El Paseo Art Scene, 2014

I seem to find myself in the Palm Springs, California area every March while my wife is at the Indian Wells tennis tournament. When not being her taxi driver, I goof off various places, including the El Paseo, a fancy shopping street in Palm Desert. There are plenty of art galleries there, and my visits sometimes serve as grist for blog posts such as here and here.

I tend to focus on representational paintings, so while browsing on a Friday Art Walk evening, I took notes on names of artists whose work caught my attention for one reason or another. Not all the images shown below were on display when I went gallery-hopping; but I want to indicate what those artists were currently doing.

Gallery

"Summer Heat" by Mark Bowles
A number of Bowles' paintings at first glance seem to be color-field exercises. But on closer examination, they are actually abstracted landscapes.

By Vanni Saltarelli
I wrote about Saltarelli here, but thought it worthwhile to show you something more recently displayed. He dashes things off, including sketchiness with more painterly passages, to put it in artist jargon.

"Black Imperial" by Kent Scaglia
Hyper-realism probably based on a photo (note the reflections he incorporates on the side of the fender). But I'm a car guy and an automobile history buff, so what's not for me to like here.

"Rainy Day Solidarity" by Jeff Jamison
The lack of facial detail on the subjects bothers me, despite whatever rationalizations are offered for this.

"At the Rialto" by Bruce Cody
Cody has painted a number of small paintings such as this, dealing with small-town scenes from Texas or the mountain states.

"Spartan Camping" by Jason Kowalski
Kowalski paints in the same subject vein as Cody. But the painting above is a bit different. I viewed the original, and was impressed by the brushwork Kowalski used to build the image.

By Eustaquio Segrelles
Joaquin Sorolla's Valencia beach scenes must resonate seriously with some Spanish painters. A while ago I posted about Ginar Bueno, whose work struck me as being both too similar to Sorolla and definitely inferior to the master's work. Segrelles uses the same subject matter, but his style is more solidly constructed than Sorolla's, making his paintings easier for me to accept than Bueno's.

"Gossip" by Michael Carson
I dealt with Carson's change of style here, but thought I'd include an image of a painting of his I saw at the most recent Art Walk.

Aeropittura: Futurism Takes to the Skies

Hitler's Nazi Germany tried to wipe out modernist "degenerate art" and replace it with Aryan naturalism. Stalin's Communist Soviet Union discarded post-Revolutionary art "isms" in favor of Socialist Realism's farm tractors and heroic workers. And Mussolini's Fascist Italy? Modernism was just fine with Il Duce's crowd, and plenty of modernist artists were just fine with Fascism.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurism was the prime home-grown modernist movement in Italy, and its focus on dynamism was in synch with the dynamism that Mussolini attempted to impart to Italian society after he assumed power. Futurism was pushed along over time via manifestos and other means of rejuvenation. Around the end of the 1920s, one form of this emerged in something called Aeropittura -- aviation pictures.

Perhaps the best of the Aeropittura painters was Tullio Crali, who I wrote about here. There were others, and I think it might be interesting to look at some of their works along with a couple of Cralis.

Gallery

Aeropittura - Barbara (Olga Biglieri) - 1938

Assalto di motori - Tulio Crali

Bombardamento aereo - Tulio Crali - 1932

Battaglia aerea - Renato Reghetti (detto Di Bosso) - 1936

Volo sul paese - Giulio D'Anna - 1929

Aeropittura - Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) - 1932

Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseso - Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) - 1930

Joseph DeCamp Portraits

In a way, it's surprising that there were plenty of portrait artists plying their trade in the early decades of the twentieth century. After all, photography was well established by then, so the basic need for likenesses of people was adequately and economically served by that medium. But wealthy people were willing to commission portraits anyway. Several reasons for this can be proposed, including the comparative durability of oil and canvas, family or social tradition, matters of social prestige, and more.

The very best portrait artists gravitated to places where wealth and tradition were firmly in place -- Paris, London, New York City and Boston are prime examples. Joseph DeCamp (1858-1923) came from Cincinnati, studied under Frank Duveneck in Munich, but made his career in Boston. A short Wikipedia entry about him is here, and a more detailed biographical note can be found here. Apparently DeCamp painted many landscapes early in his career, but most of these were destroyed in a studio fire.

Besides painting commissioned portraits and teaching -- his main sources of professional income -- DeCamp created many paintings for his own purposes, many having beautiful women as the subject. They were often very good, as can be seen below.

Gallery

Theodore Roosevelt - 1908

In the Studio - 1890-95

Mrs Ernest Major - 1902-03

The Heliotrope Gown - 1905

The Guitar Player - 1908

The Blue Cup - 1909

The window Blind - 1921
My guess is that this was inspired by Vermeer; note the similar room arrangement.

The Blue Mandarin Coat - 1922

Jules Joseph Lefebvre: Godiva and Other Ladies

The large image above is of the huge "Lady Godiva" (1890) by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911) that was displayed at, among other places, Paris' Grande Palais during the 1900 Exposition Universelle. It was recently restored, and now hangs in the Musée de Picardy in Amiens, according to this article (in French).

Lefebvre was a noted painter in his day, as this brief Wikipedia entry indicates. The link also contains a fairly long list of his works. For more biographical information, click here on the Art Renewal Center site. Included is an extensive list of Lefebvre's students, where one will find names such as Frank Benson, Childe Hassam, Fernand Khnopff and Edmund Tarbell.

Lefebvre was no slouch with his brush, having won the Prix de Rome early in his career. He favored pretty women subjects, as can be seen below.

Gallery

Graziella - 1878

Ophelia

Lauretta - 1895

Japonaise - 1882

Odalisque - 1874

Rokeby Venus - Velázquez - c. 1947-51
The variety of posing positions for the human body has limits, so some duplication (or near-duplication, in this case) can be expected. Yet the similarity between Lefebvre's and Velázquez's nudes struck me. I think the reason is the similarity in body builds as well as the general pose.

John Singer Sargent: Same Subject, Different Media

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) probably needs no introduction to Art Contrarian readers. A painting of his that I would really like to see in person is the subject of the present post.

Fumée d'Ambre Gris - 1880It is part of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute collection, whose description of it is here. Unfortunately for me, I seldom get to Massachusetts, so my chance of viewing the painting in person seems pretty slim. Yet I once spent more than four years in not-so-far-away Albany, New York -- but that was when I was still brainwashed by modernist propaganda and thought the Clark not worth visiting, if I had been aware of it at all.

Perhaps even more embarrassing, in recent times I was unaware that Sargent created some studies for it, including a watercolor now held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I've visited the Gardner, but (once again!!) failed to notice it (that is, if it had actually been on display at the time).

Here it is:

Incensing the Veil - c. 1880
A rambling discourse on Sergent's painting and the substance ambergris is here, and some supporting images are here.

Logan Maxwell Hagege's Retro Deco Southwest

Do you have a soft spot for those 1920s vintage railroad posters from the likes of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads? I certainly do.

That also seems to be the case for Los Angeles based artist Logan Maxwell Hagege, who has made a great many paintings in the spirit of those posters. His web site is here, and a short biographical sketch here.

Hagege's images are carefully designed, often making use of profile views of his subjects (it can be easier to turn a profile into design elements than trying the same from, say, a three-quarter view). And since he returns often to the same subjects, viewing a large number of his paintings at once can cause a fall-off of interest. However (not having seen one of his paintings in person), I think having only one hanging in a suitable wall, might be quite nice for some of us retro fans.

Gallery

Striped Blanket

Above the Mountains

Light on the Round Clouds

The Storm Clears

Evening Song

Mesa Near Hopi Land

Images of Hagege at work

Édouard Detaille: War Artist of the Third Republic

Even though France was humiliated in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, paintings featuring military subjects were popular in France during the early decades of the Third Republic. Perhaps the most prolific artist of that genre was Jean-Baptiste Édouard Detaille (1848-1912), who had a reputation for thorough research on details of uniforms, weapons and battles of both the Napoleonic era and 1870 and its aftermath. His Wikipedia entry is here.

Perhaps because he churned out so many drawings and paintings, a few being huge dioramas, I find them not usually satisfying as works of art. I mostly prefer the work of his contemporary, Alphonse de Neuville, who I wrote about here.

Gallery

Photo of Detaille at work
Here he is, dabbing away on a huge canvas. Many human figures, horses and other items to depict, and he probably didn't have the time to paint them with thought and care. Yet this sort of painting was what he was known for, so he kept making them.

Le rêve - 1888
This immense painting was on display at the Musée d'Orsay when I visited last September. It shows bivouacing contemporary (or 1870) French soldiers dreaming of the gloire of their Napoleonic forebears. Despite its size, it doesn't seem to have been as rushed as some of his other works, which is perhaps why the Orsay displayed it.

Charge de Mosbronn - 1870 war

The Charge at Friedland - 1894

La salu aux blessés - 1877
Saluting the wounded.

Mounted First Empire Dragoons

Hussar
I don't know if this was an elaborate sketch or a finished work. Regardless, as best I can tell from this digital image, it's nicely done. Apparently when he wasn't painting vast action scenes, Detaille was able to focus and show us what he was capable of.

Un officier des cuirassiers, fin 19eme
Another portrait of sorts, but a crowd of soldiers and horses manage to intrude as background.