Category Archives: Art

SAUL STEINBERG AND ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Posted on by

The delightful drawings behind the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film The Trouble With Harry were done (uncredited) by famed New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg, riffing on images from the paintings of Paul Klee.  Hitchcock was a collector of Klee’s work and may well have asked Steinberg to incorporate the homage.

The Steinberg drawings seem to echo a style in 50s design and animation called “cartoon modern”, which I wrote about in an earlier post — though of course the cartoon modern style derives from the whimsical abstractions of artists like Klee and Steinberg, not the other way around.  It’s an example of the way artistic ideas percolate up and down the scale from high to popular art.  In 1955, Klee was high-brow art, Steinberg (at least when he was publishing in The New Yorker) was middle-brow art and Hitchcock was low-brow art.  Today you could hardly rank Hitchcock below either of the other two on any scale of art — which just goes to show how silly and ephemeral such distinctions are, and ought to make us wonder what art today is undervalued because it’s stuck into some temporary and ultimately meaningless hierarchy.

ANDERS ZORN

Posted on by

Recently, thanks to Amy Crehore’s blog Little Hokum Rag, I discovered the work of the amazing Swedish painter Anders Zorn.  Zorn started his career in the Victorian era and his paintings share some of the attributes of the Victorian academic schools — an almost photo-realistic style combined with an emphasis on the dramatic use of spatial depth in the image (see above.)

But Zorn worked into the first two decades of the 20th-Century and like Sargent, another quasi-academic, he was attracted to the free brushstrokes and painterly surfaces of the Impressionists.  Indeed, some of Zorn’s wonderful  portraits of women can stand favorable comparison with Sargent’s work:

Like Gérôme, Zorn’s interest in stereometric forms led him to work also in the medium of sculpture:

Zorn was justly celebrated for his images of water, in which the sensual brushstokes render with convincing precision the surfaces of sea or river or lake:

Zorn is perhaps most famous for his plein air nudes.  In them he abandons any hint of the allegorical or classical, which tended to inform the Victorian academic approach to the nude, for a frank celebration of the female body in a natural setting.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these nudes influenced Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of naked women out of doors — which have the same sort of directness, as though we, the viewers, had simply stumbled upon a woman walking around naked through the woods:

There’s a hint of the voyeuristic in the approach — you get a sense that Zorn’s models might be startled (though perhaps not embarrassed) to find someone looking at them.  The image below seems to reflect something of Zorn’s attitude — seen from behind, one of his models appears to be disrobing for him out of doors, or getting dressed again after posing, but Zorn appears to be spying on her without her knowledge.  There’s no sense of violation — just of a secret delight.

I think it’s one of the sexiest images in all of art:

ISLE OF THE DEAD

Posted on by

Above is an amazing image by the 19th-Century Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin — Self Portrait With Death.  I stumbled across it while looking for another Böcklin painting, The Isle Of the Dead, which Hitchcock reportedly used as a visual frame of reference for Vertigo.

The Isle Of the Dead (below) is almost as spooky as the self-portrait, and while it’s not referenced directly in Vertigo, its mood and basic visual strategy obviously informed a lot of the film’s compositions involving Madeleine, the ghostly, morbidly-obsessed heroine, who often appears as a distant, deathly-still figure set against backgrounds of dark trees and the sea.

NORMAN ROCKWELL: CITIZEN

Posted on by


As the art critic Dave Hickey has observed, Norman
Rockwell was inspired by the idea of American citizenship, and he often
portrayed the places and occasions in American life which brought
Americans together in that peculiar comradeship unique to functioning
democracies.

In our polarized age, when the gap between rich and
poor grows positively surreal, when urban environments no longer
function as genuine melting pots, when suburban residential patterns
emphasize the isolation of income-brackets, Rockwell's visions of
community take on a nostalgic glow — but in his own time Rockwell was
celebrating something real, something in the now.

I'm particularly fond of Rockwell's paintings of
people on trains — a now uncommon mode of travel in which people from
different backgrounds met as equals, in an environment that allowed for
interaction.  There was space and time for interaction — as there
isn't, for example, on an airplane, which has no common space, where
moving about is difficult and hardly encouraged.

In the painting at the head of this post, democracy rules — a gang of
skiers sets the excited tone of the passenger car . . . the quieter
fellow submits, observes, is perhaps intrigued.  He's temporarily out
of sync, but not out of place.

The “Saturday Evening Post” cover below is one of my
favorite images of WWII.  A soldier on leave tries to make time with
his girl, while a kid looks on jealously.  The soldier, the homefront
and the future intersect momentarily on a crowded train in the middle
of a dreadful war, and we see everything that's at stake in the
conflict.


Below, a kid on a train journey by himself is watched
over by a sophisticated professional who's seen it all but still finds
it possible to be amused and touched by the rite of passage he's witnessing,
as the kid tries earnestly to make his way in an adult arena.  The
dining car waiter has a job to do — but so does the kid, and he's
working at it.


Americans
of every background meet today as citizens, as equals, only at the polls on
election days, or at casinos — there are fewer and fewer everyday
environments and occasions where one can feel the genuine community of
citizenship, and that's partly why one finds such warm fellow-feeling
at polling places and in casinos.  Rockwell was right to be
sentimental
about such places and occasions, and nostalgia is not a sufficient
response to his images of them.  They should inspire us to recover
what's been lost.

SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA: A VICTORIAN ARTIST YOU SHOULD KNOW

Posted on by


Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema might be the most ravishing of all the Victorian academic painters.  His luminous photo-authoritative images of the ancient world are sensually and historically seductive — they seem to lay antiquity before us as it might have appeared in real life were we to be magically transported back into it.

In truth his visions are romantic, concentrating as they do on sunny Mediterranean light, color, luxury and spectacle — but they convince the eye.  His preoccupation with the illusion of spatial depth draws us imaginatively into the scenes he conjures up, gives us a visceral sense of participation in them.


The tradition of the Biblical epic in cinema pursued Alma-Tadema’s aims by other means but rarely achieved them with such magnificent authority.  The chariot race in Wyler’s Ben-Hur perhaps comes closest to involving us in a vision of the ancient world that possesses a comparable enchantment and illusion of truth.


Wyler, and second-unit director Yakima Canutt, who actually supervised most of the filming of the chariot race, used the tracking shot in spectacular ways to draw us into the cinematic universe of the sequence.  A camera moving through real spaces, photographing real people driving real chariots was a powerful tool, but in a way its very power highlights the effects Alma-Tadema was able to achieve with just paint and canvas.

He was fine painter, as well as a fine storyteller — the study below gives a good idea of his purely painterly gifts, scarcely inferior to Degas’, for example:


The 20th-Century art establishment became suspicious of the meticulous “finish” the academic painters gave their works, but the über-photographic illusion they were after, and the narrative ambitions it served, remain potent and charming.

VICTORIAN ART AND THE CINEMA

Posted on by

In the mythology of modern art history the realist painters of the
Victorian era fought a losing battle with the photograph and eventually
capitulated to the dominant aesthetic of 20th-Century art, with its
irresistible (and progressive) trend towards a greater and greater
abstraction, abandoning both pictorial realism and almost all narrative
ambitions.

In fact, however, realist painters of the Victoria era conducted an
exciting and productive dialogue with the photograph, incorporating its
apparent authority but also, at the same time, extending its range of
representation beyond the technical limits of the 19th-Century camera.



Academic art surrendered not to the abstractions of the 20th-Century
painter but to the great artists of the early cinema, who assumed the
narrative and representational ambitions of academic art in a medium
which had, at least as far a popular taste went, better resources for
realizing those ambitions.  You could almost say that the academic art
of the 19th-Century was born again, gloriously, in a new medium, which
it deeply influenced.



Academic art taught movies how to orchestrate photo-realistic elements
into theatrical forms, using lighting, framing and the placement of
figures in space to create a hyper-realistic illusion that had the
coherence of actual visual experience even when departing from it in
fabulous ways.  Because film could capture motion, and thus emphasize
the plasticity of space far more expressively than the easel-painter,
it rendered the academic easel-painter’s art passé.  It was motion and
the greater illusion of spatial depth it allowed which lost academic
art its popular following.



But much more than that was lost, especially in the realm of color.  Up
until very recent times, color film stocks couldn’t begin to reproduce
the range of lighting conditions which the Victorian realist painters
gloried in.  By marrying, through draftsmanship, an almost photographic
realism with an über-photographic sensitivity to color and light, the
Victorian painters anticipated cinematic effects which remain difficult
to achieve even today.

The attempt to devalue the work of Victorian painters, seeing them as
obstinate blocks to the steady progress of art, was a strategic ploy on
the part of 20th-Century modernist painters and their apologists in the
academy and the marketplace.  Engaged in a project which would divorce
art from popular taste and arrive at an aesthetic dead end before the
end of the 20th century, they posited a straw man in the person of the
reactionary academic practitioner which lent their own schools an
undeserved glamor and prestige — even as the academic practitioner was
informing and inspiring the great new popular art form of the movies.

But the intellectual disgrace of the Victorian painters also helped
impoverish cinema, because, after the first glorious blossoming of the
art in the silent era, filmmakers forgot academic painting.  To get
back in touch with its lessons, they had to get back in touch with the
masters of the silent era, like Griffith, Vidor, Murnau and Ford, for
whom Victorian academic painting was a living form and a direct
inspiration of their techniques.  The filmmakers who followed them had
to engage Victorian academic art at one remove, and thus lost touch
with the very forms which had inspired and instructed the original
pioneers of cinema.



The propaganda of the modernist painters, understandable from their
point of view, resulted in a great loss to the visual culture of the
20th-Century.  It couldn’t obliterate the glories of Victorian academic
painting, which survived, transformed, in movies and in popular
illustration (through the work of artists like N. C. Wyeth and Norman
Rockwell.)  But it distorted the intellectual appreciation of a visual
tradition which might have been of great use to artists, film artists
especially, if they hadn’t been shamed into despising it on principle.



I would argue that a new appreciation of Victorian realist painting has
the power to recharge the art of cinema in our time — quite apart from
the pleasures to be gained by directly encountering a vital and
ravishing visual tradition.


A TISSOT FOR TODAY

Posted on by

Ces Dames de Chars.

Notice how the lead horse gallops into an imaginary space in front of
the canvas, while the eye is simultaneously drawn in the opposite
direction, through a series of distinct interior spaces within the image — the bright covered arena, the darkened audience galleries — that open up
behind the lady charioteers.

To read more about Tissot go here.

LYNN RANDOLPH

Posted on by


Here are some of the astonishing images of Houston-based artist Lynn Randolph.  At times Randolph’s work harks back to the paintings of Frida Kahlo in its contrasts of bold, warm colors and in the placid, self-possessed sensuality of its female subjects. But it also echoes at times the hard lines and the precisely delineated dream landscapes of the painters of the Northern Renaissance. Certain paintings, like the nude on the bed below, entitled The Wetlands Of Desire, suggest the calm derangement of Magritte.

Randolph’s art exists in lively conversation with the past — not trying to be new but also transcending pastiche, as her disciplined dialogue with the vanished masters ends up revealing her eccentric sensibility more clearly than aggressive innovation might have.


The painting directly above, which must certainly be a self-portrait, offers an intimate connection with the viewer, as the artist’s eyes seem to engage ours in a moment of unguarded confrontation, just as some of Rembrandt’s self-portraits do — yet the painted image within the painted image, raising its hand as though to welcome the sensual touch of the brush, speaks of another kind of intimacy, between the artist and her work, her vision, which we cannot quite share. It has an odd auto-erotic charm.

Recently Randolph has done a series of magical dream-seacapes, like the paintings at the beginning and end of this post, which are really breathtaking.

For more info on Randolph and to see more of her paintings go here:

Lynn Randolph


NORMAN ROCKWELL

Posted on by


Norman Rockwell was not the least of the Victorian academic painters, even
though he lived in the 20th-Century.  He perfected the
photo-authoritative aesthetic of the late Victorians and used it for
complex narrative purposes.  The official Victorian academy was
swept away as a fountainhead of popular art by the invention of movies,
but Rockwell competed with movies directly and survived.  Indeed,
he triumphed.  His images seem like stills from imaginary
movies — movies more wonderful and moving and entertaining than even
Hollywood could turn out.


I can’t imagine that any filmmaker from Hollywood’s so-called golden age, the studio era, wasn’t influenced on some level by Rockwell’s art.  Steven Spielberg, a
connoisseur and student of that golden age, has an original Rockwell
hanging behind the desk in his office.

Many modernist painters will admit to admiring Rockwell, but the
20th-Century art establishment in general  marginalized and even stigmatized his work for the crime of being popular in the mainstream
culture — not just noticed and known but intensely loved — and
for embracing a tradition linked to the achievement of the discredited
Victorians.

Anyone with eyes can see what nonsense that was.

ROBERT MCGINNIS

Posted on by


Robert McGinnis did the covers for hundreds of pulp and higher-class paperbacks, as well as a number of movie posters, including some of the classics from the James Bond series.

His dynamic compositions can have an almost cinematic quality and his portraits of women can be very sexy, in a pulp-noir Vegas-showgirl kind of way.

Here’s an official web site devoted to his work:

Official McGinnis Web Site

And here’s a fan site with lots of his paperback covers on view:

McGinnis Fan Site

FASHION AND DEATH

Posted on by

Fashions in clothing, Walter Benjamin speculates, always involve a dialogue with
death. Fashion, with its mercurial shifts in style, its preoccupation with novelty, seems to thumb its nose at the eternal stasis of death, defiantly proclaiming life . . . but at the same time, by investing material things, articles of clothing, with the illusion of life, and especially with the illusion of erotic life — “the sex appeal of the inorganic” as Benjamin calls it — followers of fashion embrace death in a danse macabre, a merry whirl with a corpse. Even to thumb one’s nose at something means always staring it in the face.

The investment of clothing and other material objects with erotic life, a
kind of fetishism that serves the marketing of commodities in modern
capitalism, extends its pathology, for men, to the female body itself,
which becomes a commodity, becomes essentially inorganic. If an old man
can sleep with a young woman, he can deny death — since he is not
sleeping with an individual human being who will age and die, but
with the image of her youth. She must be interchangeable as a partner,
lest her individuality, her subjection to time, rob her of her
commodity value as an elixir of immortality.

Always the corpse haunts the male vision of the female — and this, as
Benjamin points out, finds expression in the tendency to dissect the
female form and worship its component but severed parts. “I’m a breast
man,” you will hear men say, or, “I’m a leg man,” or, “I’m an ass man.”
But breast men and leg men and ass men are all butchers.

So in movies you have the phenomenon of body doubles — offering dislocated parts of themselves in close-up to stand in for the naked being of a modest star. The use of body doubles is, I think, one of the few phenomena in our culture which can be designated as indisputably obscene.

We worship the exposed female body in our culture, but in a sick way — a
way that robs it of life. Now might be a good time to turn our eyes
backwards to another culture that worshiped the naked human body, both
male and female — that of the ancient Greeks. There was idealization
in the Greek nude, but no gross exaggeration of component body parts.
Its models were real youths not radically endowed in any particular way
but pleasing in toto as images of the beauty of the human body. Almost
any of us can look at them and think, “With a little exercise, even I .
. .” or “When I was twenty, I . . .”

As obesity, a kind of spasmodic surrender to somatic despair, claims more and more of us, and breast enhancement seduces more and more young girls, it should become clear that the image of the “genetic celebrity”, of the “perfect” body, as the fashion of the day sees it,
is a demonic phantasm, the shadow of a corpse, very specifically designed to lure us into a dance with death — with the only incarnation of death which is truly terrifying . . . the kind that happens before we die.

Note that the Venus de Milo at the head of this post and the woman at her bath below are
both images of Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love. In our society, many might consider both to be candidates for cosmetic surgery — breast enlargement in the case of the first, liposuction in the case of the second. But both show that there was an age when men expended extravagant amounts of time and discipline and genius on the loving memorializing and exaltation of their “deficient” forms.

JEAN-LEON GEROME: A VICTORIAN PAINTER YOU SHOULD KNOW

Posted on by

The spooky, wonderful image above, Duel After A Masked Ball, was painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the great masters of Victorian academic art.  To me, his work aspires to the condition of cinema and can be studied in that regard with great profit.  I think one finds in it, both formally and in terms of subject matter, the reflection of many concerns that would help shape the emerging art of movies.

Gérôme used a photo-authoritative style to make his visions of Oriental scenes and his recreations of historical periods alive and true to viewers who were beginning to process the visual world more and more through the medium of photography.  He was concerned with narrative images and used the illusion of depth to draw the viewer into those images — the drama of space obsessed him.  He was so concerned with stereometric forms that he also worked regularly
as a sculptor.


Though he died in 1904, before movies came into their own as a plastic and narrative medium, he would have thrilled, I think, at their capacity to carry his aesthetic methods into new realms and elaborate them fantastically.

Gérôme‘s Technicolor über-photographs can seem like frame-grabs from imaginary movies.  You can see the compositional style of Lawrence Of Arabia (and John Ford) in his desert scenes . . .


. . . foreshadowings of Intolerance in his 18th-Century tableaux . . .


. . . the epic visions of De Mille in his Biblical scenes . . .


Griffith, De Mille and Ford would have been familiar with Gérôme directly — his work was wildly popular and widely reproduced in the time of their youth.  Lean may have echoed Gérôme simply by sharing his formal concerns, though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Lean knew and admired his paintings.  In any case, the profound connection between Victorian academic art and the cinema is nowhere more evident than in the work of this great painter.

To me, the image below of Pygmalion’s sculpture Galatea coming to life can serve as a metaphor for the advent of movies, when the aesthetic aspirations of the Victorian academic painter came into fuller life through motion itself.

GALLANTRY

Posted on by

The word gallant once meant beautiful, even as applied to a woman. Now rare in that sense, as the dictionary says, except when referring to horses or ships. The Greeks understood the logic of this association of ideas around the word gallant. Aphrodite was born out of sea foam (an event familiar from Botticelli’s famous painting above) and Neptune was the God of horses as well as of the sea.

The triad of women, horses and ships represents the irreducible
grandeur of this world, and the sea somehow speaks for them all.

Probably the most famous work showing Neptune with his
horses is the Fontana di Trevi in Rome, in which we see two of the sea
god’s minions, the Tritons, leading the animals up from the deep.

The other minion:

Below is Uma Thurman as Aphrodite in The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, with a seashell behind her — the best we can do these days but not bad, considering:


Somewhere between Botticelli and Gilliam lies the potent 19th-Century strangeness of Bourguereau, who saw the birth of Venus this way: