Maurice Utrillo, Not-Quite-Forgotten Modernist

Back around 1960, Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955) was still being featured as an example of modernism in an art history class I took in college. But his reputation was probably on the wane by then, and he became more of a historical footnote in the years that followed. His Wikipedia entry is here, and a web site dedicated to him is here.

I haven't followed prices of Utrillo paintings, so can't say when or if they bottomed out. So far as I know, they didn't fall to ha'penny type prices as happened for a while for the likes of William Bouguereau, and recent sales prices of some Utrillos have been at more than 100K in euros, pounds and U.S. dollars.

The most interest in Utrillo seems to be in France, where the Pinacothèque de Paris had a 2009 exhibition devoted to him and his mother, the model/painter Suzanne Valadon.

Utrillo himself was a mess at the personal level. Besides being alcoholic, he was in general a weak man with mental problems. The art training he got was from his mother, who learned her craft in her modeling days from the likes of Edgar Degas. Plus, he spent many years in Paris' Montmartre neighborhood, home to painters of the bohemian sort and absorbed the setting and the art being made there.

His best paintings were made during the first 20 or so years of his career, when he worked on his cityscapes outdoors. Some references refer to this as his "white" period, because the buildings he depicted mostly had nearly-white walls, a Parisian characteristic. Later on, he was reduced to painting indoors, using picture postcard images as references.

Despite all that was working against him, Utrillo gained a strong reputation and his paintings sold well. Some examples are shown below.

Gallery

Rue Muller à Montmartre - ca. 1908

La Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, Paris
In the 1920s, Utrillo lived only a few blocks from where this was painted.

Cabaret du Lapin Agile
This was down the hill from where he once lived.

Paris street - 1914
Is that the Moulin de la Galette in the distance?

Suburban street
Utrillo also lived outside Paris at times.

Rue de la Jonquiere, Paris

Rue de l'Éperon, et rue de Coutellerie, Pontoise

Théatre de L'Atelier sous la neige - ca. 1918

Notre-Dame, Paris
This might have been from a postcard-based reference.

I find it hard to evaluate Utrillo's paintings. Many have a kind of charm. They have a "primitive" or "untrained" feel to them, but not completely. That's because Utrillo either was taught perspective or had an intuitive sense of it. Not that he practiced it consistently, but part of the ethos of artistic Modernism was the rejection of previous standards, and this inconsistency probably helped to establish his modernist reputation.

Piet van der Hem, Dutch Illustrator and Painter

Pieter van der Hem (1885-1961), called "Piet," came to my attention thanks to this Sept. 21, 2015 post on David Apatoff's Illustration Art blog. Apatoff was contrasting van der Hem's painting and conventional illustration career with his work during the Great War as a political cartoonist in neutral Amsterdam. According to his Dutch Wikipedia entry, he did further editorial cartooning after the war.

I found his wartime cartoons to be of the standard-issue anti-war kind as found in leftist publications such as The Masses. The post-war cartoons I noticed while Googling seemed to be mostly gentle in tone, such as might be found in American general-interest magazines of that time. (Though I easily could have missed harsher ones that failed to pop up during my search.)

Below are examples of van der Hem's painting and illustration. He was versatile, and had a nice touch better suited to illustration than Fine Arts painting.

Gallery

A Promenade on the Pincio, Rome
This was included in David Apatoff's blog post.

Moulin Rouge - ca. 1908-09

Spanish scene - 1914
Apparently van der Hem spent some time in Spain.

Tango

Flamenco Dancer, Madrid - 1914

Woman waiting at a restaurant table

Lezende Echtpaar - Couple reading

Exhibit poster - 1913

In het theater - In the Theatre
This might have been painted after 1930.

Gustav Klimt's Houses at Unterach on the Attersee

The painting shown above is Häuser in Unterach am Attersee (Houses at Unterach on the Attersee) painted around 1916 by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). He often summered in the Austrian lake district even while the Great War was raging  It has been theorized that Klimt used a telescope for this view; the perspective certainly is flattened in the manner of a telephoto lens image. Biographical information on Klimt can be found here.

The approximately meter-square painting was auctioned at Christies in New York City on 8 November 2006. The pre-auction estimate was $18-25 million, but it sold for $31,376,000.

It was one of a group of Klimt paintings owned by the Bloch-Bauer family that were confiscated by the Nazis following the 1938 Anschluss. After the war they were in the hands of the Austrian government and displayed in Vienna's Belvedere where I saw some in the late 1990s. A descendent of the family sued for their return, and eventually succeeded. Thereafter, they were sold, as mentioned here (scroll down).

The last time we were in Vienna, my wife and I stopped by the Österreichische Werkstätten (Austrian Workshops), Kärntner Strasse 6, 1010 Wien, Österreich and spotted serigraphs of the painting. We decided to buy one the next day, but by then the rolled-up version had been sold and what remained was the serigraph attached to a stretcher. The cost of shipping it to Seattle was about the same as that of the serigraph itself, so I later wrapped it and it managed to survive the air trip home. It was properly framed and now hangs over our fireplace.

Mr. Munch and Mrs. Schwarz

In July I was working my way through the Edvard Munch (1863-1944) portion of the Rasmus Meyer collection at the Bergen, Norway Kunstmuseet when I noticed the painting that I then immediately photographed (see above). It is a portrait study of Mrs. (Fru in Norwegian, Frau in German) Helene Schwarz, made in 1906 when Munch was in Berlin.

I am ambivalent regarding Munch, who I wrote about here. I'm not fond of most of his work, but acknowledge that he was capable of drawing and painting in reasonable and interesting ways at times -- mostly early in his career. I consider his Schwarz series among his better efforts.

He made at least three versions of Mrs. Schwarz that survive, all done in 1906; they are shown below. But it wasn't until 2013 that the identity of Mrs. Schwarz was provisionally found. The account is here. It seems that Helene Schwarz was the wife of Georg Schwarz, a consultant to the Cassirer art gallery in Berlin. Before marrying him, she served as a companion to Ernst and Toni Cassirer. It also seems that Georg wanted to buy the final painting, but Munch refused the offer and eventually sold it in Norway.

Gallery

An image of the above portrait study found at the The Athenaeum website (scroll down).

A drawing or lithographic print of Mrs. Schwarz.

The final portrait painting.

A photograph of Mrs. Schwarz (at right) with her son Andreas and perhaps a nanny.

Coping With the Great Depression: John Newton Howitt

Note: I drafted this on 13 June for later posting. Now it turns out Illustration Magazine's just-released Issue No. 49 has a large article on John Newton Howitt. Below is what I wrote in June regarding Howitt.

* * * * *
John Newton Howitt (1885-1958) is an illustrator not widely known these days. But I'd place him in the "successful" category because he made the American illustration Big Time by doing occasional cover art for the Saturday Evening Post, the leading general-interest magazine in his time.

A reasonably detailed biographical sketch can be found here, a Web site devoted to illustrators working for "pulp" magazines. Printed on cheap, pulp (thick, with rough surfaces) paper, they flourished during the Great Depression of the 1930s specializing in fiction topics such as crime, science-fiction, cowboys, romance, terror, adventure and such.

So what was an illustrator for "slick" (smooth, quality paper) magazines such as the Post doing in the pulp field? He was trying to maintain his livelihood during the Depression, and the pulp market was doing well thanks to escapist subjects and cheap news stand prices. Some better-known illustrators such as Tom Lovell and Walter Baumhofer got their start in pulps, eventually graduating to the slicks. So Howitt was an exception, doing slicks work before and after the Depression and pulps and the occasional slick during those trying years.

Howitt signed his Fine Art and slicks illustrations with his full name. His pulp work either wasn't signed at all or else he simply used the initial "H" to identify it. Apparently many of the originals of his pulp work were destroyed. One source stated the Howitt himself did it, another claims it was his wife.

Gallery

Buried Treasure - (Cream of Wheat breakfast cereal advertisement) - 1909

The Symphony - ca. 1925
This might be a Fine Arts painting, but could just as well be art for advertising radios.

Probably a Fine Arts painting - 1910s?

Mother and children illustration - late 1920s

Farm family - probably an illustration from the 1930s

Holland's Magazine cover - May, 1929

Horror Stories cover - January 1935

\
Terror Tales cover - November 1935
Howitt's work was noticeably better than that found on many pulp covers (Baumhofer and a few others excepted).

Saturday Evening Post cover, 20 September 1936

Saturday Evening Post cover, 19 October 1940
The joke here is that the sailor sees a photo of a soldier (!!!) falling out of the purse.

Architects' Homes: The "Harvard Five"

I find the houses architects design for themselves interesting. Presumably, the constraint of catering to the desires of a client are swept away so that the architect can express his own design philosophy and personality.

Other constraints remain, of course. The nature of the site, the cost of building the house and the needs of the architect's family can be factors. Then there is the possibility that the architect wishes the house to be a professional advertisement, to be featured in local newspapers or even architectural magazines.

The present post features personal houses designed by a group of architects called the Harvard Five. They were associated with Harvard University in one way or another and settled in New Canaan, Connecticut where their houses were built. They were born between 1902 and 1919 and the houses were built from 1949 to 1958, so we are dealing with a group having a fairly homogeneous background. The houses reflect avant-garde domestic design in the United States from 1945 to around 1955 when the designs were conceived.

Modernist and postmodern architects have done a good deal of damage, in my judgment. But the worst of it is in the form of large buildings and not so much houses, where modest size means less visual impact. The Harvard Five houses are situated on large lots, fairly isolated from neighbors.

Shared design characteristics include large expanses of window glass, a byproduct of 20th century heating technology that eliminated the need to build tall houses with small windows and compact rooms each with a fireplace. They have flat roofs (or nearly so), an architectural fad contradicting the "form follows function" concept (flat roofs shed water and snow less well than gabled roofs). None feature explicit ornamentation. All but one are single-story.

Gallery

Marcel Breuer House - 1949
Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) had Bauhaus associations that continued through the 1930s in the person of Walter Gropius. There seems to be a whiff or decorative intent in the angled paneling on some of the walls.

Landis Gores House - 1948
Landis Gores (1919-1991) was stricken with polio, yet managed to continue his career. The use of stonework on some of the walls is a nod to the New England environment and also helps to offset the stark, geometrical aspects of the design.

John M. Johansen House - 1958
John M. Johansen (1916-2012) used a formal (symmetrical) floor plan where four sub-structures were attached to this creek-spanning central unit near its corners. Roofs are flat aside from the part featured in the photo.

Philip Johnson House - 1953
This house by Philip Johnson (1906-2005) is by far the most famous and controversial.  Controversial due to its apparent lack of privacy. I consider it a case of an architectural theory pushed beyond the realm of common sense.

Eliot Noyes House - 1955
Eliot Noyes (1910-1977) is perhaps better known for his industrial design and corporate image work than for his architecture.  Like Gores, he used local stone in his house's construction. But he did this in a more rigid way, essentially blanking out two walls of the building in stark contrast to the glazing of the side facing the camera in this photo. Like Johnson's house, this strikes me as being an instance of being too clever, resulting in degraded livability.

Adolph Menzel: Tiny Works from a Tiny Man

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (1815-1905) -- the "von" bestowed late in his career -- was very popular in his day and honored by the Kaiser upon his death. These accolades were deserved, because Menzel was highly skilled, his drawings perhaps being more likable than his painted works.

His Wikipedia entry is here. It's fairly brief, but notes two interesting and likely related facts aside from mentioning that his formal art training was limited. One fact is that he was only about four and a half feet tall. The other is that while he enjoyed society, he was emotionally detached, especially so far as women were concerned.

Besides being very short, many of his works also were of small size, more a curiosity than a connection. Probably he was a natural miniaturist like Meissonier, Dalí and others. Below are some of his small-format works.

Gallery

At the Louvre - 1867 (9.3 x 7.1 in.)
Hard to tell if this is a small study or a finished work just by looking at it. However, Menzel considered it finished because he signed it.

Baron von der Heydt, Minister of State - 1864 (11.65 x 8.8 in.)
Although the format is not large, the image is only slightly less than life-size, typical of most portraits.

Meissonier in his Studio at Poissy - 1869 (9 x 11.5 in.)
Meissonier also liked to work small, though the painting seen at his easel is fairly normal-size.

Princess Alexandrine of Prussia - ca. 1863-64 (11.6 x 9 in.)
A study about the size of a news magazine cover.

Soldier of the Prussian Landwehr and French Prisoners - 1871 (8.3 x 7.8 in.)
This is unfinished, though it seems odd that the left-hand 60 % is almost complete and all the remainder is roughly blocked in.

The Artist's Foot - 1876 (15.2 x 13.2 in.)
The depicted foot is close to actual size.

Weekday in Paris - 1869 (19 x 27.4 in.)
This painting is larger than the others, but the details are quite small.