Impressions of the Musée d'Orsay Renovation

The Musée d'Orsay was partly closed for renovation the last time I was there, July 2010. It reopened in the fall of 2011, but I didn't get to see the results until last month. Moreover, I was focusing on the paintings being exhibited rather than where and how they were presented, but that doesn't prevent me from tossing out my two-bit reactions for all to read.

A detailed report regarding the renovation is here, and interested readers should scan it to to get an idea as to what was done.

Photographs of any kind was not permitted, so the above image was grabbed from the Web. It shows the grey walls that the linked article was unsure of. I was aware of the change in background color, but it didn't bother me. And it was probably an improvement over what was there before.

On my 2010 visit to the d'Orsay, the staff had made their best effort to have the most famous items in the collection on display. That visit sticks in my mind more than what I saw saw in 2009, the previous time I was there. What this means is that what follows as a comparative perspective might well be in error. But this is professional blogging, so content flow trumps all -- and here I go:

I am not a huge fan of hardcore, Claude Monet style French Impressionism, which means that I might not have been paying as much attention as I should. But my impression of the Impressionist galleries is that a lot more works were on display than pre-renovation. For some reason, I was especially aware that a good number of Monet's early paintings were on display -- the sorts of things I especially noticed when visiting the Musée Marmottan when I was there years ago.

Fortunately for me, the d'Orsay still devotes a generous amount of space to artists outside the Art Establishment approved historical timeline to Modernism. To be found are academic works including several Bouguereaus, Orientalism, Symbolism and other interesting species of paintings from a time when uncertainty began to dominate the world of art. I took notes on what caught my attention, and these will serve as starting points for some future posts here.

So far as I am concerned, the Musée d'Orsay continues to be the don't-miss Paris art museum.

Cecilia Beaux, Portrait Artist

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was one of America's best portrait artists during what I consider a golden age of portraiture: the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Wikipedia has a useful entry dealing with her life and career. Books about Beaux have appeared in recent years, so I can assume that she is gradually regaining the recognition she had during her productive years.

As the Wikipedia article notes, although she spent time in Paris in the aftermath of French Impressionism and at the time what is now called Post-Impressionism was underway, Beaux resolutely remained a representational painter. Which was almost essential, given that she earned her living in portraiture. Nevertheless, representational painting suited her temperament, so commerce and personality were in synch.

Gallery

Self-Portrait 1894

Sita and Sarita - 1893-94

Man with a Cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker) - 1898

Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes - 1898

Bertha Hallowell Vaughan - 1901

Portrait in Summer - (Henry Sandwich Drinker and his wife Sophie) - 1911

Ernesta - 1914

Émile Aubry, Accomplished, yet Obscure

Émile Aubry (1880-1964) got off to a good start. Born in Algiers, he made it to Paris where he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme and won the Prix de Rome. Later in life he continued to find himself part of the French art establishment.

Aubry is essentially unknown today outside of France and perhaps Algeria. Even so, his French Wikipedia entry is skimpy, as is this biographical note in English. For readers familiar with French, here is a more detailed biographical sketch.

Aubry seems to be yet another of those artists who never settled into a distinctive personal style. It is fairly easy to point to this or that painting and suggest another artist whose work it resembles. Perhaps this was because he was of the generation that had to recognize that Modernism was more than a passing fad; one either had to ignore it or else come to terms with it at least to some degree. Aubry chose the latter option, and various modernist features can be found in his works, but inconsistently and never in strong measure.

Gallery

Femme algeroise

Les sirènes

Les roches rouges, study and final

La promenade

Paysage de petitie Kayblie

Woman with a parasol

La robe chinoise: Portrait de Madame C, in the magazine L'Illustration

La voix de Pan - date uncertain; 1925-30

Stuck (Franz von) in Seattle

Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Symbolist and Secessionist, is Munich's version of Vienna's Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), an almost exact contemporary. Biographical information about Stuck on Wikipedia is here.

Even though Stuck is far from unknown, he has never had an exhibition devoted to him here in the United States. Until now. Seattle's Frye Art Museum, which has extensive holdings of late 19th and early 20th century Bavarian art, is holding, in cooperation with Munich's Villa Stuck, a Stuck exhibit November 2, 2013 - February 2, 2014.

Even though I don't find most of Stuck's works likeable, they do fascinate me. Consider the image at the top of this page: "Lucifer" (1890) which normally resides in Sofia, Bulgaria. It, the paintings below, and other examples of Stuck's art are on display.

Gallery

Pallas Athene - 1898

Wilde Jagd (Wild Hunt) - 1899

Pieta - 1891

Wounded Amazon - 1905

Susanna im Bade (Susanna and the Elders) - 1904

Brussels' Comic Strip Museum

For some reason, Belgians are very fond of comic strips. So of course Brussels has a museum, the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée dedicated to that field. The Web site for the museum is here.

I had a few spare hours on a recent visit to Brussels, so hiked over to it. It's on a nondescript side street, but the building itself, the former Magasins Waucquez store, is an Art Nouveau design by architect Victor Horta.

The displays were nicely done but, as would be expected, featured comics and artists familiar to Belgians and unfamiliar to Americans. One plus was that I learned how to pronounce the name of the most famous Belgian strip -- Tintin. It's not tin-tin as in the metal tin. Nor is it tin-tan, where the final "n" is nasal, French. It is tan-tan with the nasal "n." So there.

First, some views of the building.

Gallery

Shown here is the first floor (the second floor, if you're American). Note that Horta's Art Nouveau décor is comparatively restrained here.

The street level floor, with a comics display that includes a Citroën 2CV.

Looking up towards the first floor and the skylight ceiling.

The ground floor again, the entrance at the left and the museum shop taking up most of the view.

You might have noticed that the first two photos included promotional material for a current exhibit dealing with Will Eisner, a major player in the American comics scene and widely considered the inventor of the "graphic novel" comic book genre.

I enjoyed very much seeing workups and finished art for some of Eisner's graphic novels and pages from his comic strip, The Spirit. Below are a few snapshots of the displays, the first three of graphic novels, the last of a 1950 Spirit strip. You'll see some reflections because the material was in display cases or otherwise behind glass.

C.C. Beall, Watercolor Illustrator

C.C. (Cecil Calvert) Beall (1892-1967) was an illustrator who has become so little-known these days that a quick Web search came up nearly dry where biographical information is concerned. I did find this small site devoted to him. As this is written, it was "under construction," but contains a short sketch about him.

Beall was technically skilled. He almost had to be, considering that he was usually working in what I consider the most difficult medium of all: watercolor. And he did better than many illustrators, being featured in advertising campaigns for Maxwell House Coffee (a leading brand for many years), doing cover art for Collier's magazine (a leading general-interest publication) and illustrating government posters supporting the World War 2 effort. Nevertheless, so far as his career can be evaluated, fairly or not, he probably should be rated as a second-rank illustrator.

Below are examples of his work, some of which I consider really nice.

Gallery

Maxwell House Coffee billboard or poster design - 1922

Maxwell House Coffee ad - 1923

Collier's Cover - 30 January 1932
I really like this illustration.  Interesting composition and content -- very 1931-32.  But Beall's treatment of the gal with the top hat is smashing.  Well, the hat is way too large for her head -- but look at that face!

Collier's cover - 11 March 1933
A poor quality image, but it is significant.  For one thing, Beall uses the old trick of creating an overarching image made up of smaller ones.  Another example is directly below.  The main subject here is Franklin Roosevelt, whose first inauguration took place around the time this Collier's issue was on the news stands.  The featured author is George Creel.  He was Woodrow Wilson's propaganda / public relations supremo during the Great War.  His son, also a George Creel, was in charge of Public Information for 8th U.S. Army when I was stationed in Korea.  Though I did PIO work for another command, I met him a time or two.

Defense-related poster - 1941, pre-Pearl Harbor

Army Air Forces poster - 1944

Sketch portrait of John F. Kennedy - 1962

Reginald Marsh, Yalie Gone Slumming

Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) was never a starving artist. His grandfather was wealthy, so Marsh happened to be born in Paris while his parents were there; the family moved to New Jersey when he was two years old. Later on, he attended the Lawrenceville School, but for some reason didn't move on to nearby Princeton, opting instead for Yale.

Marsh didn't serve in the Great War, unlike many other of his classmates, and graduated "on time" in 1920. Even though both his parents were artists, it was only after leaving college that he began to study and practice art seriously.

Somewhere along the line, he focused on what have been called "working class" or "blue collar" subjects, something that became fashionable in intellectual and artistic circles after the Great Depression of the 1930s hit. Rather than featuring a single person as a subject (though he did this to some extent), Marsh tended to feature large groups of people in his more ambitious paintings, placing them in settings befitting their tastes: the beach, Coney Island, burlesque theaters and such. Although it would have been tempting to do so, he avoided strong political statements in most of his Depression-era works (though early in his career he provided illustrations to the leftist New Masses publication). Visual commentary was present in many cases, but Marsh usually downplayed it by casting part of the scene as happy or energetic.

Although he didn't care for modernist art, Marsh incorporated many features of modernism (see my book for details) in his etchings, watercolors and tempera paintings. For example, he distorted the proportions of his subjects somewhat, so they didn't seem quite real. And for some reason, he often liked to depict women as having heavier than average lower legs.

Many of these points and much more can be found in Marsh's Wikipedia entry. What is missing is a discussion of his personal life, though one sentence mentions in passing that he had a wife.

Here are some examples of his work.

Gallery

"The Battery" - c.1926

"Why Not Use the L" - 1930

"Smoko the Human Volcano" - 1933

"Hauptmann Must Die" - 1935

Minsky's Chorus" - 1935

"Twenty Cent Movie" - 1936

Untitled watercolor - 1944