Summer Painting Doldrums

Edward Henry Potthast, At the Beach, 16.25 x 20 in., Private Collection

Well, it looks like I won’t be painting summer landscapes in Vermont or going to the Minnesota State Fair again this year for the umpteenth year in a row, so I guess I’ll just sit here in front of my laptop computer in the kitchen of my New York apartment and compose another little rant about the dismal state of representational painting in America today.

I just read an article in the August issue of American Art Review about Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927), whose paintings are on view in “Eternal Summer,” a current exhibit at the Cincinnati Art Museum through September 8.   Potthast created beautiful, joyous, light-filled Impressionist paintings, the most famous of them being summertime scenes of women and children at rest and play on beaches, which he created from life en plein air.

Edward Henry Potthast, A Holiday, 1915, Chicago Art Institute

Edward Henry Potthast, Blonde and Brunette, 1920s, 16 ¼ x 20 3/8 in., Private Collection

Edward Henry Potthast, Self-Portrait

Potthast grew up in Cincinnati, as did a few other great American painters, including John Henry Twachtman, Joseph Rodefer DeCamp and Robert Frederick Blum.   He began studying drawing at the age of 12 in his hometown and completed his art training in Antwerp, Munich and Paris in the late 19^th Century.  His beach scenes are reminiscent of the paintings of Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida in their joyful mood and brilliance of sunlight.  Because he had spent years learning how to draw from life, he was able to accurately compose his animated beachgoers on the spot.  More importantly, they exist in perfect harmony with their environment.  The pictures are a wonderful visual delight – things of beauty to behold.  It’s like an actual trip to an early 20^th Century beach when viewing Potthast’s paintings, not that I would know from first-hand experience, of course. 

Many of today’s painters also like to paint sunny outdoor pictures of women and little girls in old-fashioned white dresses as Sorolla and the American Impressionists did.  But now artists take photographs and paint their pictures from them, or paint their models patiently and photographically.  The result is there isn’t even the faintest breeze of real life in their paintings.   Today’s artists simply are not able to paint and draw from life as well as Potthast and his contemporaries did.   

We are living in a digital world completely unlike the world inhabited by the earlier painters.  So why do some of today’s painters labor over the same subject matter and turn out paintings that are merely superficial clichés of their antecedents.  I suppose it’s because those earlier paintings look so good and are easy to copy thematically.  And the public likes the copies, no matter how devoid of feeling they are.  We can’t forget that if a Realist painting looks like a photograph today, that’s plenty good enough for the art-buying public.

There is something comically absurd, though, about the determined effort by some of today’s painters to mimic Bouguereau, Bastien-Lepage and other late 19^th  and early 20th Century figurative painters in technique and subject matter.  Those earlier painters were in the going business of painting emotive pictures featuring beautiful young women, handsome young men, soulful peasants, careworn old folks and cute kids for an enthusiastic art-buying public.  Their studio and plein air paintings were important contributions to the development of the visual arts at the time. 
 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879, 120 x 86 in., Musee d’Orsay

Jules Bastien Lepage, The Begger, 1880-1881,199 x 181 cm, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen

Jules Bastien-Lepage, Le Pere Jacques (The Wood Gatherer),196.85 x 181.61 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum

Some of today’s painters who specialize in backward-looking subject matter are pretty skillful at rendering, especially those practitioners of a flashy style of realism, which one of my instructors at the Art Students League playfully labeled “Windy City Brushwork.”  These painters put their young, innocent and slightly-built female models in outlandish voluminous dresses with billowing sleeves and skirts far too big for the girl within, apparently designed by the artist himself to look like some old-fashioned peasant costume of odd coloring, sit or stand their models in some rural setting, barn or woods, paint them photographically, and then load up the canvas with twigs and branches and roses and all sorts of debris so your eye doesn’t’ have a clue as to what to look for in the painting, other than the tediously skillful rendering of the individual components of the picture scattered all over the picture plane, be it a twig or the model’s artfully posed hand. The work looks like cover art for Romance novels, but without a narrative component. There’s a ready market for this, yes indeed.

 

But putting those painters and all the American West painter-historian-illustrators aside, representational painting in general is not such a hot ticket with the community at large.  There is a small segment of the art market that supports and encourages the production of retrograde paintings that superficially resemble the work of the earlier painters.  But why?  All that we are able to glean from most of these emotionless paintings is that the copyists have rendered to photographic perfection their average-looking models – warts, tattoos and all other fashionable contemporary embellishments -- posing gracelessly:

• In their faux 19^th Century settings of ramshackle sylvan forest or faux plus faux Roman vestibule
• Staring straight ahead without any facial expression as if for a police mug shot, or staring straight ahead in profile, while seated or standing in some sterile environment, with maybe some background graffiti painted photographically for art’s sake
• Unclothed and lying supine, prone or on one side – front or back view -- in an advanced stage of rigor mortis on a bed covered with a rumpled white sheet. 

Here are some treatments of the fine art nude from the old days that obviously were not painted photographically, not even that beautifully drawn and colored Zorn standing figure, which depicts a flesh and blood human being with a mind at work as the artist goes about his task of painting her to perfection. 

Giovanni Boldini(1842-1931), Reclining Nude, 65 x 74 cm, Private Collection

Anders Zorn, Fjorton år tror jag visst att jag var

1916, 70.9 x39.4 in.

Anders Zorn, In Werner’s Rowboat, 1917, Private Collection

Henri Lebasque (1865-1937), Reclining Nude

Leo Putz (1869-1940)  Lisl on a Sofa

Zinaida Serebriakova, (1884-1967), Reclining Nude, 1930

Do we really want to see allegedly fine art oil paintings that are nothing more than photographic renditions of our unattractive next-door neighbors, with or without their clothes, just sitting, standing or lying there like some department store mannequin and exhibiting in extremis all the ridiculous foreshortening assessments made by the lens of a camera?  We see enough digital images of ordinary people in ordinary poses already.   We deserve figurative paintings that are just a tad more artistic, don’t you think?

The 19^th Century painters had plenty of average-looking models to work from, as well, but they weren’t average looking on canvas.  They were transformed into appealing archetypes to suit the emotional theme of the painting.  The transformation was significant in the case of Bouguereau, whose Italian models, especially the children, couldn’t possibly hold still long enough for him to paint them from life with such perfection.  He did many preparatory sketches from his live models, which he then incorporated into the graceful poses that adorn his canvases.  Bouguereau’s poses were often adapted from classical sculpture, but he alone was responsible for the incomparable beauty of the flesh and exquisite drawing of the figure, from head to toe, that we see in his skillfully composed paintings.

The transformation was less obvious in the work of Bastien-Lepage and his plein-air followers, as well as all the other Realists who painted the figure from life.  These painters stayed very close to the physical reality of their models, but subtly enhanced or subdued details in keeping with the overall composition and emotional message of their paintings.  That was the difference.  Their figures were as one with their surroundings.  Today the figures often are just pasted against some nondescript background or artificial stage setting.  Not one Las Maninas among them.

Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 125.2 x 108.7 in.

1656, The Prado, Madrid

Many of today’s painters seem to think their work is done when they faithfully copy their expressionless, average-looking models on canvas.  What happened to the desire of painters to integrate their models into real works of harmonious beauty that express on canvas the emotion that caused the painter to create the picture in the first place?  The 19^th Century painters had great drawing and painting skills and routinely adjusted the salient features of their models and their poses on canvas in keeping with the overall theme and design of their pictures.  I can’t do this myself, so I’m a little ashamed to be pointing out this lack in today’s painters who rely solely on photographic accuracy to market their pictures.

If you don’t study drawing at an early age, chances are you aren’t going to be able to improve on the features and proportions of your average looking model when painting alla prima.  So you copy photographs or slave away from the live model, putting in every unimportant photographic detail that today’s art buying public has come to expect from its artists. 

The Minnesota State Fair runs from August 22 to September 2 at the fairgrounds in St. Paul.  Wish I could be there.  This contemporary art world of passionless photographic painting is getting me down.  The last year I went to the fair an old Vaudevillian named Peg Leg Bates was the star attraction, tap dancing up a storm.  During intermission, the carnival barker announced door prizes to ticket holders. “There’s another winner,” he would shout from the stage in the darkened tent auditorium.  Heads swiveled to see the lucky winners, but you never ever saw one.   You can learn a lot about life at a State Fair.