Jacek Malczewski and Muses

Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929) made astonishing paintings. Not astonishingly good paintings, necessarily, but paintings that astonish. Not only do they astonish, they fascinate. This is mostly because of their subjects and how Malczewski presented them. For me, its a "What in the hell is going on here?" reaction in many cases. Malczewski carried this off because was a skilled artist; off hand, I can't think of any other painter who could have painted what he did in such a convincing manner.

I lasted posted on Malczewski here, showing some of his paintings dealing with death. The present post deals with artists, muses, and in particular, Malczewski's most important muse, Marii Balowej, also known as Maria Balowa or Maria Bal. For a short summary of Malczewski's career, click here.

The images below are in chronological order. Click to enlarge.

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Natchnienie malarza (Painter's Muse) - 1897

Artysta i muza (Artist and Muse) - 1898

Autoportret z muza - (Self-Portrait With Muse Holding Scepter and Heart) - 1904
Although he was married, Malczewski began using the recently-divorced Marii Balowej as a model. This turned into an affair that lasted for about ten years. Even after it ended, the two remained friends. As best I can tell, this and all the images below have her as the model for the woman.

Portret Kobiety (Marii Balowej) - 1907

Modelka (Maria Balowa jako śmierć czytająca nekrologi w gazecie) - Model as Death Reading Obituaries - 1907

Moja dusza (My Soul) - 1908
This is really a sketch, but Malczewski considered it finished because he signed it. I include it because it suggests his technique at an early stage of creating a painting.

Wiosna (Spring) - 1909

Auroportret - 1915
Another partly completed work.

Pytia Pythia (the Delphic oracle) - 1917
Painted after the break-up. Marii is fully clothed, perhaps due to that.

One Million Pageviews

Really successful Internet sites such as Drudge Report can clock one million pageviews in an hour. Some blogs can probably hit that mark in a couple of months or maybe less time.

Art Contrarian is a small blog with limited focus, but it hit the 1,000,000 pageviews mark sometime today.

So many thanks to you, the regular readers and those who drop by occasionally for making Art Contrarian reach this milestone.

Clarence F. Underwood: Prolific Then, Unknown Now

Clarence F. Underwood (1871-1929) was born in Jamestown in western New York State, trained at the Art Students League in New York and the Académie Julian in Paris, returned to America around 1901, and then pursued a career in illustration.

That's just about all I could find regarding him.

But if you Google on him and go into Images, you will find quite a number of examples of his work. It seems that Underwood was prolific and appeared in leading magazines of his day, including the Saturday Evening Post, the top general-interest magazine for more than half of the 20th century.

I have to admit that I don't care for most of Underwood's work. The scenes he depicts are usually bland (though that might have been because of the stories he illustrated). His compositions aren't usually very interesting, either. While he could draw well when he chose to, often enough his brushwork was just fussy enough to counteract the drawing. From Google, it seems that he used gouache, watercolor or possibly colored inks a good deal, this and the vignette style he often used suggest that he worked fairly fast. Given the quality of printing during his 1902 - early 1920s heyday, it's possible that the reproduction process smoothed over some of the rough brushwork.

For a quick look at some examples of his work in addition to what is displayed below, click here. The images shown below are what I consider among the best of his work.

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Couple ice skating
Many Underwood illustrations deal with well-dressed couples. Apparently this is what the stories and art editors required.

Seated young women in overcoat
I think this is one of his best efforts.

Lady getting her hair arranged
When given the chance or when in the right mood, Underwood could be witty.

Elegant couple - Saturday Evening Post illustration
A nondescript painting with large amounts of dead space surrounding the subjects. Was some of that covered with print in the publication?

Couple in back seat of limousine
By the woman's hair style, I'll assume this is one of Underwood's later works.

Did Mead Schaeffer Dislike His Best Art?

According to the article on Mead Schaeffer (1898-1980) in issue No. 45 of Illustration magazine, he was quoted as saying in 1945:

"I longed to do honest work, based on real places, real people, and real things -- work expressive of normal human emotions and activities. So, I did a right-about-face, and have never regretted it."

This was in reaction to painting "dudes and dandies, exaggerated sentiment, artificial romance, and love withe the endless 'he and she' pictures."

The images above reflect this change in attitude. The ones below are some of what I consider his better work done prior to his epiphany.

There is little question that Schaeffer was satisfied with his decision to change subject matter and, as it turned out, his style as well. But while he seemed satisfied, what about his audience and, in my case, his fan base?

To me, Schaeffer's appeal lies in his style -- the way he composed his scenes and, especially, his painting technique; subject matter is secondary. So far as I am concerned, his work from around 1940 onward was competently done, conventional, and not interesting to look at in most cases. Other contemporaneous illustrators could (and did) do pretty much the same sort of thing equally well. Very few in 1925-39 could equal Scheffer's work. Feel free to disagree in Comments.

(I wrote about Schaeffer here. A brief Wikipedia entry is here. A David Apatoff take can be found here. There is more about him here.)

The Dieselpunk World of "donaguirre"

I have no idea who "donaguirre" is. He signs his illustrations "aguirre" and it seems that he's based in Germany (could he be originally from Spain?). And I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that he was trained in industrial design.

His website is a part of the Deviant Art site, and is difficult to navigate for casual viewers such as me.

Given all this, we have no choice but to drop searching for details about him and instead take a peek at the alternative-1930s universe he has created. Click on the images to enlarge.

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These "posters" help set the stage for aguirre's world. Imaginary countries and cities exist, though they resemble those of the 1930s. And don't miss the wry bits of humor: for example, note the "generous dental plan" appeal in the 1935 faux-poster immediately above.

Two more poster-like images, but of a different kind. Robert Heinlein fans will catch the reference in the book cover.

Fighter, HMS Aquarius, 1936
Design for a dirigible-based fighter plane.

Leaving Home Defence Perimeter

Malstroen-Zeppenfeldt, 1935 faux-poster for a weekend racing event

Nikkokan Task Force
Apparently the enemy is a Japan-like nation.

Rollout
A completed passenger dirigible leaves the factory.

Spirit of Distopia
Another plane design. This from the "Hugges" company, and a likely takeoff on Howard Hughes' H-1 Racer of 1935.

Racing Weekend

John E. Sheridan: Conventionally Competent

John E. Sheridan (1880-1948) is yet another illustrator I've been writing about lately who had a reasonably successful career, yet is little remembered. And like so many other technically competent artists I've dealt with here, lasting fame was elusive because what was missing was a distinctive style.

Sheridan's Wikipedia entry is here, and a more lenghthy biography that stresses his fashion illustration is here.

The "reasonably successful career" evaluation I made above is based on the fact that Sheridan painted about a dozen covers for the Saturday Evening Post, the dominant general-interest magazine in America during the first six decades of the last century. Becoming a Post cover artist was truly the Big Time for an Illustrator. And yet ...

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This is a Sheridan Post cover. The United States was in the process of a crash mobilization for the Great War at the time it appeared, but one would never guess that from the cover's subject matter. Interesting car, however: note the slanted radiator which is more evocative of 1932 than 1918.

One of Sheridan's efforts featuring men's suits by Hart Schaffner & Marx, a leading clothing firm for much of the 20th century.

Cover for the May, 1931 American Magazine. American was a second-tier magazine in those days, and Sheridan's illustration has no "story" to it whatsoever.

Also from the early 1930s, though I don't know whether it was for an advertisement or a magazine cover. Once again, a bland, generic subject. It's quite possible that art directors, and not Sheridan, were responsible for subject selection on this and the preceding image.

I really like this movie advertisement or poster. Try to ignore the blue reversed headline type bleeding through that nifty chorus girl. Here we find zing, not blandness. Perhaps Sheridan's reputation would have been better had he been commissioned to paint more of these than the sort of things shown above.

Violet Shading in Circa-1930 Illustration

I'll leave it to art history scholars to tease out the various "firsts" related to this post. Instead, I'll just offer some approximations. For instance, if the French Impressionists didn't originate the concept that shaded areas on objects might be colored violet or purple, they surely popularized it.

I haven't fully researched its use in illustration, but Impressionism-influenced illustrator N.C. Wyeth was including small touches of violet shading on characters he was painting by around 1920 and Harrison Fisher might have been doing the same occasionally a few years earlier.

But it wasn't until well into the 1920s that American illustrators made bold use of violet as a shade hue. Perhaps the influence here was the popularity of toned-down colors on contemporary murals where opposites (in color-wheels terms) were either mixed or placed side-by-side Divisionist-style. At any rate, a warm-shifted approximate opposite to sunlit flesh color (that is, an orange) would be some sort of violet. Examples presented in the present post cover the period 1928-1934 when this color fashion was at its height. Actually, it wasn't much of a fashion, as only a few illustrators participated.

Perhaps the most famous was McClelland Barclay (1891-1943), who used violet shading in some illustrations he made for a General Motors' Fisher Body advertising series. Least-known was Karl Godwin (1893-1962), who I wrote about here. His big-time career period was in the late 1920s and early 30s, though he continued to work at the margins, as indicated here. Finally, there is Walter Baumhofer (1904-1987), whose career began with "pulp" magazines and later transitioned to "slicks." I wrote about him here. Other sources of information are here and here. But if you are really interested in Baumhofer and his work, consider getting a copy of this issue of Illustration Magazine, which is devoted entirely to him.

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Barclay - Fisher Body ad art - December, 1928

Barclay - Fisher Body advertisement - July, 1930

Godwin - From a 1929 Hudson automobile advertisement

Godwin - Ethyl advertisements - 1932

Baumhofer - Magazine cover - March, 1929

Baumhofer - magazine cover - May-June, 1931

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover - July, 1933

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover - February, 1934

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover art - May, 1934

Baumhofer - Doc Savage Magazine cover - September, 1934
Baumhofer made the greatest use of violet shading, and that was mostly for some of the cover art he created for Doc Savage Magazine. One reason for this is that Dec was described in the stories as having a bronze complexion, and some sort of violet or blue would be the opposite of that dominant color. The cover shown immediately above is my favorite.

Dieselpunk Airplanes

I'm sort of a sucker for the 1920s and 1930s. Call it a "false nostalgia" thing. For that reason, I've developed a peculiar semi-fascination with Dieselpunk imagery where actual 'tween-wars art, machines, architecture and so forth are dumped into parallel universes or alternative histories and thereby transformed.

Wikipedia deals with Dieselpunk here. A more extensive introduction can be found here at the Dieselpunks Encyclopedia.  And a few Web sites for further immersion in Dieselpunk are here, here and here.

Like most other things, Dieselpunk objects can be fascinating or ridiculous or something between. As for which, that depends on the eyes and background of the beholder. Just for fun, let's take a peek at Dieselpunk aircraft.

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Flying boat, by Tyler West

Vigil at War
I don't have a name for the artist, but wish I did because it's a realistically imaginative image.

Skycrawlers
Again, I don't know the name of the designer.

"Red Baron" by Ajdin Durakovic

Chaparral float plane by Inago
This looks too nose-heavy to actually fly.

Heavy Attacker, by Inago
This illustration has airbrushing that looks very 1938. The airplane itself strikes me as pretty silly.

Fictional Airships by "linseed"

Joint Defense Fighter by "donaguirre"

British flying aircraft carriers and fighter planes of 1939
These are from the 2004 movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I haven't seen, but probably should have for the purposes of this post.

Sky Captain - Manta fighter by "linseed"
The Manta also seems too nose-heavy to fly.