sandr021

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) often returned to the same kind of subject over his career . One of the subjects that occasionally crops up is marketplace scenes. Some are "establishment shots," where the market square is seen from a distance. Others are closeups, with sellers and buyers in the foreground and crowds in the background. Shown below are five such "closeup" scenes. My knowledge of Pissarro is sketchy, so I relied on Internet sources for captions reporting the paintings' subject markets and dates. Assuming that information is correct, Pissarro made them from time to time over nearly a decade. Gallery Poultry Market, Pontoise - 1882 Poultry Market - 1885 Market at Gisors (unfinished) - 1889 Market, Gisors - 1891 Poultry Market, Pontoise - 1892 Market at Gisors - 1899

I posted a "Towards the End" topic dealing with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and his post-1950 paintings here . I concluded: "To my eye, there was no real stylistic progression or sense of direction over the 20 years [ca. 1950-1970] covered by the example images.... This ties into the thesis of my e-book "Art Adrift" that once the elements of modernist painting had been established by around 1920, aspiring modernists and even established ones such as Picasso had no real sense of what to do next." My benchmark for that analysis was his Dora Maar au chat of 1941 that not many years ago was auctioned at a very high price. So my point was that he seemingly had largely run out of creative fuel by the time he was around 60 years old. Which leads us to the present post that deals with some of his paintings from the late 1920s into the early 1940s. His stylistic changes are shown with an eye towards both his previous and future work. Gallery Painter and His Mode...

Christina's World - 1948 Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917-2009), son of famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth, was a sickly lad who in 1951 had part of a lung removed, yet lived 91 years and attained fame perhaps surpassing that of his father. "Christina's World," shown above, is his most iconic work and resides in New York's Museum of Modern Art, of all places. Wyeth's Wikipedia entry is here , and an interesting timeline can be found on the Web site devoted to him. I'll probably get around to posting about the disdain his work provoked amongst modernist-oriented observers at some point. For now, let's focus on how quickly Wyeth evolved his signature style that, with some variation, he practiced for some 60 years. Because his work was so commercially successful and so far removed from trendy art movements of his time, he had no reason to follow that aspect of the art market. Gallery Spring Landscape at Kuerners - 1933 The sky is slightly cropped in this image. I...

André Derain (1880-1954) was a noted modernist who, like Picasso, changed styles at many points in his career. Unlike Picasso, perhaps because his paintings are less famous, Derain's paintings can be fairly hard to identify as being his. For example, I posted here about his landscapes, many of which bear little stylistic relationship to how he painted other subjects. Derain is best known for being a founder of Fauvism , along with Henri Matisse. He also was involved in the brief post- Great War return to classicalism by modernists, but beyond that point, he didn't involve himself with later movements such as Dada and Surrealism, and so far as I know never did abstract painting. For some information regarding his career, go here . Due the the lack of a strong Derain style, I cannot guarantee that all the paintings below are his or that they are correctly dated. I had to rely on captions for them found on the Web in a more naïve manner than I prefer. Gallery Pichet, verseuse...

Max Ernst (1891-1976), as this fairly lengthy Wikipedia entry mentions, was involved in the Dada and Surrealist movements. Despite -- or perhaps because -- Surrealism having entered middlebrow American culture by the early 1940s (several movies had Surrealist "dream sequences") avant-garde painters in the USA moved on to various kinds of abstract art after World War 2. So did Ernst, though his post-surrealist paintings are not as well known as his Dada and Surrealism. Some examples of his later paintings are below. Gallery Napoleon in the Wilderness - 1941 An example of Ernst's Surrealism. A Sunny Afternoon - 1957 Migration - 1963 A Double Life - 1964 Homage to Velazquez - 1965

The woman is the portrait detail above is Rebecca H. (Harbert?) Whelan (1877? - 1950?), about whom little seems to be known, if Googling the Internet is any indication. It seems that her father (can't get a Google hit on him, either) was a trustee of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where the painter, Thomas Pollock Anshutz (1851-1912) taught. Here is the entire painting: A Rose - 1907 The painting can be seen at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the museum's Web page devoted to the painting is here . I wrote about Anshutz here , wondering if the woman who posed for "The Rose" was the same one depicted in "The Incense Burner." It turns out she was the same model. Moreover, Anshutz portrayed her more than twice. Below are paintings by Anshutz where Rebecca was either definitely the model or quite possibly was. Gallery The Incense Burner - c. 1905 From about the same time as "The Rose." Tanagra - 1909 This is the largest i...