Thinking about Raphael Soyer of the previous post led me to read more about the painters working a decade or two before him, in particular Robert Henri and the members of the Ashcan School. Although he studied art in the Philadelphia as well as in Europe, it was while biking through France and Belgium in 1895 that he had a road to Damascus experience upon discovering the work of Franz Hals (The Eight, Monhonri Sharp Young, p. 20).

At right is Franz Hals' Portrait of a Man in His Thirties (looks older than that to me, but then, no heating, no generous Dutch vacations, and just wearing that collar would be exhausting. ..) Below is Henri's Jimmy O'D (1925).

Henri was a passionate believer in realism. He had turned his back on the impressionists, looking instead to the work of Velasquez, Hals, Eakins and Manet as models. He loved teaching (Hopper was a pupil), loved to discuss art, literature and culture, often late into the night: Living in Philadephia from 1891 to 1895, Henri taught all day and talked all night, which did not leave him much time for his own work. (p. 22)

It must have been hard for him to watch changes in the art world sweeping through:

In 1910 they (the Eight) organized the enormous Independent Exhibition which anybody could get into as long as he was a friend of Henri. Then, in 1913, his friends put on the immense Armory Show. When the other side, the abstract side, won, they could not believe it; they could not believe it all their lives. They went on doing good work but they did not conquer. The realist revolution did not take place, but the abstract revolution did. (The Eight, Mahonri Sharp Young, p. 12)

What do you think? Can't close without this sidebar: Did you know that his real name was Robert Henry Cozad, but after his father argued with a cattleman, the rancher drew a knife and Henri's father shot him? The family fled town, the rancher died from his wound, and the senior Cozad was charged with murder. The family all changed their names and the boys passed off as adopted sons. Apparently Henri covered up the story his entire life, despite the fact that the murder charges were eventually dropped. (p. 16)

Social-realist painter Raphael Soyer joins the looooonnnngg list of painters I know nothing about. Learned that he emigrated to NY from Russia, became part of the Fourteenth Street School in the 1920s, and later taught at the Art Students League. While he created a number of studies of the unemployed during the Depression, he also focused on his family's middle class Jewish life, and here above, his fellow artists. He explained:

Farewell to Lincoln Square (1959) was painted in the Lincoln Arcade Building located in Lincoln Square, on the eve of it being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center. I loved that building. Many American painters from way back lived and worked there. The painting depicts the exodus of its denizens. . .with myself waving farewell. (from Painting the Century, R. Gibson, p. 178)

Others have pointed out that the woman in the foreground in Farewell echoes the central figure in Rodin's Burghers of Calais (1884-88) which I never would have picked up, but here it is below. Wonder if that's a subconcious connection on the part of the artist or an intentional one. What do you think?

Although she is a lot more famous for her oils, I think I like her watercolors just as well and maybe more. I remember seeing a room full of them at the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe last year. They are tiny, many only about 10 x 12, and they date from the early part of her career when she was living in rural Texas, teaching art. Perhaps if you're not interested in clearing brush, making art might sound like a good alternative.

Evidently she had seen an exhibit of Rodin watercolors a few years earlier while living in New York, and had not forgotten them. At right is Rodin's Reclining Nude, 1900.

Here's another of Rodin's from his series of nudes. Uses line in a way O'Keeffe does not.

She takes a bolder approach, doesn't she? Above left is a somewhat larger piece- 18 x 13 1/2- part of Nude Series VII. What do you think? I really like the minimum of detail, lack of features, strong negative shapes; there's no concern for precise proportions (that big hand just feels right the way it is), but such sensitivity to those curves. I'm sure there's more that makes this work, but I can't put my finger on it.

Talk about multi-tasking. Artist Ian Fairweather started drawing seriously while otherwise occupied as a prisoner of war in France during WWI. This was also the time that he began to teach himself Chinese. After the war he studied drawing at the Hague as well as forestry at Oxford, but finally settled on painting at the Slade school in London.

Later travels took him to Canada, China, the Dutch West Indies, and Australia. Apparently these were not Abercrombie and Kent style tours - he did a lot of living and traveling on the cheap, and even after successful shows in Australia and London, he lived out his last years in a thatch hut he built for himself on the island of Bribie off Australia. (Well, I guess we all have different goals; probably got by without a coffee maker, too.)

Others have pointed out the influences of Chinese calligraphy, batik designs, and Cubism in his work. Above is Monastery (1961). There's something alive about the use of line, isn't there? And those borders work so well, don't they? I think if you took away the borders, there would be something incomplete about this, and some tension would be lost. But I think if you added two more borders, the painting would become sort of static. What do you think?

It's too bad we have to look at this on a small screen. At 56 7/8 x 73 inches it probably knocks you out.

Nothing like getting to the end of a long day and finding a painting that looks a bit like you feel (at least I hope I don't look like this). Isn't it haunting and beautiful in its simplicity? It's called The Old Farmer (1903)

I had never heard of Paula Modersohn-Becker. Apparently, she found her initial inspiration at the artists' colony of Worpswede near her family home in Bremen. The emphasis at the colony was to look to convey simple, humanistic values; often farmers or mothers with children were subjects that interested the colony artists.

She took classes there and moved to the colony to live and work, but eventually went to Paris on 4 different occasions to study and see the work of other artists. She chose the first date of her departure for Paris symbolically - the last day of 1899. In Paris she met Rodin, took in all that was happening in the world of French art, and came away impressed by the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Vuillard, and Cezanne.

What do you think? Do you like those buttons as much as I do? And those shoulders that seem so narrow but are at such an interesting angle; are they coming forward or not? There is something resigned but also strong about this woman. With her head so close to the top of the frame, she seems to be pushing out from her boundaries.

According to an interesting site (Galerie St. Etienne in NY), Modersohn-Becker's work did not receive much attention until the 1950s. Her life was very short - she died in 1907 at the age of 31. The cause was cardiac embolism which occurred just a few weeks after giving birth to her first child.

Larry entered the scene like a demented telephone. Nobody knew whether to put it in the library, the kitchen or the toilet. But it was electric.

Frank O'Hara



On Presidents Day it would be fun to be at MoMA in New York having a look at Larry Rivers' take on Washington Crossing the Delaware. While the original version has George striking a preposterous pose while the boat cuts through jagged chunks of ice, this George is a lot more human, a smaller-than-life guy alone in a rowboat, while men and horses remain scattered about. Here's Rivers on how his idea took shape after finishing War and Peace:

Tolstoy’s novel was not something I could see, not a figure or a landscape, a church or a mountainside. By meshing Napoleon’s invasion of Russia with contemporary life, Tolstoy set me on a course that produced Washington Crossing the Delaware…… This work was going to take my style of painting, charcoal drawing and rag wiping, to a new height. The mixture of grand art and absurdity was with me from the beginning. (from Larry Rivers Foundation site)

Rivers painted this figurative work in 1953 while many in the NY art scene were whipping up purely abstract works, and many feel his work is an early combination of Pop and Abstract Expressionism. His subjects weren't always new takes on iconic subjects; he also focused on everyday people and objects. In fact he painted his mother-in-law which strikes me as a really risky gambit.

There's a good bio of the artist at the Larry Rivers Foundation site. Apparently he began as a jazz saxophonist before he became an artist. He also forged a lifelong friendship with Frank O'Hara and the two exchanged letters and ideas, collaborating on projects for years.

What do you think of his work? I love the combining of graphite and oil and have been experimenting with that myself. Let's see. . . Obama shoveling snow? Clinton undergoing stent surgery?

I continue to be interested in influences - the tangled effects of circumstance and luck - and so it was interesting to come across the work of David Alfaro Sisqueiros, a Mexican painter and muralist. As a teenager he first became a political activist, and remained so his entire life.

He earned a scholarship granted by the Mexican government following his involvement in the revolution there and went to Europe to study from 1919-22. While, there he met Diego Rivera, was exposed to Cubism, and came away impressed with the work of a number of European painters, especially Cezanne.

Later, in the 30s, he became an influential teacher in New York. One of the students in his experimental workshop, Jackson Pollock, was impressed with Sisqueiros' ideas about 'pictorial accidents' as well as his use of industrial materials (blow torches, pyroxylin paints used in the car industry, spray guns).*

In El Botero, above, I love the way he plays with scale, enlarging those hands so that they're bigger than the rower's face. And if you put your hand over your eyes to block your view of curves in the upper right, I think you find that you really miss them as a counter-balance to the strong, red diagonals of the oars. Once I was told about the influence of Cezanne, it seemed obvious with those textures and the chunky blocks of color. What do you think? Had you known about him?


*from Art, by Dr. Robert Belton, Watson-Guptill