Art Contrarian

Thursday, June 2, 2016

The Los Angeles Broad

I visited the new Broad art museum in downtown Los Angeles March 1st with my wife and some LA friends. It contains much of the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, which is focused on American postmodern art. The website of The Broad is here, and its Wikipedia entry is here.

As Faithful Readers should know by now, I consider most postmodernism silly, and a good chunk of it not even art. So I'll set that aside and deal with the building. It is a long way removed from functionalist, International Style purity. It's even entertaining in a sterile sort of way.

Here are some snapshots I took.

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The Broad as seen from the Disney concert hall side of the street. The building has a core clad in that sheath of slanted openings.

A view of the opposite side of the building.

Looking out at the street from the lobby.

The lobby from near an entrance.

Another view of the lobby.

The lobby-level museum shop.

The escalator seen at the gallery level. Behind it is the elevator and farther back is the stairway.

View from the opposite direction.

A gallery featuring Andy Warhol "art."

This shows a relationship of the interior and the exterior cladding. That's a Roy Lichtenstein painting on the far wall.

Gallery view showing the ceiling and its lighting.

This was the cutest architectural touch. I took this while partway down the stairway from the main gallery floor to the lobby. Seen here is a window to the storage room.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Dorothy Hood, Fashion Illustrator

This is probably the least-informative post I've ever done. That's because I can't seem to find anything on the Internet or in my reference material in the way of a biography of Dorothy Hood (1918-1984).

That strikes me as rather strange because she was the ace fashion illustrator for the famous Lord & Taylor store in New York in the 1950s and 1960s.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Irwin Caplan, a well-known cartoonist who taught fashion art back when I was in art school. Caplan regularly brought a copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times to the classroom so that we could paw through it and see what the top fashion illustrators were doing. Since Lord & Taylor advertised heavily in the Sunday Times, we got to see a lot of Hood's work.

Somewhere I read that at one point Hood damaged her drawing hand and had to learn to draw with the other one. But I can't seem to locate that source either, so take it as hearsay.

All I can do for now is show some examples of her work. Fashion art (and photography) have changed since her time, not necessarily for the better.

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From 1954

From 1958

From 1964

From 1965

From 1964

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Ken Auster, Mostly-Urban Impressionist

Charley Parker called my attention to the passing of Ken Auster (1949-2016). Some images of his paintings and a short biography can be found here.

Auster earned an art degree in college and then spent a number of years in commercial art, doing surfer-themed t-shirt graphics and other such work. Around 20 years ago, he shifted to painting. His style evolved into broad-brush, sketchy, impressionist (but not of the broken-color variety) painting featuring strong use of color to help create atmosphere. He did a good deal of plein air work, much of it in cities. In recent years he painted many bar and restaurant scenes.

An interesting practice was the titles her assigned to his works. Often they are ironic takes on what he was depicting, as can be seen in the sampling below.

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Coastal Cactus

Point Reyes

San Francisco street scene
Auster's urban scenes often made use of strong value contrasts. This also has some contra-jour.

Swarming - 1997

Primary Transportation

Land of Relentless Sun - c.2014
A rainy winter day in California (rains can get very heavy there at times).

Knock Out
The background image is George Bellows' Dempsey and Firpo (1924) located at the Whitney Museum of American Art. So I wonder if this is a scene from an actual bar.

King Cole Bar
The background painting is Old King Cole by Maxfield Parrish, located in the King Cole Bar in New York's St. Regis Hotel.

How About a Biscuit
The background image is Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party that is housed in the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Perhaps a reproduction or copy is in a bar unbeknownst to me.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Fritz Willis' Non-Pinups

Fritz Willis (1907-1979) was a first-rate pinup artist who did other kinds of illustration earlier in his career. But even then, his focus was on beautiful young women.

For more information about him and discussions regarding his work along with examples (some of which I present below), you can link here, here, here, here and here.

I get the impression that Willis might have been a bit more interested in his pinup's faces, rather than their bodies. That's because he sometimes painted heads that are too large compared to the rest of the body. You can check this if you're interested by Googling on Willis and then clicking on Images.

Here are examples of Fritz Willis' illustration art, mostly of the rare, non-pinup variety.

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Setting the stage, here are two pinups painted in Willis' mature style.

A story illustration, but I don't have the source.
UPDATE: A reader reports that this illustration is from the Saturday Evening Post story "The Airborne Female," in a December 1956 issue.

Two story spreads from Collier's Magazine

Story illustration from Saturday Evening Post -- 22 November 1958.

More unsourced story illustrations. Willis worked on full-color advertisements (fairly rare in the 1940s and 50s) and illustrated for major "slicks" such as the Post and Collier's. By these criteria, he was successful even before he drifted into art for pinup calendars.

He also did cover art for Ice Follies programs for many years.

The cover of a how-to book Willis did for Walter Foster.

July 1947 page for Esquire magazine, an early step towards pinup art.

I include this for its simplified brushwork -- not typical Willis.

Finally, a near-pinup bathing suit image.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

William Holman Hunt: The Consistent Pre-Raphaelite

William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, along with Gabriel Dante Rossetti and John Everett Millais. As his Wikipedia entry notes, he continued its principles during his career to a greater extent than the others.

From today's perspective, Pre-Raphaelite art in its purest technical sense would be considered "hard-edge." The PRB link above notes that "sloshy" (presumably "painterly") art was something the brothers were strongly against. Subject matter varied, but Hunt's usually contained a moralistic or literary-with-moralistic-overtones core. But in order to earn a living as painters, the PRBs often found that they had to rely on portraiture. This was certainly the case for Millais, who "went establishment," being knighted and made president of the Royal Academy.

As for Hunt, I find his most important paintings more interesting than likable, though I don't actually dislike them. I suppose this is because I usually don't care for hard-edge painting.

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