Santiago Michalek, Painter of Rusty VWs

I recently noticed Santiago Michalek's paintings at the Bellevue Arts Festival, which evolved from a show of paintings by the better Seattle area artists back in the 1950s to what's now pretty much a crafts street market. As implied, a few painters do exhibit there, and Michalek struck me as the one with the most talent.

His Web site is here, the linked page containing some biographical information. Michalek lives in Utah, but was born in Argentina and claims to be self-taught. His passion is old Volkswagens -- usually Microbuses. But he paints locomotives and other transportation objects -- and even does people.

Below are images of his paintings that I grabbed mostly from his Web site.

Gallery

Early VW in garage

Murphy's Wholesale
A Derelict VW Microbus.

Silver Plane

15328 Engine

Switching Yard
I remember this from the show. It's fairly large, giving Michalek room to paint both tightly (the Baltimore & Ohio diesel locomotive) and freely (the background).

Color Study

Motion Figure

John Falter: Major Post Cover Illustrator

If doing paintings for Saturday Evening Post covers marked the zenith of an illustrator's professional career, then John Falter (1910–1982) was near the top of that elite group during Ben Hibbs' time as editor from the early 1940s to the early '60s. That's because he painted more than 100 covers over a 20-year period. (The count varies. One source says 129, others claim upwards of 200. Regardless, he was liked by the Post and prolific.)

More information about Falter can be found here and here. A gallery of his Post covers can be accessed here.

Falter was one of those illustrators whose work was highly competent, yet lacked a strong personal style -- a trait that seems to be necessary for lasting recognition and, especially, fame.

Gallery

Early pulp magazine cover art. It shows more style than his later works.

Two World War 2 U.S. Navy recruiting posters. The one showing the aircraft carrier has factual errors that might have raised the hackles of a sailor, but probably went unnoticed by most potential recruits. (The carrier is a Lexington class ship, probably the Saratoga. The Sara lost those big 8-inch guns early in 1942, but the F4F fighter shown has insignia that didn't appear until mid-year. The Lexington was sunk in May of that year.)

Wartime art for a Pall Mall cigarette advertisement.

Falter could do abstract art, too.

This has the look of Post cover art, but a quick look at Google Images didn't turn up a cover. Maybe it's buried in the cover images link above.

Two representative Falter covers for the Post.

A 1960 Post fold-out cover showing New York's Grand Army Plaza at Fifth Avenue (at the the left) and 59th Street (foreground).

"Miscellaneous - C" Images

I like to download art images from the Internet to my computer. Some are intentional grist for a post that I'm working up. Others are collected because I really like them. And then there are those serving as aides-memoirs of paintings that catch my eye for potential future collecting of images. At some point, when I have a lot of images by an artist, I'll create a directory ("folder" seems to be the term of art these days) for that artist, moving those images from a "Miscellaneous" directory to the new artist-based one.

Today's post contains images from my Miscellaneous directory for painters, and I'm selecting from those artists whose last names start with the letter C.

The original paintings were made during the 70-year period between 1870 and 1940, a time when Modernism was on the rise from ignorable quirkiness to near-domination in fine-arts painting. By the time I was being brainwashed in college, many or even perhaps all of the images shown below would have been greeted by a sniff and a condescending remark by modernist cognoscenti.

Yet I now find that same 1870-1940 period endlessly fascinating for both mainstream Modernism and art that ignored Modernism entirely or selectively nibbled at it. Of course, I am not alone nowadays, because the previously ignored non-Modernist art is regaining the respect it was denied in the 1950s.

The images shown below are in alphabetical order of the artist's name and reflect no particular theme. Have fun looking at them.

Gallery

Cabanel, Alexandre - Samson and Delilah - 1878

Cadorin, Guido - Decorazioni del salone all'Hotel Ambasciatori (detail) - 1926

Caputo, Ulisse - Lavoro di sera

Citroën, Paul - Corry Mohlenfeldt - 1939

Clark, Alson - Portal, Mission San Gabriel - 1919

Constant, Benjamin - Afternoon Languor

Cortès, Edouard-Léon - Champs Élysées scene

Cucuel, Edward - The Bather

Cursiter, Stanley - The Fair Isle Jumper - 1923

Czachorski, Wladislaw - The Proposal - 1891

Men's Suits: Drapery Extremes

Many things seem to swing between extremes. Not all extremes reach absolute limits, but they can come close to something like limits imposed by practicality. That is the case for the subject of this post: the amount of cloth used in men's suits.

It turns out that two extremes were reached about 20 years apart. Around 1940, fad apparel for some young men was in the form of the Zoot Suit, an exaggeration of current men's suit styles that already were rather baggy. By 1960 fashionable men's suits were snug and used minimal material. Lapels were narrow, as were neckties. The archetypical suit had three buttons and the two upper ones were buttoned down. On college campuses, this was sometimes called Ivy style, after the prestigious group of colleges and universities in the Northeastern USA (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown and Cornell) where the mode of dress was supposedly popular.

Gallery

Here is a Zoot Suit. Its characteristics include: Baggy, high waisted trousers "pegged" (narrowed) toward the cuffs. A loose-fitting suit jacket with wide lapels, heavily padded shoulders and a hem down toward knee level. An extremely long key chain was a usual accessory. Neckties might be long or (as in this case) bow, in both instances using plenty of material.

Two Zoot-suiters with a young Army sergeant (who himself might have worn a Zoot Suit a year or two earlier).

The great Cab Calloway in 1942 wearing an exaggerated (yes, it must have been possible) Zoot Suit for a performance.

Now it's 1961 and we find Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard on New York's Park Avenue during the filming of Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Peppard is wearing an Ivy style suit, but for comfort's sake has it unbuttoned.

William Aylward, Illustrator of Nautical Scenes

William James Aylward (1875-1956) came from a Great Lakes shipping family, was a student of Howard Pyle, and usually illustrated stories with nautical themes.

Biographical information about Aylward is skimpy. Two sources are here and here. The Kelly Collection site deals with him here.

Having been accepted by Pyle as a student signifies Aylward's potential as an illustrator, which was fulfilled in most cases. I do include one poorly-done example below from late in his career.

Some of the titles of the illustrations shown below are truncated. Those lacking capital letters are conjectural titles.

Gallery

Coming to America

Contrasts - 1905

future airships? - McClure's Magazine - 1905

storm scene - Harper's - 1909

Surrender of the Guerriere - Harper's - March, 1912

Perry Transferes His Flag - 1913

Mystic, Connecticut - 1916

battleship - c. 1943
This looks like a North Carolina class battleship, though a number of things seems "off" to me. For instance, the ship is too foreshortened for the viewing angle. The North Carolina and Washington had long bows, so it's possible that Aylward used some artistic license to better fit the ship into a compositional scheme. In any case, the top of the hull is too low at the front (there's much more of an upwards curve on the actual ships) and the main turrets are more distant from the prow than is shown here. The foremast structure and, indeed, all the superstructure elements shown are seemingly too high and definitely too large compared to the main turrets. The problem here is that the perspective is a mess. The anti-aircraft guns mounted high on the superstructure appeared late in the war on the North Carolina, but by that time the foremast was much more cluttered than pictured here in its 1941state. I really have no idea why an artist as experienced as Aylward would let all this happen.

SS America Bringing Troops Home - c. 1945

Molti Ritratti: Lina Cavalieri

Natalina "Lina" Cavalieri (1874-1944) was orphaned as a teenager and ended her life in a bombing raid. Between those events she appeared in a movie and in operas while having her image on postcards and other popular media. That was because she was regarded as perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world.

Her Wikipedia entry is here, and a slightly snarky take regarding her singing ability from London's Telegraph is here.

Usually I populate Molti Ritratti posts with paintings. Oddly, even though Cavalieri's career was at its height when painted portraits were commonly made, very few were actually created.

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Cavalieri was mostly depicted by photography.

Here she appears in an illustration for a Palmolive soap advertisement.

Portrait painting by Cesare Tallone, early 1900s.  The contrast between the face and the rest of the painting is jarring.

Photo of portrait painting by Antonio de la Gandara, 1912. This is the only image of the painting I could locate on the Internet. Let me know if a better one exists.

Two portraits by Giovanni Boldini painted in 1901.  He caught her in police mug shot fashion -- profile and full-face -- but neither try seems satisfactory to me.

Is it possible that a woman can be so beautiful that artists are incapable of conveying that beauty? Possibly.

Thomas Dugdale: Wars and Portraits

I seem to post a lot about 20th century British artists who are little known today, yet seem to have carved out respectable careers for themselves. Today I do it again, this time about Thomas Cantrell Dugdale (1880-1952).

I could find little in the way of biographical information about him after a half-hearted Web search. London's National Portrait Gallery has only this: "Thomas Cantrell Dugdale was a painter and book illustrator. During the First World War he served as a Staff Sergeant in the Middlesex Yeomanry." The Tate offers only a little more here.

As a result, we are left to fall upon the device of examining Dugdale's art. Which is a sensible thing to do, because that's what really counts.

Gallery

Charge of the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars at El Mughar, Palestine, 13 Nov. 1917 - 1920

Wellington and crew, Pilot and Navigator Confer - c. 1940
Dugdale served in Allenby's Palestine campaign, though apparently not with the Buckinghamshire Hussars. As for the World War 2 scene, I have no information as to whether or not he had any sort of official war artist status.

Night - 1926
This image might be an illustration, rather than strictly a painting.

Life
An interesting, naturalistic pose. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was based on photography.

La Bella Andaluza
Stylistically different from Dugdale's other works, but another natural pose.

Jessie Matthews - (actress)

Dame Wendy Margaret Hiller - c. 1935

Vivien Leigh - c. 1936
Dugdale seems to have painted quite a few portraits of British actresses during the 1930s, though I have no information regarding why.

Portrait of a lady

Princess Margaret, Colonel-in-Chief, Royal Highland Fusiliers

I think Dugdale at his best was a good artist, yet not top-notch. I like the paintings of the mother-and-child and Andaluza best of this lot. The rest display a touch of Modernism that is manifested in a sort of dabby style that lacks punch and individuality. That might be why he is little remembered even though representational art is regaining popularity.