Mikhail Nesterov: Remained in Russia and Copied Leo Putz

Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov (1862-1942) was a Russian painter in Czarist days with strong religious beliefs who remained after the Revolution. Yet was able to live out his days while not conforming to the Soviet artistic system. Apparently he managed to survive via portrait painting.

His Wikipedia entry is here, and more information from Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery is here.

Gallery

Vision of the Young Bartholomew - 1890
It seems this painting helped launch Nesterov's career.

Taking the Veil - 1897-98
Another of his many paintings with a religious theme.

Entombment of Alexander Nevsky - 1900
An historical theme here.

Portrait of Alexei Maksimovich Gorky - c.1901

Portrait of Lev Tolstoy - 1907

Portrait of Yekaterina Petrovna Nesterova - his second wife - 1905

Olga Nesterova in Riding Habit - his oldest daughter - 1906

Femme nue
Sold in 2007 at Christies Paris auction for about $14,000 (link here). Dimensions are 45,6 x 47,5 cm. (17 7/8 x 18¾ in.). The link to Christies does not mention that this is a copy of a painting by Tyrolian artist Leo Putz.

Sommertraeume - by Leo Putz - 1907
The dimensions of "Summer Dreams" are 119.5 x 110 cm -- much larger than Nesterov's copy. I can conform this, because I viewed the Putz painting several years ago when it was in Seattle. I wrote about Putz here.

Joe De Mers: Mainstream 1950s Illustrator

Joe De Mers (1910-1984) was a leading illustrator of fiction in major American magazines -- he signed his last name in two parts, but it is often combined as "DeMers" in many references.

I didn't notice any useful biography on a brief Google search, but I can report this: He was born in San Diego, trained in Los Angeles' Chouinard and then at the Brooklyn Museum. Worked in Hollywood, but his main career was with the famed Cooper Studio in New York. He retired to Hilton Head, South Carolina.

His style was similar to that of Coby Whitmore and several others active in the 1950s. Such illustrations typically offered only enough background and stage-setting details to provide context. Featured were the subject person or persons, often as only heads and shoulders. Media was usually gouache or casein, these allowing for rapid work and lack of the messiness that oil paints might cause when works are transported.

Gallery

De Mers did some pin-up work while building his career. This was in an Esquire calendar for March 1948.

The whole thing as seen before reproduction.

From "The Invisible Bride" - Ladies' Home Journal, May 1954.

Note the spare staging.

De Mers adds some distortion to the tables in the foreground.

I'm thinking this last image is from the late 1950s or early 60s, given the Bernie Fuchs - inspired style change.

Automobile as Genre: Robert Bechtle

Robert Bechtle (b. 1932) is a genre painter of the so-called photorealist variety. Come to think of it, almost any photorealist painting is genre because it depicts what a photograph (or combined extracts from several photographs) captures of the everyday physical and social world of humans. Bechtle's Wikipedia entry is here.

Bechtle bases his paintings on photographs he has taken. Unfortunately, I have never seen one of his paintings in person, so I can't report just how hard-edge they are. But a video posted on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website suggests that there is painterly action when viewed from really close.

One thing I especially like about Bechtle's art is that he includes carefully done images of actual automobiles -- not some tossed-off generic car-shaped collection of paint that I find all too often.

Gallery

'58 Rambler - 1967

'62 Chevy - 1970

'64 Valiant - 1971

'71 Buick - 1972

'63 Bel Air - 1973

Alameda Gran Torino - 1974

S.F. Cadillac - 1975

Near Ocean Avenue - 2002
I find this interesting because it looks like Bechtle used an old slide or print as its basis. That is, the colors have yellowed and the cars shown in the foreground are no more recent than the mid-1970s -- yet the painting is dated 2002.

Alameda Intersection - Clay and Mound Streets - 2004
This is the painting featured in the video linked above.

Santa Barbara Motel - 1977
I include this to show that Bechtle paints subjects other than cars. Indeed this looks a lot like some motels near Santa Barbara's waterfront, though I can't say which one he's depicting here.

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.

Gallery

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.

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.

Gallery

From 1954

From 1958

From 1958

From 1964

From 1964

From 1964

From 1965

From 1964

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.

Gallery

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.