What is Art? - Reflections on 2014 Turner Prize Finalists

As happens every fall, the British component of the Art Establishment has spoken. Herein is the 2014 Turner Prize winner and the three other finalists.

Duncan Campbell was the winner; the Tate webpage citation is here, and includes the following: "Campbell makes films about controversial figures such as the Irish political activist Bernadette Devlin or the quixotic car manufacturer John DeLorean. By mixing archive footage and new material, he questions and challenges the documentary form."

As for the runners-up, there is Ciara Phillips.

The Tate link mentions "Phillips works with all kinds of prints: from screenprints and textiles to photos and wall paintings. She often works collaboratively, transforming the gallery into a workshop and involving other artists, designers and local community groups. Phillips has taken inspiration from Corita Kent (1918–1986), a pioneering artist, educator and activist who reinterpreted the advertising slogans and imagery of 1960s consumer culture." The image above of a Phillips exhibit credits the late Corita Kent with the "text works." Phillips' specialty is printmaking.

Then there is Tris Vonna-Michell (link). "Through fast-paced spoken word live performances and audio recordings Vonna-Michell (born Southend, 1982) tells circuitous and multilayered stories. Accompanied by a ‘visual script’ of slide projections, photocopies and other ephemera, his works are characterised by fragments of information, detours and dead ends."

James Richards' display of blankets from 2007, above, is titled "Untitled Merchandise (Lovers and Dealers)" -- not his Turner Prize effort -- that the Telegraph helpfully explains as showing artist Keith Haring's "dealers and boyfriends." The Tate link is here, including the following: "Born in 1983 in Cardiff, Richards was nominated for Rosebud, which includes close-ups of art books in a Tokyo library – the genitalia scratched out to comply with censorship laws."

So this is art worthy of our attention and respect.

Though I've seen neither Campbell's movies nor Vonna-Michell's standup schtick (though I'm virtually certain they're of the postmodernist ilk), what we seem to have here is a group of career-building posturers quite likely cynically gaming the postmodernist Art Establishment system by being "creative," "innovative," and "fearless" in shocking the bourgeoisie while posing as vedettes of the avant-garde.

Fundamentally, they are not as serious as they think (though they are unlikely to admit it).

But the real problem, in my warped (from their perspective) mind is the committee of establishmentarians who selected the finalists and winner. What on earth could they have been thinking? My guess is that they were fearful of being accused of conservatism.

I don't want to get into the business of trying to define "art." Though I think a useful distinction worth preserving is the concept of Fine Arts and Fine Arts - related illustration as opposed to other "arts" such as film, dance, graphic novels, and the self-promotional artifacts the Turner committee seems to prefer.

Moreover, I don't like the idea of "art" being defined by a body of "experts." That easily leads to bureaucratic rigidity exemplified by the French Academy in days of yore.

Nor do I especially welcome the self-proclaimed "artist" who defines whatever he is producing as "art." Actually, there is no real harm in that so long as there would be a philistine accusation-free zone where others could gauge those products against their own tastes and are allowed to publicly proclaim that what they are viewing is usually silly. Which is what I think most Turner Prize "art" is.

Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman: Early Pontiac Grand Prix Illustrations

So far as I know when drafting this post, he is still alive and probably illustrating automobiles. That would be Art Fitzpatrick, born in 1920 or maybe a year or two earlier. Although he did automobile advertising art for several American car makers in the 1940s and 50s, his fame is largely due to his work for Pontiac in the 1960s and 70s in collaboration with Van Kaufman. Fitzpatrick rendered the cars and Kaufman provided the backgrounds.

I didn't notice a biography of either artist on a quick Google search. In place of that, some links dealing with Fitzpatrick's career and work are here, here and here. Of particular interest is this link which features an interview with him.

The present post features images created by Fitzpatrick ("AF" was the signature he used) and Kaufman ("VK") for Pontiac's 1962 and 1963 Grand Prix models. Fitzpatrick mentioned that the new (for 1962) Grand Prix model's name implied Europe, so he and Kaufman researched European backgrounds they thought would be suitable for advertisements. In one telling observation, he stated that their Pontiac illustrations were unusual for the times because the people in the scenes were not admiring the cars, but instead were doing other things that fit the context of the scene being shown.

I include 1962 Grand Prix illustrations because that was the first year for that model. The 1963 cars were based on a new body (note differences in the windshield), and I consider its styling especially nice; a thorough repudiation of the baroque styling excesses of the 1950s.

Gallery

1962 Pontiac Grand Prix
Shown along the Corniche high route along the French Riviera.

1962 Pontiac Grand Prix
Another Riviera setting, though I'm not sure where (Cannes?).

1962 Pontiac Grand Prix
France, again. Note the Citroën Traction-Avant in the background.

1962 Pontiac Grand Prix
Still in France, but again I can't pin down the location. Please comment if you know where.

1962 Pontiac Grand Prix
Big change: Back in the good old USA.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix
This illustration might be from a brochure. Ditto the image immediately above it.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix
One source has the setting as the canal along the Loire River.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix
Might be Portofino. Note the sketchy style of both the car and background components. And the cyclist blocking part of the car: bold for a car ad then.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix
In front of the Hotel de Paris in Monaco, down the hill a short ways from the Monte Carlo casino.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix advertisement
On the Pont Alexandre III in Paris.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix advertisement
That's Paris' Opéra Garnier in the background.

Cross posted at Car Style Critic

Tokyo's Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel: My Photos

One of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright's "lost" buildings is his (1923-1967) Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

Actually, it seems that part of it survives at the Meiji-Mura Museum near Nagoya (see the above link for details). Surviving bits are mostly in the form of exterior stone decorations, lobby furnishings and such because the brick and concrete construction of the original could not be disassembled.

It happened that I was in Japan a few times while serving in the U.S. Army and took some slide photos of the hotel that I recently scanned and digitally adjusted. The images aren't very good, but at least they offer a sense of what the Imperial Hotel was like a few years before it was demolished. Had I known its future, I probably would have taken many more photos to document the building.

Gallery

An architectural rendering of the Imperial Hotel. The images below deal with the entrance court area which appears at the right-center of the rendering. It faced out towards the Imperial Palace plaza. The wing in the foreground was along a street leading to the Ginza district and contained shops on its lower level.

Two postcard views of the hotel from around 1932, to judge by the automobiles. These images should serve as orientation to my four photos below.

This shows part of the gardens and a tiny glimpse of the building. It was taken in June of 1964.

Also taken in June, 1964. It shows the pond by the entrance as well as some entrance details. By this time, the stone ornamentation was getting pretty mildewed.

This photo and the next one were taken in March 1964 when I spent a week in Tokyo on temporary duty at the Stars and Stripes newspaper.. The weather was gloomy the day I took these photos. Worse, the film I used was Kodak's Ektachrome, a cheaper alternative to its now-discontinued Kodachrome color film. Seen here is the entrance and reflecting pond. Among the cars shown are a Chevrolet and a Cadillac, Japan having little in the way of domestically built large automobiles in those days.

This photo shows some of the brickwork and decorative detailing.

Dante Rossetti's Similar Faces of Different Models

One of my posts that's most often linked is this one dealing with Helen of Troy of the Homeric epic. Here is yet another version of Helen.

Helen of Troy - 1863

The model - Annie Miller, ca. 1860

It was by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), a founder of the famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of young, mid-19th century British artists. He mostly painted what amounted to portraits of women in literary settings. He used various women for this purpose, and in his paintings, they all looked fairly similar, as we shall see.

The Wikipedia entry for Rossetti is here.

Regardless of who the model was, Rossetti usually transformed her into a woman with a long nose, a short upper lip/muzzle zone, a strong chin and a long neck. Also, her hair tended to be parted at or near the the center of her head and was usually long and wavy. Below are more examples of Rossetti's women along with photographs of the models.

Gallery

Beata Beatrix - 1864-72

The posthumous model - Elizabeth Siddal, ca. 1860
Siddal (1829-1862) was Rossetti's wife, who died young.

La Ghirlandata - 1871-74

The model - Alexa Wilding, ca. 1875

Bocca Baciata - 1859

The model - Fanny Cornforth, 1863
She was Rossetti's housekeeper and mistress for many years.

Astarte Syriaca - 1875-77

Beatrice - 1879

The model - Jane Morris (neé Burden), 1865
She was married to William Morris of the Arts & Crafts movement. It seems that Rossetti was infatuated with her, and her looks tended to merge into the paintings he made using other models, as can be seen above.

"Art Deco Hawaii" Exhibit

One of Edward Lucie-Smith's many books is titled Art Deco Painting. With all due respect, I find it difficult to class a painting as "Art Deco," though I already conceded that Jean Dupas' works fill that bill. And probably the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka as well.

Which leads me to the recent (3 July 2014 - 11 January 2015) exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art titled "Art Deco Hawaii" that I was able to visit a few days before it closed. There were some pieces of sculpture and some print items, but much of what was on display was paintings -- some were illustration art, others were fine arts images.

To me, Art Deco (a term retrospectively coined by Bevis Hillier in the late 1960s) is primarily an ornamentation style in architecture and graphic arts, secondarily a sculpture genre, and sometimes a variety of mannered illustration. As mentioned, not much in the way of paintings, though that's what the exhibit featured.

So-called Art Deco paintings fall into the category of simplified representation that was common between the two world wars. That is, aspects of pre-Great War modernism were incorporated in an effort to come to terms with modernism without going whole-hog. I deal with this in my e-book "Art Adrift" mentioned on this blog's sidebar. And that was pretty much what I saw: typical 1920s and 1930s paintings with little true Art Deco spirit. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my visit. Below are some images from the Internet along with some photos (a few are cropped slightly) that I took.

Gallery

Girl with ukulele - Edward Eggleston - ca. 1925-30
Eggleston was an illustrator who seemed to specialize in pretty girls. I mention one of his travel posters here.

Lei Makers - Cornelia Macintyre Foley - 1934
Information on Foley (1909-2010) is here. Her style is that often seen in the 1930s, reminding me of the work of Mexican muralists active in those days.

Lithograph by Robert Riggs
Riggs was a leading illustrator in his time. David Apatoff wrote about him here. I didn't know that he dabbled in fine arts, so was surprised to spy this lithograph.

Discovery - Arman Manookian - 1928
Manookian (1904-1931) was born in Turkey, received his art education in the USA, served in the Marine Corps in the 1920s, practiced commercial and fine arts in Hawaii and then killed himself. More biographical information is here. According to the link, he didn't make many paintings over his brief career, and they are seldom shown publicly. So I was fortunate that several were on display. I consider the one above to be amongst his better ones.

Aloha ... the Universal Word - Eugene Savage - 1940
This was one of a set of murals that Savage (1883-1978) was commissioned to paint by the Matson Navigation Company, whose liners carried tourists and others between San Francisco and Honolulu for many decades. The murals were intended to be placed on the liners, but World War 2 intervened and the artwork wound up being reproduced on ships menus and such. Matson still owns the original murals, but large reproductions can be found in places such as Honolulu's Royal Hawaiian Hotel (once owned by Matson). I was pleased to be able to finally view the original artwork.

"Aloha" - detail

Pomp and Circumstance - Eugene Savage - 1940
Savage's Matson murals are crammed with detail, but that's the norm for mural paintings. His Hawaiians don't look very Hawaiian to me, but that really doesn't matter because Savage was trying to create evocations rather than documentation. An oddity in some of the murals is one figure staring out at viewers, as if caught by a camera. (Note the fellow towards the left side.) The paintings featured here include groups of females holding identical poses, which is a decorative characteristic of Art Deco.

"Pomp" - detail
Click to enlarge the two detail photos for a closer look at Savage's brushwork.

Arthur Bowen Davies: Inconsistent Modernist

This post about Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1928) is rather brief because I couldn't find many useful examples of his work on the Internet.

It seems that Davies, obscure today, was well-known and made a good living as an artist. Plus, it seems he had an interesting life, having one legal wife along with another, secret, de facto one, both with his children. This and his artistic career are well-covered here, here and here.

From what I've seen, I'd rate Davies as a Symbolist -- his painting owned by New York's Met featuring unicorns, and many other works dealing with dancers. Especially during the 20th century's 'teen years, he plunged into modernist styles, though not deeply or completely. Apparently this cut down his sales, so he shifted back to more clearly representational paintings in the 1920s.

For what my opinion might be worth, I saw no Davies painting that struck my fancy.

Gallery

Unicorns (Legend - Sea Calm) - 1906

Air, Light, and Wave - ca. 1914-17

Figures in a Landscape

The Dancers
This is in the Phillips Collection for some reason.

The Dawning - 1915

Dancers
I think this is a Davies, but the Web information on it is sketchy.

Italian Hill Town - Ca. 1925
Here he is back to representational painting.

Heliodora - 1926

Edward Cucuel's Lounging Women in White

Edward Cucuel (1875-1954) was born and died in California. But his parents were German, and he spent much of his career there following training in Paris and flitting back and forth to the States. He left Germany for good when World War 2 started. These and other details of his life can be found here and here.

The second source mentions that Cucuel, who mostly portrayed attractive young women, used family members and friends rather than professional models. To judge from his body of work (just Google on his name and then go to Images), his friends must have been dear and the family members very obliging. That's because he did painting after painting showing a pretty woman in white dress, lounging around so that plenty of leg above her white hose was showing and, by the way, part of the top had fallen away to expose a small breast. I show only one of the latter below, the rest indicating other subjects he painted.

Gallery

Picking Flowers
Some of his ladies were fully dressed and not wearing white.

Mädchen in einem Interieur
Although the title I found for this is in German, it was probably painted around 1950 when Cucuel lived in Pasadena.

Picnic on the Starnberger See
This painting seems a bit more hard-edge than some of the others, but that might be due simply to size.

Die Badenixen

Wood Nymph
Flatter than most his his paintings. If the tree trunk were less modeled, that would be an improvement to what already is an interesting work.

Young woman on dock
The perspective of the sailboat is highly distorted -- for no good reason, in my opinion.

Young woman reading in garden

Young woman sleeping, parasol
Were I female and dressed like that, I'm not sure I'd want to flop on the grass.

Young woman sleeping on a sofa
One of many of this general theme.