The Slightly Surreal, Illustration-Like Intellectual Art of Mark Tansey

Late February, we visited The Broad, a new museum in downtown Los Angeles (background here). The collection of Eli and Edythe Broad is housed there, a collection focused on postmodern art of the period 1960-1990, if the impression it gave me is halfway correct.

I am not a fan of the kind of art. Nevertheless, I did come across a few artists and their works that interested me. One of these was Mark Tansey (b. 1949) who I was essentially unaware of. Some background regarding him can be found here, here and here.

Some examples of his work are below. All the paintings date from 1979-90, a period when he did what I consider his most interesting work.

Gallery

The Innocent Eye Test - 1981

The Occupation - 1984
1980s New York City occupied by 1914-vintage troop from Imperial Germany.

Triumph of the New York School - 1984
Allegory showing Great War clothed French artists surrendering to World War 2 garbed New York modernists.

Triumph ... key to depictions
I found this helpful graphic on the web.

Action Painting II - 1984

Forward Retreat - 1986

Forward Retreat: flipped detail
I took this photo at The Broad.  From right to left are (1) a 1917 Great War French soldier, (2) a 1914 German Great War Soldier, (3) a 1917 Great War British or American soldier, and (4) a polo player.

Constructing the Grand Canyon - 1990

A Short History of Modernist Painting - 1979-80
Another painting I saw at The Broad.  Below are some detail photos I took.

History ... detail

History ... another detail

History ... yet another detail

Dying Magazines and the Fall of Traditional Illustration

Leif Peng had an interesting 26 October 2011 post on his Today's Inspiration blog regarding the decline and death of some general-interest magazines that had supported what I'll call traditional illustration.

Such magazines were called "slicks" because they were printed on smooth paper instead of cheaper newsprint or rough-textured "pulp" paper. Many of these magazines had circulations in the millions of copies when the U.S. population ranged from around 63 million in 1890 to about 180 million in 1960 (the number now is more than 320 million).

The archetypical general-interest magazine was the Saturday Evening Post, whose content was a mix of short stories and non-fiction articles, the former being decorated by images from famous illustrators. Covers also used illustration, the two most prolific cover illustrators being J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell.

The advent of radio in the 1920s had no noticeable effect on circulation of "slicks," and the most prominent ones also weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s. What brought them down was television, following the end of the 1948-1952 TV station license moratorium resulting in a surge of new television stations rapidly spreading across the United States.

Below is a listing of prominent magazines with their prime publication lifespans.

Saturday Evening Post -- 1897-1963 (as a weekly publication)

Collier's -- 1888-1957 (the Post's main competitor)

The American Magazine -- 1906-1956

Liberty -- 1924-1950

McCall's -- 1973-2002

Ladies' Home Journal -- 1883-2014 (as a weekly or bi-weekly)

Life -- 1936-1972 (Time, Inc. version)

Look -- 1937-1971 (like Life, was photo oriented)

I included Look Magazine because it is another good example of a mass-circulation publication that failed to survive very far beyond the 1960s. McCall's was a magazine for women that included short stories illustrated by many of the top names in the field, including Bernie Fuchs. The American and Liberty were lesser general-interest magazines. The Time Incorporated version of Life (they bought the title from an existing magazine) was primary photograph-oriented. But when dealing with subjects where good photos were unavailable, leading illustrators were brought in to provide images.

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.