Glackens Beyond the Ashcan

William Glackens (1870-1938) was a newspaper artist and painter usually associated with the Ashcan School of artists active in New York City in the early 1900s. His Wikipedia entry has more than the usual detail, and stresses that he was most heavily influenced by French Impressionist Auguste Renoir. Another useful biographical site is here.

In any case, Glackens' style evolved over his career, passing through the rough, realist Ashcan look through a Renoir-inspired era and ending with a dash of 1930s simplified solidity.

Unlike some of the other Ashcan artists such as John Sloan, Glackens did not strongly focus on the life and times of the lower elements of society, but seems to have preferred associating with and depicting the upper-middle class and those even higher such as art collector Albert Barnes.

Here are examples of his work dealing with people as opposed to landscapes and cityscapes, which he also painted at times.

Gallery

Figures in a Park, Paris - 1895

Seated Actress with Mirror - 1903

Chez Mouquin - 1905
Perhaps his most famous painting.

The Shoppers - 1907
That's Glackens' wife in the center.

Cafe Lafayette - Kay Laurel - 1914
She was a Ziegfeld Follies performer also known as Kay Laurell.

Kay Laurel - 1915

Nude, unfinished - 1920s
Very Renoir-like.

The Soda Fountain - 1935
Glackens slides slightly from Renoir to 1930s simplified-solids style not long before his death.

Packards Everywhere

They call it the Antique Car Museum, but it's really mostly about Packards.

My wife was getting in a tennis session plus some poolside sunning, and I was at loose ends because those activities aren't for me. A dive into the guidebook entry for Fort Lauderdale, Florida mentioned a car museum, something up my alley. So off I went. The museum lies a mile or so south of the city's downtown on a sidestreet so, like me, you might have to grope around a little to find it. But the price of admission is very reasonable, and the collection is interesting.

What the museum's not is glitzy or over-curated. No shiny black floors and spotlights like the Blackhawk museum in California. No faux street scenes as in the ex-Harrah museum in Reno, the Petersen museum in Los Angeles or the Henry Ford museum near Detroit. Just all kinds of stuff everywhere. That stuff includes custom car designer renderings from the 1930s, framed car ads for many brands, cases containing shelves of hood ornaments, gasoline station and car dealer service signs, and much more potentially fascinating clutter. There's even a small room in homage of Franklin D. Roosevelt who for some reason didn't seem to favor Packards. Nobody's perfect.

Here are some of my photos. The quality varies because the museum walls are pierced by many small windows that let in the intense south Florida daylight that contrasts with the otherwise fairly dark interior.

Gallery

Touring car - 1931
This is one of the more elegant Packards from the marque's heyday as America's top luxury automobile.

Runabout - 1928
The golf bag in the rumble seat is a nice touch. Note the huge spotlight mounted aft of the front fender. 23-skidoo!

Convertible - 1939
Seen 74 years later, this Packard seems very impressive. But at the time, its styling lagged behind its Cadillac and Lincoln competition which were featuring more streamlined shapes.

Caribbean - 1955
One of the last of the "real" Packards. After the 1956 model year, Packards were built, but their bodies were facelifted Studebakers. That's called dying with a whimper.

Station wagon - 1948
The greenhouse rear treatment makes it sort of a "woodie," but nearly all the body was metal. The photo doesn't show how narrow the woodie part was; this wagon wasn't all that functional.

Convertible - 1950
This car and the wagon in the previous photo represent facelifts of the attractive 1941-47 Clipper body. The facelift included clumsy flow-through fenders that enhanced the awkward, bulky appearance of the cars. The convertible shown here was the top-of-the-line model and somehow seems slightly impressive nowadays.

Light Eight - 1932
Luxury car makers were hit especially hard by the Great Depression. For 1932, Packard added the Light Eight line in an attempt to offer lower prices without tarnishing the Packard mystique. From what I read, the Light Eight was still expensive to produce, and it did little to stanch declining sales. The line was abandoned for the 1933 model year.

Light Eight grille
The styling feature I like best on the Light Eight is its grill, popularly called "shovel nose." To me, it combines the traditional Packard iconography at the top with a gesture to streamlining at the bottom.

Mystery Painting

Above is a reference photo I took in December, 2011 at a gallery in Honolulu's Royal Hawaiian hotel. The photo doesn't show it, but the handling of the paint was nicely, skillfully done. It looks like it was made after about 1910-1915.

Problem is, I don't know who painted it.

I might have jotted down the artist's name, but if I did, the scrap of paper became lost and I'm left to grind my teeth in frustration.

What I remember is that the artist was Austrian, and for a time was something like a court painter during the dying years of the Chinese Empire. A while ago I tried Googling using various search phrases based on those scraps of information, but nothing turned up.

Can anyone out there help me?

Pietro Piccoli's Vaguely Cubist Mediterranean

Paintings by Pietro Piccoli (b. 1954) are usually found in galleries in wealthy, but non-big city places such as Carmel-by-the Sea and Palm Desert in California. That's because his paintings are bright, stylized, reality-based works with none of the snark and irony found in the art scenes of New York or San Francisco.

I think they're pretty nice even though some of the effects he uses to set his work apart can interfere. And of course, viewing a bunch of them together makes them seem stereotypical. Actually, seeing a collection of works by almost any artist reveals a sameness. That might be because it's simply due to a painter's personality or perhaps because economic survival requires producing work in a distinctive manner. In any case, Piccoli's style has evolved slightly over time, perhaps because his stuff seems to sell well and he can now trade on his name rather than the exact kind of paintings that launched his career in the American galley scene.

I haven't been able to find much biographical information on the Internet; this at least goes on for a couple of hundred words.

Gallery

Alghero - Sardegna

Barconi a Riposo
The square, lens-like shape in the middle is typical of the Picolli works that I first noticed eight or nine years ago in Carmel. He seems to have abandoned this career-launching quirk, generally a good move on his part.

Harbor scene

Warm Harbor

Still life

Paese sui Colle Romani

Bits of Fancy Florida Hotels

It can be fun to visit fancy hotels even if you don't (or can't) pay the fancy fare to stay. We were in Florida the first half of February and did some hotel-crawling while there. Although we didn't rent rooms, we did dine at each of those shown below.

So far as I'm concerned, the grandest of the lot is The Breakers in Palm Beach. Its Web site is here and the Wikipedia entry here.

Not so grand, but about as old and still pretty nice is the Don Cesar on St. Pete Beach in the Tampa Bay area. The Wikipedia entry is here.

In Coral Gables, near Miami, is another 1920s grand hotel, the Biltmore, whose Wikipedia write-up can be found here.

Below are some photos I took. No thorough studies here, just snippets to provide a taste.

Gallery

The Breakers main lobby

The Breakers, at one end of the lobby hall

The Breakers HMF bar
Originally this room was the main dining area, but has been a bar for years. It was recently redecorated, perhaps with too large a dash of contemporary feeling.

The Breakers HMF bar
A close-up of the bar itself. The illustration is mid 1950s, but I don't know who did it. Nor do I know if it dates back to then or is a retro piece.

Don Cesar from the beach

Don Cesar, poolside

Don Cesar interior

Biltmore Coral Gables pool
The Biltmore has a huge pool. This was taken from the bar area.

Biltmore Coral Gables
Another view of the pool and main hotel structure from not far from where the previous photo was taken.

Walt Kelly's Pogo Brushwork

The Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelly (1913-1973), whose life was cut short at age 60 by diabetes, was beloved by many.

I read it some when I was young, but had trouble following it. Plus, I suppose I wasn't intelligent enough or sophisticated enough to appreciate the politics Kelly injected into the strip. Even today, I think Pogo would have been better had it stuck to the foibles of life and personalities because injecting politics upsets or angers a good deal of one's potential audience.

That aside, Kelly's cartooning style was marvelously inventive. I show some examples below that I grabbed off the Web so that readers unfamiliar with Pogo can see what I mean. For instance, note Kelly's use of a variety of typescripts in the second image. Also observe the outlines of the panel boxes; hand-drawn and bold. Most of all, consider Kelly's combination of strong brushwork and body action for his subjects -- this probably thanks to his days working for Walt Disney.

Gallery

Self-portrait

Kelly's use of type

Albert and bird

Original art with non-reproducing blueline workup

Everett Shinn, Who Would Rather Do Theatre

Edward Shinn (1876-1953) was the youngest of New York's famed Ashcan School of realist painters active early in the last century. Biographical information can be found here and here.

It seems that Shinn, like other Ashcan artists from Philadelphia, got his start as a newspaper illustrator. And he continued to illustrate long after he took up painting, this to help pay his bills when needed.

Besides painting and illustration he became deeply involved in theatrical activities. Later he extended this to professional work as an art director for movie studios.

A 1901 visit to Paris acquainted him with the works of Edgar Degas which strongly inspired him, as can be seen below, especially in his "The Orchestra Pit." Of course Shinn painted landscapes, city scenes and other subjects, but I thought it might be interesting to focus here are theater-inspired paintings. All shown here were made in the early 1900s with the exception of the one of the night club that was done around 30 years later.

Gallery

Spanish Music Hall - 1902

Girl on Stage - 1906

The Orchestra Pit (Old Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre) - 1906

Theatre Box - 1906

Review - 1908

Night Club Scene - 1934

Helen Dryden: From Illustration to Industrial Design

Helen Dryden (1887-1981), according to her Wikipedia entry, spent most of her art school years working to become a landscape painter. And afterwards she shifted to commercial art, becoming a cover illustrator for Vogue magazine. (More biographical information is here.)

By 1914 she was doing costume and set design for theater, though Wikipedia does not provide information regarding how many productions she worked on.

Besides fashion-related illustration, by the late 1920s Dryden was practicing what was becoming known as industrial design. I could find no examples of this work to present below. She consulted for Studebaker in the later 1930s, probably mostly dealing with interiors. Studebaker advertising credited designs to her, though Raymond Loewy also began working with Studebaker in 1936. Since he had had previous experience styling Hupmobiles, he probably did exterior work, but the advertising featured her probably because she was better known at the time.

The Wikipedia entry indicates that she had fallen on hard times by the mid 1950s. If her year of death was 1981, I wonder how she managed to survive for another 25 years; the entry implies city welfare.

Gallery

Vogue - 15 July 1914

Fashion Fête program cover - November 1914

Vogue (UK) - April 1919

Vogue (UK) - 1 November 1920

Delineator - July 1929

Delineator - October 1929

1936 Studebaker Advertisement crediting Dryden

Viewing Nicolai Fechin

For those of you who can get to Seattle by 19 May, consider visiting the Frye Museum which has an exhibit of paintings and drawings by Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955).

Fechin's Wikipedia entry is here and I wrote about his Taos, New Mexico house and studio here. But if you have time to go to only one link, go here to Matthew Innis' blog for biographical information plus details concerning Fechin's palette and technique (the latter Innis regards with horror).

Fechin's basic style changed little from the time he completed his training, though individual works fell within a range of "painterlyness" (I made that word up, I think) from kinda finished to pretty sloppy, the more finished examples being commissioned portraits. While I can't say that I love Fechin's paintings, I find them interesting and instructive.

The archetypical Fechin painting featuring a human subject follows a formula. Skin, especially the female face, is depicted smoothly; Innis states that Fechin would wet his fingers with his tongue and finger-paint the smoothness. Subjects' hands were more likely to be done in a sketchy manner, while nude bodies fell somewhere between. Backgrounds are typically highly sketchy and painterly to the point that they often seem like the New York school of Abstract Expressionist art from the 1950s. Sometimes recognizable objects appear, other times not. Being somewhat lazy myself, I wonder if Fechin adopted this kind of background treatment to avoid having to get bogged down painting details.

The exhibit at the Frye was an excellent opportunity to examine a large number of Fechin paintings and draw some conclusions of my own. Below are a few examples of Fechin's work to set the scene; the lower two were on display.

Gallery

Konstantin Mihailovich Lepilov, artist - 1909

Portrait of My Father - 1912

Eya in Peasant Blouse - 1933

The upper two paintings are of men, so the faces are not smooth, in contrast to the lower portrait of Fechin's daughter. In many of his works, Fechin's application of paint ranges from thin to thick. In the portrait of his father, you can see thinly painted sketch lines and washes supplemented by built-up areas for the background and flesh. The Lepilov portrait is also fairly early and follows the same pattern, Eya's portrait was made more than 20 years after his father's, and is more typical,

Images of Fechin's paintings fail to convey the actual appearance more than in most cases because his work usually contains passages of heavy impasto than can be hard to discern. In the case of Eya, if you click on the image to enlarge, you might be able to notice extremes of thick and thin paint in the lower right quadrant of the painting. In some cases, Fechin painted thickly with a brush, and at other times, use of a palette knife is evident. Innis says that he would apply with a brush first and then swipe with the knife at an angle to the brushstroke.

Innis also asserts that Fechin's techiques resulted in his paintings being in bad shape even before they were finished. Whereas I do not doubt that, nearly all the works I saw at the Frye seemed to be in good condition. Given Fechin's use of both washes and impasto on completed paintings, such works would probably be a nightmare to restore, so I contend that many have aged well.

A Fine Noel Sickles Illustration

Above is a slightly cropped image of a Noel Sickles (1910-1982) illustration intended for a Life magazine article during World War 2. Sickles was a hugely talented, largely self-taught draftsman who worked in the Associated Press bullpen, then drew the Scorchy Smith comic strip for three years before becoming a successful illustrator. His Wikipedia entry is here. Leif Peng discusses his military art here. David Apatoff comments on Sickles' drawing ability here. And here is one of my takes on Sickles.

The illustration at the top of this post was not used. What Life did publish is here:

I prefer the rejected image as an example of extremely well made illustration. The Life illustration might have been selected because it was a better teaching tool for soldiers encountering armor.

I like the unused illustration for several reasons. Perhaps its best attribute beyond Sickle's accuracy in depicting soldiers and the German Pkw IV is the economy of detail. For example, the tank is not so much a collection of lines as it is a study in darks, middle values and (comparative) lights. The American soldiers are also rendered in a sketchy, slightly impressionistic manner. Folds of the uniforms are highly simplified, yet convey the shapes of the individuals. Helmets are accurately shaped by line and shadow. This is important because many illustrators and painters seem unable to depict helmets convincingly (I'm thinking of you, Sir William Orpen!).

The soldier's poses are also convincingly shown. My one gripe is that, probably for reasons of pictorial composition, Sickles grouped the BAR gunner, Tommy gunner and Lieutenant with the carbine on his back too closely together for a real combat situation. A short machine gun burst or a single mortar shell could wipe out all three along with the rifleman to the right.