Apples and Pears

Two still life painters who got the picture dealers and art critics squarely behind them were Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Robert Kulicke (1924-2007).  They both had plenty of money, so they painted pictures and sold them just to feed their creative egos.  Not having to worry about money is a very good way to prolong an artist’s career.  It’s an especially good thing if you are a perplexed painter like Cezanne, who jumps from style to style and thinks way too hard about visual theory, but still manages to produce some solid paintings of apples.  It's also a good thing for a painter like Kulicke, who paints pictures of an agreeable pear or two over and over again while in a meditative state.

Cezanne,Still life with Apples,The Fitzwilliam Museum,Cambridge, England

Robert M. Kulicke,Still Life with Pear,1993

www.antiquesimagarchive.com,image courtesy of Pook & Pook

Cezanne was a prosperous banker’s son with a nice inheritance, whose clumsy attempts to reconfigure Mother Nature were either scorned or embraced by his contemporaries, as we all know. The dealer Ambrose Vollard (1866-1939) sensed he had a winner and bought hundreds of Cezanne’s paintings, ultimately leading to his own fortune in the resale of them.  Vollard said he sold his first Cezanne to a blind man, who liked it because the paint was so thick he could feel it.  Impoverished academic artists were soon tearing out their hair and imploring him to take their paintings because they were “much better” than Cézanne’s, but to no avail forever after.  Picture dealers had wrested control of art from the artists themselves.  No longer were the art academies with their annual Salons determining what paintings should look like.  Paintings would henceforth look like whatever the dealers could sell.  

The dealers and their cohorts, the art critics, love innovative artists who can speak and write words without end about their own work, as Cezanne certainly could.  Their words provide the foundation for flowery, hyperbolic sales pitches to wealthy collectors, who treat paintings like other investments, and this, in turn, convinces the generally ignorant public that the work of these artists must be great because, “look at all the important people who have bought it.”

  

Most of the outstanding realist painters of the late 19^th Century, like Sargent, Boldini, Sorolla, the Scandinavians, the Russians and all the Academics, said absolutely nothing interesting at all about their work, except to other artists who wanted to paint like them.  And the public didn’t need words to appreciate their work, it spoke for itself.  But there weren’t that many of these superstars, and there were a lot more painters who had studied alongside them at the academies who knew they couldn’t paint and draw as well, but thought of themselves as more “artistic.”   Like Cezanne, they abandoned realism to explore other ways of depicting nature, no doubt influenced by the growth of photography as a convenient record keeper of the visual world.  Along came Vollard, the Gimpels pere et fils, Roger Fry and Gertrude Stein, and the race was on.  The paternity of famous quotes in the field of art is highly suspect, but Matisse and Picasso are both said to have called Cezanne, “the father of us all.”  That’s the story of modern art in a nutshell.  All the rest is talk.  But be careful if you don’t get the official Cezanne narrative just right in art history academia.

The painter Abel G. Warshawsky (1883-1962), who studied at The Art Students League and painted in France during the early 20^th Century, wrote a long-neglected memoir about his early years through the mid 1930s that was edited and published in 1980 by the Kent State University Press in a book titled “Memories of an American Impressionist.”  For a couple of pages, Warshawsky rails against the hype surrounding the modern art movement.   He writes that one “self-made” critic “solemnly announced that an apple painted by Cezanne had more significance and art value than a canvas by Raphael.”  And he condemns the underhanded sales tactics he personally observed in Paris in the frenzy to promote all the second-rate followers of the Post Impressionists.

Of the movement itself, Warshawsky wrote, “for all its glaring faults and deformities, [Post Impressionism] had brought joy and color into a field of painting that had been degenerating into the cold, pompous and photographic.”  He continues, however, that:  “The tremendous sincerity of Cezanne, which in many cases overcomes his deficiencies of technique, found countless imitators who only copied the defects, without ever being able to acquire the virtues and simplicity which Cezanne aimed at.”  

  

Okay so far, but he goes on to state as fact that Cezanne “suffered from a form of astigmatism that made him see standing objects as if tipped towards him.”  This one is awarded the publisher’s asterisk.  Warshawsky had died 18 years before the book was published, so he couldn’t object to the following publisher’s footnote:  “Warshawsky should not be condemned too harshly for his misunderstanding of the distortions of form in Cezanne’s art.  J.K. Huymans and Emile Bernard were also convinced that Cezanne had faulty eyesight.  Erle Loran has shown, however, that Cezanne purposely distorted objects to accentuate their volumes or to add dynamic tensions to his designs. (‘Cezanne’s Composition’ (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1946)”

Now I should really get around to Kulicke, the other painter I mentioned up front.  While not well-known as a painter, Kulicke was famous for having been a very successful, innovative frame maker and jewelry designer.  But he also carved out an interesting little niche for himself by making paintings of one or two pears on small panels less than 12 inches in either direction.  He also painted peaches and oranges, and sweet little nosegays in glass vases, all in the same format – the objects, alone or in a small group, centered on a flat base with a flat background.  He must have made more paintings of pears than anyone, and maybe even more than the law allows.  I’ll bet he sold just about every one.  I saw plenty of them in photographs of apartments in the glossy shelter magazines in the 1980s and 90s.

I really like Kulicke's pear paintings, with their soft color harmonies, which I first saw at the Davis and Langdale Gallery, located in a brownstone on East 60^th Street. This unique gallery specializes in small works of 19^th and 20^th Century American and British painters, including those of the Bloomsbury crowd.  It was worth visiting occasionally, even though it was a bit too far east to be on my routine inspection tour of several Manhattan galleries along 57^th Street that I kept up for quite a few years.  I remember seeing a wonderful show there of works by the British painter Gwen John, the introverted sister of the extroverted painter Augustus John.   I was surprised to read later that she was obsessed with Rodin, her former lover, and would stand on a hill overlooking his studio to see what was going on inside. 

Gwen John,Nude Girl,1910,17 ½ x11”,Tate Britain,London

When I saw that exhibit of Kulicke’s pear paintings, I felt sure that one or two should have satisfied his creative impulse to paint them.  But he kept painting and selling them.  In a way, they are earlier and far more esthetically pleasing versions of the paintings sold today on the Internet by the “daily painters.”  I think I read somewhere that he painted some of them from out of focus photographs.  Quel horreur!

Now you and I could paint very similar charming little fruit and flower paintings, with a little practice, of course, and go completely unnoticed by the art world.  The big difference is that Kulicke was this world-renowned frame maker, who had his frame business in the basement of the gallery brownstone, and put his little gems in individually created, gorgeous, handmade frames, adding immensely to their attractiveness and marketability.

In a January 1990 interview with Bruce Gherman in "Picture Framing Magazine," Kulicke said, “I am an intimist, still life painter and for 34 years have devoted myself to painting fruits and flowers, often a single fruit. My painting stems from Zen philosophy and medieval art, which is why I have found that 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th century frames are the most sympathetic to some of my work. I decided to experiment making medieval frames as fairly authentic reproductions. To me, the frame is the ultimate presentation, the reward for painting the picture.  I get an enormous amount of enjoyment out of making them.”  I say amen to that.  Unfortunately, framing is the biggest curse of the low-income painter.  The cheap Internet mail-order frames you can afford are so abominable that they destroy the look of any halfway decent painting. 

Kulicke’s exquisite little paintings, with their softly muted, grayed-down colors, were just one of many creative endeavors undertaken successfully by this human whirlwind.  He revolutionized the frame making industry by designing thin, welded aluminum frames and Lucite “plexibox” frames for some famous modern artists and The Museum of Modern Art.  He also is credited with introducing the aluminum sectional frames you put together yourself.  And he crafted reproduction frames for some of the greatest paintings in the country, including Giotto’s “Epiphany” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Not satisfied, he also helped to revive the ancient cloisonné technique of granulation used in the design of gold jewelry, and established a school for jewelry making. Widely knowledgeable in art history, he often supported himself and his businesses by buying and selling medieval art and Coptic textiles.  His many accomplishments were noted in newspaper obituaries upon his passing.

Giorgio Morandi,Still Life,1953

Nonetheless, he reportedly considered himself first and foremost a painter, which he resumed with a passion in 1957 after he framed a number of Giorgio Morandi’s contemplative still life paintings of bunched together bottles, jars, boxes and other shapes, with no surface detail and in pale colors.  Being studio-challenged myself, I got a real kick out of learning that Morandi lived in a house in Bologna with his three sisters and had to walk through one of their bedrooms to get to his room, where he both worked and slept for most of his life.  Morandi (1890-1964) was influenced by Cezanne and Kulicke was influenced by Morandi. That’s the way it goes.
 
I still like the nonsense couplet I composed upon first seeing those precious little pear paintings, so beautifully framed, hanging on the walls of the gallery 25 years ago:  “Paintings are made by fools like me.  But only Kulicke can paint a pear.”