This blog is resting for awhile.
E.H. SHEPARD
I was raised on Ernest H. Shepard’s illustrations for the Winnie the Pooh books, but for some reason Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows never found me until recently. Better late than never.
Shepard worked in vignettes, letting the edges go, by which device he focussed in on his perfectly selected details. And his style, while very free, is by no means wild–notice, for example, how he doesn’t bring the background tone quite down on the heads as he does on the backs.
Rat and Mole
His characters are so animated. Look at the fingers on Toad’s left hand as he pulls on his glove.
Toad of Toad Hall
His humans are quite as colorful as his critters.
the Bench of Magistrates
Toad in the dock
Wonderful stuff, stylish and intimate at the same time.
NON-SCHNABEL BEACH
I am not a fan of the work of Julian Schnabel (vide July 7, below).
“Pascin Pig Passin Time” 1983 [Artsy]
But I’m reminded of his labored crockery paintings by the shore of an inlet off San Francisco Bay, in Richmond. Right across the road from Costco, as a matter of fact. Visible only at very low tide.
Decades ago, the Tepco Crockery factory used this bit of shore as a dumping site for a zillion pieces of broken crockery.*
Waves and the tides have spread them in a thin, crackly layer over the beach, and colored them, creating of them something between lively rubbish and an engaging effect of nature.
They have the advantage that no one has muddled their charm by painting over them.
* reported by Brody at odysseyseaglass.com
DALI BLUE
One of the characteristics of oil paint is that it grows transparent as it ages. When the paint is applied in thin glazes, underwork eventually begins to show through. As in Salvador Dali’s “Portrait of Dorothy Spreckels Munn” (1942) in the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.
Here we can see that Dali hogged in the whole piece from the horizon line down in blue, and then painted the foreground, including the figure, on top. Now the foreground glazes are going transparent, and the underpainting begins to tint what lies over it. This is especially visible in her right arm, but in fact the whole figure, including her dress, are noticeably darker and cooler below the horizon than above.
This is quite a common effect in older paintings done in glazes. Below, “Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine,” (1862) by Fitz Hugh Lane. It was painted from back to front; the farther shore and far mountains, laid in first, are visible through the sails of the ship. Working this way let the artist build the image in thin, delicate tones, and saved him from having to fill in pesky little background shapes that might muddle the main action.
Considering that transparency is an old and well-known characteristic of the medium, you’d have thought that Dali would have been more adroit.
SIDEWALK DELIGHTS
Followers of this blog will know, of course, that we ponder only the most lofty and profound questions of art, except when, as now, we pause to notice odd, nifty little things.
As here. Every year dozens and dozens of youngsters fan out to execute pastels on the sidewalk on a shopping street in my neighborhood. As you’d expect, much of what they do is no more than cheerful scribble, but here and there you find engaging, imaginative images.
Staying within the bounds of one concrete square enforces a compositional discipline they might not enjoy if they were spreading out vaguely over unrestricted space.
Fascinating in the piece below is the repetition of colors in the eyes and the voice balloon. If a mature artist had done that, we would all be chattering about the insightful connection between observation and belief.
Above, a catalogue of delights.
Rainbows seem to have been a widely adopted theme, but put to a variety of uses.
Those waves must have come from someplace, but no artist invents everything, and here they are convincingly folded into the narrative. The pattern on the bathing suit. So much going on.
TWO MORE CEZANNES
Recurring to the subject of Cezanne’s methods (see July 28 below), consider two portraits of Antony Valabrègue, done about five years apart. One is so much better than the other.
24 x 20″ 1869-70
25 x 21″ 1874-5
The earlier piece is just plopped down. The parts are there, but flatly, just showing up for duty.
As opposed to the later piece, where the beard, for example, comes and goes, full of little spritzes and subtleties. The hair and hairline—that delightful escaping ear, and the lock of hair behind it. The shoulders skipping downward, alive with action. The bouncy eyes and brows. Every line and shape witty and on the go.
Every artist, of course, has a range of success. But it’s worth taking a minute to see what that range is, and notice the reasons.
pics from Cezanne Portraits by John Elderfield
PICKETT? REALLY?
Recently, paging happily through “The New Yorker Album of Art & Artists,”* I stopped to enjoy the classic Tobey cartoon after “The Sleeping Gypsy” by Henri Rousseau, c. 1897. I’d admired this many times before, but never bothered to notice the painting on the wall to the left.
It is “Manchester Valley” by Joseph Pickett (1849-1918).
When discussing avant-garde art, the name of Joseph Pickett is not on every lip. But “Manchester Valley” is, in fact, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and hung in the museum’s 25th Anniversary Exhibition in 1954-55. It was on Floor 1: “CEZANNE THROUGH THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY”: Cezanne and his contemporaries; Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin; Ensor, Redon; Rousseau; Bonnard, Rouault; Prendergast; Matisse; The lesser “fauves”; Modigliani; Expressionism in Central Europe.
And Pickett. Who seems like odd company for those luminaries. The fact that it was a gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a founder of MOMA, and wife of moneybags John D. Rockefeller, Jr., may have had something to do with its inclusion. In any case, there it was.
My parents saw that show, and picking through the competition, walked out with a reproduction of “Manchester Valley.” Which in the fullness of time came to me, and now, a bit darkened with age, still hangs in my house. An odd piece, but full of satisfactions. It holds up after all these years. Thus my interest, and how I can’t imagine how for so long I failed to notice it in the Toby.
*Published 1970. Heartily recommended. Pieces from The New Yorker’s great old cartoon days, riffing on art and art fashions from the ’40s through the ’60s. Available at abebooks.com for $4.64, the last time I looked.
BROOKLYN WINDOWS
You find these and many similar windows along Carlton Ave in Brooklyn. Informal art of an unassuming, delightful kind: people putting out little plantations and looking after them.
And sometimes plantings mingle with burglar bars–a happy assertion of domesticity amidst the uncertainties of urban life
SOUTINE’S SPLASH
The show of Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) now at the Jewish Museum in New York is full of delights—some pretty standard images in all the art history texts, but other, lesser-known surprises. And one of the nifty things about this show is that very few of the pieces are under glass, so you can really eyeball the surfaces–sometimes to Soutine’s advantage, but not always. He gets messy.
The piece right inside the door (okay, under glass, but sensitively lit) is his famous and magnificent “Still Life With Rayfish.”
The closer you look, the more fascinating is the loose, splashy handling—color and brushwork wonderfully expressive but having little, if anything, to do with physical description.
Then the odd “Hanging Turkey” c.1925. with its human female torso.
And “Turkey” c. 1925. The turkey almost gets lost because the dark neck against the dark surround separates the head from the body, the leg shapes and color are repeated along the side, and there’s that odd mechanical piece coming in from the corner.
But once you’re hooked in, you come closer and closer, fascinated with how Soutine dances between representation and abstraction.
A FAVORITE THEOPHILUS BROWN
Theophilus Brown (1919 – 2012) was a member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and continued drawing and painting into the new century.
This undated lithograph ( 8½ x 6” ) lives happily on my dining room wall. I admire the strong, sharp design – those sleeves, those two improbable but perfect light lines coming down the wall, and then the horizontally delineated floor panels. The rich dark shadows here and there that press foreground and background into one plane. The figure modeled in unabashedly direct, diagonal strokes.
Bit by bit and all at once the piece hits that exciting balance between image and abstraction that those Figurative fellas understood so well.