Walter Ernest Webster: Artist Without a Biography

Walter Ernest Webster (1878-1959), British.

That's it. That is about all I could find about the man on the Internet aside from a good many of his paintings. Something about him will surely turn up, but for now all I can do is display some of his works.

Gallery

After the Performance - watercolor

Coquette

Lady Diana
I'm not sure about the title, but that's what one Web site called it.

Rhapsody

Sweet Lavender

The Japanese Fan - 1909

The Lute Player

Clearly, he liked to depict young women, and did that well. He also painted a number of nudes that might be a little stark for viewing at the office.

Prendergast Actually Painted Some Portraits

Alas, I've never been a fan of the art of Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924). That's because I've never liked broken-color Impressionist style paintings. I probably never will like that style. And I can't easily explain why I don't like it; something visceral, I suppose. Try not to hold it against me.

As for Prendergast, some biographical information can be found here and here.

Being a committed broken-color guy, he usually painted outdoor scenes, though not many still lifes. Interestingly, he often included small, full-length human figures in his landscape works, usually with many such figures in a single painting.

Another genre he tended to avoid was portraiture. That's not surprising because painters using broken-color or small-areas-of-flat-color styles as Prendergast did, probably found that such styles weren't compatible with portraiture. Nevertheless, he did paint a few portraits in the years immediately after he moved to New York City. I located three such images on the internet, and here they are:

Gallery

Portrait of a Young Girl - c.1913

Portrait of a Young Girl with Flowers - c.1910-13

Miss Edith King - c.1913

Like many American Impressionists, Prendergast retained a certain amount of delineation and structure in his paintings. This is particularly noticeable in the portraits shown above, because if an artist's intent when making a portrait is to actually portray, then the Impressionistic approach has to be dialed back, as they say.

The images above strike me as being satisfactory Impressionist style portraits, but not very satisfactory from the standpoint of pure portraiture.

Murky Painters

Each era has its associated painting styles. Of course, there is plenty of variation and always artists whose styles are unique or otherwise hard to characterize temporally. Nevertheless, in general, paintings made in 1830 and 1930 for instance (give or take a decade or two) can be tied to when they were done by their general appearance, even when setting aside other identifiers such as clothing people wear or modes of transportation that might appear in outdoor scenes.

Around the last couple of decades of the 19th century some artists painted in a style I'll call "murky," where images were indistinct or smudged and colors often tended towards monochrome. Below are examples from three artists. I don't know if there was any direct influence between any of them or whether similarity in approach was a matter of part of the artistic zeitgeist of the period.

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) for many years has been held by the Art Establishment as a pioneer of modernism. Since I no longer consider modernism as the capstone or end-state of painting, whatever Ryder might have done to somehow inspire later painters is moot in my mind. Looking at his paintings and setting aside that Art Establishment imprimatur suggests that he just wasn't very good.

Eugène Carrière (1849-1906) produced a stronger air of mystery and fascination in his paintings than Daingerfield for sure and Ryder to a lesser degree. Readers who have visited Paris' Musée d'Orsay in recent years might have noticed a few of his works tucked away in one of the upper galleries.

Elliott Daingerfield (1859-1932) is a painter I was unaware of until recently when I came across some images of his paintings on the Internet. This served as inspiration for the present post. Daingerfield's images were generally fuzzy looking, but less monochromatic than the others'.

Gallery

Ryder: The Lover's Boat

Ryder: Toilers of the Sea
Via the Internet, I found two paintings supposedly with the same title as above. Not being a Ryder expert, I don't know if he re-used titles, so I'm not certain that this title is correct. Note the serious cracking, indicating poor oil painting practice or faulty materials.

Carrière: Mme Auguste Bonheur

Carrière: Clemanceau

Daingerfield: Two women
Again, I'm not sure of the title.

Daingerfield: The Ivory Tree

Daingerfield: Village After a Storm

Blogging Note: Off to Europe

This is to let you know that I'll be in Europe for a couple of weeks or so, but that posts should continue to appear as usual on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

The itinerary is: Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague, Delft, Arnhem, Cologne, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and Paris, topped by an unplanned layover in New York City.

I'll be visiting art museums when and where I can fit them into the kind of tourism I prefer: getting to know cities. If any readers know of any not-so-famous-hidden-gem museums in those places, let me know via Comments or email (which I'll check whenever I have a little spare time and can find a WiFi hotspot for my iPad Mini). I can't promise to visit such places, but will try to do so when circumstances permit.

Ugly Car: Nissan Juke

The Nissan Juke, a vehicle occupying the cloudy space between sport-utility (SUV) and hatchback, was styled at the company's British design center and refined in Japan. Then Nissan styling supremo Shiro Nakamura must have signed off on it, for reasons I find hard to fathom.

Actually, I can imagine a likely justification from some of the younger folks in Nissan's marketing and product planning groups.  Expressed in American English, words such as "edgy," "funky," "provocative," "postmodern" and "countercultural" and others might have been bandied about conference tables or infested emails and memoranda.  For the Juke seems to have been slotted into a market segment of young buyers with just enough extra money to indulge themselves with a vehicle that makes a statement.

I'm note sure how large this market might be, world-wide, but Nissan hedged its bet by building the car on the Nissan B platform shared by a number of other Renault-controlled brands including the Nissan Leaf electricity powered car (which has a slightly longer wheelbase than the Juke).

Gallery

The Juke does not have much brightwork, yet nevertheless is a "busy" design due to the elaborate sheet metal bulges and creases, especially those on its stubby sides.  Such sculpting might be expected these days on standard-size cars, but everything is jammed onto the Juke.  This is not to say that the Juke's shaping had to be austere and bland; but a compromise such as having the fenderlines flow a little more might have helped.  The really off touches are the taillights and front turn-signal and auxiliary lighting fixtures set atop the fenders.  They enhance the stubby appearance and generally clash with the rest of the design, such as it is.  I find the use of round headlamps a nice touch, though their placement on the front strike-panel is both odd and risky.

This side view clearly shows the strange roofline.  It is nearly flat, which makes me wonder about its aerodynamic usefulness.  But its most serious defect is that it slopes to the rear, pinching off potential carrying capacity for objects placed in the trunk area.

A view of the lumpy rear.  The most interesting feature here is the wraparound backlight (rear window).

These views from above provide more detail as to how the body was shaped.  I would have placed the front auxiliary light ensembles right above the grille opening with the hood cut-lines as their inner edge.  But I suppose that wouldn't have been funky enough for the target market.

From the standpoint of the arts, I find the Juke interesting in that it strikes me as being yet another dreary symptom of self-indulgent, cultureless faux-creativity of this "postmodern" era that we must endure.

A slightly different version of this post can be found at Car Style Critic

Anders Zorn: When Not Painting Portraits and Nudes

The reputation of Anders Zorn (1860-1920) continues to climb along with those of his friends John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla, each of whom made a good living painting portraits while doing other painting on the side, sometimes for cash and otherwise simply for the enjoyment of doing it. There are two major Zorn exhibits in the United States in 2013. In the first part of the year was one held at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston, and starting in the fall is one at San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Biographical information on Zorn can be found here and here.

As mentioned, Zorn was a leading portrait painter. He is also known for his etchings and the many paintings of nicely padded young, nude Swedish women in the outdoors. As I recall, one of the essays in the Gardner exhibit catalog mentioned that Zorn didn't seem interested in painting still lifes. And a quick scroll through Zorn images on Google suggests that he didn't paint many pure landscapes either; his outdoor scenes normally included people -- especially those nudes. But he did manage to paint some genre scenes. Here are a few:

Gallery

Impressions of London - c.1885
Could this be of one of those notorious "pea soupers" that used to plague the city?

In the Harbor of Algiers - 1887
Yes, the place still looks something like that as best I remember. But instead of those women, what I mostly noticed were tourists embarking and debarking Spanish ferries.

Valsen - 1891
A highly unusually setting for Zorn.

Omnibus (1st version - 1891-92)

Omnibus (2nd version) - 1892
Passengers crammed into a Paris horse-drawn omnibus must have fascinated Zorn because from this setting he made at least several studies, two paintings and one etching (of the final painting). I think his depiction of the beam of light on the cheek and coat of the women in the foreground is a brilliant concept well-executed.

Night Effect - 1895
This painting was controversial in its time because the subject was (or was thought to have been) a drunken prostitute.

Midsummer Dance - 1897
Perhaps Zorn's most iconic genre work.

Olga Boznańska: Impressionist Portraiture

Olga Boznańska (1865-1940) was born in Kraków (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in southern Poland) and died impoverished in Paris, where she seems to have spent much of her career. Her Wikipedia entry is here, and a much more detailed biography here.

The second link states that Boznańska was not as honored in Poland as she felt she should be. That problem seems to have been corrected posthumously, because (at least when I visited a while ago) part of a gallery in Warsaw's National Museum was devoted to her work. The National Museum in Kraków also had examples of her work on display.

Boznańska trained in Munich and Paris and soon was influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionist painting. Much of her career was based on portraiture, and she incorporated as much of those approaches as she could, given the need to have her depictions recognizable people. My opinion is that Impressionism, in its extreme form at least, is barely compatible with portraiture and not worth the trouble of trying to combine the two.

Below are examples of her work up to 1906. Examples of later work are hard to locate in a Google Images screen dump, possibly because none stood out as being interesting.

Gallery

Portrait of a young woman - 1888

Japonka - 1889

Woman in white - 1890
These paintings are essentially Impressionism-free.

Young Breton Woman - 1889

Bretonka - 1890
Portraits of a young Breton woman (or perhaps of different people who look similar) painted a year or so apart.  The first painting uses comparatively clean, definite brush strokes, whereas the second one has a more Impressionist feeling.

Self-Portrait - 1893

Self-Portrait- pastel - 1906
Comparative self-portraits.

Girl with Chrysanthemums - 1894

Portrait of girls - 1906
Here are examples of Boznańska's Impressionism-influenced portraiture style.

City scene - 1885

View from Cracow studio - c.1900

Nasturcje - 1906
Above are various non-portrait works where Impressionism is more at home.