sandr021

Hugh Goldwin Riviere (1869–1956) lived a long life and made a living as a portrait painter in the United Kingdom. The most detail I could find about him during a short Google search is here -- almost nothing there, as you can see. Nevertheless, he painted many portraits, a number of which can be seen here . Note that nearly all are of persons of local or middling national interest. There are no royalty, top-level nobility or senior military leaders shown. Nor are there subjects from the entertainment world. That said, Rivière (of Huguenot descent) was competent in his work and also painted subjects besides portraits on occasion. Despite his competence, as readers of this blog might be aware by now, he had a great number of British competitors who were equally good, and a few who were much better. In the Gallery below, a few portraits are presented, then three other works. The latter pre-date the portraits, so I'll conjecture that he tried other subjects before settling on po

Konstantin Alekseyevich Korovin (1861-1939) was a Russian painter with a free, sketchy technique influenced by Impressionism, though his style apparently was always somewhat loose before he first visited Paris in 1885. He was well-connected, knowing many of the important artists and patrons in Czar Nicholas II's day. Not long after the Revolution he moved to Paris, where he lived the rest of his life. Biographical information can be found here . Korovin's stylistic sketchiness seemed to kick into a higher gear following his move to France in 1923. Perhaps this had to do with the need to quickly produce paintings to bring in money. Or maybe it had to do with Paris being an avant-garde artistic place (though the same might be said for Russia, especially in the early post-Revolution years). Or it could have been that this was his natural artistic trajectory as he continued to gain maturity and experience. And, possibly, this looser style was what the Paris art market wanted

Frank Anthony Albert Wootton (1914-1998) painted landscapes and horses, but for me he's noted for his illustrations of automobiles and airplanes. In particular, he was highly skilled at depicting the effects of light, shadow and reflections on shiny metallic surfaces such as can be found on cars and planes. His brief Wikipedia entry is here . A more extensive treatment can be found in his obituary in the Independent. I wrote about his poster art here . In October I visited the Royal Air Force Museum London located at the former Hendon aerodrome north of town. Besides aircraft and support vehicles there was a small gallery of aviation paintings, several by Wootton. The one I focus on in this post is titled "Harts Over the Himalayas" (c. 1967) that shows three Hawker Hart biplane bombers in the north of India during the 1930s. Closely related to the Hart was the Hawker Fury fighter that in turn was an ancestor of the famous Hawker Hurricane fighter that comprised

Johan Axel Gustaf Törneman (1880-1925) is credited in his Wikipedia entry as being "one of Sweden's earliest modernist painters." Not knowing much about Swedish painters other than Anders Zorn, I can't attest to the truth or falsity of that. However, given that Törneman turned 20 years old towards the end of 1900, this means that Swedish artists must have been years behind those in France, Germany, and perhaps even Russia in terms of modernist styles. Sadly, he died age 45 of a stomach ailment, so we will never know what he might have produced with increasing maturity and exposure to Parisian art fashions. In the years leading up to his death he sometimes distorted proportions of his subject matter considerably. But for most of his career proportions were close to reality, though he did simplify and slightly distort as he saw fit. His Modernism, therefore, usually took the form of exaggerated or shifted colors. The images below are ordered by year. Gallery Absint

"Honoring the picture plane" was a big deal when I was in art school, though the idea has lost some of its punch in Postmodern times. The gist of it was, since a canvas is normally a flat, two-dimensional object upon which things are painted, its nature is violated by attempting to depict three-dimensional things on it. More simply put: flat painting surfaces demand flat depictions. What interests me nowadays is how seriously this was taken by intelligent people. My sophomore-year undergraduate art history course cast a deterministic process for Western art where the ultimate, end-of-history was abstract art as currently practiced by highly publicized New York City painters. I'm pretty sure our instructor, a senior staffer at the university's art museum, was largely influenced by Clement Greenberg (1909-1994). The Greenberg Wikipedia link just cited has a sub-link to something called medium specificity , a fancy term for picture plane honoring that I hadn't b

Aside from perhaps a few religious icons and early modernists such as Kandinsky and Malevich, my college art history class ignored Russian art. I don't know what current art history classes deal with, but it's clear to me that late 19th century Russian painters are becoming better-known than they were 50 or 60 years ago. Still confined to obscurity is Stalinist Socialist Realism. In part this was because of its propagandistic nature. Perhaps an even greater reason for its disparagement by the Art Establishment was its use of Academic and other pre-modernist styles. Due to all this, until recently I was unaware that along with collective farming and other individualism-suppressing practices, there was the use of "brigades" of artists who collectively created large paintings. This is dealt with in this book . On page 182 Matthew Cullerne Brown writes: "In 1949 [Vasili] Efanov and a team of young artists painted Leading People of Moscow in the Kremlin . This w

The image above is an illustration titled "Hands Up," alternatively "Holdup in the Canyon" painted for C.P. Connolly’s “The Story of Montana,” published in McClure’s Magazine, August 1906. In 2016 it was auctioned at Christie's for just under $4.5 million (details here ). This amount was far above Christie's price estimate and even greater than previous prices for works by N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth (1882-1945), considered one of America's greatest illustrators. Biographical information on him can be found here and here . Both sources mention that he made two journeys from Pennsylvania to the West with the purpose of soaking up the spirit and details of that region from personal experience rather than second-hand via books or magazines. "Hands up" was one of many drawings and paintings resulting from those journeys. I'm featuring it here because I'm pleased that classic American illustration is getting its due recognition as valued