Towards the End: Klimt's Portraits

A few years ago I wrote about the early works of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). Now let's take a look at some portraits he made using a style different from that of his most famous paintings.

If you are interested in viewing the latter in person, the best place to go is Vienna, and once there, I strongly suggest visiting the Belvedere, which has his iconic "Kiss" (1907-08). More information regarding Klimt is here.

For what little it might be worth, I'm not enthusiastic about most of the people-related paintings he made during the last six or eight years of his life.

Gallery

The Black Feather Hat - 1910
No decorative detailing here. Perhaps Klimt was in the process of reconsidering his style.

Portrait of Mäda Primavesi - 1912

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II - ca. 1912

Portrait of Friedericke Maria Beer - 1916
Although painted several years apart, Klimt used a similar composition for these portraits -- the subject facing the viewer, taking up roughly the middle third of the painting with the rest occupied by decorative elements to varying degree.

Lady with Fan - 1917-18
For much of his career, Klimt painted "busy," detail-filled paintings. Here the contrast in colors between the subject's flesh and most of the rest helps pull the lady's image into dominance.

Paint sketch portrait  1917

Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Ria Munk III) -- 1917-18I include these two works because they show Klimt's technique from shortly before his death.  Very sketchy, so details had to emerge and get firmed up as he proceeded. Quite the opposite from how he must have worked in his early, academic-influenced days.

Felice Casorati's Cool Portraits

The Musée d'Orsay held an interesting (to me) exhibit titled Dolce vita ? Du Liberty au design italien (1900-1940) "Dolce Vita? From the Liberty to Italian Design (1900-1940)" (running 14 April - 13 September 2015). I visited it in July when I was in Paris for a few days.

There were four paintings on display by Felice Casorati (1883-1963) that caught my eye:

Le signorine - 1912

Una donna - 1918-19
Casorati seems to have briefly experimented with with soft-care Modernism.

Ritratto di Renato Gualino - 1923-24

Silvana Cenni - 1922
This has been cited as his most famous work.

The final two portraits are cool (as in "dispassionate," not the slang term referring to "good") in several ways. The poses are formal, the subjects seated and facing the painter and viewers. The subjects' poses are essentially symmetrical, though the settings are not. The subjects' faces show no emotion. Critics pointed out this sort of thing at the time, but Casorati shrugged the criticism off, commenting that, in effect, he was doing what he thought he should be doing.

Here are a few more portraits made during that phase of his career:

Ritratto di Riccardo Gualino - 1922

Ritratto di Cesarina Gualino

Ritratto di Elisabeth Albrecht - ca. 1925

Raja - 1925

Casorati's style changed over his career, as can be seen in the first set of images. Perhaps I'll present more of his work later.

In the Beginning: Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) -- biography here -- did not quite make it to his 37th birthday, joining a surprisingly long list of artists who died before reaching 40. Had he lived a normal life-span, most of his existing paintings, posters, and other works might have been classed as "early."

Even so, it might interest readers to feature some of his really early paintings, works completed by the time he was about 25.

As can be seen, he was a proficient artist even as a teenager and capable of competently painting in traditional style. Yet even then, he was experimenting with a more thinly-painted, sketchier manner as can be seen in the first image below done when he was about 18.

Gallery

Young Routy in Céleyan - 1882

Seated Nude - 1882

Academic study - 1883

Gustave-Lucien Dennery - 1883

Portrait of a Young Woman - 1884

Carmen Gaudin - 1885

Suzanne Valadon - ca. 1886

The Laundress - Carmen Gaudin - 1886

Mme. Lili Grenier - 1888

Hélène Vary - 1888

Poudre Riz (Suzanne Valadon) - 1888-89

Luigi Bonazza: Not Quite Traditional

Besides a major exhibition of Pierre Bonnard's paintings, the Musée d'Orsay was holding another exhibit when I dropped by 19 July, titled Dolce vita ? Du Liberty au design italien (1900-1940) "Dolce Vita? From the Liberty to Italian Design (1900-1940)" (running 14 April - 13 September 2015).

An item that caught my attention was this large triptych:

It's titled La leggenda di Orfeo (1905), painted by Luigi Bonazza (1877-1965). The image above does not have very good resolution. Otherwise, it would show that Bonazzo used a form of pointillism to fill areas of what otherwise appear to be solid, sharply painted subjects.

According to this Wikipedia entry (in Italian), he was born and grew up in Arco, just north of Lake Garda in Trentino, or Südtirol in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which has been part of Italy since the Great War. Bonazzo was of the Italian-speaking community there and fled south when Italy declared war on the Central Powers, even though he had received his art training in Vienna.

Bonazzo seems to have spent much of his career in Trento, keeping his style almost traditional, yet with an air of modernism. More examples of his work are below.

Gallery

Trentino (Poster) - 1904
Bonazzo, like many artists of his time, also did commercial work.

Jovis Amores, Deione - ca. 1908-1912
From a series of mezzotint engravings.

Notte d'estate ca. 1912 or 1916 or 1920 or 1928
I can't find good, consistent information on this tempera-on-cardboard painting.

Gabriele D'Annunzio
Portrait of the poet, adventurer, aviator and politician.

Ritratto di Feliciana - 1939
A later work also adding a slight modernist touch to a traditional format.

Frank Brangwyn's Mural-Style Art

Sir Frank William Brangwyn (1867-1956) was largely self-taught, as this Wikipedia entry mentions. That supposed lack was no obstacle, because Brangwyn had a long, successful career. I wrote about his railroad poster work here.

He had a strong, interesting style suited to mural painting. An 1895 mural commission definitely launched the style featured below, but he was already heading in that direction. In the early 1890s he traveled to North Africa and Turkey, and the scenery there brightened his palette. He also began to paint in a flatter manner and introduce outlining, and important feature of murals that had to be seen and read from a distance.

Some of the images below are quite large, so click on them to view in even greater detail.

Gallery

Venetian Scene - 1906
An example of Brangwyn's signature painting style.

Buccaneers - 1892
This pre-1895 painting approaches his mural style, though stronger outlining is lacking.

Tank in Action - 3 panels - 1925-26
A later work showing British troops and a tank in action during the Great War

The Wine Press

Venice: Santa Maria Through Rigging

Music - 1895
"Music" and "Dance," below, were panels in Siegfried Bing's famous Galeries l'Art Nouveau in Paris that gave the name to that stylistic movement.

Dance - 1895
The other Galeries l'Art Nouveau mural. This is one of my favorite Brangwyn works.

Dance - detail - 1895
I find Brangwyn's use of color and outlining fascinating because I'm not sure if he had a system for this or whether it was intuitive.

William Penhallow Henderson's New Mexico Paintings

William Penhallow Henderson (1877-1943) was one of a number of artists who moved to the Taos - Santa Fe part of New Mexico around one hundred years ago. In Henderson's case, this was in part because his wife was tubercular and it was thought that the dry climate would be helpful (and she did live for 36 more years). Here is some biographical information on Henderson.

What I find interesting about Henderson, Ernest Blumenschein, Buck Dunton and others of that New Mexican migration cohort is that their painting styles had similarities. Could it have been the climate, topography and Indian subculture of north-central New Mexico that molded their paintings? To some degree I think this was so. But not to the degree that the California Impressionists' art was influenced by their subject matter. New Mexico painters also tended to be influenced by art style fashion, and one strong fashion prevalent from the late 'teens through the 1920s and well into the 1930s was what I've called Modernism-Light. That is, forms were simplified, often with a hint of reduction to geometric shapes, and certainly by elimination of some surface detailing. What I am not yet sure of is whether buyers of such paintings demanded that style or if there instead was subtle peer pressure or group-think going on.

Gallery

Little Sister (The Chaperone) - ca. 1916

Holy Week in New Mexico - 1919

La Tienda Rosa - ca. 1920

Noon - 1920

Feast Day, San Juan Pueblo - ca. 1921

Fiesta Brown Eyed Beauty - 1924

Cerro Gordo Before the Sangre de Christo Mountains - 1930

Pierre Bonnard's Big Show

On average, my timing regarding want-to-see art exhibits in places I'm visiting is usually bad. That should be expected, because the majority of art museum exhibitions don't interest me, which means that I'm unlikely to get to see the few I'd like if my travel dates are random relative to exhibition schedules. What frustrates me most is when I miss a must-see exhibit by only a few days or weeks.

That said, my luck was good in July because the morning after I arrived in Paris, the Musée d'Orsay's Pierre Bonnard exhibition (17 March - 19 July 2015 -- "Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia") was starting its final day. (American Bonnard admirers will have the chance to visit a version of it at San Francisco's Legion of Honor from 6 February to 15 May 2016.)

I'm not actually a big fan of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) -- Wikipedia entry here. I don't dislike his work, but don't love it either. But I was pleased to be able to view so many Bonnard paintings at one time.

There were many, many items in room after room. Some were from the d'Orsay's collection, but others came from as far afield as Toledo, Ohio and Moscow's Pushkin.

Below are some examples of Bonnard's work, a few of which were in the display.

Gallery

Poster - 1891
This poster helped launch Bonnard's career. He did other commercial work, much of it related to books and publications such as Thadée Natanson's La Revue blanche.

Femme avec chien - 1891

Peignoir - 1892

Misia avec roses - 1908
Musician and muse to many artists, Misia, at the time of this portrait called Misia Edwards (she was previously married to Natanson and later married Spanish painter José-Maria Sert).

Nu à contre-jour - 1908
This well-known painting was in the exhibition.

La loge - 1908
Commentary on the people portrayed in the painting found here on the d'Orsay web page:

Dans leur loge à l'Opéra de Paris, sujet "moderne" que la fin du XIXe siècle a mis à l'honneur, sont représentés Gaston [Bernheim, the art dealer], debout au centre, avec, à sa droite, sa belle-soeur Mathilde, à sa gauche, son épouse Suzanne, et à l'arrière-plan, son frère aîné, Josse.

Google translation:
"In their box at the Opera of Paris, about "modern" as the late nineteenth century honored are represented Gaston, standing center, to his right, his brother's wife Mathilde, to his left, his wife Suzanne, and background, his elder brother, Josse."

Place Clichy - 1912
The square as seen from a brasserie.

Salle à manger à la campagne - 1913
A scene combining an interior, still life, plein-air and a portrait.

La Palme - 1926
Bonnard later spent much of his time on the Côte d'Azur.

Because there were so many paintings on display and my time was somewhat limited, I'll offer only the following impression Bonnard's work made on me. His painting style is usually patchy, with many small, uneven brush strokes.  He often places "warm" and "cool" colors close together using such strokes to cover an area. This sometimes is in the form of opposite, "vibrating" colors such as some Impressionists applied. More often, the colors are closer on the color wheel, but tending towards warm and cool directions.