

Adolph Treidler: Poster Style Illustration

Adolph Treidler (1886-1981) wrote a charming little memoir for Automobile Quarterly's Third Quarter 1976 issue. If you do the subtraction, that would have made him about 90 years old at the time. By that point, he had been retired from illustration for around 25 years. And some of his best known work was done as long ago as 1910 for Pierce-Arrow, one of the leading makers of luxury cars in America.

This site has a tiny biography along with examples showing a variety of Treidler's work. But there was no really useful biographical sketch that I could find on the Internet.

According to his AQ memoir, Treidler was born in West Cliff, Colorado. The family moved to various mining towns in that state until leaving for San Francisco about 1898. He worked for an advertising agency while in his teens, experiencing the 1906 earthquake and fire shortly before departing for Chicago. There he stayed for about a year and a half, working as an artist for the Chicago Tribune newspaper. Then he moved on to New York where one of his paintings that happened to include a Pierce-Arrow car caught the eye of a man who soon became an art director at the Calkins & Holden advertising agency, which held the Pierce-Arrow account. From that point, his career took off like a rocket.

Besides Pierce-Arrow ad art (which ended around 1930, when the company was rapidly declining), he did poster and other advertising art for the French Line, Bermuda tourism, the government war effort in both world wars, and Chesterfield cigarettes.

Gallery

Pierce-Arrow ad harking back to an earlier Treidler ad

Pierce Arrow ad art, Literary Digest - 5 January 1929

Chesterfield cigarette advertising

Poster for Bermuda tourism

World War 2 poster - 1942

Poster for Furness line

Treidler was surprisingly versatile when it came to style. The posters dealing with Bermuda would seem to have been done by another artist than the one who did the World War 2 poster. And it might have been a third artist who did the Chesterfield ad art and a fourth who worked for Pierce-Arrow. But of course this was all Treidler. I wouldn't quite place him in the top echelon of illustrators because he didn't do story illustration so far as I can tell. But as an advertising artist he was indeed good.

Really Small American Cars, 1935-1955

During the early years of the American automobile industry, the size, mechanical configuration, type of power and general shape of cars was something being sorted out. That era was largely over by 1915 or thereabouts. And by 1930, most American cars fell into size ranges that were generally proportional to price classes. This became the norm until about 1960, when brands began sprouting "standard size," "compact," and "intermediate" models.

But even in that era of stable stratification there were exceptions in the form of cars built smaller than entry-level Fords, Chevrolets and Plymouths.

The 1938 American Bantam shown above was one of a little more than 4,000 built during the years leading up to World War 2. Other versions were produced in the early 1930s under the aegis of the American Austin Company.

The Crosley car was part of Powell Crosley's manufacturing and broadcasting empire. Cars were built from the late 1930s into the early 1950s with a wartime hiatus. The top image in this group shows a 1939 model. The middle image is of a 1947 sedan, about 14,000 of which were sold thanks to the postwar seller's market. The lower photo is of the Hotshot sports car from 1950-52. A roadster version with doors was manufactured 1949-52 and sold slightly better. Total postwar Crosley production was a little more than 75,000.

And then there was the King Midget, a tiny car built from 1946 until the late 1960s. Estimated production is 5,000. I have never been able to understand why anybody would buy one, but a few people did.