An Airplane I Should Have Known About

That's a C-46 Curtiss Commando transport pictured during its World War 2 heyday. (The nickname seems inappropriate, its closest relationship to real commandos lies in alliteration, though I suppose at one time or another some commandos or other special forces types might have parachuted from one.) A lengthy Wikipedia entry about it is here.

I have been aware of the Commando for almost as long as I've been aware of airplanes. Sometimes I must have seen one in the air, but the only real early memories I have were seeing some that were operated by non-scheduled passenger or cargo airlines sitting along the edge of Seattle's Boeing Field.

Commandos are probably best known for their role flying "The Hump" -- cargo plane routes from Allied bases in India over the Himalayas to bases in China when land-based supply to the Chinese sector was difficult or entirely cut off due to Japan's conquest of Burma. After the war, the Commando was mostly used as a cargo plane because scheduled airlines preferred the DC-3s they had been using pre-war and then purchased postwar airliners.

This future usage was unknown, of course, around 1937 when the Commando was first conceived as the CW-20 design. It was to be a large, twin-engine passenger transport with a figure-8 fuselage cross-section. The upper bulge was to be pressurized (a radical step, then) and the smaller, lower bulge left unpressurized for mail and other cargo. As it turned out, no pressurized version was ever built. As for "large," the Commando's wingspan was 108 feet (33 m), more than four feet wider than that of the brand-new Boeing YB-17, the Army Air Corps' newest four-engine bomber.

So what was it about the Commando that I was unaware of for all these years? It was that the prototype at first had twin tails instead of a single vertical stabilizer. It was only recently that I came across the images below via the Internet.

That's a wooden mockup of the CW-20 on display at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Note that only one of the twin tails exists; mockups didn't need to show every redundant feature.  The fighter in the foreground is a Brewster Buffalo whose markings indicate that it was about to be serving on the aircraft carrier Saratoga (CV-3).  (It's possible that this photo is from the 1940 version of the fair, because the Buffalo didn't enter service until late 1939.  But the Wikipedia link above states that the display was in 1939.)

The prototype on the tarmac. A pitot tube is attached to the nose for flight test purposes.

And here's the twin-tail CW-20 prototype in flight.

The Retro World of Robert LaDuke

Robert LaDuke (born 1961) paints small acrylics that, for some reason, I find both quirky and charming. Actually, that "some reason" probably has to do with the fact that the 1920s and 1930s greatly interest me. LaDuke states that his interests lie in the 30s and the 1940s and the objects he depicts are largely derived from toys of the 1930s.

There isn't much information about LaDuke on the Internet. A snippet is here, and a brief interview is here (scroll down). Read them to get a notion of where (he says) he's coming from.

A number of images of his paintings can be found in this Dieselpunk link. A few others are below:

Gallery

Northbound
The airplane is a Gee Bee racer from the early 1930s. We'll be seeing more of it.

Diver

Swan

Swimming
LaDuke, like the composer Jacques Offenbach, does not hesitate to recycle his own material.

Clipper

Mercury

Solitude

Up Close: Mead Schaeffer (3)

This is part of an occasional series dealing with detail images of paintings featuring the brushwork of the artist. Previous posts can be found via the "Up close" topic label link on the sidebar.

The present post deals with Mead Schaeffer (1898-1980) when he was following the style that gained him success as an illustrator. Additional information on Schaeffer is here. Previous post about Schaeffer in this series are here and here.

Featured here is an illustration for "Hide the Body" by Grace Sartwell Mason in a 1933 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

The source of the detail images is explained below:

* * * * *
The Kelly Collection has what is probably the outstanding holding of American illustration art by private individuals (not organizations). I was able to view part of it at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California towards the end of a January 12 - March 31, 2013 exhibition run. The collection concentrates on illustration art created roughly 1890-1935 and one of its purposes is to further knowledge and appreciation of illustration from that era.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took a large number of high-resolution photos of segments of those original works. This was to reference the artists' techniques in a manner not always easy to obtain from printed reproductions. (However, the exhibition catalog does feature a few large-scale detail reproductions.)

I thought that readers of this blog might also be interested in seeing the brushwork of master illustrators up close to increase their understanding of how the artists worked and perhaps to serve as inspiration for their own painting if they too are artists.

Below is an image of the entire illustration coupled with my work. Click on the latter to enlarge.

* * * * *

This image is from the Kelly Collection website.

Schaeffer often painted freely in his 1920s book illustrations. Here he is tightening up a little, though his brushwork remains strong and his paint thick. Also unlike some of his previous work, he treats his subject's face fairly carefully, blending some of his brush strokes and cutting back his use of impasto.

Norman Bel Geddes' First City of the Future

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), shown above posing with a model city of the future, is perhaps most famous for his Futurama America in 1960 exhibit in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. But before that, he did a trial run for the Shell Oil Company in a 1937 series of advertisements.

Well, I think it was a trial run. But given the lead-time required to construct the GM exhibit, it's possible that the two somewhat similar projects might have been started at about the same time. Some Googling failed to turn up anything definite regarding this, but perhaps an existing or forthcoming Geddes biography will have the details.

The smaller-scale Shell project was nevertheless a typical bravura Geddes combination of showmanship, technology and imagination. Below are images of the model of the Shell City of Tomorrow along with a few advertisements featuring it. Click on them to enlarge.

Gallery

Molti Ritratti: Gloria Swanson

Gloria Swanson (1899-1983) was a legendary movie star whose career was at its height during the 1920s and early 30s. An extensive biographical link is here.

Today's Molti Ritratti is another switcheroo in that rather than featuring formal commissioned oil portraits, the images below are cover illustrations for movie fan magazines.

Nowadays fan magazines use photography for cover art. But into the 1930s their covers normally featured illustrations, and those illustration were often done in pastels rather than oil paint, watercolor, gouache and other commonly used illustration media.

Hollywood cranked out a lot of pictures each year, therefore keeping the stars very busy. So I don't know if cover illustrators were able to view their subjects in person or else relied mostly on photos furnished by the studio publicity staffs. I suspect the latter.

In any case, for your viewing enjoyment, below are covers featuring Miss Swanson.

Gallery

Publicity photo for "The Trespasser" - 1929
Swanson was about 30 year old when this was taken, and it strikes me as a suitable image for comparison with the magazine covers below.

Motion Picture - November 1923
By Hal Phyfe.

Motion Picture - November 1926
The cover artist is Marland Stone.

Photoplay - September 1928
By Charles Sheldon.

Screen Book - December 1929
The artist's signature reads as John Clarke, best I can tell.

New Movie Magazine - September 1930
I cannot see an artist signature.

Motion Picture - February 1931
Another cover by Marland Stone.

Marcello Dudovich: Italian Poster Ace

Marcello Dudovich (1878-1962), despite his Slavic last name, was Italian, having been born in Trieste. But then, Trieste sits next to the South Slav region formerly known as Yugoslavia, which explains his heritage.

For the first 40 years or so of the 20th Century Dudovich reigned as Italy's foremost poster artist. Reproductions of some of those posters can be found today.

Like his more famous German contemporary Ludwig Hohlwein, Dudovich made use of solid representational bases from which design-related simplifications or elaborations could be created to provide intended visual impacts. Unlike Hohlwein who began his career as an architect, Dudovich had a fair amount of formal art training. Moreover, his style evolved over time, becoming more simplified in the 1930s in line with fashions in illustration and fine art.

A detailed biography can be found here on a Web page devoted to Dudovich. The site includes a good number of examples of his art. Below are works shown there and found elsewhere on the Internet.

Gallery

Poster from 1905.

This was for a Naples store, 1907.

Dudovich was a contributor to several magazines, including the famous German Simplicissimus. The illustration shown here is from 1913. Due to the Great War and Italy's eventual participation on the side of the Allies, Dudovich had to terminate his relationship with the publication.

Much of Dudovich's work was related to fashion.

There were several variations of this Martini & Rossi poster. The artwork is the same, but captions vary.

This ad is for a hand-held, probably 8mm, movie camera. High-tech in 1923.

This seems to be a magazine cover. Motoring magazines in Europe often used to feature cover art advertising, so here we find a Fiat ad in 1930.

Dudovich also created posers for Fiat. This 1934 example is perhaps his best-known.

Another 1930s poster, this for cigarettes.

Our final example is a liquor ad from around 1940, to judge by the subject's hair style.

Antonio Sant'Elia, Visionary Draftsman

Antonio Sant'Elia (1888-1916) was a highly influential architect, almost none of whose designs were ever built. One reason why little was built was because he was killed during the Great War, age 28.

His fame rests on an early modernist/Futurist theoretical architecture project called La Città Nuova (The New City) carried out around 1914. This was essentially a series of speculative architectural sketches and renderings that astonished architects of a modernist bent over the years as well as the architecture-appreciating general public, myself included.

A fairly brief Wikipedia entry on him is here. This Italian language site has both a brief biography and a link to a timeline.

It's out of print, but so far as I know, this book by Esther da Costa Meyer is the most comprehensive work in English dealing with Sant'Elia. She mentions that the Città Nuova concepts were largely un-buildable as depicted.

Regardless, Sant'Elia's renderings make for very nice art in themselves, regardless of their architectural merits.

Gallery

Station for airplanes and trains, La Città Nuova - 1914

Temple of Fame - Monza cemetery - with Italo Paternoster - 1912
A design for an architectural competition. The rendering is by Sant'Elia. According to da Costa Meyer, the extent of Paternoster's participation is unknown.

La Città Nuova - study of structure with terraced floors

La Città Nuova study - 1914

Electric power station, La Città Nuova - 1914

La Città Nuova, particolare - 1914