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Williamstown is in the northwest corner of Massachusetts. It is the home of Williams College, one of the so-called Little Ivies -- small, elite colleges in the Northeast that in some respects are comparable to the more famous Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn and so forth. Also in Williamstown is the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute , founded by Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark . Its web page is here . A major part of the Institute is its museum which houses some outstanding paintings. It happened that for more than four years I lived and worked in the Albany, New York area, about 45 miles west of Williamstown. During that time, I'd drive through Williamstown maybe three or four time a year. And never visited The Clark. That's because I was focusing on demography and my interest in art was at a comparatively low ebb. Moreover, I was still somewhat in the brainwashed-by-modernist-ideology zone and besides, not a

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) suddenly decided to become an artist not long after he completed his French Army service. Shortly after that, he became involved with the new Surrealist movement. Even though he wasn't formally trained as an artist, he acquired the necessary oil painting skills to produced"finished" looking works. On the other hand, so far as I've been able to find on the Internet, Tanguy never painted anything recognizable: no people, no still-lifes, no landscapes. To that extent, lack of formal art training didn't matter to him or to the many prominent museums that acquired his paintings. His Wikipedia entry is here , and his Guggenheim page is here . Once Tanguy settled into his version of Surrealism, he mostly painted variations of a basic plan. Its elements included a fairly plain "sky" area that usually took up a large share of the upper part of his canvases along with various visually solid (i.e., not flat) shapes in th

Tom Purvis (1888-1959) was a leading British poster artist during the 1920s and 1930s, especially after his style evolved into simplified shapes with areas of flat color and no outlining. Purvis' Wikipedia entry is here , but as of the time this post was drafted (late December 2017), it was not very informative. More biographical information can be found here , but you will need to scroll down to find it. Although he worked for a number of clients, he is best known for his railroad posters and those for Austin Reed, a clothier. Both Austin Reed and Purvis were at their peak when the posters shown below were created. Purvis moved on to portrait work and religious painting in the years following World War 2. Austin Reed went bankrupt in 2016 and its remains were acquired by Edinburgh Woolen Mill. As I write this, there are no Austin Reed stores in London. Gallery For most of its existence, Austin Reed's flagship store was located at the lower end of Regent Street, not far fr

American newspaper comic strips were greatly reduced in size decades ago and their content was reduced to various kinds of humor. Gone were the plot-continuity strips occupying a half or even a full page such as were found in 1930s Sunday papers. One such strip was Terry and the Pirates , an adventure series taking place in China. When World War 2 came along, it evolved into a military-themed strip. By late 1946 Milton Caniff, its creator, had tired of the distribution syndicate's control and moved on to create an Air Force themed adventure strip. Due to its popularity, Terry was continued by another artist, George S. Wunder (1912-1987) -- Wikipedia entry here . Wunder has been criticized, with some justification, for his treatment of faces. But what interests me here is the degree of background detailing found in his version of Terry, a carryover from strips of the 1930s and still common into the 1950s. That is, Wunder ranked up there with other cartoonists whose strips stil

The painting above is "Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot" by John Singer Sargent (1888). Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890) lived just 29 years, but showed considerable promise, as Sargent seemed to have realized. Some biographical information is here , and some of Bunker's thoughts regarding being an artist can be found here . Bunker was a solid traditional/representational painter who spent a year or two in France when French Impressionism was gaining acceptance and Post-Impressionism was getting underway (Manet died in 1883 and Seurat was about to paint his masterpiece, "Un dimanche après-midi à l'île de la Grande Jatte"). He made some oil sketches that seem to lie in the gray zone between being simply sketches and being a sort of Impressionism -- it's difficult to tell. But he largely continued on a traditional path after returning to America. There is no way of telling what he might have painted had he lived into the era of modernist &quo

Frank Newbould (1887-1951) was an almost exact contemporary of fellow poster artist, the better-known Tom Purvis . Both did a good deal of poster art for British railway companies in the 1930s, especially the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway). Also, by 1930 both were using a style featuring many broad areas of flat colors where outlining was scarce or entirely absent. Unfortunately, I don't have enough information to say who practiced that style first (I suspect Purvis), though it became associated with the LNER due to its extensive use. Not a lot of biographical information on Newbould is on the Internet, so this Wikipedia entry will have to do for now. Newbould's work was strong, but I rate him not as good as Purvis or Fred Taylor, another railway poster man. Below are his posters for domestic sites. He also did Continental scenes that I might deal with later. Gallery A nice, strong poster for the spa town not far from York. A silkscreen look, even though this was