The Bland Art of Fairfield Porter

I wrote a post called "The Bland Art of Giorgio Morandi. In that post, I blamed my assessment on the fact that I'm just not much into subtlety.

So along with Morandi, I'll toss in another painter whose work doesn't meet my need for flash and dash: Fairfield Porter (1907-1975). Porter's Wikipedia entry is here, and more information here.

On the other hand, some people I respect are Porter fans. Among them are The Wall Street Journal's theater critic Terry Teachout (see here, for instance) as well as my former 2Blowhards blogging colleagues (here).

Here are examples of Porter's work:

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Jane and Elizabeth

Porter painting ... the scene above?

Wheat - 1960

Broadway South of Union Square - 1974-75

Girl in a Landscape - 1965

A Day Indoors - 1962

Nothing wrong with Porter's work, mind you. It's just the eye of this particular beholder.

Virgil Finlay's Scratch and Stipple Illustrations

Let's face it. Despite the rehabilitation of pulp magazine illustration of roughly 1930-1955, much of it wasn't very good. In some cases, the artists were simply mediocre. In other instances, they were good, but still young and trying to get their careers launched; some were able to eventually make the jump to the prestigious and better paying "slick" magazines.

One of the very good ones who never really made the illustration Big Time was Virgil Finlay (1914-1971), who is best known for his science fiction illustration. He also did illustrations for a third-tier magazine and later in life kept his career going by providing illustrations for astrology magazines.

The jist of this can be found here in his Wikipedia entry. But a more useful source about his career and, as important, his unusual technique, is here.

It seems that Finlay was a scratchboard artist who supplemented normal scratchboard techniques with stippling (application of tiny dots of ink). The second link above provides a useful discussion of this.

Below are examples of his work. As you can see, Finlay apparently really liked to draw beautiful women, and he did this very well. Click on the images to enlarge.

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]

* * * * *

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.