The $25.20 Still Life

The $25.20 Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 16x20"

I tinkered away early this week on the $25.20 still life shown here.  And in case you were wondering, while working on it I listened to WQXR, New York City’s only remaining classical music radio station.  The kind of music you listen to when you paint is very important, and it is a question often asked of painters on the ascendant who are profiled in artists’ magazines.   Who can paint in total silence today?  I can imagine Vermeer must have done so, but maybe not Caravaggio.  I’ve read that Rubens listened to Monteverdi CDs in his huge studio in Antwerp while he and his production crew were hard at work.  Maybe my memory is faulty.  Maybe Rubens actually had someone read from classical literature while he was painting.  Anyway, silence is verboten in the studios of artists today.  Wonder how Cezanne would feel about that?  He angrily stopped working on the portrait of his dealer Vollard when he heard the faint barking of a dog a mile away.  I hear all kinds of caterwauling on Broadway below the window of my 8th floor home studio on the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan.  The worst was an eccentric lady who stood on the sidewalk behind her folding card table every day for a couple of months one summer, droning, at the top of her lungs, “Stop the abuse, sign the petition” for a couple of humanitarian causes you no longer felt so charitable toward thanks to her entreaties. She was a skinny, stern, scary looking lady, and maybe that’s why I never saw anybody actually sign one of her petitions.  I have no choice but to carry on with my painting before the tomatoes rot.  I’m not real keen on painting rotten produce.  I actually think I paint better without musical accompaniment, but it sure helps drown out the noise outside.

From what I’ve read, I get the impression that most artists seem to prefer one kind of music to listen to exclusively while they go about painting their masterpieces.   I’m pretty eclectic when it comes to the music I paint by, but I won’t listen to Monteverdi, dreamy symphonies, classical piano music, John Cage, modern operas, most forms of jazz, hard rock, hip hop music, or any other music without a discernable melody.   WQXR is my go to source when I’m too lazy to drop in my cassette tapes of Rich Conaty’s Sunday evening program, “The Big Broadcast,” music of the 1920s and 30s, which he has hosted since 1973 on WFUV, the Fordham University radio station.  The bouncy rhythms of that music are just right for cheerful painting, although some young adults who have posed for me can’t stand listening to it.  Two 90-minute tapes on my old dual cassette deck take me right up to the end of my regular painting session.  If I’m at my easel on a Sunday, I tune in to WKCR, the Columbia University radio station, to listen to Amazing Grace (Gospel), The Moonshine Show (Bluegrass) or The Tennessee Border show (Hank Williams, et al.), which takes me from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., when I’m usually finished painting for the day.  The problem with painting along with the aforementioned WQXR is you have to put up with all the annoying sales pitches from the hosts.  The station is no longer a commercial radio station with advertisements, but it runs endless appeals for money from its listeners and frequent plugs for its “corporate sponsors” that sound just like ads to me.  Many times, depending on my mood, I’ve painted along with tapes of such music as popular songs from the so-called “American Songbook,” folk songs, Edith Piaf, country western, Broadway musicals, opera and, my favorite, Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.  I’m very happy when I’m nearing the end of a good painting session at the same time that, for example, The Mikado is nearing its end with such triumphal phrases as “The threatened cloud has passed away...” and “With joyous shout and ringing cheer…”  I can never quite bring myself to put down my brushes at the exact same moment that the music ends, regrettably.  Gustav Rehberger (1910-1995), a popular drawing instructor at the Art Students League, used to widely demonstrate his Baroque-influenced technique to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, putting the finishing touches on his flamboyant drawing in concert with the final passages of this stirring composition.

Now about that still life of mine.  On Sunday morning I made my customary visit to the neighborhood flea and farmer’s market on Columbus Avenue looking for some locally grown flowers to paint.  The couple who sell bedding plants and cut flowers had brought in some nice peonies in the late spring, but now they are selling uninspiring mixed bouquets with several kinds of little, spiky, colored weeds mixed in with two beautiful zinnias.  The little stuff is hard to paint and I only wanted a nice big bouquet of farm-fresh zinnias.  Why do they do this to me?  So I moved on to the produce vendors.   I bought the two white eggplants for $1.75 from one vendor and the two attached heirloom tomatoes from another vendor for $3.45, a little less than a pound, which is $3.80, as I recall.  I don’t usually eat the fruits and vegetables I buy for my still life setups, by the way.   Who knows how to prepare white eggplants and heirloom tomatoes anyway?

I meandered over to the adjacent flea market and came upon something that is very rare in that market -- a new vendor.  He was a youngish retired chef from Rhode Island who now does the flea market thing in his home state, but was in New York for the first time because his market was closed for some reason or other.  Maybe I should have asked him how to prepare the eggplants and tomatoes.  I was surprised that he didn’t know the sweet little song “Rhode Island is Famous For You,” composed by Howard Schwartz, with lyrics by Arthur Dietz.  Here’s a link to Blossom Dearie singing it in a YouTube clip: http://youtu.be/Ig2daWp-Pls.  At any rate, the vendor accepted $20 for the green enamel pitcher and the pottery vase depicted in the painting.

I thought it might be interesting and appropriate to paint the lot together.  So on Sunday afternoon I pulled out a couple of the many old and undistinguished cloth rags I keep stashed in my studio and spent half an hour pushing things around in an attempt to get the objects to relate comfortably with each other, a difficult task because they really don’t seem intrinsically simpatico to me.  I did not enjoy the process.  My patience is easily tested.  The next morning I took a couple of minutes more to push things around until I finally gave up.  I then spent Monday and Tuesday morning painting the $25.20 still life to the best of my limited ability, with a little overworking thrown in on Wednesday morning.   I think the painting looks a little better than my lousy photograph of it, which shows too much glare and uneven lighting because I photograph my paintings using just one light source, the available light from my studio window.  To compound the problem, the image became washed out when uploaded to this blog for some unknown reason.  The color is pretty accurate, though.  I was never inclined to master the proper way to take photographs of paintings using two light sources, which requires more open floor space than I have in my home studio.  I paint with a lot of turpentine, so this painting needs to be varnished to even things out.  I’m not sure I could sell this painting.  I don’t think I would want to buy it myself.

The next day I quickly did another painting of the two eggplants with two old potteries over an old painting I scraped down a little and that one came out a lot better.   But I don’t feel like dragging out my tripod again to take a picture of it, so that will have to be the “fish that got away” for the time being.  How much can I trash my own work?  Let me count the ways.  I might be able to get $100 for this $25.20 still life, if I’m lucky, and if I don’t destroy it first.  That’s a whopping $74.80 free and clear, if my arithmetic is correct.  Who could ask for anything more? 

Riding Herd on the Somerville Trail

Howard Somerville, Miss Nora (sic) Baring, n.d., Oil on Canvas, 125 x 99 cm., Gallery Oldham, England

Howard Somerville, Norah, Oil on Canvas, n.d., 124.5 x 100 cm., The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Hanley, England

Actress Norah Baring Publicity Photo

Actress Norah Baring Publicity Photo

UPDATE, 8/26/2016 (edited a couple of times, enough already)

I've recently learned that a comprehensive biographical article on Howard Somerville has been written by Geoffrey Fleming, executive director of the Huntington (West Virginia) Art Museum, which has the Somerville portrait titled Joyce in its collection:  http://www.askart.com/artist/Howard_Somerville/11268140/Howard_Somerville.aspx  His article proves that it takes a fully committed scholar to examine the life of an interesting artist from ages past who has been consigned to the dustbin of history.  And Mr. Fleming's research reveals that Mr. Somerville was indeed highly acclaimed for his portrait work during his most productive years.  He was not an unknown artist, as my initial Internet research seemed to suggest.

My only quibble with the article is when Mr. Fleming  maintains that Somerville worked from live models for many of his portraits.  I don't know.  I've only seen his work in reproduction.  Mr. Fleming's research indicates that Mr. Somerville didn't start painting portraits until his early 30s, and his first portrait was exhibited in 1908 when he was 35 years of age, quite late for a successful portrait painter in those days.

With all due respect, I still maintain that Somerville's models may have been employed primarily for being photographed and for clarifying the local color as the work progressed.  That's just the way it seems to me,. having painted a number of portraits and studied the subject for many years.  I concede that Somerville gets a nicely blanched cinematic light effect on his portrait faces.  But I'm always suspicious that photos have been used when the random distribution of accessories and transitory patterns of light and shadow instantly captured by photography are faithfully reproduced in a finished painting without any apparent attempt to edit them for aesthetic purposes

For example, in that elegant painting titled Nora Baring shown above, the carefully modeled but clumsy folds of the skirt near the bottom contribute nothing to understanding the body below.  And in the second portrait titled Norah, Somerville has cautiously copied the random fringe pattern of the shawl by the wrists.  And he cuts off the elegant pose just below the knees, considered a no-no by most portrait painters.  In lighter versions of the painting on the Internet, you can see that he spent a lot of time painting the knees, not a subject worthy of artistic attention in this context.  Would extending the dress to the bottom to further highlight the face have been a wiser choice?  Yes, but only if you are not a slave to the original photograph.  And now that I think about it, Norah seems to be sitting on her knees, with her back ramrod straight, a pose I should think she could hold for only as long as it took to take the photograph! .

Nevertheless, if you are curious about Mr. Somerville, as I certainly was, I highly recommend that you read Mr. Fleming's article.  If you are not an Askart subscriber, you can read the full article for free on Fridays. And if you are in the vicinity of the Huntington museum, take a look at Joyce and decide for yourself whether the artist might have gotten a little help from a photograph.  The painting is said to be a big hit with museum visitors.  Remember, even Vermeer has been "accused" of using the camera obscura in his highly polished paintings, which also display no evidence of brushstrokes in the finished work.  And remember also that the general public loves portraits in oil that look "just like a photograph."

Here's my original blog post, written without having the benefit of Mr. Fleming's painstaking research:

Come along boys and listen to my tale and I’ll tell you of my troubles on the Somerville trail, come a-ti yi yippi yippi yay, yippi yay, come a-ti yi tippi yippi yay.

The curious case of Howard Somerville is driving me a little nuts.  The first I ever heard of this early 20^th Century portrait artist was in a recent post by Matthew D. Innis on his very comprehensive representational art blog called Underpaintings.   As noted by Innis, there is absolutely no biographical information readily available about this British/Scottish artist, other than the apparent fact that he was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1873 and died in 1952.  And yet he is well represented in the collections of museums throughout the United Kingdom.  Innis even had an email exchange with a curator at one of the museums who admitted she knew nothing further about this artist.

So I looked a bit closer at the original source for this unearthing of the unknown Somerville’s work,  the two-year-old BBC website Your Paintings, which displays images of 35 of his paintings housed in museums or other public institutions throughout Great Britain.  It is the website’s intention to “show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real.  It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.”

This noble endeavor is impressive and will solve some mysteries but create others, as in Somerville’s case.  There are absolutely no “stories behind” his paintings.  When you click on “additional information,” all you get is a brief notation on how the painting was acquired.  Of the 35 Somerville paintings in public collections, 19 were gifts, six were purchases, four were transfers from other institutions two were commissions and there was no information at all for the remaining four works.  And eight of the gifts were described variously as “bequeathed by Miss Adamson, 1953”; “gift from the Misses Adamson, sisters of the artist, 1955”; “gift from the Misses Adamson, sisters of the artist, 1957”; “gift from Miss Winifred Adamson, 1957”; “gift from Miss Adamson, 1955”; “gift from the Misses Adamson, 1965”; “presented by the Misses Adamson, 1955,” and “gift from Miss Adamson.”  I had no luck searching for information about the sisters Adamson, either, although I thought I was getting close a couple of times.

Judging from the unevenness of Somerville’s work, ranging from very precise photographic renditions of elegant women done in the style of Sir William Orpen to awkward, amateurish painting in his self-portraits and some figure studies, I get the feeling that the sisters just started cold calling every museum in the UK after their brother died, asking if they wanted to add one of his paintings to their collection, and some did.  When you start looking for explanations as to how museums great and small grow their collections, you are bound to find yourself tumbling down some giant rabbit hole in pursuit of the truth.

It’s my belief that Somerville was a largely self-taught artist who painted from photographs in a style he picked up when he was hand-coloring black and white photographs for illustrated magazines.   A website devoted to issues of the Illustrated London News lists a "Howard Somerville" as one of  three men who “tinted” photographs for the Christmas 1911 issue of the magazine.  Somerville would have been 38 years old at that time, a bit late to be doing such work, don’t you think, if he had been a reasonably proficient graduate of Orpen’s alma mater, the Slade School of Fine Art in London?  

Howard Somerville, The Artist and Model, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 74.9 x 61.9 cm., The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, England

Shortly afterward, in 1912, the first Somerville painting entered the collection of a museum, a presumed self-portrait that couldn't possibly be the work of an academy trained professional artist in terms of paint handling and design of the pictorial space, not to mention the horrendous rendering of the nude model in the background.  The attitude struck by Somerville reminds me a great deal of one of Orpen’s self-portraits. 

 

It so happens that this first Somerville acquisition adds greatly to the mystery surrounding the career of the artist.  It was purchased by the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England from Horace de Vere Cole (1881-1936), a notorious prankster.  Wikipedia is full of news of his outrageous escapades.  As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, for example, Cole posed as the Sultan of Zanzibar, who was visiting London at the time, to make an official visit to his own college accompanied by his friend Adrian Stephen (the brother of Virginia Woolf).  Here are three minor pranks pulled off by Cole that I have extracted from the Wikipedia entry because the retelling is brief:   Cole once hosted a party in which the attendees discovered that they all had the word "bottom" in their surname; at one point he gave theater tickets to each of his bald friends, strategically placing them so that their heads spelled out an expletive when viewed from the balcony; on his honeymoon in Italy in 1919, Cole dropped horse manure onto Venice’s Piazza San Marco -- a city with no horses that could be reached only by boat. He is also suspected in the Piltdown Man hoax.  Once heir to a great fortune, Cole married twice and died in poverty in France.

So how did this merry prankster acquire Somerville’s painting and how did he convince the Mercer Art Gallery to purchase this mediocre work by a painter who must have had no reputation to speak of, at least without a bit of hyperbole?   Maybe this isn't really a self-portrait.  I don't know what Somerville looked like.  Perhaps this painting was represented to the gallery as the portrait of a famous artist, maybe even Orpen himself?  Just another wild guess on my part.

The most puzzling aspect of the Somerville story for me, however, is his painting of two elegant photographic portraits of the well-known British actress Norah Baring (1905-1985), who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 movie Murder and appeared in 12 other films before retiring from the screen in 1934 after only six years in the business.  It seems she originally studied art and wanted to become an artist before becoming an actress.  The portraits Somerville painted of her are fine examples of precise copying of photographs mimicking the style of oil portraits painted from life by his famous contemporaries.  Those paintings from life by Sargent, Orpen and any number of excellent portrait painters in Somerville’s day convey a sense that the subject is a living, breathing, three-dimensional human captured on canvas.  Somerville’s are flat as a photograph.  Somerville employs the same background drapery arrangement used by Orpen in several of his portraits.  There is no evidence of any brushwork when the images are enlarged greatly on the computer screen, no modeling of the form with color and values, and no particular emphasis on any element of the painting.  In other words, just like the detached evenness of a photograph throughout the canvas.  Compare Somerville’s paintings to a similar Orpen portrait and you can immediately see what I’m talking about.

The art world of the day would have seen these portraits for what they are -- big colored photographs, or else there would have been some envious chatter about Somerville among other artists.  But I’m sure you won’t find his name in the index of any biography of the leading artists of the time.  I came across a couple of black and white publicity head shots of Miss Baring that resemble the difficult tilts of Miss Baring’s head that Somerville chose for his two portraits, another indication of the use of photographs to accomplish the paintings.  Sitters won’t strain their necks long enough to be painted with photographic precision from life.  He did not copy those still photos exactly, and may have taken liberties by combining elements from several different head shots,  so who knows if Somerville achieved perfect likenesses of Miss Baring.  Did Miss Baring actually pose for photographs taken by him or did he work from some long-ago black and white studio publicity shots?  Did he put her head on someone else’s body?  Who knows?  

But maybe these large-scale paintings Somerville created of the famous actress Norah Baring were never shown to the public during his lifetime.  No dates are given for their execution.  He may have done them purely for speculation or for his own amusement in the privacy of his own studio, and they went unnoticed until he died and his sisters got on the telephone with the museums to donate them.  Miss Nora (sic) Baring was donated in 1955 to Gallery Oldham in Greater Manchester, England and Norah in 1965 to The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley, England.

There was also some mystery surrounding the life of Miss Baring, with one website claiming confidently some years ago that she was killed in an auto accident in 1944 when she would have been just 39 years of age.  It was later determined that Miss Baring, who married three times, the last time in 1946, did, in fact, die in 1985, at the age of 79, in Surrey, England.

Howard Somerville, The Late Reverend Theodore Bailey Hardy (1863-1918), 1919, Oil on Canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm., Imperial War Museums, UK

Somerville painted at least a couple of commissioned posthumous portraits from photographs during his lifetime, so one can assume that he was, indeed, working as an artist.  You can see the awkward results of that work on the BBC website.  The heads are way too big for the bodies, especially on the portrait of The Late Reverend Theodore Bailey Hardy (1863-1918) which was acquired in 1919 by the Imperial War Museums organization in Britain.  Hardy was a chaplain who was killed serving in the First World War.  In addition, the BBC website lists Asa Lingard, a wealthy department store merchant in Bradford, England and big-time art collector, as the donor of two of Somerville’s paintings, in 1915 and again in 1930.

Mystery solved?  I doubt it.  But at least now I can rest easy and get back to my painting, unless and until some member of the Somerville family comes forward to clarify the matter.   Howard Somerville painted from photographs and probably got very little attention from the public during his lifetime and is getting none in posterity, other than from curiosity seekers like me.  Painters working from life in the old days were often mentioned in memoirs of their famous sitters, who described in some detail their experience of sitting for their portraits.  When you work from photographs, what can the famous client say about you?  Nothing!  You will be in good company with Howard Somerville.

The Seeing Eye

Sir Alfred J. Munnings, The Red Prince Mare, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 40 x 60 in., Private Collection

I seem to remember having discussions with fellow half-baked artists who cited binocular vision as the reason painters have an advantage over the monocular lens of the camera with respect to such things as depth perception and field of vision.   Binocular or monocular, it makes no difference.  What makes a difference is the human eye to human brain neural connection.   So far, scientists haven’t implanted into the nervous systems of cameras and computers the brain’s sensory capacity to interpret the visual world in the same way as we wise and all-powerful sentient human beings do.  But that day is coming, I’m sure.  I get the feeling now that those discussions we had in the pre-digital age were pathetically antediluvian.

But I thought it might be interesting to point out that painters with sight in only one eye have painted just as well or better than painters with two good eyes, with no apparent lack of depth perception or other visual deficiencies.  And it’s probably inappropriate for me to point out that having only one eye eliminates the double-vision painters with two eyes encounter when measuring angles or checking symmetries with the handle of a brush held at arm’s length or when using a viewfinder.  With two eyes, one eye is always dominant and you have to close the other eye to make such calculations.  At least I do.  But this so-called “binocular disparity” is said to improve the brain’s perception of depth at a distance.

I’m by no means attempting to minimize the tragedy for a painter of not having sight in one eye.  Your field of vision must be greatly reduced.  And the fear of losing the remaining good eye must be a constant and frightful worry, especially as we age and have to deal with cataracts, retinal and corneal problems, macular degeneration and all the other conditions that threaten our sight.  I’ve had successful cataract surgery in both eyes and the improvement in sight is miraculous.  Unfortunately there are no effective treatments for certain other degenerative eye disorders as of yet.

At any rate, let me touch briefly on three painters I know of who had successful careers even though they had vision in only one eye.   One painter lost sight in one eye in childhood, the other two as young men.   Did that make a difference in the brain’s ability to make sense of the visual world?  Is the brain hard-wired at birth to interpret such things as depth perception?  I personally don’t know of any painters who have been blind in one eye since birth.  But I suspect their visual experience would be the same.

The most famous of the three painters is the outstanding equestrian painter Alfred J. Munnings (1878-1959), who became one of the very best realist painters of the 20^th Century and had a fabulous and well-documented career, even though he lost the sight in his right eye in an accident when he was 20 years old.  His dazzling brushwork and drawing skills are on a par with the greatest bravura painters of the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.  Munnings was made President of the Royal Academy in 1944, the same year he was knighted, and served in that capacity until his resignation in 1949, which coincided with his highly controversial Royal Academy dinner speech denouncing all Modernist art.  The 1921 painting by Munnings reproduced above was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2007 for $7,848,000, a record for one of his works.  That’s amazing, but so is the painting, one of many masterpieces of equestrian art by Munnings, who also was a wonderful landscape and figure painter.

The illustrator and portrait painter Frank C. Bensing (1893-1983) was blind in one eye after being stricken with scarlet fever as a child, but he had a long and successful art career.  Early on he created covers for such magazines as McCall’s, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post; ads for high-profile consumer products, and movie posters for RKO Studios.  He later became a sought-after portrait painter and created landscapes for his own pleasure.  He continued to paint until the age of 88, only two years before his death at the age of 90.

And the watercolorist Irwin Greenberg (1922-2009) exhibited his work widely and was a beloved painting teacher in New York City for many years, even though he lost the sight in one eye when he was hit by shrapnel just as he had parachuted into France with the U.S. Army during the Second World War.  “Greeny” taught traditional painting skills at The High School of Art and Design, The School of Visual Arts and The Art Students League, all in  New York City.  I’ve met many of his former students and colleagues and they all speak of him with great affection and respect for his inspiring presence in their lives.  Near the end of his life, I heard that he was, indeed, concerned that an age-related eye condition might rob him of sight in his one good eye.

As I’ve discovered in researching other artists without big reputations whose careers pre-date the Internet age, there aren’t many images of the work of Bensing and Greenberg on the Web.  Both men were represented by Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City, one of the premier galleries for realist art in America from the 1920s until its demise in the early 1980s.  They had other gallery connections as well.  But most of their paintings were sold privately years ago and images are not readily available.  Bensing was a very active and accomplished portrait painter, yet I could find no really good images of that important phase of his career.  

Frank C. Bensing, Francis Trow Spaulding, 1955, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Frank C. Bensing, World War II Couple

Irwin Greenberg

Irwin Greenberg

It’s sad when one learns of painters who have been forced to give up painting when their eyesight fails before they do.  They go to remarkable lengths to continue painting until there is no sight left at all.   Here’s a link to a heartwarming video I saw recently about how one 97-year-old man continues to create art even though he is nearly blind: http://vimeo.com/70748579.

Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986) lost all but some peripheral vision by 1971 because of macular degeneration.  She bluntly expressed what most artists think about at some point in their lives when she declared, “When you get so that you can't see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn't come by it gradually, I guess you'd just kill yourself when you couldn't see.”

Painting is not a Spectator Sport

Peder Mork Monsted (1859-1941)

I don’t remember where or when I first came across the observation that “painting is not a spectator sport,” but it doesn’t matter.  I agree with it completely.  It’s so sad and annoying that painters are often forced to paint what they want to paint under the watchful eye of crowds of tourists heavily armed with image-capturing gadgets of all description.  You can’t do good work with spectators around.  The act of painting is a sacred undertaking between you and your subject, be it a still life, a landscape or a human being.  Total concentration is required.

When I was learning about Edward Cucuel and Leo Putz and their idyllic summers spent together painting pictures of young women clothed and nude in a secluded Bavarian forest in the early part of the 20^th Century, I couldn’t help feeling extremely envious of their good fortune.   What a contrast that was to my own experience of painting young women in Central Park with four of my good painting buddies over the course of seven summers, which I wrote about in an earlier post.  Of course we had to pose our models with their clothes on. 

Our easel setups arrayed before our attractive models perched on a rock in a touristy section of the park made a very picturesque mise en scene for picture taking, I must admit.  We were obliged to choose a location that was accessible by public transportation and had bathrooms nearby.  In our case, the Boathouse Restaurant bathrooms were just two minutes away.  We thought of painting in more rustic, secluded areas of the park, but those are quite a hike from the bus and subway lines and there are no nearby bathrooms.  I’m sure Putz and Cucuel had an easier time of it with their secluded lakeshore and woods just a short walk from the ramshackle Bavarian Castle that was their command central.

I can’t imagine how many photos and videos exist somewhere in never-never land showing us old-timers hard at work painting our attractive young models.  Sometimes tourists would ask if they could take pictures, but usually they just fired away.  One man hung around for half an hour shooting the scene with his video camera.  Our models were non-professionals for the most part and didn’t seem to mind being photographed.  One of our models, an ecdysiast by night, was pretty outraged initially, but she realized that it was part of the deal of posing outdoors in Central Park.  We joked about putting down a hat for donations, but we never did that.  I hear there is one woman painting in Central Park this summer who has a big sign next to her easel alerting onlookers that donations are required if pictures are taken.

Most of the comments we received from onlookers during our painting sessions were postponed until the rest breaks.  But I used to get annoyed anyway.  Like the time I was doing a pretty good job on my painting when a guy walked up to one of the other painters and said, “Yours is the best painting.”  That put me in a foul mood for a few minutes, at least.  Another time, some bimbo was hitting on the painter among us who paints like an Expressionist, while the rest of us paint realistically.  She just loved his work and wanted to buy it and was just getting over some heartbreak or other and on and on.  It was all talk, as it turned out, and good for a laugh with him later.

One of my favorite models was a wonderful guitarist and singer who had been a teenage celebrity in Israel. She was posing lying on a rock languidly one day near the Boat Lake when a young guy in a small group of tourists recognized her and shouted out, “Hey Y…”  We carried on with our painting and she carried on with her modeling after amiably acknowledging the recognition.  That was actually a lot of fun to observe.

I don’t even like painting a model with other painters in an open painting class that I attend regularly, but I’m forced to do that because I can’t afford to hire models privately.  Who wants other artists nosing around your work while you are in the throes of creation?  A dozen other artists may be painting the same model, but I’m going one-on-one with the model in an intense visual dialogue and can’t be bothered with such interruptions.  Even premature compliments can interfere with the work in progress by setting you up to fail at the end.  It’s my feeling that such unsolicited comments might be done on purpose by certain fellow artists to unsettle me.  Paranoid much?

Of course painters who teach have to demonstrate their wares before spectators.  But that is just for show normally and no serious painting is ever created during such demonstrations, although some artists do find some sucker among the rapt attendees eager to buy their demo painting. One young painter of means coughed up a thousand dollars for a demo painting by a well-known contemporary painter.  By the same token, I know an attractive woman artist who posed for a demo and begged the famous portrait painter to give her the painting, which he eventually did, whereupon she took it home and destroyed it because she hated the likeness the artist had created.  

In the old days, some painters wouldn’t let their portrait clients see their work in progress, keeping it under a drape until it was finished.   One painter I knew kept a newly finished painting under a velvet drape for an unveiling at a reception he held in his studio when he was getting his career started.  This painter was using the maroger medium and when he lifted the veil he found the surface of the painting was now pockmarked with velvet fuzz.   There’s no business like the show business.

Rowboats and Bathing Girls

Edward Cucuel

Leo Putz

The American Edward Cucuel (1875-1954) and the Tyrolean Leo Putz (1869-1940) must have been in ecstasy when they painted outdoors together in Bavaria over several summers in the early 20^th Century.  In the environs of a secluded lake, Putz was a mentor to the younger painter as they practiced their juicy, impasto brushwork on cheerful paintings of healthy young women dressed in paint-friendly summer whites or dressed not at all.   They posed their models in rowboats or just lolling around on the shore or in the surrounding forest.

Edward Cucuel

Edward Cucuel

Edward Cucuel

Leo Putz

Leo Putz

 

Leo Putz

The two men had very similar art backgrounds and aesthetic principles.  Both had studied academic painting and drawing with Adolphe Bouguereau and Benjamin Constant at the Academie Julien in Paris.  Putz began his studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, while Cucuel added Jean-Leon Gerome at the École des Beaux-Arts for good measure during his student days in Paris.  But by 1901, Putz was already a confirmed Impressionist.  And when the two men first met in Munich in 1907, Cucuel was eager to kick over the traces of academia as well.  And yet it was their solid training in drawing and paint handling that enabled them to rapidly paint their figures boldly and realistically in a direct attack on canvas.  They knew color and values.  And their figure drawing was excellent.  Even when there is some exaggeration of the pose or foreshortening problem, their figures remain convincingly human.

Cucuel was born in San Francisco.  His father was a newspaper publisher.  He enrolled at the age of 14 in the San Francisco School of Design and worked as a newspaper illustrator before traveling to Paris at the age of 17 to begin his academic training.  By 1897 or so he had set up permanent residence on the Continent.  He traveled around France, Italy and Germany and did some more newspaper illustration work in Berlin, where he met his future wife, Clara Lotte von Marcard, a painter of florals, whom he married in 1913.  When he moved to Munich in 1907 he found his true home.  He got involved with a group of artists led by Putz called “Die Scholle,” which means something like “the soil” or “tiller of the soil,” I guess.  Seems it’s hard to translate.  Cucuel painted with Putz from 1909 through 1914 during the summer months at the Hartmannsberg Castle in Bavaria, where the two comrades in art created their famous “rowing boat” and “bathing girls” paintings.  From 1914 to 1918 Cucuel lived in Holzhausen at the Ammersee (lake) in Bavaria and later had studios in Munich and Starnberg.  He spent some winters in New York, but he continued to paint pictures of ladies at leisure in the summer months in Germany until forced to leave Europe in 1939 when the war broke out.  There aren’t as many nudes in Cucuel’s later paintings, probably because he preferred to paint his family and friends, rather than professional models.  He returned to California and reportedly lived a secluded life until his death at the age of 79.

Edward Cucuel, Self-Portrait

 I had been familiar with the work of Cucuel for many years, often seeing it reproduced in the auction catalogs.  But the work of Putz is a more recent revelation.  Putz, a leading force in the German Art Nouveau and Impressionist movements, is said to have created more than 2,700 works in his lifetime.  The “Scholle” group he co-founded in 1899 is credited with spurring the development of German Expressionism.  The group’s premise was based on a reverence for nature and individualism.  The name was said to be a symbolic reference to the idea that each member should tend his own patch of soil in an individual way.  A glance at the makeup of the group can send you into some serious research about a whole bunch of interesting artists you have probably never heard of, like Adolf Munzer (1870-1953).

Adolf Munzer, Self-Portrait

Putz was said to have had a joyful, outgoing personality that made him “good company” at any social gathering and helped him on his path to great success as a painter.  “Earnest, industrious, and jovial, he radiates happiness with every movement and from the gleaming surface of each canvas that leaves his easel,” a reviewer wrote in the March 1914 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine after a visit to his Munich studio.  “The situation in summer merely com­prises a change from indoors to the more expansive freedom of sun, sky, and un­trammeled nature.  You must never dis­close the whereabouts of the secluded and sylvan retreat to which you have been suddenly transported.  Suffice to say, it is not far distant from one of those lakes that sparkle, like eyelets of the sea, upon the face of the South Bavarian land­scape. In a wing, let us say the east, or the west, of a rambling, irregular castle on the edge of a forest, Professor Putz has his congenial quarters. Here he paints, rows upon the lake, reads a bit, and, after a few salubrious months, hies back to town with a score or so of canvases instinct with the feeling of the out-of-doors­ glimpses of summer subtilized, intensified, harmonized, as only a born painter-poet can conceive them.”

Leo Putz, Self-Portrait

And Cucuel was alongside him for many such idyllic summers of painting, creating a very similar body of work, but a bit more refined, more tempered – slightly more restrained American than spirited Tyrolean, in the final analysis.

After creating scores of internationally acclaimed paintings of young women, Putz accepted an invitation to travel to South America in 1929, when he was already 60 years old.  He was fascinated by the new world of colors and people with a different culture.  He painted in Brazil and Argentina, creating a second body of work that was said to emphasize a brighter, more tropical color scheme and simpler forms.  He traveled on the back of mules to study and paint the rain forest.  He was made a professor at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Rio and was a celebrity guest of society.  His paintings from South America were the subject of a major exhibition upon his return to Munich in 1935, but I couldn’t find any examples in a cursory search of the Internet.  Putz’s work was considered “degenerate art” by the Nazis.  Perhaps most of the work in that exhibition was destroyed?  The exhibition had focused attention on Cucuel’s strong anti-Nazism views and he was forced to flee Munich for his hometown of Meran in South Tyrol, where he met with similar repression in that largely German-speaking community.  The death of this exceptional, highly acclaimed painter in 1940, at the age of 71 after an operation, was officially ignored in Italy and Germany.

You can ignore the man, but you can’t ignore the art.  Happily for lovers of beautiful, exciting figure painting, plenty of the passionate works created by Edward Cucuel and Leo Putz during those golden summer days of rapture in Bavaria and for many years thereafter have survived for our visual enjoyment.  

Painting Debris

John Singer Sargent, The Wyndham Sisters, 1899, Oil on Canvas, 115 x 84 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

There’s nothing wrong with painting twigs, weeds, leaves and other debris to fill in some areas of a painting that you have not properly accounted for in your original composition.  It’s a fine way to spice up that painting of an apple or a human being you have put smack dab in the center of your canvas with no thought other than to paint the dickens out of it, him or her.  You haven’t painted anything in two days and you have to get going on something ASAP, right?  You’ll worry about the composition tomorrow.

I enjoy painting twigs, weeds, leaves and other debris on occasion.  But you can’t get such useful props in my fashionable Upper West Side neighborhood anymore.   Twenty-five years ago, before the neighborhood became fashionable, you could get twigs, weeds, leaves and all kinds of debris for your paintings.  My neighbors were singers, dancers, musicians, composers, poets, liberal Democrats, progressive Democrats, moderate Democrats, radical Democrats, left-wing anarchists, Jules Feiffer, Stiller and Meara, Stefan Zucker (the world’s highest tenor), assorted poor people like me, and the bearded, genial, save-the-world preachy guy with the funny cap and farmer’s overalls festooned with every possible liberal-cause button he could pin on them.  It was his duty to spread the word to total strangers on the street and on the city buses.   We were all used to debris.  Now my neighbors are stock traders, investment bankers, real estate moguls and lawyers, who won’t allow twigs, weeds and other debris to sully their gentrified environment.  But the same lanky lady still walks briskly past you without stopping, asking out of the side of her mouth if you can spare any change, as she has done for the last 25 years or so.  She never gets any but she keeps on walking and asking.   All this may be beside the point, but then again, what isn’t?

I’ve gone to great lengths to acquire debris for my paintings.  I once found a 40-pound slab of asphalt (okay, maybe 30 pounds) in a dumpster that I thought would make a wonderful base for a still life painting.  It didn’t.  I was going to just toss it in the garbage, but the maintenance staff in my apartment building told me the sanitation workers wouldn’t pick it up as is.  So I had to break it apart with a hammer and fill about 10 plastic bags with the resulting debris before I could dispose of it at regular intervals over the course of a few days.  That stuff was tough to break up, which shouldn’t have surprised me because it’s designed to bear the weight of cars and trucks for a few years, at least.

Onions from Verdi Square, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20 in.

Just two blocks south of my apartment building there used to be a farmer’s market on Saturdays at Verdi Square, a little triangular park adjacent to the subway stop at 72^nd Street and Broadway.  The vendors brought in all kinds of unexpurgated produce that was so much fun to paint.  It took only a couple of minutes early Saturday morning to get to the market and I could start painting alla prima half an hour later. The market lost that space when construction began on a second subway station house about 15 years ago, and I lost a great source for natural looking produce with all the stems and leaves still attached.   I was crushed.  I needed the farmer’s market a lot more than I needed a second subway station house built to make the morning commute easier for all the Wall Street types flooding into my neighborhood.  Things were starting to go downhill before then, however, when vendors started asking customers if they wanted the tops cut off their veggies.  You bet, everybody replied.  Onions with their glorious stems and leaves were guillotined by the farmers before being put on sale at the market.  Customers started shucking their own corn right then and there and throwing the husks in a big wastebasket near the farmer’s stand, never mind that they used to tell you to keep the husks on until you are almost ready to boil the corn.  But that would mean more debris in your own apartment.  Nobody wants that. 

The other, more-distant farmer’s markets I frequent nowadays sell expurgated produce, which is not nearly as exciting to paint.  And by the time I drag the produce or flowers home I’m too tired to paint them right away, so everything wilts and decays until I get around to painting them the next morning, when the available light is most constant in my west-facing home studio.  I occasionally put the flowers in my refrigerator overnight.  I’d do it more often, but my kitchen is not well arranged.  With my nice new landlord-supplied replacement refrigerator, one of those small upright ones, I have to keep the kitchen door open so I can open the refrigerator door wide enough to pull out all the shelves in order to lower them so I can fit a vase of flowers inside.  I can’t figure out how to put the flowers in the refrigerator horizontally without crushing some of the petals, which happened when I tried it once.  Fantin-Latour never had such problems.  He was painting flowers fresh from his garden the same morning he cut them at his summer home in a little French village called Bure in Normandy.

Pasquale Civiletti, Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) monument, 1906, Kenneth Ritvo for The Wall Street Journal

Verdi Square, by the way, is home for my favorite public monument in the city, the sculpture of the great Verdi himself, with four figures from his famous operas encircled below his majestic standing figure.  Much of the year, the sculpture is obscured by twigs, weeds, leaves and pigeon droppings, and goes unnoticed by passersby.  Before its cleaning a couple of years ago, it received even less notice.  And in the 1960s and early 1970s, heroin users made Verdi Square and a small companion triangle named Sherman Square just south of it such a popular destination that together they were referred to as “Needle Park.” 

Filling in the blank spaces around your center of interest has been a problem for even the best of painters.  Wasn’t it Rubens who had a snappy retort for the man who introduced him to the young Van Dyck with the words, “And he already knows how to paint backgrounds.”  “Then he knows more than I do,” Rubens replied, or words to that effect.  Rubens had a lot of help on backgrounds from a host of able studio assistants, as well as from Jan Brueghel the Elder, who painted flowers and other decorative trappings on some collaborative works.

Maurice Grosser, Onions, 1940, 15 x 20 in., Private Collection

The modernist painter Maurice Grosser (1903-1986), who wrote four books on painting, was an art critic for The Nation and devised the scenarios for two operas by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947), was so vexed by backgrounds that at one point in his career he decided to just eliminate them and paint his still life subjects right up to the edges of his canvases.

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665, 18 x 15 in., Mauritshuis Gallery in The Hague

Grosser, by the way, in his book The Painter’s Eye (1951), suggested the most intriguing theory I’ve ever come across on how Vermeer might have created his perplexedly smooth surfaces with their completely fused edges, which Grosser likened to “eggshell lacquer.”  Even the little sparkling highlight dots have soft edges.  Grosser speculated that Vermeer might have employed the technique of baking his paintings in a slow oven, as the notorious forger Han Van Meegeren did in the 1930s and early 1940s before being arrested.  Grosser wondered:  “Could it have been that Vermeer himself painted in some soft varnish medium, and subjected the finished picture to a cooking process such as this, which softened his paint, caused it to run slightly…and in this unorthodox way produced the even surface and fusion of edges which made his pictures so different from all others?  Strange as this conjecture may seem, and improbable as I believe it to be, it is not entirely impossible.” He justified his speculation by noting that very little is known about some of the 16^th and 17^th century painting methods.  I’m always dumbstruck at how I can’t see one brushstroke in Vermeer’s paintings, even with my nose right up against the surface.  His paintings are simply immune to any sensible talk about paint handling.

Grosser, given his avant-garde sympathies, didn’t appreciate the more brutal edges created by the brushwork of bravura painters like Boldini, Sargent and Zorn, many of whom threw in a lot of “debris” to fill in the blanks of their exuberant paintings.

John Singer Sargent, Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1886, Oil on Canvas, Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen (Normandy), 32 ¼ x 19 ¼ in., inscribed u.l. “a mon ami Blanche”

Jacques-Emile Blanche, Jean Cocteau

Jacques-Emile Blanche, Henry James, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 39.25 x 31.73 in., National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Sargent’s treatment of substantial areas of nothing happening in his large portraits came in for some scathing commentary by Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), a wonderful painter who employed a direct painting technique for portraiture not unlike that of Boldini, and Sargent, himself, on occasion.  Blanche knew the art scene of France and England very well and wrote two memoirs, which include many trenchant comments about the artists of his day.  In his highly entertaining and acerbic Portraits of a Lifetime (1938), Blanche wrote a couple of interesting pages about Sargent, which included this caustic observation: “Covering a surface with forms and lines in a definite pattern was beyond Sargent’s powers; he invoked the aid of the dressmaker and the florist and filled in holes with the help of pieces of furniture; satin and velvet flowed in cascades, cushions bulged like Zeppelins on sofas, azaleas moved from vases to urns, and arum lilies added a white note to a park-like background that Marcus Stone would not have rejected.”  Sargent and Blanche had been good friends.  Blanche tells of one visit to Sargent's studio when Sargent asked his advice about a portrait he was having trouble with.  Sargent was already dead 13 years when this memoir was published, so the mourning period had obviously passed for Blanche.  The Marcus Stone (1840-1921) Blanche cattily referred to was a popular English painter of sentimental pictures of young lovers in park settings.
 

Marcus Stone, In Love, Oil on Canvas, Nottingham Art Gallery (U.K.)

Getting a good design for a painting from the get-go is not an easy task for alla prima painters.  So go ahead and load up your canvases with lots of twigs, weeds, leaves and other debris, just like the best of them did, and enjoy painting again.