Ludwig Dill: Conservative Secessionist

Wilhelm Franz Karl Ludwig Dill (1848-1940), who called himself Ludwig Dill, was a founding member of the Munich Secession artists group. A brief Wikipedia entry on Dill is here.

In 1894 he became second president of the group after Bruno Piglhein's death. He was appointed professor at the Karlsruhe fine arts academy in 1899, so resigned and was replaced by Fritz von Uhde.

Although Dill was supportive of modernist tendencies in painting, his own works were fairly conservative. His mature style tended to simplification through use of broad brushwork as well as somewhat decorative composition. His favored subjects were trees and boating scenes from the Venice Lagoon, especially towards its southern end and the town of Chioggia.

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Fischer in Venedig - 1880
"Fishermen in Venice" show Dill's earlier traditional style.

Ein bewaldete Flusslandschaft - 1883
The title doesn't translate easily into English, but refers to a landscape featuring woods and water.  Modernist influence is clearly found here.

Trees

Der Morgen
"Morning" and the painting above it are characteristic of Dill's tree paintings, though Der Morgen seems more of a sketch than his usual tree art.

View of a town
No tile or date for this, but it shows that he didn't exclusively paint trees and boats. However, he tended to avoid painting people other than small, incidental figures in his boat paintings.

Segelboote in Kanal - ca. 1890
"Sailboats in a Canal" is in a style different from the paintings below that also are said to be from around 1890, so I wonder when it was made.

Ankunft des Fischerbootes - ca. 1890
"Arrival of the Fishboats" and the following painting are done in a decorative, broad-brush style that yields a modernist feeling without much distortion of the subject matter.

Fischer in Pellestrina - ca. 1890
Pellestrina is a barrier island to the Venice Lagoon.

Booten im Hafen - ca. 1900
"Boats in Harbor" apparently was painted later than the images above and incorporates a slight shift towards Expressionism and away from Dill's faintly Romantic earlier views.

John Lavery's Glasgow Exposition Sketches and Paintings

Sir John Lavery (1856-1941) is perhaps known as a portrait painter (I wrote about his portraits of his wife here). But he was pretty much an all-rounder, painting village scenes, doing wartime art, interiors, and finally poolside views of sunny south Florida. A short Wikipedia entry about him is here.

The present post deals with career-building works he painted at the 1888 Glasgow International Exposition. Lavery made a number of oil sketches along with a few finished paintings, including a major one of Queen Victoria and a multitude of assembled dignitaries that helped him win portrait commissions thereafter.

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State Visit of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888 - 1890

Woman Painting a Pot at Glasgow International Exposition, 1888
A finished painting.

The Dutch Cocoa House at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888
One of the sketches. Note the Van Houten plaque ubder the mantle.

The Blue Hungarians at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Musical Ride of the 15th Hussars during the Military Tournament at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

The Cigar Seller at the Glasgow International Exposition, 1888

Frank Gehry's Mangled Buildings

Frank Gehry (b. 1929) is a famous architect who I wouldn't commission to design a doghouse.

Unfortunately, people and organizations having pockets far deeper than mine seem to be thrilled to hire the old fellow to create yet another twisted, smashed-up appearing structure. No accounting for taste, as they've been saying for centuries.

I will grant Gehry one thing. Classical examples of modernist architecture or "International Style" (as the Museum of Modern Art called it in the 1930s), are almost always boring to look at and not human-friendly. Gehry's buildings are far from boring. They are appalling. Also not human-friendly.

My limited experience with Gehry buildings (Los Angeles' Disney, Seattle's EMP -- see images below) is that their interiors are confusingly laid out. The exteriors generally try to hide the fact that these are buildings with some sort of structure that supports them. By visually denying the logic and solidity of a building, they are disorienting, upsetting, denying their proper nature. Which does not mean that I necessarily favor structural clarity über alles -- that was a major defect of International Style.

Gehry, his buildings, and perhaps those who commissioned them, strike me as being sad victims of perpetual adolescence; aging juvenile show-offs, if you will.

Here are some examples of Gehry's work, images found here and there on the Web.

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"Dancing House" - Prague - 1996

Experience Music Project - Seattle - 2000

Peter B. Lewis Building, Case Western Reserve University - Cleveland - 2002

Walt Disney Concert Hall - Los Angeles - 2003

Cleveland Clinic, Lou Rovo Center for Brain Health - Las Vegas - 2010

Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, University of Technology Sydney - 2015

William Logsdail: From Cityscapes to Portraits

William Logsdail (1859-1944) was born in the hill city of Lincoln in the English Midlands and received his initial art training there before going to Antwerp for further study. So it might be said that his training was probably competently done for the times, but not at the elite level. But training can only take someone part of the way; personal factors come to the fore once a career is launched. In Logsdail's case, architecture was a strong interest, so his best known works include scenes of the cities of Venice and London. He could portray people as well, so by the early 20th century switched to portraiture for a more reliable income stream. His Wikipedia entry is here.

I don't believe I've ever seen a Logsdail painting in person, so my evaluation of the London scenes below must be tentative. The impression I have is that although they seem fairly tightly done, this is slightly loosened by his use of color and atmospheric perspective. Some other works shown below are painted more loosely, though his portraits of the 1900s generally seem to have a high degree of finish.

Gallery

Venice
An interesting point of view. Shown is the central tourist zone square-on. Most artists choose to paint from the opposite side of the Grand Canal and sight down it.

Venice - 1881

Eve of the Regatta - 1881
Some of the better American illustrators of 1895-1930 painted scenes much like this.

By the Lion of St. Mark, Venice - 1885
Here Logsdail sights along the canal, but this view is in the opposite direction from the usual depictions.

Church of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice - 1885
Another unconventional viewpoint. The Church is usually shown with the canal or its shoreline in the foreground, rather than from a subsidiary canal as done here. This viewpoint is one a photographer might select, though Logsdail was a plein-air artist in those days and didn't use reference photos so far as I know.

St. Paul's and Ludgate Hill - ca. 1884
An historical document, this is.

Bank and the Royal Exchange - 1887

The Bank of England - 1888

St. Martin's-in-the-Fields - 1888

The Greek Theatre, Taormina, Sicily - 1890s
Having visited Taormina a year ago, I can vouch that Logsdail did a good job of capturing the scene. That's Mt. Etna in the background. Today, the shoreline is built up and large tourist hotels can be found.

John William Waterhouse - ca. 1887
Portrait of the well-known Victorian artist. The style is similar to that used by the Glasgow Boys school.

The Artist's Wife - ca. 1905

George Nathaniel Curzon - 1909
Curzon had been Viceroy of India before this was painted.

Mary Victoria Leiter, Lady Curzon - 1909
A posthumous portrait of Curzon's first wife.

Charles Dana Gibson: More Than Pretty Girls

Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) was an American illustrator who was famous as the creator of the Gibson Girl, married well, had many important artists as friends, and earned enough money to buy an island in Maine.

He is the subject of a profile in Illustration Magazine issue 47, and his Wikipedia entry is here.

Leafing through the magazine, I soon realized that there was more to Gibson than just those Girls. The man was a master of capturing expressions on a large variety of faces. Plus he was a highly skilled pen-and-ink artist.

Some of this can be seen in the image above from Heritage Auctions. It's from the About Paris illustrations from about 1905. Note how he was able to fade the background subjects using careful linework and perhaps slightly watered-down ink.

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Here is an example of a Gibson Girl.

Gibson was careful to correctly depict clothing.

Many Gibson Girls had half-closed eyes: not this one.

A group scene. Note the variety of faces.

Another group illustration.

And yet another. Looks like Oscar Wilde setting at the left, though he would have been dead were this illustration made after 1900 (I don't have its date).

Two examples of Gibson's work from around 1925-31.  Pen-and-ink was largely out of fashion in the illustration world by that time, but it was Gibson's strength. Besides, he owned Life Magazine in those days and could print whatever he pleased.

He also took up oil painting as more a hobby than a means of making money. This looks like it was made in the late 1930s. As I noted, his strength was pen-and-ink.

Jugendstil's Jugend Magazine's Style Varied

Die Jugend or simply Jugend, meaning "Youth," was a German magazine published 1896-1940 and best known today for its name being lent to Jugendstil, as Art Nouveau was called in that country.

Links dealing with the magazine are here and here. The latter is to the German Wikipedia site, but you can click on a button for a rough translation to English. It is useful for a listing of contributors to the publication.

A brief discussion of Jugendstil is here, and the Wikepedia entry on Art Nouveau, with a section on Jugendstil, is here.

Below are some Jugend covers, the earliest from the time they embodied Jugendstil, and one from later on when Art Nouveau was passé and Weimar culture reigned. One detail that interests me is that the magazine's covers in the early years differed dramatically, depending on the style and taste of the artist doing the cover illustration. Moreover, there seems to have been no set Jugend logotype; the cover artist supplied his own typography.

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30 May 1896

27 March 1897 - Heinrich Kley illustration

Nr. 28, 1897 - Franz Stuck illustration

September 1899

Nr. 19, 1903 - Eugen Spiro illustration

No. 21, 1913

Nr. 5. 1928