Towards the End: Picasso

In January 2011, I wrote an "In the Beginning" post (here) featuring Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who the general public still seems to regard as the genius master of Modern Art.

Recently, I've added a complementary series, "Towards the End," dealing with an artist's late, rather than early work. So now seems to be as good a time as any to add the remaining bookend to Picasso's career.

Considering that he died aged 91, it's a little unfair to select a start-point ten or even 15 years before his death. So what I did was rummage through images of paintings made after 1950, when he was nearly 70. Below are some examples from what I found.

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Dora Maar au chat - 1941
I include this painting Picasso made when he was about 60 to serve as a benchmark for the later ones. "Dora Maar with Cat" sold at auction for one of the highest prices ever.

Villa in Vallauris - 1951

Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle - 1952

The Studio - 1955

Woman in Turkish Costume Sitting in a Chair - 1955

Les pigeons, Cannes - 1957

The Rape of the Sabine Women - c. 1963

Le peintre et son modele - 1963

Grandes têtes - 1969

Tête d'homme - 1972

True to his form, Picasso never went purely abstract; each painting includes a subject or subjects potentially identifiable via the captions.

To my eye, there was no real stylistic progression or sense of direction over the 20 years covered by the example images above. This ties into the thesis of my e-book "Art Adrift" that once the elements of modernist painting had been established by around 1920, aspiring modernists and even established ones such as Picasso had no real sense of what to do next.

Ted Rand: Local Illustrator Who Made Good

Eons ago, when I was majoring in commercial art at the University of Washington, the Big Man in the Seattle illustration scene was Ted Rand (1915-2005).

There were other competent illustrators working in Seattle back in the days when the Seattle area was far from the world-class place it is now. The same can probably be accurately said for many mid-size metropolitan areas back when the nationally-known illustrators worked out of the New York City area (mostly), Chicago (to a lesser extent) and San Francisco (somewhat). Today's example features Seattle, because that's the place I knew about at the time.

Rand was the top illustrator locally in part because his work was featured in Pendleton ads that appeared in national publications. The other local guy with national cred was cartoonist Irwin Kaplan, who I wrote about here. As I mentioned in that post, Kaplan taught a fashion illustration class, and Rand appeared there once as a guest lecturer. Later on, Rand taught at Washington; too bad I missed out on that.

A biographical note on Rand is here, and a two-page obituary is here. As best I can tell, he had little or no art training beyond high school, so he must have been a "natural." Also noteworthy is that, at around age 65, he shifted professional gears to become a prolific writer and illustrator of children's books.

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The images above look like they might be two segments from a horizontal spread (note the Frederick & Nelson logotype split). Frederick's was the leading Seattle department store into the 1960s.

Rand's work appeared nationwide during the 1950s when he illustrated ads for Portland, Oregon's Pendleton.

Here are two of his book covers.

Lily Elsie: Too Beautiful to Paint?

This is one of several posts featuring show business stars active from the 1880s to around 1920. It was a period when photography and portrait painting uneasily coexisted where notable people were being depicted. On my mind is the thought that really beautiful women are better pictured in photographs than in portrait paintings.

Today's subject is Lily Elsie (1886-1962), a popular star of London musicals whose personal life ended badly, as her Wikipedia entry indicates. A website devoted to Elsie is here.

So far as I can find, there is only one portrait of Elsie painted by a leading artist, that by American expatriate James Jebusa Shannon in 1916. On the other hand, many photographic portraits were taken of Elsie, most of which seem to be publicity-related (as might be expected).

Gallery

Some photos of Elsie; yes, she really was a beauty. The final photo was taken when she was about 40 years old and still looking very good.

An illustration publicizing the 1911 show "The Count of Luxembourg." The resolution is poor, but all the versions of usable size I could find were like this.

A postcard image by Talbot Hughes.

Lily Elsie by James Jebusa Shannon, 1916.

Jean Metzinger and His Variously Styled Women

Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger (1883-1956) is usually associated with Cubism, though seldom ranked as highly as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris in that aspect of modernism. However, Metzinger, along with Albert Gleizes, attempted to codify cubist practices and generate a theory of Cubism in their book Du "Cubisme" that appeared in 1912.

There are lengthy biographical articles on Metzinger on the Internet. His Wikipedia entry is here. Another long essay that is richly illustrated can be found in two places: here and here.

I must confess that I was unaware of Metzinger until very recently when I began searching for cubist portraits. Although he is hardly unknown to art history, it seems that he has been somewhat bypassed in the Modernist Establishment timeline that culminated in Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. Perhaps this was because he reverted to a restrained version of modernism by the 1920s, failing to take up Surrealism or full-blown abstraction.

Metzinger seemed to enjoy portraying women. With that in mind, I summarize his career in the series of paintings featuring women in the Gallery section below.

Gallery

Femme assise au bouquet de feuillage - 1905

Femme au chapeau c. 1906
Metzinger was in his early 20s and trying out modernist styles. In these two paintings he is experimenting with Divisionism, a Postimpressionist approach.

Le goûter - 1911
Some sources credit this as Metzinger's breakthrough Cubist painting. Braque and Picasso had been painting in the Cubist style for two or three years at this point.

La femme au cheval - 1911-12
The title says this is a woman with a horse -- but I'm sure you could tell that already by simply looking at the image.

Danseuse au café - 1912
Note Metzinger's use of light in this painting and the two previous ones. These are in the spirit of Analytic Cubism, but the bland colors favored by Picasso and Braque in this cubist phase are ignored. Instead, we see the effect of light sources on the cubistically reassembled objects. One result is a feeling of depth, rather than the flattened picture plane favored by other cubist painters. I find this very interesting.

Les Baigneuses - 1912-13
A cubist landscape with bathing women that also features light shining on subjects.

Femme à la dentelle - 1916

La tricoteuse - 1919
These two paintings reflect the late-style Synthetic rather than earlier Analytic Cubism. Metzinger soon abandoned Cubism for many years.

Jeune femme pensive aux roses rouges - 1923
After the Great War many modernists recoiled from the "isms" that had been created in the years leading up to the conflict. Some, like Picasso, returned to more hard-core modernism. Others retained some representation of subjects, but included modernist affectations such a a flattened picture plane, simplification of shapes and so forth. Here Metzinger relies mostly on simplification.

Salomé - 1924
And here he uses both simplification and distortion as modernistic effects.

Femme debout - 1935
In the mid-1930s Metzinger continued to paint women in the then-fashionable simplified, solid-appearing manner.

Nu au hortensias - 1935
A touch of Cubism possibly returns here in the form of the unusual light-shade pattern.

La baigneuse (nu) - 1936-37
Here Metzinger flattens the picture plane somewhat.

Yachting - 1937
Hints of Cubism in the background, but the interesting treatment of the woman is non-cubist.

Portrait de femme en vert - c. 1940
A highly designed composition with a flattened picture plane, simplifications, some color distortion. Yet the drawing of the woman's head is so strong that those details are ignorable.

Nu couché - 1946
This postwar painting continues Metzinger's Cubism-lite that was seen in Femme en vert above.

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.

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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).