Category Archives: Art

JULIO ROMERO DE TORRES

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This wonderful portrait, Carmen Of Cordova,
is by Julio Romero de Torres, a Spanish painter of the late Victorian
and early modern eras.  His images are dark, earthy and
erotic, with a hint of the perverse.

He started out doing conventional Victorian narrative tableaux, like the one above — titled Look How Beautiful She Was! — but eventually developed a more eccentric vision.  Below, a twist on a famous paiting by Velasquez:

Like any respectable Spaniard he both loved and feared women . . .

. . . and also tended to see them in a mystical light:

His sensibility represents an odd blend of the carnal and the spiritual
— always in his work, however sensual, we can hear the Spanish saying
“Where the body goes, there goes death.”

Above, the artist in his studio with a model and a visitor. 
Romero de Torres was born and spent most of his life in Córdoba, taking
time out to serve as a pilot in WWI and to visit the Argentine, where
he got sick, returning to Córdoba to die at the age of 55.  There
are no books in English which collect his work, although twelve more
books about the mildly amusing advertising artist Andy Warhol were
published last week.

Something is terribly wrong with our civilization — but you knew that.

There is a museum in Córdoba which lovingly preserves his house and work, which you can visit virtually here.

Thanks, as so often, to Little Hokum Rag and Femme Femme Femme for pointing the way to this enchanting painter.

A BOUGUEREAU FOR TODAY

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Once a poster boy for bourgeois bad taste, Bouguereau is starting to
look more and more radical — certainly more and more bizarre. 
The solidity of his angels here is uncanny.  The wings of angels
in art are often merely symbolic — in this image they
seem like practical appendages, as necessary to flight as a bird's
wings.  They give these angels a monstrous quality, as though
they're the product of some unholy genetic experiment.  On the
other hand, it may be that the sight of real angels would produce the
same impression and that real angels, if photographed, would look exactly as
they do above.

For a lengthier meditation on the work of this extraordinary artist, go here:

Bouguereau and the Über-Photograph

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE: A VICTORIAN ARTIST YOU SHOULD KNOW

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Jules Bastien-Lepage died tragically young, in 1884, when he was in his late thirties.  He painted one masterpiece, Joan Listening To the Voices (above),
which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 
It's impossible to describe the effect of this large canvas, with its
complex and convincing illusion of space, which Joan seems about to step out of,
prompted forward by her visions.  It's an example of a
photo-realistic technique enlisted in the service of mystical drama.

Bastien-Lepage groped about a bit in his short career, with stylized
works of grandiose ambition that seem clumsy and pretentious and
modest genre paintings that seem trite, but his über-photographic style
could occasionally produce miracles, like this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Bernhardt,
which has the quality of a bas-relief:

No other evocation of Bernhardt, in literature, art or photography,
brings us as close as Bastien-Lepage's portrait does to the charisma of
the great artist.  Nadar's photographs of the young actress
humanize her, touch the heart — Bastien-Lepage's portrait records the
determined audacity of her genius.  She seems powerful and
vulnerable at the same time, part of the alchemy of a star.

The American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens did a remarkable
bas-relief portrait of Bastien-Lepage in bronze, which makes a fine
pendant to Bastien-Lepage's portrait of Bernhardt — both have a
tactile grace that takes the breath away, both summon their subjects into
our immediate presence, obliterating time and mortality:


AN N. C. WYETH FOR TODAY

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The above is an illustration by N. C. Wyeth for the book Legends Of Charlemagne. 
N. C. Wyeth, the father of Andrew, was the greatest of American book
illustrators and one of the greatest of American painters.  His
influence on cinema, especially the work of John Ford, cannot be
overestimated.

[The image is courtesy of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, one of the most delightful sites on the Internet.]

UNSPEAKABLY COOL: DREAM OF THE RAREBIT FIEND

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The fourth of the four coolest books published in the last few years, like
two of the others, collects the work of Winsor McCay — in this case
the extraordinary strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend — but unlike the other three wasn’t put out by Sunday Press Books.  Privately published by Ulrich Merkl, it
includes all of the strips from the series — those not reproduced in
the book itself are supplied on a DVD that comes packaged with the book.

The book is gigantic and presents the strips, published between 1904
and 1913, in their original size.  It also has a wealth of other
illustrative material showing McCay’s sources and documenting the
enormous influence his images have had on America’s visual culture,
especially that of the movies.

The draftsmanship of the strips is stunning, the visual imagination exhilarating.  Its central gag involves the dreams of people given indigestion by eating Welsh Rarebit, making it a kind of run-up to McCay’s masterpiece strip Little Nemo In Slumberland, which illustrates the dreams of a restless little boy.

Merkl’s book, published in a limited edition, is expensive but worth every penny.  It lovingly documents a brilliant and endlessly enchanting work of popular art.

Check out my reports on the other three coolest books of recent years:

Little Nemo

Little Sammy Sneeze

Walt and Skeezix

PIERROT'S EMBRACE

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Guillaume Seignac
was a late Victorian painter (he died in 1924) who mostly turned out
undistinguished but sometimes amusing imitations of Bouguereau. 
His draftsmanship could be flabby and his images didn't have the
über-photographic authority of his master.

The image above is different, though.  It has an odd suggestive
power, almost perverse, that's rooted in theatrical gesture.  I
find it haunting, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.

A PUNCHINELLO FOR TODAY

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Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) was the son of the great painter and master of the fresco Giovanni
Battista Tiepolo.  Domenico painted and did frescos as well, but
his most amazing work was series of drawings featuring the commedia dell'arte character Punchinello, done towards the end of his life.

The series comprised 104 pen and wash images which explored the
character in unexpected ways.  Domenico showed him in childhood,
in the kitchen cooking polenta, imprisoned, and finally dead and buried
(see above.)  Indeed, Domenico treated Punchinello as an early
version of Krusty the Clown, but with a depth of feeling that
transformed him from a stock figure of the comic stage into an image of
everyman, a clown of Shakespearean dimensions.

The drawings are free, almost casual, but incredibly beautiful. 
The series was sold and dispersed in 1921 but in 1986 77 of them were
collected and superbly reproduced in a book, which is out of print but
still available, for a price, through online booksellers.  It's
well worth tracking down.

FLETCHER HANKS

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Fletcher
Hanks is sometimes called, with a kind of affectionate awe, the worst
comic book artist of all time — sort of the Ed Wood of the comic
book.  Like Wood, he was bad in an earnest, reckless way that
grips the imagination.

Fletcher's drawing style was crude, his stories simple and
brutal.  They have a way of penetrating straight to the unconscious.

Not much is known about him, except that he was an abusive drunk who
terrorized his family and then abandoned them in 1930, that he stopped
drawing comic books in 1941 and that he froze to death on a park bench
in New York City sometime in the 1970s.

But the work remains, saved by a few collectors of wildly obscure comics and now reprinted in a new book called I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!  It is a cry from a twisted heart and in some weird, unfathomable way both brilliant and important.

JAMES SHEEHAN PAINTING AT NIGHT

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My
sister Libba Marrian is making a documentary about the wonderful
painter James Sheehan.  I've seen a rough assembly of part of it
and it's fascinating.

You can see a short sequence from the film, James Sheehan Painting At Night, on YouTube here.  The painting and the images recording Sheehan at work on it are beautiful.

You can see more of Sheehan's work here.

A NORMAN ROCKWELL FOR TODAY

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O. k., Norman Rockwell did sometimes push the cuteness factor a bit too
hard, especially in his advertising work.  (The image above is
from a magazine ad — the family is excited because dad is bringing
home a new Plymouth for Christmas.)  The expression on the face of
the boy on the right is just a bit too orgasmic for the occasion. 
The expression on the face of the dog makes up for this to a degree — I get
a feeling he's looking forward to urinating on the Plymouth's new
tires.  The self-absorption of the birds also makes for a nice
counterpoint to the ecstasy induced by conspicuous material consumption.

Yet for all that the image moves me.  It sums up exactly how I felt in the Christmases of my youth, which is pretty much exactly
how I still feel at Christmas — surprising considering how many
such seasons I have under my belt.  Sometimes art isn't meant to
make us rethink how we feel about things — sometimes it's meant to
remind us how we feel about things.

Remove the Plymouth from the equation — imagine it's just dad, a
salesman perhaps, back from a long road trip in time for the
holidays.  That works, too.

BLACK COMEDY

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When
I discovered the work of Amy Crehore, via Boing Boing, I was particularly
struck by the image above, titled Black Comedy, and reproduced it at the head of my first
post about the artist.  This holiday season someone gave me an
original limited-edition print of the image, which is not just striking
but ravishing, far beyond anything an Internet reproduction could
convey.

The odd tone of the scene is intensified in the print — a dreamy, erotic
playfulness that has something to do with the theatricality of sex, or
the sexiness of theater, but floats mysteriously above any precise
interpretation.

Anyone looking for a special gift this Christmas could do worse than peruse the prints available at Crehore's web site.

The peek-a-boob joke in the painting puts me in mind of something that
happened to me recently here in Las Vegas.  I'd just had a drink
at the Mirage with my friend the architect Deane Evans, in town for a
conference, and went out to pick up my car at the valet stand. 
There were two guys in cowboy hats (the rodeo is also in town) and two
girls at the stand waiting for their truck.  As I came up to them
one girl, very tall, very attractive and very drunk, turned to me and
opened the front of her blouse, flashing her very impressive
breasts.  Then she broke up laughing.  I didn't know how to
respond to this cheerful greeting and just said, with what was probably
a goofy smile, “Thank you.”

The greeting wasn't personal — the young lady was flashing her boobs
and laughing delightedly at any guy who came near her, including the attendant who delivered her
ride.  They all responded with goofy smiles.

I now realize, given the season we're in, that I should have said, “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

A GÉRÔME FOR TODAY

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Victorian academic painters loved doing scenes set in antique Roman or
Oriental baths — it was a respectable way of showing lots of women in
various stages of undress.  The casual, languorous poses of these
women would have seemed shocking in a modern setting or unseemly in
mythological or allegorical images.  One of the things that was
radical about the Impressionists was their depiction of nudity in
naturalistic ways, in ordinary settings.  The academics had it both
ways — their settings could say, by implication, “Modern European
women don't look or act this way with their clothes off,” but everyone
knew (or suspected, or hoped) differently.  The hypocrisy added a little spice to the
proceedings — wink, wink . . . nudge, nudge.  It seems a bit
silly now, but a bit charming, too.

UNSPEAKABLY COOL: LITTLE SAMMY SNEEZE

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The third of the four coolest books published in the past few years is (I am compelled to report) also from Sunday Press Books — a collection of Winsor McCay’s pre-Nemo comic strip Little Sammy Sneeze.

This book is not a gigantic volume reproducing newspaper pages in full size, simply because Little Sammy did not command a full page on Sundays.  It is, instead, a good-sized coffee-table book — all that’s needed to reproduce McCay’s color Sammy Sneeze strips almost exactly as they were originally published.

Sunday Press’s philosophy in regard to reproducing old color strips is
very sensible.  They use modern digital techniques to correct the
fading of colors and the yellowing of paper, but don’t try to improve
on the colors as they would actually have appeared to a reader of the
time and don’t try to eliminate minor characteristic printing
errors.  What one sees in their books is thus a very close
approximation of the medium the comic strip artists composed for.

In Little Sammy Sneeze, McCay took a very small idea and made something wonderful out of it. The strips normally employ either six or eight panels, all showing the same location and generally from the same point of view.  Activity proceeds within the space of the location as Little Sammy works himself up to a sneeze, which usually produces catastrophic effects within the location and causes Sammy to be ejected from it angrily.  For some reason, this mechanical formula produces endless delight — much the way simple variations on a  musical theme can produce endless delight.

The drawing, of course, is brilliant, as you’d expect from McCay, and the period detail within the mostly realistic settings has only grown more magical with time.  The strips are in part about time, of course — small segments of time in which many things happen.
Seeing the way static pictures on a page can evoke a sense of the passage of time is intrinsically fascinating.  It’s like deconstructing the process of cinema, with the illusion laid out anatomically before you.

In one instance, McCay deconstructs his own medium, as Sammy’s sneeze fractures the frame of the comic strip panel itself:

If the gag in the strip is always the same, or more or less the same,
it is nevertheless always surprising — or perhaps one should say
always suspenseful.  There’s a psychological phenomenon involved
here that’s at the core of any good joke, which can make you laugh even
if you’ve heard it before.  In part, it’s the shape of the joke that
makes it work — a tension is created that can only be resolved with
the release of a laugh.  The same phenomenon is at work in all
stories, which is why it’s possible to cry every time you read A Christmas Carol — even if you know it almost by heart.

You can obtain Sammy’s sneezes here.