F.R. Gruger: Black & White Master

Frederic Rodrigo (F.R.) Gruger (1871-1953) was a prolific and highly respected illustrator whose career was at its zenith during the 1920s and early 1930s. In those days, most story illustrations (as opposed to magazine covers) appeared in black and white or sometimes duotone. So Gruger generally used monochrome media such as soft pencils, pen and ink, and washes. At times he did illustrate in color, as we'll see below, but he is mostly remembered for his monochrome work.

Gruger was inducted into the Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame in 1981. A biographical citation is here. David Apatoff posted a series of articles about Gruger here, here, here, here, here and here and, as usual, makes excellent observations. Another worthwhile Web page dealing with Gruger is here.

Gallery

Illustration for the book "Manslaughter" by Alice Duer Miller - 1921
This seems to have been done entirely in pencil.

Illustration
It seems to be dealing with ghosts from different eras and places.

Illustration
Gruger also used watercolor or lampblack washes.

Illustration
Note how sketchily done most objects are here.  The viewer will therefore probably focus on the two faces and maybe the girl's knee.

Illustration
Perhaps a speakeasy nightclub scene. Compare to Henry Raleigh's party scenes. Different styles, but equally compelling. Makes me wish I was there.

Illustration for "He'll Come Home" - Saturday Evening Post - 16 March 1929
More lightly done than many of his illustrations.

Study

Illustration for "Show Boat" by Edna Ferber - Woman's Home Companion - April 1926

Color illustration for "Show Boat" - Woman's Home Companion - April 1926
Yes, Gruger also could do color. This is a scan from Benjamin B. Pearlman's biography of Gruger, "The Golden Age of American Illustration: F.R. Gruger and His Circle" North Light Publishers, 1978. The image in the book was itself scanned from a copy of the magazine because the original art could not be found. Therefore, the quality is not good and the color might have shifted due to aging of the magazine page.

"Show Boat" - Kelly Collection
The Kelly site dates this as 1903 (as of the time I captured the image), but 1925 should be a better estimate. The publication image is below. But might this actually be the presumably lost original? Although the colors differ (they seem thinner here, for one thing), examination of the line work, shading, and other details show that it is the same as the final version. Could colors have been altered during printing preparation?

Color illustration for "Show Boat" - Woman's Home Companion - April 1926
I like this illustration a lot due to the delineation quality -- the variation in line weights and such. The remarks for the first scan, above, also apply here. Moreover, both images have been slightly cropped.

Molti Ritratti: Nancy Cunard

Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) was a rich heiress of the kind who led a messy, self-destructive life that ended in poverty, alcoholism and a degree of insanity. I speculate that, because she reached maturity when Modernism (and its rejection of the past and quest for a fabulous, new, to-be-determined-by-the-Modernist-elect, future) was becoming fashionable, this made things even worse than they might have otherwise been.

I'll spare you more details of her foolishness, but this link provides the basics.

Cunard's portraits were mostly photographic, but a few were painted. Here are examples of both:

Gallery

By Man Ray (un-cropped version)
This seems to be a contact print.  Man Ray tended to cut the bottom at or just below her left elbow.

By Cecil Beaton
A fashion magazine image.

By Cecil Beaton - ca. 1930
This is one example from several taken at one shoot.  Probably not used for publication, as others were better.

By Ambrose McEvoy - ca. 1925
Doesn't really look like her.  Plus, I don't see her trademark bangles.

By Alvaro Guerva
A Russian look, but that was in fashion during the early 1920s.

By John Banting
Edging towards Surrealism, but a few bangles still show up.

By Oskar Kokoshka - 1924
A mess of a painting.

By Wyndham Lewis - 1922
Several sources mention that Lewis and Cunard were having an affair that year. This bangle-free drawing exhibits his skill in judicious modernist simplification that nevertheless retains the character of the portrait subject.

El Lissitzky: Mostly Non-Objective

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1890-1941), who styled himself El Lissitzy (the "El" might be from Eleazar, or perhaps from an aspect of the Unovis movement of 1920 when he first identified himself as "El"), was a major player in the group of Russian modernists who briefly thrived around the time of the Great War and for a dozen years or so in its aftermath. Biographical information on him can be found here, and this site features a number of large images of his graphic work.

Lissitzky trained in architecture in Germany and traveled in the west, but was forced to return to Russia when the war started in 1914. He did not serve in the Imperial army though he was of military age. This might have been because of tuberculosis, a disease that killed him at age 51. (Though one source mentions that the disease did not impact him until after the war, so perhaps his professional training or other factors kept him out of the army.)

The October Revolution kicked his creativity into high gear, his Jewishness no longer being a social barrier. Lissitzky's graphic designs helped anticipate the work of the Bauhaus in Germany and modernist-inspired designs elsewhere up into the 1950s when angled design elements became largely passé.

Some of his designs spilled over into painting, where his works were what was termed Non-Objective Art, a phrase used during the 1930s by New York's Museum of Modern Art for abstractions often comprised of geometrical elements. Aside from some Op-Art pieces in the 1960s and 70s, this geometrical type of decorative painting seems to have been an artistic dead-end.

Gallery

"Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" poster - 1920
This was in support of the Bolshevik armies during the post-revolution struggle against anti-Bolsheviks.  The Red Army eventually succeeded against the White forces, but didn't do well in its push into Poland.

Preliminary version of poster design - 1920

Proun design

Proun design

Vyeshch cover - 1922
Vyeshch was an avant-garde, modern art review that seems to have been multi-lingual to a degree. Note the German and French, especially at the lower left. The title is the three large Russian letters, the third of which symbolizes the "shch" sound.

"Iron in Clouds" design for Strastnoy Boulevard structures - 1925
The note at the upper right indicates that this drawing was a gift from Lessitzky to J.J.P. Oud, the Dutch architect who happened to have been born the same year.

Kusntgewrbemuseum Zürich catalog cover - 1929
This is perhaps Lissitzky's best-known graphic design, the merged heads being a clever but not particularly meaningful touch.  The event was a Russian exhibition, presumably of architectural and graphic designs.

When Renoir Doubted Impressionism

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was, along with Claude Monte and Camille Pissarro, a major French Impressionist whose painting style is archetypically "Impressionistic" in the minds of most viewers. (On the other hand Edgar Degas, although considered one of the original band of French Impressionists, painted in a more traditional style.)

Were I into pop-psychology, I might assert that Renoir experienced a "mid-life crisis" in 1883 when he was in his early 40s. He began to doubt his Impressionist painting style and experimented with a more delineated, harder-edge approach inspired by his admiration of Ingres (who Picasso also claimed to admire). This is noted in his Wikipedia entry and elsewhere on the Internet. It is also discussed in this book by Anne Distel, a Musée d'Orsay curator.

Renoir's wanderings in a not-quite-Impressionist wilderness lasted roughly five years (1883-88). He then picked up where he had left off stylistically.

But not entirely. From time to time he continued to make paintings featuring more sharply defined subjects. And not just commissioned portraits; the final painting below was done for his own purposes in 1896.

Gallery

Luncheon of the Boating Party - 1880-81

On the Terrace - 1881
To set the scene are the two paintings above, made not long before he modified his style.

Les parapluies - ca. 1880-86
As this link notes, Renoir began "The Umbrellas" around 1880-81 and then reworked and completed it about 1885-86. It notes that the right side seems to have been painted first and the left part later. So it is a stylistic hybrid that Renoir was hesitant to sell for several years.

Children's Afternoon at Wargemont - 1884

Bather Arranging Her Hair - 1885

The Large Bathers - 1887

The Washerwomen - ca. 1888

La famille de l'artiste - 1896

Eric H.W. Robertson: Both Traditional and Modernist

Scottish painter Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson (1887-1941) is essentially a cipher, so far as information about him on the Internet is concerned. In fact, most of what I could find regarding him was on this Wikipedia entry dealing with his first wife, Cecile Walton (1891-1956), daughter of the Glasgow Boy, Edward Arthur Walton.

The link above mentions that he was trained in architecture, but shifted his attention to painting. From the evidence of a photo of him in uniform in the link along with a painting (see below), Robertson served in some capacity in the Great War. Finally, it seems that he was a heavy drinker, this affecting his peculiar marriage arrangement and quite likely his artistic career.

So why am I bothering to write about Robertson? Because he is one of those painters who flipped back and forth between traditional painting and various degrees of modernism -- sometimes even working those styles at around the same time. Moreover, I find many of his images appealing. Others seem to be of the same mind because, even though there is essentially no biographical information, the Internet has a fair number of images of his paintings.

Gallery

Spring - 1913

Beauty Luxuriant - ca. 1919?

Shellburst

Robert the Bruce and de Bohun

The Daughters of Beauty (part)

Cartwheels - ca. 1920-21

Dance Rhythm

Cecile - 1922

Wynne Walker (the artist's later wife) - ca. 1924

Ralph Pallen Coleman: He Stayed in Philadelphia

Ralph Pallen Coleman (1892-1968) carved out a respectable career as an illustrator while remaining a notch below others who were famous and often better known to the public than the authors whose stories they illustrated.

Could this have been because he spent his life in the Philadelphia area? Whereas Philadelphia might strike some readers as a backwater of sorts, for the first half of the 20th century and a while beyond, it was a very important place so far as illustration was concerned. That was because the Curtis Publishing Company was based there, close by Independence Hall. And Curtis' stable of magazines included Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal, each having huge circulation numbers in their day. So being close to this source of work was no handicap for an illustrator.

Coleman's career is outlined here. The source mentions that one of his art instructors was the "difficult" master illustrator Walter Everett, who I last wrote about here. The link also indicates that Coleman drifted away from commercial illustration in the 1940s to producing religious illustrations, murals, and such in the later part of his career. I will deal with his non-religious art here.

Gallery

Blue Book cover - January 1921
One of the earliest works that I could find.

Story illustration - 1922
Somehow this seems to have been done a few years later than the date shown where I grabbed this image, but of course I could be wrong.

Story illustration - early 1930s
The date under Coleman's signature block is smudged, but the woman's gown and hairdo push this beyond the 1920s. The vignette format seen here and immediately above and below was popular with art directors in those days. Illustrators probably liked it too, because they didn't have to spend a lot of effort on backgrounds and settings.

"To Look Before You Leap" - American Magazine - February 1932
Here Coleman is using outlines and drawing rather than creating a traditional painting.

"An Atlantic Adventure" - Cosmopolitan - August 1934
Interesting combination of framed and vignetted art. I'm pretty sure that the white space was used for a headline and / or text in the magazine.

Home Arts cover - February 1937
This magazine dealt with sewing crafts, and so had a somewhat different core audience than the Post, Cosmo and such. Coleman seems to have altered his style to deal with this, quite possibly in line with the art director's wishes.

"Calcutta Adventure" - 1940
Yet another two-color vignette.

Motor Age cover - July 1944
Just because he was transitioning to religious art didn't mean that Coleman was a total prude.

Emil Nolde's Style Trumped NSDAP Loyalty

I include the tag "Political art" for this post about Expressionist artist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) not because his art featured political subjects, but because his political position failed to overcome Nazi opposition to "degenerate" (modernist) art.

He was born Emil Hansen in the the border area of Germany and Denmark, later changing his last name to that of the town near where he was born. Nolde got a late start in painting, seeking training when in his early 30s. He was a modernist, first influenced by Impressionism, but gave that style up to become an expressionist. In the early twentieth century he was associated with Die Brücke and then with Der Blaue Reiter, key groups in early 1900s German Expressionism.

Nolde's Wikipedia entry is here, and another fairly long account of his career can be found here. For Nolde's relationship to the Nazi party and its dealings with his art, a useful source is this book.

It seems that Nolde was a Nazi party member -- but of the Danish, not the German one. He was a strong supporter of Hitler, but the regime favored völkisch art (traditional in technique, featuring Nordic, countryside and heroic subjects, among others). Expressionism of Nolde's kind fell into what was by the late 1930s considered "degenerate" art by Hitler's regime, and a number of his paintings were pulled from state galleries and some included in a exhibit of modernist art considered worthy of scorn. So his Nazi affiliations well as support by some high in the party hierarchy were not enough to counteract his style of painting in the earlier years of his career. He retreated to the land of his birth and worked largely in watercolor during the late 30s and the war years.

Gallery

Printemps dans la chambere (Springtime in the Room) - 1904
This was painted not long after his marriage, so the subject might be his wife. The style is Impressionist, but with a hint of Fauve coloring.

Dance Around the Golden Calf - 1910
By 1910, Nolde was in full expressionist mode.

Spectators at the Cabaret - 1911

Crucifixion - 1912
He came from a religious background and painted some religious subjects such as the crucifixion of Christ.

Nadja

Verlorenes Paradies (Paradise Lost) - 1921
Adam seem miffed regarding Eve.

Frauenkopf mit roten Haar (Woman with Red Hair) - 1925

The Sea at Dusk
I have no date for this, though I think it might be a watercolor from the years when Nolde was in disfavor and spent most of his time in Seebüll, near the Danish border.

NOTE: The NSDAP in the title of this post refers to the National Socialist German Worker's Party, the German language version being commonly abbreviated to "Nazi." The term "national socialist" was intended to distinguish the party from international socialism, the leading generic leftist concept of 1920.