George Lepape, Golden Age Fashion Illustrator

Once upon a time, fashion illustration -- be it hand-drawn or photography -- was elegant. Quite unlike the ugly photos of strange looking models that populate both advertising and editorial content in current American fashion-related magazines.

For example, consider Georges Alexandre Adrien Lepape (1887-1971), a mainstay of French fashion illustration from around 1910-1930. His Wikipedia entry (in French) is here. English-language blog posts devoted to him are here and here. A lengthy French post is here.

Lapape's style is regarded as influenced by Japanese prints -- flat areas and thin linework, heavily design oriented.

Lapape married around the time his career was launched, and he had a daughter. For some reason, he seems to have ceased being active in fashion illustration by the very early 1930s, if images found on the Internet are any clue. He is known to have built a house by the Riviera, and died near Châteaudun, southwest of Chartres.

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Photo of Lepape
Dressed to the nines.

Pochoir from Les Choses de Paul Poiret - 1911
This publication for the famed couturier launched Lepape's career in fashion illustration.

Vogue (USA) cover - 15 January 1919

Vanity Fair cover - December 1919

L'eventail d'or - Gazette du Bon Ton - March 1920

Les Modes Élégants - fashion spread - 1922

Vogue cover - 1 January 1925
Interesting Voisin car, distorted perspective.

Vogue cover - November 1927

Vogue (USA) cover - 1 May 1928
Tall, narrow skyscrapers, tall, narrow lady.  Very 1920s.

'L'Initiation vénitienne' par Henri de Régnier - 1929

Vogue (France) cover - November 1930
Apparently a late fashion illustration by Lepape.

Up Close: Alfred Maurer at the Huntington

Alfred Henry Maurer (1868-1932) began as a representational painter influenced by James McNeill Whistler and then switched to various schools of modernism before committing suicide.

I wrote about Maurer here. A more recent article about him in The Wall Street Journal is here.

Earlier this year I came across a Maurer from his early period on display at the Huntington Library in San Marino, near Pasadena California. The Huntington has a good collection of late 18th century British paintings, but there is also a useful collection of American art from the decades around 1900.

Below are two examples of Maurer's work from 1901 that were shown in my previous post about him along with photos I took of the Huntington painting.

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An Arrangement - 1901
This seems to be Maurer's best-known painting from that time.

Girl in White - 1901
Another 1901 painting, perhaps of the same model.

Woman in Interior - 1901
This is the Huntington painting, also from 1901. The model might be the same woman as in the previous images. Disregard the hair color and consider the face.

Woman in Interior - 1901 (detail)
Close-up photo of the painting above.

Brynolf Wennerberg and His Smiling Women

Gunnar Brynolf Wennerberg (1866-1950) was born in Sweden, but made a successful career elsewhere, mostly in Germany. His Wikipedia entries are only in Swedish and German as of the time this post was drafted. You probably can have your computer translate from either language. However, differences in syntax with English make for difficult reading in places -- though you ought to grasp most of the meaning.

Wennerberg was skilled at drawing and painting smiling women. Moreover, most of the images I've found on the Web have highly natural-looking subjects. This is even though female makeup and grooming fashions, particularly in the 1920s and 30s, required some other illustrators' results to seem odd to us.

Beyond his ability to portray, Wennerberg had a very nice painterly style.

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Beim Ankleiden - Käthe Berger

Costume ball scene?
Wennerberg illustrated a lot of carnival and costume ball scenes.

Der Charmeur
This might be a magazine illustration from around 1910.

Faun
A very nicely painted sketch with just enough detail to sell the scene.

In Erwartung
She is waiting, but for whom or what, I can't say.

Carnival

Morgengabe - c. 1920

Simplicissimus cover
I don't have the date for this, but between 1910 and 1915 shouldn't be far off.

Dancer

Dancer

Dancer
Three paintings, each featuring a Tänzerin.

Clothilde Eggerer - 1939
For once, a woman who is not smiling. Because of the war?

Spritzig - c. 1930

Portrait sketch - 1935
I think this is especially well done.  The guy could really paint.

Eric Fischl and Photoshop

Eric Fischl (1948 - ) is for me an important post-modernist artist because he broke from abstraction and moved to realist paintings of people in psychologically ambiguous situations. Plus, his work was commercially successful while being generally accepted by the New York art world.

Fischl's Wikipedia entry is here, and here is his web site that contains many examples of his work.

Due to his need to portray people in those psychologically ambiguous situations I referred to, he needed capture-the-moment body poses and gestures difficult or impossible to obtain from live models. Beyond that was the need to get correct effects of light and shade on his subjects. So Fischl necessarily was drawn to the use of photography for reference material. This is what classical illustrators usually were doing by the 1940s.

Another consideration was composing scenes. Again he borrowed from illustration by creating overlays, one to a subject, and moving them around to establish the ensemble best fitted for artistic and story-telling purposes. Early in his career he made use of glassine to create finished works on that support material.

In recent years Fischl has been relying on digital photography, using Photoshop to manipulate the positions of subjects to achieve what he feels is a satisfactory compositions. He credits his wife, landscape artist April Gornik, for getting him using that software.

A 2012 exhibit at the San Jose (California) Museum of Art dealt with his use of photography. The museum's website page dealing with the exhibit is here.

Here are a few examples of Fischl's use of photography for his painting.

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This is an example of a Photoshopped image.  I don't have an image of a completed painting for comparison.

Years before using Photoshop, Fischl began using conventional photography.  This is a key photo taken at a beach near Saint-Tropez, France about 1984.  The pose of women in the center was later used by him in several works.

Above are a digital image and a completed painting from his 2002 Krefeld Project. This seems to be pre-Photoshop.

Phototshoped composition and final painting, "The Gang," 2006. The woman in the foreground is April Gornik.

Gaston La Touche's La Belle Époque

Gaston La Touche (1854-1913) did not receive expert art training, but his ability and the influence of Impressionist painters and other sources led him to a successful career as a painter and illustrator. As his Wikipedia entry mentions, in 1909 he was named an officer of France's Legion of Honor. More extensive biographical information is here.

La Touche painted a variety of subjects, but often depicted scenes from the ongoing La Belle Époque. He was happy to include fireworks displays and liked masked balls as subjects.

His technique was not hard-core Impressionist. It was rather more like the American Impressionist approach of combining accurate drawing and wispy brushstrokes at the times he was in an Impressionist mood. As best I can tell, La Touche painted using oils, though several of his works viewed over the internet seem as though they were done using pastels.

His paintings don't interest me much, but I nevertheless think they are worth showing you.

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At the Opera

Dinner at the Casino - 1903

In the Opera - c.1890

L'Entracte - 1908

L'intrigue nocturne

The Ball

The Champagne

The Joyous Festival

The Promenade

Harry Willson Watrous, Who Profiled Women

Harry Willson Watrous (1857-1940) was president of the National Academy of Design, 1933-34, but there is not much information about him on the Internet. One might consult this Dutch Wikipedia entry, or perhaps a short National Academy biography here. And there's this anecdote at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art site.

Watrous, was born in San Francisco, raised in New York City, studied art in Paris at (where else?) the Académie Julian. While in Paris, he became influence by the small, carefully crafted paintings of the vastly popular (at the time) Jean Meissonier. Watrous painted in the Meissonier manner until the early 1900s, when he developed vision problems -- his "eyesight began to fail" noted the National Academy link. Thereafter, he painted larger, more simplified works, especially paintings featuring profile views of elegant young women. This was about 1905-15. After that, he shifted to landscape and still life painting.

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The Concert - 1903
This is the closest example to his earlier style that I could locate. But it's probably not quite what he usually did before 1905.

Solitaire
From the hairdo, this looks like it might have been made about 1900-1905.

A Cup of Tea, a Cigarette, and She - c. 1908
Cigarette smoking for women was controversial in America as late as the early 1930s.

Girl With the Mirror

Libelulas: The Passing of Summer - 1915
The NY Met anecdote linked above deals with this painting.

Just a Couple of Girls - 1915

The Chatterboxes - 1913
Très élégant.

The Composers
More ravens.

Fallen Pine at Hague, Lake George
Hague is near the north end of the lake, on the west bank. Watrous and his wife had a house on Lake George in Upstate New York.

The Blue Goats - 1929
An example of his still life painting.

So Watrous had impaired vision. What kind of impairment is not stated in the few sources about him that I could find. I am puzzled, because all the post-1905 painting images displayed above suggest that Watrous could see pretty well: note the fine lines and details on even the landscape and still life. That is, he was painting quite well with sub-optimal vision for at least 25 or as many as 35 years.

It happens that Yr. Faithful Blogger has had cataracts in both eyes as well as macular pucker (also called an epiretinal membrane) in one eye. These are fairly common vision-impairment ailments. In my judgment, if Watrous had either of these problems, they must have been mild if he were to have painted what is shown above. Otherwise, perhaps his wife, also an artist, might have assisted painting the finely detailed bits.