Alfredo Ambrosi, Aeropittura Artist

Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi (1901-1945) -- Wikipedia entry in French here -- was not the most famous or best practitioner of Aeropittura, a late form of Futurism, but I thought it would be worth presenting some of his paintings here.

I posted on Aeropittura here and about Tullio Cruli, perhaps the best of the lot, here.

Gallery

Colosseo - Colosseum
Aerial view of Rome's Coloseum from the northwest.

Aero-ritratto di Benito Mussolini aviatore - Aero Portrait of Benito Mussolini, Aviator - 1930
Related to the upper painting of the Colosseum, but the city view is extended to around the Piazza Venezia where Mussolini's famous speech-site balcony was located.

Fiesta aerea - Aviation Meet - 1932

Prima crociera atlantica su Rio de Janeiro - First Trans-Atlantic Crossing, Over Rio de Janeiro - 1933
Italo Balbo, head of Italian aviation, led two long-distance formation flights across the Atlantic, the first to Rio in 1930, a later one to the USA in 1933.

Volo su Vienna - Flight over Vienna - 1933
This commemorates the Gabriele D'Annunzio-led 9 August 1918 Flight over Vienna, an exceptionally long-distance operation during the Great War.

Aero-ritratto di Gianni Caproni - 1938
Portrait of airplane designer and builder Giovanni Caproni.

Pronto per l'attaco / Canale di Sicilia, 1942 - Ready to Attack
A World War 2 scene.

Raymond Leech, East Anglian Vettriano

I recently stumbled across images of Raymond Leech (1949 - ) paintings. As this biographical sketch indicates, Leech is based in England's East Anglia and paints coastal scenes, some of which are found at the link.

But other Leech paintings strongly remind me of those by his Scottish contemporary Jack Vettriano (1951 - ) ... Wikipedia entry here.

What we have are steamy (to varying degrees) scenes featuring beautiful, often not fully-clothed women and men usually wearing suspenders (braces, in the UK) and often with hats. I don't know enough about Leech to say if he is following Vettriano's lead or got there first.

As for style, Vettriano paints in a slightly flat, simplified, almost-poster style whereas Leech is more "painterly," where brushstrokes are featured. Below are a few Vettiano examples followed by some of Leech's work.

Gallery

Vettriano

The Out of Towners

Narcissistic Bathers

The Purple Cat

Games of Power


Leech

Couple about to kiss

A Brief Encounter

An especially Vettriano-like painting.

Nightclub scene

Sunday Girl

Dancer (one of a series with same model)

Out of Character: Pierre Bonnard and Odilon Redon

I recently saw the Seattle Art Museum exhibit "Intimate Impressionism from the National Gallery of Art" that featured mostly small paintings from a variety of artists active 1860-1900, approximately. In other words, it covered pre-Impressionist modernism as well as Post-Impressionism, with perhaps less than half the works being mainstream Impressionism.

That was fine by me, because I mostly find the pre- and post- more interesting than hardcore Claude Monet type Impressionism. A character failing, I suppose, but that's why I call myself a Contrarian.

What caught my eye were a few works that struck me as being out-of-character for the artists who painted them. That prompted this post along with the new "Out of Character" theme.

The artists in question were Odilon Redon (1840-1916), biography here, and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Wikipedia entry here. Below are the paintings I noticed in the exhibit along with some examples of their more typical work.

Gallery

Odilon Redon

Closed Eyes - ca. 1894

Mystical Conversation - ca. 1896
Redon is usually considered a Symbolist.

Village by the Sea in Brittany - ca. 1880

Breton Village - ca. 1890
These crisp Brittany scenes are strikingly different from the smudgy Symbolism associated with Redon. What puzzles me are the dates attributed to these works. Given their similarity of style and setting, I think they were painted around the same time. I'd guess closer to 1880 than 1890.


Pierre Bonnard

Femme avec chien - 1891
The typical Bonnard painting has a busy surface often (though not here) with dabs of color atop bits of near-complementary colors.

Paris, rue de Parme on Bastille Day, 1890
But this Bonnard is extremely clean.  Perhaps it's just a study because I don't see a signature.

Rockwell Kent Illustrations

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was a painter and illustrator whose style varied little over his long career. But it was a spare, modernist-leaning style in synch with the Art Deco and Moderne mood from the mid-1920s through the 1930s when his career was at its peak. Today, like so many other artists of his time, he is largely forgotten by the public at large. Biographical information is here.

Perhaps due to architectural training or maybe inherently, Kent had a strong sense of design of the monumental sort. Even small illustrations such as bookplates (see below) have a lot of visual heft. This style also was in keeping with his politics, glorifying the proletariat and winning him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967 as testimony for being "useful."

The present post deals with Kent's illustration; I might post about his painting another time.

Gallery

Bookplate for Katharine Brush - 1920

Revisitation - 1928

Ahab - from Moby-Dick - 1930

"Workers of the World Unite" - 1937

And Women Must Weep - 1937

Faller - 1942

From Decameron - 1949

Some Artzybasheff Early-1950s Time Covers

Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965), was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, Russian Empire, and in 1919 left Russia for the United States in the wake of the Communist Revolution. I have no information regarding art training, but he did make illustration his profession, usually as a book illustrator during the first part of his career. Biographical information via the Society of Illustrators can be found here, and an appreciation by Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. is here.

Artzybasheff began illustrating for Time, Inc. in 1940, making more than 200 magazine cover illustrations over the next quarter century when Time magazine was at its peak as a serious, influential publication. The images below are from the early 1950s when he was at his most productive and inventive.

Gallery

Time cover - 2 July 1951
The Korean War had been on for a year and the USA was in the process of rearming for the Cold War. At the nerve center of these activities was the Pentagon, subject of this Time cover showing all that red tape.

Time cover - 20 August 1951
Lt. General Vasily Stalin (1921-1962), son of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Vasily began to get into trouble the following year, even before his father died. After that, his career collapsed.

Time cover - 8 December 1952
The Space Age was still in gestation, but Artzybasheff considers the use of unmanned probes for exploration.

Time cover - 2 February 1953
Harold S. Vance, President of Studebaker shown with the sensational new Starliner styled by Raymond Loewy's team.

Time cover - 16 March 1953
Joseph Stalin (1878 - 5 March, 1953). Given the lead time for publications in those days, I suspect that Artzybasheff's illustration had been completed before Stalin's death, perhaps intended for a cover story still in the planning stage. By the way, news that he was ill came out only two or three days before his death. Before that, there was little inkling that Stalin might die, so Time editors had no strong reason to set up an issue dealing with it in advance -- though it's possible that they might have anyway, in newspaper obituary-writing fashion.

Time cover - 8 June 1953
3-D movies were a big, but brief, sensation in 1953. Here Artzybasheff switches from machines and portraits to a cartoon style.

Time cover - 29 June 1953
James H. (Dutch) Kindelberger, Chairman of North American Aviation, builder of the F-86 Sabre shown here battling a Russian MiG-15. Compare to the MiG-15 he pictures for the Vasily Stalin cover, above.

Paul Delvaux

Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) was a Belgian painter who settled on a 1920-vintage style by the 1930s and kept at it for the rest of his long career with few changes in subject matter. Biographical information is here.

His strongest influence seems to have been Giorgio de Chirico, and therefore his works have been variously classed as Magic Realism, Metaphysical Art or Surrealism ... the terms can overlap.

As can be seen below, Delvaux usually included women, often unclothed, in his paintings. Men, if they appeared, were normally fully dressed. Settings were often at dusk or night, usually in towns or cities. Generally his subjects are static, no action shown and little implied. People and other subjects are slightly simplified and distorted. In sum, what the viewer sees is clearly not quite real.

Gallery

La joie de vivre - Joy of Life - 1937

La rue du tramway - Street of Trams - 1938-39

Phases of the Moon - 1939

Loneliness - 1956

Toutes les lumieres - All the Lights - 1962

Petitie place de gare - Small Square Train Station - 1963

Les ombres - Shadows - 1965

The Retreat - 1973

Robe de mariées - Wedding Dress - 1976

Molti Ritratti: Queen Victoria

Victoria (1819-1901) became Queen of the United Kingdom in 1837, about the time photography emerged.

In theory, that makes it possible to compare photos of her with painted portraits. However, based on some Googling on my part, it seems likely that most photographs of her were taken during the last half of her reign. I was able to find a few that provide comparisons with most of the paintings I selected.

As for the paintings, because they are of a monarch, they tend to be cautiously done, perhaps even a bit more so than commissioned portraits of others.

Gallery

Photo by Bryan Edward Duppe and Gustav William Mullins - 1854 - image copyright HM Queen Elizabeth II
Victoria was about 35 years old when this was taken.

By Thomas Sully - 1838
Painted around the time of her coronation.

By Franz Xaver Winterhalter - 1842
Winterhalter was a go-to portrait artist for royalty and nobility.

Photo by John Mayall on a Carte de visite - 1861 - copyright Victoria & Albert Museum
This shows Victoria with Prince Albert who died 14 December of that year.

By Franz Xaver Winterhalter - 1859
Winterhalter seems to have firmed up her chin for this official portrait.

By Carl Rudolph Sohn (from a photograph) - 1883

Photo by Alexander Bassano - 1882

By Heinrich von Angeli - 1899
Victoria was about 80 when this was painted.