Giuseppe Amisani: Portrait Art

The portrait above of actress Maria Melato was by Giuseppe Amasani (1879-1941), an Italian artist who specialized in portraying women. He studied at a technical school, switched to art, briefly abandoned the field, attained some success, then traveled a good deal during the 1920s (Egypt, Brazil) before returning to Italy. That's what I glean from Wikipedia entries in Dutch and Portuguese -- entries in English and (surprisingly) Italian are little more than placeholding stubs.

Amasani's style does not neatly fit major categories. He painted realistically in terms of drawing, his colors were sometimes exaggerated as best I can tell from Internet images, and his brushwork was almost always visible, but ranged from relatively subdued to strong.

Market interest in his paintings seems limited, for now. Apparently one can buy a Amasani at auction for only a few thousand dollars.

Here are more examples of his work.

Gallery

Portrait sketch

Ritratto di Emanuele Greppi
Amisanti also portrayed men.

Vera Vergani

Ritratto di Lyda Borelli

Lyda Borelli - 1912
Actress Borelli posed for Amisanti several times.

Riri

Riri col giubbetto rosa
  The biographies linked above do not say who Riri was. A wife?

Ballo nella taverna
This seems to be from the 1930s.

Harry Grant Dart's Circa-1908 Multi-Winged Future

Harry Grant Dart (1869-1938) was an illustrator and cartoonist active in the early part of the last century. Around 1907-10 he created a number of scenes depicting what he saw as future developments in aviation. The illustration above, "Going into Action," is from 1907, and shows aerial combat of a form curiously like a naval action on the ocean's surface. Bear in mind that the Wright Brothers had flown for the first time less that four years before and the Great War was seven years in the future, so his conjecture can't be strongly criticized.

In any case, it's an exciting scene, with deck guns blazing and crewmen maneuvering a craft using what looks like a ship's wheel. The aircraft are not the boxy, kite-like affairs found in 1907. Instead, they have sleek fuselages surmounted by dragonfly-like wings or else are bird-like monoplanes. Missing is a lot of maneuvering in the vertical plane, but in 1907 the airplanes he knew about were content to be flown at a pretty constant altitude.

Dart's brief Wikipedia entry is here, and a link dealing with his cartoon work is here.

Gallery

Air-sea battle at night - 1910
Night sea battles were a rarity, and suggesting that aircraft might be part of the mix was an audacious prediction by Dart.

A Look into the Future - 1908
Another future combat scene. Shore-based artillery in the foreground. Battleships toward the horizon. What might be submarines or high-speed torpedo boats near the shore (it's hard to tell what Dart was depicting here). And that large aircraft sprouting wings in every direction. Oh, and I see something that could be a rocket or missile. Dart was really cookin' when he dreamed this up.

Transcontinental Flyer - 1909
Hard to say what's going on here. The aircraft doesn't seem to have crashed. More likely it landed on the mountaintop so that men could climb off and do some exploring or research nearby.

Transport of the Future
Note the swept-back wings on this job. Very sleek, but like the rest of his imaginary creations, unflyable in reality.

From Harper's - 11 June 1910
Huge wings and delicate frameworks, not to mention a boat-like fuselage with a small fore-deck for observers.

Seen at 2014 La Quinta Arts Festival

One of the major outdoor art shows in the western United Sates is the La Quinta Arts Festival held every March in California's Palm Springs area. I usually write about it, because attending gives me something to do while not driving my wife to and from the Indian Wells tennis tournament that's also held in the area in March.

My interest is paintings, but those comprise a distinct minority of what is on display (and for sale). The rest includes, among other things, photography, jewelery, sculpture and clothing. Some paintings are abstract art, which I generally don't blog about. So I'll mention some artists whose work is at least somewhat representational. I divided the paintings according to whether they dealt with people as subject matter or else were landscapes. There were a few still life artists, but they are ignored here.

Most of the images below are not what I saw at La Quinta. Instead, I grabbed them from here and there on the Internet with the intention of presenting something representing the artists' styles.

Gallery

People

"Three Ladies" by Tom Barnes
This is little more than a cartoon, but Barnes cranks out a lot of paintings in the same vein, so there must be a market for it.

"My Life" by Yoram Gal
Gal's works are often cluttered with expressionist takes on people. They don't appeal to me.

"Studio Gathering" by Ali Golkar
Almost-abstract humans here. Given the colors and composition, I'm guessing that Golkar is a Matisse fan.

"Hat Club" by Rebecca Molayem
More cartoonishness. It must sell well enough, perhaps because of all those colors.

"The Mystery of Her Shadow" by Marcio Diaz
I wonder if Diaz was influenced by Chuck Close, in that he builds up images from fairly uniform little shapes. In this case, the shapes are little circles about the size and shape of reinforcement stickers used for punched paper placed in ring binders.

Landscapes

California landscape by Donny Hahn
The style here is 1920s, where the subjects are partly outlined. Retro, but pleasant.

"Magenta Hills" by Erin Hanson
Lots of strong color here along with some expressionist brushwork. Restrained, contemporary Fauvism? Whatever it is, something is wrong (I blame all that magenta and red).

"Spring in the Mountains" by Diane McClary
More overdone reddish tones, but more acceptable than the previous painting. Still, the colors are too fake, and the sun angle implied by the mountain shadows isn't carried over in the foreground.

Napa valley scene by Beverly Wilson
Wilson also really likes magentas and purples, but she deals with them better than Hanson and McClary.

"Mangrove Harbor Morning" by Tom Swimm
Yes, it's possible to paint hard-edge landscapes. Swimm's work is little too crisp for me, but he is a competent painter in that style.

"Serenity" by Teresa Saia
I thought Teresa Saia was the star of last year's show, as I wrote here. And that charming lady does it again in 2014.

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.