"The One in Yellow"

Has anyone seen an oil painting created in the last 75 years or so that made them fall into a swoon upon first viewing it on a gallery or museum wall?  I certainly haven’t.  And I’m not talking here about just getting dizzy on an empty stomach in the rarefied atmosphere of a sanctified environment. 

Maybe some people really do go limp when they view, for example, a Clyfford Still abstraction in a largely ignored gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted solely to his canvases of monumental scale, the only required “technique” for this genre.  I suspect that such a collapse would not be from aesthetic overload, but from fatigue caused by all the mental gymnastics needed to explain to the ignorant public what the brush marks on the canvas signify and why the man is considered a creative genius.

But I’m sure most of us, painters and non-painters alike, have had deeply emotional encounters with one or more oil paintings created from the early Renaissance to the mid-1930s, when things really started to fall apart for the sensual side of painting, with the emergence of abstract art, well-meaning but chunky social realism, and the increasingly pervasive influence of photography, which taught the public, and many artists, to see the world through the lens of a camera.

Gustave Moreau,The Young Man and Death,1865,Fogg Art Museum,Harvard

Fantin-Latour,Self Portrait,1860,Fogg Art Museum,Harvard

Artists who encounter works by one of their favorite painters for the first time, by chance or on purpose, are particularly susceptible to these “sneak attacks” on their unconscious minds.  One of my painter friends was in a gallery at Harvard’s Fogg Museum that contained works by two of her favorites, Gustave Moreau and Fantin-Latour.  She recalls being mesmerized and feeling faint in front of the Symbolist painter Moreau’s “The Young Man and Death.”  She then caught a glimpse of a Fantin self-portrait and cried out, “Oh God, catch me, I feel like I’m going to pass out.”  Her painter’s soul was responding to the palpable feeling of light enveloping the gorgeous flesh of the young man in Moreau’s painting, which so perfectly renders the light effect many of us are longing to achieve in our own work.  Masterful painters who come close to infusing their paintings with the actual light of the world are the ones who can inspire such emotion from fellow members of the human race.  

Edward Hopper,Gas,1940,Museum of Modern Art, New York

 Corot,The Banks of the Seine at Conflans,1865-70,Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

I’ve had quite a few close encounters of that kind myself since I began studying painting for good in 1978.  Before then, however, I confess that I didn’t pay much attention to the great paintings found in museums and galleries.  Like most people, I was preoccupied with other work and play, and only a couple of paintings left any lasting impression.  The first painting I recall being emotionally drawn to was Edward Hopper’s 1940 painting “Gas” in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  The painting strongly evoked the cool twilight air of a gas station in the middle of nowhere, which is where I grew up.  Another painting that had a similarly evocative effect on me in my pre-painting days was Corot’s “The Banks of the Seine at Conflans” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When I began studying painting on a serious level, though, the most evocative, soul-stirring works, the kind that have made me giddy with delight upon seeing them in person, have been those done by the great figurative painters -- Titian, Caravaggio, Guido Reni (the great Guido), Bronzino, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyke, Velasquez, Vigee le Brun, Sargent, Zorn, Boldini, Manet, Mary Cassatt, Kroyer, Sorolla, Repin, Kramskoi, Serov,  some early 20^th Century American and European realists and impressionists – the list from the old days goes on and on.  All of the painters I admire most were masters of the craft of painting, and also masters at creating the illusion of life on canvas – the thing that means more to me than anything else in painting and is my ever-elusive goal in my own work. 

Edmund Tarbell,The Breakfast Room,1903,Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Near the end of his life, the painter Edmund Tarbell (1862-1938) gave voice to my own feelings when he said to Ives Gammell , the painter, teacher and astute chronicler of the Boston School of painters, “Well, here’s hoping I can make one that really looks like it before I’m through.” 

A painting by a fellow Boston artist, William McGregor Paxton (1869-1941), provided one of the most epiphinous moments in my art-viewing life.  Paxton was an outstanding draughtsman, both by native talent and by training in Gerome’s atelier in late 19^th Century Paris. He was also a fabulous colorist, inspired by the plein air discoveries made by the French Impressionists.

I have a wonderful monograph on Paxton published in conjunction with an exhibit of his work sponsored by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1978-79 and edited by Ellen Wardwell Lee.  In a biographical essay in the book, Gammell (1893-1981), who was a student of Paxton, relates the story of another student that illustrates Paxton’s devotion to the accurate portrayal of the beautiful color found in nature.  He writes that Paxton told the student his picture wasn’t very good, but the Renaissance colorist Titian “never painted anything as true in color as that picture of yours…if Titian walked in here now he would examine that canvas very, very carefully and then would go back to his studio and paint a picture finer than any he had previously painted, very likely finer than any picture ever painted.”

William McGregor Paxton,The One in Yellow,1916,Private Collection

It so happened that I serendipitously came face-to-face some 25 years ago with just such a picture, and it was one created by Paxton himself, in 1916.  It is one of the finest figure paintings I have ever seen.  I was on one of my regular tours of the midtown galleries and walked into the Berry-Hill Galleries, then located on Fifth Avenue between 57^th and 58^th Streets.  I turned a corner off the reception area and there it was, “The One in Yellow.”  I gasped audibly and babbled unintelligibly to the gallery manager, “When, where, how, wow!”  

I had fallen in love with the painting after seeing it in reproduction, and never expected to see it in person because it has been privately held over the years.  I was bowled over by the strikingly beautiful color in the painting, more intense than in any figure painting I have seen before or since.  And the slightly stylized, rhythmic drawing of the elegantly posed model was perfection itself.  I continue to bless my good fortune for having this gorgeous painting ascend, like “Brigadoon,” for me alone to enjoy for “one brief, shining moment.”  Praise be to the Lord!

Artists Learn How to Multiply

At this time in our nation’s history, I’d guess that about 3 million Americans or more now tell The U.S. Census Bureau, the IRS and the world at large that they are artists.   The folksong writer and performer Tom Paxton brilliantly satirized the legal profession in 1984 with his song, “One Million Lawyers.”   Today he could confidently write, “In ten years we're gonna have [10 million artists].  How much can a poor nation stand?”  While the flood of lawyers streaming from the law schools has undeniably wreaked havoc with our increasingly litigious daily lives, the situation may be even more insidious with respect to artists.

Spurred on by the Internet’s siren call of easy money, artists are multiplying like lemmings on a march to the sea of oblivion, despite all the websites, blogs and “daily painter” blather.  I was shocked to see that “The Artist’s Magazine” in its March issue lists a mere 350-plus artist workshops in its annual roundup.  There must be three or four times that many lurking hither and yon over every hill and dale.

This incredible expansion of a career path upon which the survival of the human race is not exactly dependent is quite understandable in 21^st Century America.  Everything useful is now made in China or Mexico.  Here we make such things as artists and art.  

Caravaggio,Judith Beheading Holofernes,1598-99

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Ghirlandata,1871-74

  

The mass migration of Americans into the art business was spurred by a change in the attitude of women toward painting, which, until maybe around 1984, had been dominated since the dawn of civilization by robust men like Caravaggio, Meissonier and George Bellows, or high aesthetic types like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley.  I did not originate this forthcoming notion about women and art.  Philip S. Alfieri did.  Phil, who died in 2009 at the age of 88, was a painter I got to know at The Art Students League, where he usually hung out Monday through Saturday at lunchtime during the last 15 or so years of his life.  He was a short, stocky Italian-American, with a bulldog countenance and an ego as big as all outdoors. 

He was not a masterful painter, but he made his living making paintings.  He went to a Miami art school after service in World War II and came to the League after already having learned his trade better than his League instructors, by his own account.  He boasted that while the other students were dutifully painting from the model, he was in the back of the studio making paintings that he could sell.   He was a good portrait sketch artist, and did a lot of work on the boardwalk in Atlantic City during the 1950s.  He said he once sketched Dick Van Dyke backstage when Van Dyke was in “Bye, Bye Birdie” on Broadway.

Clowns were his favorite subject. “Not clowns, harlequins,” Phil would hotly interject, explaining that he drummed up elaborate costumes and the clown makeup from his imagination after first painting the figure on canvas.  I recall seeing a print of one of his “harlequin” paintings on a wall at a Blimpie’s restaurant near the studio Phil maintained for years in a longstanding artist’s building on the east edge of Union Square.  I ate a lot of Blimpie’s submarine sandwiches, tuna salad with all the extras, after my frequent shopping trips downtown for art supplies at Utrecht’s on 4th Avenue or art books at the Strand in the 1980s and 90s. 

Phil also took photographs of female models, from which he painted 30x40 inch canvases featuring these lightly clad models lolling around in imaginary boudoirs, with imaginary flowers in imaginary vases, and similar decorative make-believe.  This way he avoided challenges from those people who like to point out mistakes in paintings made by those artists who like to paint every brick in a brick wall.  “Nobody’s going to know what the things look like,” he would say.  He refused to show his paintings on the Internet because he was sure thieving artists would steal his compositions.  Good heavens, Phil, did you actually think one artist would steal from another!?

A few of us regulars at the Saturday morning members-only painting class at the League, after our exhilarating session working from the live model, would repair to the cafeteria to wind down.  Phil would be waiting for us to remind us of what a great painter he was, and to repeat ad infinitum the details of the story of his life.  He joined us in painting once, but he claimed the light was too poor, which it can be, and he never repeated the experience. 

One time another painter with a giant ego, down from Gloucester, MA for the weekend, dropped by at lunchtime.  Sensing their shared proclivities, they sat quite a ways apart to tell their respective stories.   I had a fervent wish that we could get the two of them in a room together on closed circuit TV and see who came out on top.  But I have to say that those of us who were Phil’s audience were so ego-challenged, that anything he said sounded like he was claiming to have brought down the tablets from Mount Sinai.  Give us a break, we groaned inwardly.

Phil sold quite a few of those 30x40 inch paintings in a Pennsylvania gallery, but sales started to fall off about the same time he started to hang around the League.  He had figured out the reason for the decline in his sales.  “When I started out, women bought my paintings,” he said.  “Now, they want to paint their own.”  He had first-hand experience with that in the form of his wife, a dark-haired beauty from Eastern Europe, whom he married somewhat late in life.  He said she became jealous of his painting career and begged him to teach her how to paint.  He did, and it seemed to cause some tension in their marriage, which ended with her death from cancer a number of years before his own.

So now everybody wants to be a painter, if they can’t get into show business, that is.  And it’s not just the women.  Men are chiming in as well, young and old, including quite a few early retirement captains of industry who can afford luxurious private studios, the hiring of private models and the finest art supplies.  These latecomers to the art experience also help support the hundreds of enterprising artists who entice them along on expensive vacation workshops to Tuscany, et al, where they can sip fine wine and enjoy the scenery for a week or so, without learning much about how to “find themselves” as painters, which used to be considered a good thing.     

Internet sideshows like Etsy and eBay make it seem that selling art is easy.  The activity in this arena is feverish, with numerous workshops and blogs offering advice on such matters as how to use photographs effectively to become a successful “daily painter.”  And it really doesn’t matter whether your copy of the photograph is good or bad, or the subject matter is beneath the trivial and banal, somebody somewhere will find some charm in your “original work of art” and buy it.  But the sign on the virtual front door seems to read: “Serious artists who entertain thoughts of suicide if they get rejected from a rigged juried exhibition need not apply.”

It strikes me as amusing that in the 1940s, “American Artist” magazine actually had a monthly column of painting advice for amateur painters.  Can you imagine anyone today owning up to being an “amateur painter?”  As soon as the first apple is painted, a website is created and Giclee prints are put up for sale on the Internet.  Oh, Rembrandt, don’t you weep, don’t you moan.  You might have had to suffer for your art, but that’s not for us.  We just want to have fun.

Newsprint is My Friend

They say that newsprint contains the chemical compound lignin found in wood pulp, so it turns yellow, becomes brittle, and deteriorates in a short period of time.  I wish I could reply with the Noel Coward line, “How beastly of them to say that – it’s slander.”  But alas, it is true.  Newsprint has a short shelf life.

This is unfortunate, because there is no finer drawing paper for artists who sketch with charcoal than good old newsprint.   Don’t worry about its rapid decay, though.  You can make Giclee prints of your precious drawings on durable “acid-free” paper and sell them for a few bucks each on the Internet or the sidewalks of New York.  

The more-expensive acid-free and archival drawing papers are highly processed -- coated with a hard sizing and buffered to remove the bad stuff, making them last until eternity, but leaving them totally unsympathetic to the touch of organic charcoal and the human hand.  Newsprint, which is not subjected to any chemical processing to remove the bad stuff, is pretty much like it was when it was invented in 1844, just mechanically processed wood pulp.  It has a soft feel that is friendly and inviting to the touch. 

My Figure Drawing Arsenal

On smooth newsprint, you can smudge with your fingers and quickly get back to the tone of the paper with a kneaded eraser.  I’ve never been able to smudge or erase successfully on those acid-free papers during the 30 years I’ve been drawing short poses from the live model.  Many artists feel smudging and erasing is a very bad thing.  One 19^th Century command was never let your hand rest on the paper.  But I got over that when I read that Rodin admitted he often got lazy and smudged his drawings with his fingers.

Some artists like to draw on smooth brown wrapping paper, tracing paper or bond paper, but I prefer the convenience of newsprint pads, and the handling properties and pale beige tone of smooth newsprint, which shows the darkest charcoal accents to good advantage.

Another very good paper for charcoal drawing is Rives BFK, a 100% cotton rag printmaking paper.  This acid-free paper is softer than the drawing papers and takes charcoal beautifully.  But when you are going through 100 sheets of newsprint almost every week and can barely pay the rent, Rives is not a practical option.

Because it is both cheap and satisfying to work on, newsprint is still the paper of choice for learning figure drawing at the art schools.  The illustrator Frank Reilly taught hundreds of successful illustrators over the years.  He had them drawing their highly structured Reilly lines and shading on smooth newsprint with Wolff’s carbon pencils, which are a bit harder than the compressed charcoal pencils I use. Former Reilly students continue to teach his drawing method. They sketch on 9x12 inch sheets cut from the 18x24 inch pads.

Albert Wasserman,Notre-Dame de la Garde,Marseille,charcoal and ink,1983

Albert Wasserman, a good friend who won the top Pulitzer Award for painting at the National Academy of Design in the 1940-41 school year, as well as the silver medal for drawing, still sketches the figure beautifully on 18x24 inch pads of smooth newsprint, often filling up both sides of the paper because he has neglected to buy a new pad!  He occasionally will switch to smooth brown wrapping paper, accenting his work with white chalk.  At 92, Al still draws and paints a couple of times a week at open classes at The Art Students League, while teaching two painting classes every week, one in his home borough of Queens and one on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The two of us are often told that we “should draw on good paper.”  But we both know that nothing is better than newsprint for doing these quick charcoal figure sketches, which can be looked on primarily as practice sessions for the hand and eye. Those who prefer to sketch with pencil, pen and ink, pastels, watercolors and such, have their own favorite surfaces to work on, of course.

I’m not much good at pure line work and I’m not interested in anatomical studies.  I employ a fluid, painterly style of drawing, working the long point of a compressed charcoal pencil to a sharply angled, flat side for broad strokes and shading.  I can turn this broad side on edge for precise, delicate lines.  The newsprint has to be smooth, though, not rough, because the rough variety breaks the charcoal stroke apart in an unpleasant way, and erasing is not as easy.

But now there is trouble brewing for us lovers of smooth newsprint.

As in every industry, the supplies you prefer disappear over time or are changed for the worse.  My friend Al laments, for example, the disappearance of a particularly good French charcoal he was able to obtain.  He still has a supply of that charcoal, and he plans to search New York Central art supply store's extensive inventory for the paper he remembers being most receptive to that charcoal.

When I first started using the paper-wrapped Blaisdell charcoal pencils I was very happy.  You could just peel away the wrapping with the embedded string and maintain a broad, flat side of the charcoal all the way down to the end of the pencil.  Blaisdell was acquired by Berol and the charcoal pencils got thinner, often broke at the slightest pressure, and 2b, 4b and 6b grades, from medium to extra soft, were so inconsistent that they were rendered meaningless.  Berol stopped making the charcoal pencils and the remaining brands of peel-away pencils were awful, so I was forced to switch to wood-encased General’s charcoal pencils.  The transition was difficult, but I endured it manfully, and have managed to cope, but just barely.  I’m back to whittling the pencils with single-edge razor blades, which are now made in China and hold their sharpness about a third as long as the old “Made in USA” razor blades.  What can you do but whine away the hours.

I fear that genuinely smooth newsprint for the art market may disappear.  The daily newspapers that use it in enormous quantities may switch entirely to online publishing in the near future.   Due to the declining revenue from the newspaper industry, the manufacturers seem to be settling on an unsatisfactory compromise paper for the art market – somewhere between smooth and rough finishes – not as rough and not as smooth as before.

Smooth newsprint pads for artists formerly came in all sizes, including my preferred 14x17 inch size.  In the art stores I frequent, you can now only get 18x24 inch pads of smooth newsprint, a size I find uncomfortably large for drawing in a crowded sketch room.  Cutting it in half leaves you with 12x18 inch paper that is too vertical for seated poses, and 9x12 quarter-size sheets are too small for my exuberant, trial and error technique.   It’s the same problem cutting down the 36-inch rolls of newsprint that are available from the art stores, unless I want to waste a lot of paper. Rough newsprint is still available in all sizes.  

I want my 14x17 inch smooth newsprint pads back!  I sent away for a few pads of smooth newsprint in that size from Seth Cole, the California paper manufacturer.  The product I received wasn’t real disappointing, but not worth the shipping cost to the East Coast.  I haven’t tried Blick’s “all-purpose” newsprint with a “smooth” surface yet.  I’ve sometimes bought folded sheets of very smooth newsprint used as packing material in the moving business, but the fold can’t be smoothed out entirely, so the paper doesn’t lie sufficiently flat on my foam core drawing board.

In the late 1980s, I took home a large roll of “newspaper” newsprint that had been discarded on the Lower East Side and got about three years worth of drawing out of this perfect material.  An artist I know who studied the Reilly method had a friend who worked for a Canadian paper company, and until his friend retired recently, he got unlimited supplies of smooth newsprint from him.  I was very jealous.

I could continue.  But despite all my complaints, a few of which I’ve addressed above, when I’m drawing with the broad side of my charcoal pencil on smooth newsprint from a good model posing under the proper “form” lighting, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

  

Kroyer's Great Love

Midsummer's Eve Bonfire on the Beach at Skagen,1906,150x257 cm

Whenever I hear the “Swedish Rhapsody” played on WQXR, New York City’s classical music station, I am reminded that Hugo Alfven, the composer, stole the most beautiful painter’s wife who ever lived away from Peder Severin Kroyer, one of the finest painters who ever lived.  God knows it is hard enough for great painters to find true romance, since most of their time is spent painting pictures, talking about art and planning their next masterpiece. So it seems, from my distant vantage point, that Alfven committed one of the most despicable acts imaginable. 

 

But Kroyer was first and foremost a painter.  He tore this painful story from his heart and set it down on canvas.  The result was a masterpiece of personal narrative that is unrivaled in the history of art.  One critic likened it to a “theatrical ensemble…with all the requisites for an Ibsen or Strindberg psychological drama.”  I’ll endeavor to explain.

Kroyer was born in Stavanger, Norway in 1851, but raised in Copenhagen by an uncle’s family because his unwed mother was declared mentally unfit to raise him.  He started his art studies at age 9 and developed into a remarkable painter with a prodigious talent, a bon vivant nature and, it seems, a sturdy ego.  He once said that he was the fastest painter around, only Zorn was faster.  The plein air paintings of the two Scandinavians made a deep impression on the Spaniard Sorolla, another master of bravura painting.

Himself in 1897

Summer Evening with Marie on the Beach at Skagen, 1899

 Kroyer’s most famous paintings were created in Skagen, a remote Danish fishing village and one of the enchanted art colonies that arose in Europe in the 19^th Century.  He first visited Skagen in 1882, and right away alienated Michael Ancher, the resident painter who had invited him there, because he painted a scene or two that Ancher considered his territory.   Their differences were soon sorted out, and for several years, this colony of artists and poets was one big happy family.  The paintings of Ancher and his equally talented wife, Anna. were good, solidly painted works.  Kroyer’s were brilliant.  Kroyer remained a traveling, cosmopolitan artist of great reputation, but spent his summers in Skagen. 

Marie in 1890

Marie in 1891

Her's and His Portraits on a 5 7/8 x 7 1/2" canvas,1898

In 1892

In Paris in 1888, Kroyer fell in love with the beautiful Marie Triepcke, 16 years his junior, an art student he had briefly instructed a few years earlier in Copenhagen.  They married at her parents’ home in Germany on July 23, 1889 after a whirlwind romance.  She was his “great love” and the inspiration for some of his most famous paintings.  They had one child, Vibeke, born in January 1895.  But the marriage soured due to Kroyer’s growing manic depression, believed to have been inherited from his mother.   Much more seriously, Kroyer had been diagnosed with syphilis in 1886, a killer disease in the 19^th Century that eventually led to his dementia, total blindness and early death in Skagen at the age of 58 in 1909. 

In 1902, Marie met Alfven, a notorious womanizer, who became enamored with her after seeing one of the many pictures Kroyer had painted of his beloved muse.   Marie was exhausted from dealing with Kroyer’s mood swings and thus was susceptible to Alfven’s practiced advances.  In 1905, Marie won the divorce that Kroyer had bitterly contested.  She had written her lawyer that her relationship with Kroyer had become “a living hell…all humanity and compassion has been ripped out of him.”  Years later, Marie, who died at the age of 73 in 1940, reportedly recanted, asking herself how she could have left that “good, kind-hearted, loveable man.”  Marie had been sharply criticized for deserting Vibeke, who stayed with Kroyer while she ran off with Alfven.  Marie gave birth to a second daughter in 1906 and eventually married Alfven in 1912. 

Kroyer had tried desperately to hold on to Marie.  When Alfven arrived on the scene, this highly regarded painter was an emotional train wreck about to happen, already suffering from dementia and only a few years away from his horrible death.  Painting was his only salvation, so of course he got right to it.  First he did a preparatory oil sketch in 1903, one year after Alfven’s appearance.  Then he stretched a 5 by 8 foot canvas and, in 1906, one year after the divorce, unveiled his huge masterpiece showing a great crowd of the artistic and influential Skagen community gathered around a large bonfire.  The painting, “Midsummer’s Eve Bonfire on the Beach at Skagen,” is now in the collection of the Skagens Museum, as are many other Kroyer paintings. 

Most of the more than 40 figures in the painting are identifiable from numerous preparatory drawings, pastels and oil sketches Kroyer made for his marvelous and seemingly innocent depiction of the nocturnal celebration of the summer solstice.  But Kroyer has placed Vibeke, his fragile 11-year-old daughter, standing in the extreme lower left hand corner of the picture, dressed in a white summer frock, her hair neatly braided.  Vibeke's rapt gaze is focused on the bonfire, but she must also see to the left of the bonfire a man and woman standing together in the background, leaning against a boat, their eyes cast downward in stark contrast to the animated mood of revelry depicted throughout the scene.  The man, his hands in his pockets, is Hugo Alfven.  The woman is Marie Triebcke Kroyer, the mother who had abandoned her to the care of the doomed father.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Beach Painting Breakdown

Firmly ensconced in my penultimate role as a painter of pictures, I am certain there is no finer calling in life than a career in the visual or performing arts.  Whenever a painter I have known personally or by reputation passes from this vale of tears, I shake my head sadly and say to myself, “he’ll never paint another picture.”  When I reflect on the greedy big shots who rule the worlds of commerce, politics, art, etc., I say to myself, “Yes, but can they paint a picture?”  Some of them can.  And when I discover that fact, I am somewhat mollified.  I try to discern the root causes for their wretched excesses.   Consider Hitler.  What would have happened if he hadn’t been rejected twice from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in 1907 and again in 1908, because of his “unfitness for painting?”  Painters aren’t interested in such trifling pursuits as world domination.  

Melchers,The Communion,1888,Johnson Museum,Cornell University

Melchers,My Garden,1900-1903,Butler Institute of American Art

One version of a statement made by the American painter Gari Melchers perfectly expresses my own attitude, and hints at why we often entertain thoughts of suicide.  Melchers, who could paint and draw naturalistically with the best of them, turned more toward impressionism in later years, no doubt influenced by fellow artists who were jumping on that bandwagon.  He was only being honest when he said:  “Nothing counts in this world with the painter but a good picture; and no matter how good a one you may paint, you have only to go to the galleries and see how many better ones have been done.”

I really must beg your pardon, but I just can’t help myself, having been a charter member in the 4^th Grade of the “We Never Guess, We Look It Up” club.  Here’s the earliest published version of that quote making the rounds on the Internet:  “Nothing matters in this world to the painter, but a good picture.  And it must be a mighty good one to compete with those already done.  Galleries are full of masterpieces, and the bad painter has no place – and he should have none.”  The use of  the word  “mighty” and its pedantic concluding sentence make this version seem somehow more authentic, but much less suicidal in implication.  Geez, I hate the Internet!

At any rate, given the tremendous importance we attach to our paintings, suffering humiliation as a painter is a very bitter pill to swallow.  You can experience enough of that anyway by just being your generic self.

I often replay one memorable humiliation in my idle moments.  It involves my attempt to paint a beach scene in Margate, New Jersey, a popular “island” community on the Jersey Shore near Atlantic City.

I had been invited to paint there about 20 years ago by a painter who was getting married to a local girl I knew from The Art Students League.  She was a good painter.  He was an excellent painter, one of the best I’ve ever known.  But when the marriage collapsed after a couple of years, he retreated to a hollow in his native Arkansas, where he now seems to live and paint in virtual isolation from the outside world.  I hope he will resurface some day.

Getting back to the beach.  Everything went wrong for me from the get-go.  He had loaned me an easel, some paints, and some brushes of a kind I didn’t use in my own work.  I set up in the shelter of an overhang on the porch of the clubhouse.  He was sitting on a folding stool on the beach in full sunlight, and in short order was painting multiple figures superbly on a small panel, to my chagrin.  I had never attempted a beach painting before. The brilliantly lit sand and all the beachgoers in the distance seemed an impossible subject for me, accustomed as I was to painting portraits, still lifes and the occasional tree in Central Park. 

After struggling for about an hour and growing more frustrated by the minute, two newly pubescent girls, the kind who always make me nervous when they run in packs, were leaving the beach and passed near the clubhouse.  Without even seeing my painting, one of the girls, stout, round-faced and in a one-piece bathing suit, looked up at me and shouted out, “Hey Mister, do you know what you’re doing?”  Her friend said, “Aw, leave him alone.”  But the damage was done.  I had been exposed.  I had been living a lie.  I was not a painter after all.  They didn’t even have to see my pitiful effort to know that.

Years later, the memory of that beach encounter on a bright sunny day in Margate, N.J. lingers on, but at least I can laugh a little bit now about what was then an excruciatingly embarrassing and humbling moment for a prideful painter.

"Here am I"

You may not know of Samuel J. Woolf, a New York painter and portrait sketch artist who was born in 1880 and died in 1948.  I didn’t either until I picked up a battered old book with the above title in the basement of the Strand Bookstore about 30 years ago.  It looked to be written from a serious artist’s perspective, with lots of “inside” information, so I took it home with me for $2.  It turned out to be the finest personal record of an artist’s life I have ever come across.  Its 372 pages are liberally sprinkled with anecdotes and observations about Sargent, Inness, Matisse, Twachtman, Kenyon Cox, Emil Carlsen, and many other artists, as well as trenchant comments on the study and practice of painting and drawing.  Woolf’s eloquent prose and remarkable eye for detail made it a distinct honor to accompany him on his fascinating journey through life. 

After studying for three years at The Art Students League, my own “alma mater,” he painted portraits, did illustration work and was an artist in France during the First World War.  After the war, needing a steady income, he fell into an exciting career as a portrait sketch artist for Time Magazine, The Herald Tribune and The New York Times in the 1920s and 30s.  His superb charcoal sketches of world leaders and other famous men and women were accompanied by accounts of his conversations with them as they sat for their portraits, with only brief notes on the margins of his sketch paper to jog his photographic memory. 

His autobiography, published in 1941, reproduces 32 of these charcoal sketches, including those of Mark Twain, Henry Ford, George Bernard Shaw, General Pershing, Winston Churchill, Fiorello LaGuardia, George Gershwin, Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and Benito Mussolini. 

Woolf’s detailed report of his encounter with Mussolini in 1929 offers a remarkably intimate portrayal of “Il Duce,” who ruled Italy as the leader of the National Fascist Party from 1922 until his ouster in 1943.  Woolf writes that at the beginning of the portrait sitting, Mussolini “spoke of himself, of his father who was a blacksmith, of his own exile in Switzerland, where he worked as a mason, and … how he had returned to Italy and began writing for a paper.  ‘Then the war came,’ he continued, ‘and I learned so much that I was no longer a socialist.’”

The sitting was interrupted several times by visitors.  During each of these interruptions, Woolf writes that Mussolini “showed anger and pleasure, disgust, hatred, satisfaction and impatience” in his speech and body language.  “Mussolini must have noticed the suspicion of a smile on my face as he arose to salute the last visitor, for, before raising his hand, he gave me a broad wink and then went on as he had before.”

That action, according to Woolf, “confirmed my first impression of the man – a strain of humor and a love of the theatrical are mingled with real ability…He recounted his long days of strife and nights of work.  His dark eyes flashed as he spoke of his efforts to show the people of Italy that they needed a new type of government, that old parties should die and the country be saved” from the growing influence of Russian communism.

The encounter ends with Mussolini signing Woolf’s sketch in pencil, erasing his choice of the word “compliments,” and replacing it with “felicitations,” at the suggestion of his male secretary, “saying almost prophetically, ‘we all make mistakes.  Unfortunately not all can be corrected as easily as this one.’”  As we know,  two years after his ouster Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian Partisans in 1945, and hung upside down in Milan for public viewing. 

Woolf writes astutely about the people he met and the world he lived in, as well as the family into which he was born.   His non-religious Jewish parents only went to synagogue once, and that was to attend a funeral.  Woolf states that “the little theological knowledge I had” was acquired from his maternal grandmother.  He had asked the author of “The Magnificent Ambersons” for advice about how to write about members of his family, and Booth Tarkington told him: “So long as you hesitate, I advise you to sit down and tell all that you know about them.  Wasn’t it Oliver Wendell Holmes who pointed out that man is an omnibus in which all of his ancestors reside?  To give a true picture of yourself, you have to describe all the passengers you are carrying.”  And so he did.

Perhaps his grandmother’s theological instruction was the strongest influence on his development because Woolf closes his fascinating narrative with a spiritual crescendo of thought that is as moving for me as another of my favorite literary passages, the stream-of-consciousness flurry of words that ends Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

Woolf sets forth a number of paragraphs beginning with “He has…” as he rapidly summarizes his life experiences, before concluding with an allusion to a verse from the Old Testament First Book of  Samuel, Chapter III, Verse 4, that provided the title for his memoir:

“As a man of sixty, he pushes aside celanese curtains and looks out on the world in which there are wars and strikes, famine and floods, in which there are also sunshine and joy, a world in which men are born, live, love, work and die.  He has lived his life, trusting in something, he knows not what.  He hears his name, and although he does not know who calls, he answers: “Here am I.”

As a latecomer to art and its passionate hold over me, I was enthralled by this book, and wept when I finally set it down.

Just Like a Photograph

Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art

"It looks just like a photograph,” said one middle-aged man to another while viewing Sargent’s affecting 1905 portrait of the 100-year-old Spanish singer Manuel Garcia at the IBM Gallery on 57th Street some years ago.  It was around noontime.  The two gentlemen were dressed in suits and looked respectable and polite, so I was encouraged to interject, “No it doesn’t.  It looks just like life itself.  No photograph can even come close to that.”

Antwerp Cathedral, Belgium

But artists know that the highest praise John Q. Public can bestow on a figurative painting today is, “It looks just like a photograph.”  Aren’t we glad that Rubens lived in an age when painting was supreme among all the visual arts and he could paint “The Descent from the Cross” and not worry about Photorealism, Hyperrealism or any other shady art marketing gimmick.

I blame photography for a lot of the evil visited upon figurative painting over the past 100 years in the guise of artistic freedom.  When photography was new in the 19^th Century, Degas and many other painters were fascinated, and they enjoyed sampling from this magic elixir.  A few of the academic realists, including plein air painters like Dagnan-Bouveret, even painted figures based on photographs, a shocking discovery for some of us in the late 20^th Century. 

The best figurative painters in the 19^th Century continued to paint from life, though, and seemingly ignored this potential threat to their livelihoods.  The existence of photos of subjects painted by Sargent does not prove by any stretch of the imagination that he used them in his figure work, but a couple of his later landscapes look rather suspicious. 

Other brilliant bravura painters, like Zorn and Sorolla, appeared to have good reasons for employing photos of people on occasion to help with some of their more challenging subjects.  Zorn seemed to have used reference photos for his paintings of pulchritudinous nudes posing sweetly unabashed in a Swedish forest or stream.  But the paintings bear (sic) little resemblance to the photos, praise the Lord.

Sorolla’s beach scenes in brilliant sunlight, with their precise, late-afternoon cast shadows on the animated figures, could easily have been abetted by the use of photos.  But if he did use photos, nobody seems to have reported seeing him do so.  The great Boldini thought Sorolla painted from snapshots.  Sorolla’s father-in-law had a photography studio.  One of Sorolla’s American students recalled that he would always be shooed off at a critical point so he never saw Sorolla apply the finishing touches to a painting.  Hmmm!  But other painters firmly declared that Sorolla never painted from photographs.  The best 19^th Century figurative artists did not need to use photographs anyway because their painting and drawing skills were so secure, honed from an early age. 

Despite its many advantages over oil painting as a visual record-keeper, photography sucks the life out of life.  Humans don’t see their world like a camera does, so there is no visceral connection with a still photograph in the way there can be when an oil portrait, landscape or still life is powerfully executed from direct observation of nature.

Many of today’s figurative painters are willing slaves to the photographs that have enabled them to paint dogs, horses, and humans in the first place.  Some of them do very well financially, thank you very much.  But speaking from experience, most of them begin their serious studies too late in life to develop the presumed extraordinary hand to eye coordination of the earlier painters, who started at age 12 or younger and kept right on going, with no time off to attend an Ivy League finishing school.  As a consequence, most of today’s painters are unable to expand convincingly on the enforced parameters of the flat photograph, with its foreshortening absurdities.  Nor can they compensate for the photo’s utter lack of atmospheric perspective (visual effects created by the air we breathe, particularly depth perception and color modification).  This is the thing that ultimately brings life to the painted image when carefully observed from nature and suggested on canvas by a sensitive artist.  The worst part of all this is the painters don’t see anything wrong with copying photographs, usually claiming they are “interpreting” them, and the buying public doesn’t either! 

Quite a growing number of young artists in America and elsewhere are currently attempting to work from life in the style of Bouguereau and other 19^th Century French academic artists.  They attempt to follow what is known about the French academic method in their portrait and figure sketches, which are often very accomplished.  In their more polished works, while they may they get the surface look of those earlier paintings, they miss the feeling.  I think they spend too many hours zeroing in on details that are captured better by high-resolution digital cameras.  In fact, it occurs to me that a futile competition with an “iron horse” might be playing out here.  The old painters were admonished to subdue or ignore those details.  It used to be said that it took two people to paint a picture – one to paint it and the other to tell him when to quit.  Nobody believes that anymore!

Another issue I have with these neo-Bouguereau painters is their high-contrast figures often appear to be cut out from the surrounding space, which is rendered without a satisfying illusion of depth.  And attempts to inject poetic narrative into their figurative paintings, so commonplace in the 19^th Century, seem merely to be awkwardly executed tributes to those earlier painters, at least in my jaundiced view.  Take a good look at the Art Renewal Center website and judge for yourself.

Ultimately, of course, we are all caught up in the maelstrom of high-definition this and that now dominating our visual world.  So maybe it’s inevitable that many of today’s painters, even when they work entirely from life, end up with paintings that really do look “just like a photograph!”

Painters and Painting Ex Libris-2

When I enrolled at The Art Students League to study painting in 1978, I knew instantly that I had finally found a real home among all the like-minded artists and aspiring artists who frequent this historic institution, a self-governed fellowship of artists founded in 1875.  The outside world, with its petty focus on “getting and spending” and all the trappings that go with that febrile state of mind, was not allowed in.  All we were concerned about was making art to the best of our ability, and any judgment passed on individuals mattered only in that rarefied creative realm.  Society’s rejects were welcomed with open arms – if they could paint and draw or were eager to learn how.   

I had enough money to study full-time at the League for two glorious years of painting and drawing day and night, with no other worldly concerns.

At the same time, already in my mid-30s, I discovered something else that played an equally important role, if not more so, in my decision to dedicate the rest of my life to the study and practice of painting and drawing.  I discovered a magical world that offered up an unparalleled wealth of inspiration to this aspiring painter.  I discovered the 19^th Century!  I discovered a ragtag band of individuals called painters who thought like I did.   All that mattered to them was the painting on the easel.  Just throw more coal in the pot-bellied stove in the ice-cold garret and eat your potatoes.  Riots in the street over government injustices?  Forget about it.  Just keep painting.  What was the use of getting involved, when everything boiled down to Realpolitik anyway.  There are no antonyms for Realpolitik.  Far too many talented painters from that century and early into the next had their lives snuffed out in those senseless, endlessly recurring cycles of riots and wars over all this getting and spending business.  But I digress.

Of course I discovered this painter’s nirvana in books, which I rarely read, being too preoccupied with my own trivial thoughts about my miserable existence to read the thoughts of others.  For 10 years I scoured the used book stores in Manhattan for books on the lives of the 19^th Century painters.  I already knew I was in love with their paintings.  But I also wanted to know what these painters thought about life, how they talked to each other, how they dressed, how they looked, how they painted, how they fared in the art world, what their studios were like, what their colleagues thought of them, what led them to become painters, and on and on, including how they fared in family and sexual relationships (most of them badly, I was pleased to learn; though I was sad to learn that too many died of syphilis in those days).

Renoir's Lise,1868,Nationalgalerie,Berlin

Renoir's Eugene Murer,1877,Metropolitan Museum of Art

 Self-Portrait,1897,Clark Museum

It all began with Renoir.  I borrowed the biography written by his filmmaker son Jean Renoir from the branch library in my neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  The book was full of really good, personal information about this great painter, just the kind of stuff I was eager to read.  I remember walking out of the library clutching the book to my chest like a schoolgirl and reciting, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Renoir is with me.”

I made numerous forays to the many used book stores then in existence in New York City, especially the venerable Strand Bookstore on Broadway at 12^th Street.  In the Strand’s claustrophobic basement, which was overflowing with ancient tomes, you could still find great buys on musty old out-of-print books on artists that now cost a fortune if they come up for sale on the Internet.   An hour or two went by swiftly as I dug through the cornucopia.  I was extremely disappointed when I couldn’t acquire a book I wanted because I didn’t have enough cash on hand.  One such missed opportunity was a big book on American painting techniques of the 19^th Century that I perused at Gryphon Books on Broadway near 82^nd St.   That old book was full of great tips on such matters as how to paint skies and portraits in the manner of painters like Thomas Cole and Thomas Sully.  It was priced at $12 and I just couldn’t spring for it at the time.  I told another artist about the book, and the next time I looked it was gone.

Most of the books in my art library are these out-of-print books and “coffee-table” picture books on artists that I admire -- the known and lesser-known.   I have a few books on painting and drawing techniques.  But the “who, what, when, where and why” has always seemed more important to me than the “how” when reading about painters from the past.  Most of them said very little about their own working methods anyway, and the little that was said hasn’t traveled well in translation over the years.  

Nevertheless, the books I treasure are sprinkled with succinct comments about painting and drawing made by Gerome, Bouguereau, Monet, Sargent and other 19^th Century masters to their students and others.  These remarks have offered much food for thought while I’m painting.  One remark that often pops into my head is Sargent’s dictum to a private student that “the thicker you paint, the more your color flows.”  I’m quite sure he is right, but I’m not able to securely visualize the effect he is talking about.  I would have had to have seen him slap the paint on a canvas with a fully loaded brush to know for sure.  Oh, how wide is the gap between the tantalizing words of the revered, long-departed painters and my puny deeds.

I’m usually not interested in books that attempt to analyze the techniques of the great artists of the past, unless the subject is Vermeer.  What a fascinating puzzle his technique remains.   It is enormous fun to try to figure out how the artists we love “did it” when looking up close at their paintings in a museum or gallery, but in the end we must figure out how to do the best we can in our own work and in our own way, in my opinion. 

I stopped exploring for books after about 10 years.  By then the painting life had been firmly fixed in my psyche and I was just about ready to call myself a real painter and not an “I used to be a journalist, but now I paint” kind of fellow.  I still acquire the occasional book on an artist I admire, but not with the same passion as before.  I haven’t yet kicked the habit of picking up auction catalogs for a couple of bucks apiece when they contain wonderful figurative and still life paintings that are new to me.  The best ones always contain a lot of worthwhile biographical information about the painters.  I get furious when flea market sellers who probably get these things for nothing from people’s garbage want a firm $10 or more for them.  Don’t they know who I am!  I am a painter, just like the guys featured in the books you are trying to swindle me on.  Such effrontery!

I hope to ramble on about some of my favorite book acquisitions in future posts.