Dorothy Hood's 1950s, 1960s Fashion Illustration

My training in commercial art included a course in fashion illustration. The instructor, Irwin Caplan, who I wrote about here, would bring issues of the Sunday New York Times to class for our inspection and inspiration.

The Times in those days was filled with advertisements for department and women's apparel stores. Around 1960 those included Macy's, B. Altman, Arnold Constable and Bergdorf Goodman. Perhaps the ads Caplan touted the most were from Lord & Taylor, featuring the illustrations of Dorothy Hood (1902-1970). Not surprising, because Hood had been at the top of the New York fashion illustration world for a long time and was still going strong.

There seems to be little about Hood on the Internet, but some biographical information can be found here and here. The latter source mentions that due to a 1950s accident affecting her right arm, she trained herself to illustrate using her left hand ... without noticeably affecting the results.

Most fashion illustrations in newspapers and even magazines in the 1950s and 60s were printed in black and white; run-of-paper color is common now, but rare then. Illustrators usually opted for brushwork and ink or watercolor washes to quickly produce effective views of featured merchandise.

Here are some examples of Hood's work for Lord & Taylor from those days.

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Hmm. Where Did I See That Plane Before?

I visited the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida in late April, and amongst the dazzling collection (for an airplane fanboy like me) was a Messerschmitt 262 B-1a jet from World War 2. The Wikipedia entry on the Me 262 is here. Scrolling down you will find that the two-seat B-1a variant was a trainer, and some other B-1s were used as radar-equipped night fighters. Most Me 262s were single-seat fighters or fighter-bombers.

These are two photos I took of the Aviation Museum's 262. It is nicely restored, but the fighter aspect is stressed on the information card seen in front of the plane in the upper photo. The museum's web site page for the Me 262 (here) states: "The model on display, 'White 35,' was captured in Schleswig, Germany in 1945." No mention is made of its trainer status, as best I recall.

Only a small proportion of 262s were two-seaters, and all the 262s I've seen in various museums aside from this one were single-seat planes.

Well, I did see a two-place Me 262 once. It was March, 1969 at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station in Pennsylvania. Here are photos I took then:

There is now an air museum at Willow Grove, and its web page indicating planes in the collection is here. Missing is that 262 "Red 13" (as they say in the aircraft ID trade).

So I wonder if "White 30" and "Red 13" might be the same airplane. Few were built, few survived the war, and how many fewer still were in the hands of the U.S. Navy after the war? It's entirely possible that "Red 13" was passed over to Pensacola at some point since 1969. But its also possible that the Navy indeed acquired two Me 262 B-1a aircraft. Feel free to let us know which supposition is correct.

Molti Ritratti: Grace Coolidge

A while ago I posted about illustrator and portrait painter Howard Chandler Christy, and included an image of his portrait of Grace Coolidge, wife of President Calvin Coolidge.

It seems that Grace was somewhat the opposite of Calvin, in that she had a sparkling personality. So it stands to reason that given her status and attributes, there ought to have been a number of portraits painted of her.

And there were. Except that there are few decent images of them to be found on the Internet, and some original works might have gone missing. Below is what I've been able to locate here and there on the Web thus far.

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This is the official portrait by Christy that hangs in the White House.

A photo of Grace Coolidge.

Grace Coolidge with Rob Roy, who also is in the official portrait.

Another Grace Coolidge portrait attributed to Christie. It doesn't look as skillfully done as his other work, and the subject doesn't quite look like her.

A Christy portrait at the Coolidge Presidential Library in Massachusetts from this source. I like this one better than the official portrait. Too bad I can't locate a decent image of it on the Internet.

Grace Coolidge by an artist named Frank Ashford.

Photo of Juliet Thompson with her painting Grace Coolidge taken 8 February 1927. I could find no other image of this portrait.

Grace Coolidge with Frank O. Salisbury and his portrait of her. Again, I couldn't find an image of the portrait.

Monuments, Texas-Style

The state of Texas has many virtues, especially for a good many of its residents. A deficiency is in tourist attraction sites, the only truly famous one being the Alamo.

For several year my wife was anxious to tour Texas, and we finally made good on the plan in April. For various reasons en route from San Antonio to Houston's Clear Lake area, we skipped a planned visit to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station. Instead, we visited the San Jacinto battlefield east of Houston where on 21 April 1836, Texans defeated a Mexican army (for more information click here).

San Jacinto (the J is pronounced by Texans using a hard "J", not the expected Spanish "H" alternative) is not a strong attraction for most non-Texans, but I found it an interesting place.

One attraction is the San Jacinto Monument. This link states: "The monument, constructed between 1936 and 1939 and dedicated on April 21, 1939, is the world's tallest masonry column..." It is 567.31 feet (172.92 m) tall, slightly higher than the better-known 554.612-foot (169.046 m) Washington Monument in the District of Columbia. Note that construction began a century after the year of the battle.

Also on the site is the battleship USS Texas, BB-35 (Wikipedia entry here). Commissioned in 1914, it is the oldest remaining dreadnought-type American battleship; other survivors are of the World War 2 vintage "fast-battleship" type.

Below are some of my photos.  Click on the images to enlarge.

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There stands the monument behind our rental car. Unlike the plain, obelisk-like Washington Monument, the San Jacinto Monument has flutings like Greek columns on four of its eight faces.

Atop the monument is a four-sided Texas star.

The base, containing a museum, features inscriptions describing the battle's circumstances.

And there are very 1930s-Moderne bas-relief images with captions.

Not far away is the USS Texas. In a few years it will be placed in a dry setting (it has experienced leaks and other deterioration from time to time since it arrived at San Jacinto in 1948). Aside from the placement of the main turrets, the superstructure and armament of the Texas are drastically different from its appearance in 1914. I know it's financially impossible, but I'd love to see the Texas as it was when it was new.

Navy buffs will find the Texas interesting due to the layout of its main gun turrets. The guns are 14-inch cannons mounted in pairs. Since ten guns are carried, there are five turrets strung along the ship. This is not ideal because the third turret is placed so that its guns cannot fire fore or aft nor even nearly fore or aft, a waste of potential firepower. The strung-out turrets also require a longer swath of side armor, adding to the ship's displacement. Later battleships used three- and even four-gun turrets (Dunkerque and following French battleships).

Henry Soulen, Mural-Style Illustrator

Henry James Soulen (1888-1965) was an illustrator whose work was published in major magazines, yet he is virtually unknown today. Short biographical links are here and here.

Soulen's style included bright colors, limited depth, and cloisonnist outlining of his subject matter. These traits are commonly found in murals painted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Dancing at the Waldorf

Great War scene

The Three Musketeers

The Ukulele Player

Flowers of Gold

From "One Man and One Woman"

Here is an example of a problem faced by me and other bloggers who make use of unfamiliar images found on the Internet. Not having seen the original art or even a printed reproduction, I have no sure way of telling what the original coloration was like. Above are two versions of "The Parade." The upper version has more naturalistic colors. But I wonder if the image was scanned from a magazine; illustration colors were and are altered purposefully or otherwise during the publication process. The lower version has better resolution (you can see more impasto brushwork: click to enlarge), yet the colors don't strike me as realistic for a German scene. If any reader knows for certain what the original colors were, please post a comment.

Gregory Stocks: Bold-Brush Tonalist

In mid-March I was doing one of my usual walk-throughs of Palm Desert's El Paseo area killing time while my wife was watching tennis at Indian Wells. El Paseo has a number of art galleries, and I finally decided that this would be the day to walk into some to find out what was new since last March. Turns out that there wasn't much of interest this time, though I did write down names of a few artists for further investigation.

One instance was the Jones & Terwilliger gallery (which is also found up in Carmel-By-The-Sea) that had several landscapes on display by Utah-based painter Gregory Stocks whose biographical note in his website is here.

Both links show paintings by Stocks whose commercial work is mostly landscapes that usually feature trees with autumn leaves and are painted boldly, but not wildly. Stocks has a very nice touch that is best appreciated when viewing his works in person.  He favors autumn scenes where he can tone down (mix in some opposite color) reds and oranges, etc. on the foliage while doing the same for grasses and and green leaves that are dark, yet haven't yet turned color. In a way, his color strategy is similar to that used by a number of American painters and muralists in the 1920s, something that for some reason has appealed to me for a long time.

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Autumn Stand

In Harmony

Distant Cloudbank
Not as strongly autumnal as the first two painting, but there are hints in the nearest clumps of trees. Also note the inclusion of orange, ochre and such for the grasses.  More distant grasses are greener due to the blueing of atmospheric perspective.

Homestead
A much different scene from the previous painting, but the same color strategy is used.

Mixing It Up
This seems to be a plein-air painting due to its small size (14 x 11 inches; 35 x 27.5 cm). Plenty  of bold, square-brush action here.

Extra-Fancy Building Tops: 1930 and 2004

Most modernist architecture is horrible. There: I said it. Actually, I've probably said it before, either on this blog or back when I blogged on 2Blowhards.

For now, I'll spare Faithful Readers a rant on why I think modernist architecture is horrible. Instead, this post deals with a building that from one perspective seems a bit silly, yet from another point of view has some merit.

That building is the Frost Bank Tower (completed 2004) that I recently saw in Austin, Texas. Here's a photo I took:

What the photo doesn't show is the base that's a few stories tall and fills the space out to the sidewalk. That's a good thing in principle, because most pedestrians pretty much view things near eye level rather than gaze upward at tall buildings they're walking past. Unfortunately from an aesthetic point of view, the base and tower designs don't seem to blend well, although they easily could have (scroll down the above link for more views).

I like the massing of the tower, this offering some relief from its stubby proportions. This massing also evokes skyscraper design from its 1925-32 golden age.

The controversial feature is the decorations at the top. A hardcore functionalist observer would collapse with the vapours at such ornamentation. Me?: Although the top is a little "over the top" as they say, I like the idea of tall buildings having something interestingly decorative at their apex.

The opening defined by the four highest spikes recalls the top decor of Rochester, New York's Times Square Building, shown in a postcard view below.

This 1930 treatment is even more outrageous than that of the Frost Tower. My main objection is that those wings are out of scale with the rest of the building. They would have worked much better were the tower 30 or so floors tall.

Anthonius Mor: 16th Century Portraits that Looked Like People

"Sir Anthonius Mor, also known as Anthonis Mor van Dashorst and Antonio Moro (c. 1517 - 1577) was a Netherlandish portrait painter, much in demand by the courts of Europe. He has also been referred to as Antoon, Anthonius, Anthonis or Mor van Dashorst, and as Antonio Moro, Anthony More, etc., but signed most of his portraits as Anthonis Mor" is how this Wikipedia entry begins.

As regular readers of this blog probably know by now, I seldom write about artists active before around 1850. That has to do with my interests, and I write about what interests me. Paintings done before the mid-19th century for the most part elicit a reaction of indifference. I don't hate them, but don't love them either. (Exceptions include Velazquez, Tiepolo, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin and some others.)

Two reasons for this, among others, are (1) the settings are too "staged" or static or artificial for my taste, and (2) I don't love highly "finished" paintings. Plenty of exceptions here, but when both factors are present, I'll usually give the painting a once-over and move on. Which is why, when I'm in Paris next month, I might not get farther into the Louvre than its great book / gift store.

Portraits made before about 1700 usually strike me as offering a sense of what the sitter looked like, but seem contrived, somehow. Again there are exceptions. One such set of exceptions includes some portraits by Anthonius Mor, who I was unaware of until I saw a post on the Gandalf's Galley blog featuring his portrait of the Duchess of Parma. Mor's portraits include all the fancy costuming expected for important sitters. But it is the faces that strike me as being those of flesh-and-blood people -- not smoothly-painted diagrams of people's faces.

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Duchess Margaret of Parma - 1562
Click on the image for a considerably enlarged version and examine Mor's treatment of her face.

Willem I van Nassau (William of Orange) - ca. 1554

Queen Mary Tudor of England - 1544
Painted before she gained the throne.

Sergius Hruby: Sensual Symbolist

There's not a lot regarding Sergius Hruby (1869-1943) on the Internet other than examples of his artwork. Some biographical information is here, and a much shorter mention is here.

In brief, his Czech name to the contrary, he was born in Vienna, studied art and made his career there.

Hruby can best be classified as a Symbolist of the Art Nouveau variety. Many of the images he created featured nude or partly-clad women and were in the form of illustrations for printed reproduction. What I find interesting is that his style changed little over most of his career, unlike many other artists of his generation who chased modernist artistic fashions.

It's also worth noting that Hruby's works draw one's interest because, in part, they are unconventional. That is, the humans he depicts are done in representational style with little in the way of simplification and none of the distortion often found in mainstream symbolist works. From that basis, he places those humans in strange situations using dramatic or unusual compositions.

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Apotheosis

Ungleige Seelen (Different Souls)
That's a rough translation, the title might also be rendered as "Unequal Souls" or even something more freely put in English.

Die Verspottung Christi (The Mocking of Christ)
Click on it to enlarge.

I'm not sure what the title is for this painting. The image I captured from the Internet had the tag "Oil on Wood," which would be the description of materials used to make it. This strikes me as being an earlier work, though I might easily be completely wrong. Nevertheless, it's pleasing.

Anbetung der Natur (Nature Worship) - 1932
At least this one is dated, and was made when he was in his early sixties, still evoking 1900 sensibilities.