James Rosenquist on Art

The painting is "I Love You with My Ford" (1961) by James Rosenquist (b. 1933), who is usually labeled a Pop Artist, even though he insists that the term is misleading and, in any case, does not apply to him.

I confess that my knowledge of the personal lives of modernist artists active after the 1930s is rather thin, because I don't like most of their work. So I was surprised to learn (even though the rest of the world knew it) that Rosenquist gained much of his early experience as a painter doing billboards in New York City. Which is why his paintings are large as well; he knew how to do it.

A biographical sketch on Wikipedia is here and a chronology on Rosenquist's own Web site is here. A few years ago, Rosenquist and a collaborator wrote this rather interesting autobiography. It contains a few observations about art I'd like to pass along.

* * * * *[About instructors at the Art Students League in the mid-1950s] That kind of teacher isn't around any more, there's nobody even near that caliber. All the people I studied with were true artists of the old school who had mastered composition and fine art. [page 34]

Billboard painting was really like an old master's school of painting. These people were journeyman artists, in a tradition that went back to the painters' guilds of the Middle Ages. The nearest thing to it would be for a kid to be mixing colors in an ink manufacturing plant. You would get to know color pretty well doing that. Of course there are still the scenic artists who work on Broadway shows. That's quite a complicated business because they use water-based paints that dry darker and differently than when you are working with them wet. They have to use water paint so it won't catch on fire so easily. That would be the nearest thing to getting an education painting billboards. [page 49]

[His thinking circa 1960] I wanted to do something totally different from anything being done by everyone around me. All the artists I knew had been taught to use paint expressively, to splash paint on a big canvas, look at the big blob you'd created and to have it suggest something back to you. It seemed to me too simple to put a mark on the canvas and have that be it. Once you've put that mark on the canvas you have the responsibility of cleaning up the mess, of making something unexpected out of it because you started out with a white canvas that was beautiful to begin with.

My question was, what do you do with that mark? There's a difference between trying to achieve a predetermined idea and letting your random action dictate what it may or may not suggest. Now, I like the first first idea better for many, many reasons. If you tackle a huge canvas, unless your idea is planned out, as in mural painting, everything can, may--and usually does--go awry. [page 78]

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Claude Buckle's Railway Posters

Claude Henry Buckle (1905–1973) trained in architecture, spent a number of years creating travel poster art for British railway companies, and in his final years became a skilled water color painter. Biographical information is here.

Thanks to his work as an architectural delineator, Buckle was able to paint convincing scenes of towns, cities and noted structures. Below are examples of posters containing his illustrations. Several scenes are familiar, whetting my desire to head for England and Wales to visit the rest.

Gallery

Multi Ritratti: Lady Hamilton

Lady Emma Hamilton (1765-1815) came from humble origins but, thanks to her beauty, soon entranced men of status and power including most notably Lord Nelson, England's greatest fighting admiral. Her life is reported in considerable detail here.

Among those struck by her looks was the painter George Romney who produced a large number of portraits of her striking various poses, usually of classical or literary characters. These are the best-known images of her.

She was painted by other artists, the most competent being Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun. An excerpt from Vigée-LeBrun's memoirs dealing with Lady Hamilton is here.

Gallery

The paintings above are by Romney.

These last three are by Vigée-LeBrun.

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.
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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.