H.R. Giger: A Note Regarding Taste in Art

Swiss fantasy artist Hans Rudolf "Ruedi" "H.R." Giger (born 1940) died 12 May 2014 as a result of injuries from a fall. The event was met with many expressions of sadness and regret on the Internet. A biographical sketch of Giger is here, and an example of his art is shown at the top of this post.

I too regret his passing, as I do for most other people. I must add that I knew little about him while he lived. Yes, in art sections of bookstores I noticed books displaying his works. But I never picked them up or thumbed through them. And not being much of a moviegoer, I never saw "Alien," which apparently was a career breakthrough for Giger thanks to his design work for the film.

You see, I think Giger's work is pretty awful to look at. Dark, depressing, convoluted. Nothing there to mesh with my personality.

Yet there are many well-qualified observers who are smitten by his images. And I will say in Giger's favor that his paintings are technically well-done. Moreover, his intent was serious, unlike so many postmodern artists who seem to be showoffs and self-marketers rather than serious professionals (please take their statements about their "art" with a large amount of salt).

George Morland, Dissipated Genre Painter

Yes, he was dissipated, throwing away an otherwise successful career through lack of financial and personal self-control. That was George Morland (1763-1804). What I find interesting is that he was a prolific painter of mostly countryside genre scenes that had little to do with his wild, largely urban life. An extensive Wikipedia biography is here.

I don't find Morland's works very interesting from an artistic standpoint. On the other hand, they can be useful documentation of aspects of late 18th century English life. Let's take a look.

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Coast Scene -1792

Winter Landscape

Herdsman with Cattle Crossing Bridge

Cowherd and Milkmaid - 1792

Pigs in a Sty
Morland painted many pigsty pictures.

Lovers Observed

Easy Money

The Public House Door - 1792

The Fortune Teller

The Artist in His Studio and His Man Gibbs - 1802
No fancy studio here, for Morland was trying to avoid his creditors after leaving debtor's prison.

Jules-Alexandre Grün as Painter

Jules-Alexandre Grün (1868-1938) is perhaps best known as a poster artist, having worked for the great Jules Chéret. But he also painted, which is the focus of this post.

Grün's English language Wikipedia entry is tiny, so readers interested in biographical details should consider consulting the French entry.

Most of his paintings that I could find on the Internet are crowded social scenes, often containing small portraits of people well-known at the time he painted them. In a way, Grün picked up on social scenes from the Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer (1851-1909) after the latter died.

Those paintings are necessarily "busy" compositionally, but Grün was skilled at it, and the works draw viewers into the details of the depicted people.

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Oops, here is painting of just one person, a woman serving fruit.

But here she is again in this social setting.

This seems to be a study for Un groupe d'artistes.

The final Un groupe d'artistes, 1929.

This large paintings is titled "Friday at the French Artists' Salon," painted in 1911.

This is a detail from the above.

My favorite Grün is Fin de souper, 1913. The young woman at the left seems entrancing. I wonder who she was.

John Harris: Sci-Fi Artist in Oils

A large percentage of book cover art for the science-fiction and fantasy genres is now done using digital media. The resulting images can be quite striking at times, especially when complex shapes overlay one another; the effects would be difficult to achieve using traditional media. On the other hand, the digital image needs to be printed in some form if an admirer wants to cherish it someplace besides a computer/tablet/smart phone screen and doesn't want the interference of a book title and other cover necessities. In any case, there is no true "original" image in the sense of a traditional drawing or painting.

Some cover artists prefer to use traditional media, oil paints especially. This is true for many contributors to the Muddy Colors group blog managed by oil painting artist Dan Dos Santos.

A somewhat older artist than the Muddy Colors crew is British cover artist John Harris (1948 - ), who worked in acrylics and other media for some time, but finally settled on oil paints because he could best achieve desired effects in that way. The best biography of Harris that I could find on the Internet is here.

Harris can be painterly or (comparatively) hard-edge, depending on requirements. Here are examples of his work.

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The title associated with this on the Web is "A Minor Incident," but I couldn't locate a cover image to confirm this.

A segment at the left of this was used as cover art for a book titled "Ancillary Justice."

I have no titles for the four images shown above.

This is titled "Quiet Night" and seems to show the moon disintegrating as it approaches too close to Earth at some future time. Or it might be another moon-planet location entirely.

This rather hard-edge Harris painting is titled "Temple."

Up Close: Giacomo Favretto's "Dopo il bagno"

As I mentioned in the previous post, a late-19th century Venetian painter whose brushwork I like is Giacomo Favretto (1849-1887), who died aged 38 of typhoid fever. A brief Wikipedia entry is here and more details can be found here.

One of his paintings, Dopo il bagno - "After the Bath" (1884) was on display in Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Web site here). I was able to take some photos of it that are displayed below. Click on the images to enlarge. But be warned that paintings are often difficult to photograph in museums, so the focus might not be as sharp as it should be, and there can be extraneous light affecting the view.

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This image was taken from the Internet to serve as reference.

Here is my "establishment shot" of the painting.

The subject up close.

Favretto's handling on the right side of the painting.

The left side, with a bit of the frame included to improve the focus.

Giacomo Favretto: Next-To-Last Really Good Painter from Venice?

A while ago I wondered if Ettore Tito (1859-1941) was "The Last Really Good Painter from Venice."

Since then, I discovered another Venetian artist who, in his way, was Tito's equal. His name is Giacomo Favretto. But Favretto, 1849-1887, was born ten years before Tito and died of typhoid fever at age 38, so he couldn't claim to be the last really good painter from Venice.

English language information regarding Favretto is skimpy on the Internet. A brief Wikipedia entry is here. More details can be found here.

Favretto painted a number of 18th century costume scenes, but I prefer his paintings related to Venice. Here are some examples:

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La raccolta del riso nella terre del Basso Veronese - 1878
Okay, this isn't Venice, but a setting a ways farther inland. I include it because he rarely did landscapes.

L'ultima parola - 1879

Mercato in campo San Polo

Poveri antichi! - 1880
A commentary on art restoration, I think.

Una riva a Venezia - 1881

La calle

Il traghetto della Maddalena - 1887

Susanna e i due vecchi - 1887
The title can be translated as "Susanna and the Elders," but here Susanna is fully clothed and quite happy to be part of the scene.

Liston odiero - 1887
A view of Venice's Promenade Day. Favretto was working on it just before he died. At first glance, it seems finished, but closer examination shows that some of the background figures are only sketched in. Click on the image to enlarge.

Favretto had a very nice touch that, for me, cancels any potential criticism that his subjects lacked profundity.

Fascist Remnants

I took the photo above in 2006 when visiting the Deutsches Museum in Munich and posted it on the 2Blowhards blog. The aircraft is a World War 2 Me109 fighter, and something is missing. The missing item is the Nazi swastika on the tail. At the time (and today as well, for all I know) part of Germany's de-Nazification required removal or deletion of National Socialist symbolism, and that included historical exhibits such as that Messerschmitt. Yet bookstores in Germany carried books about the Second World War filled with photos of aircraft sporting swastikas -- no airbrushing there.

Italy is different from Germany. And its dictator Benito Mussolini was different from Adolf Hitler. Until Mussolini made the mistake of teaming up with Hitler in the mid-1930s, his regime had little blood on its hands, and he was held in fairly high regard by a number of Great Powers political leaders and print media publications. Even following the war and his execution, his family thrived: son Romano was a noted jazz musician who married Sophia Loren's sister, and Romano's daughter Alessandra has been successful in Italian politics.

And so it is that, unlike swastikas in Germany, fasces (the symbol of Fascist Italy) can be found here and there along with essentially unaltered buildings from that era. Actually, the 1930s was a time of transition in architectural fashion towards pure International Style (a New York Museum of Modern Art term of the day). That transition was done in stages, ornament being slowly discarded. Government building tended to retain simplified hints of classical architecture, as can be seen in the United States as well as Italy and elsewhere.

Below are images from my recent visit to Sicily and southern Italy. I didn't research the dates the buildings were built, but I'm pretty sure most date to Fascist times.

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Poste e Telegrafi, Palermo

Poste e Telegrafi, Matera

Banco di Napoli, Matera

Banco di Sicilia, Palermo

Manhole covers in Ostuni with the Fascist symbol

I was surprised to find this bust of Mussolini in a souvenir shop in the Sicilian resort town of Taormina, but there it was along with statuettes with religious and other themes. I bought this small one so that I could show it on this blog. There were larger size busts as well as a full-figure statuette of Mussolini with his right arm raised in the fascist salute. More than one shop had these items, and apparently no one seemed to mind that they were on display.