Just Another Yoke

Among the rare, distinct pleasures for a low-income artist living in Manhattan are the free auction exhibits of 19^th Century and American Art held a couple of times a year by Sotheby’s and Christie’s.  You can always find a few great paintings that you will never see again once they revert back to private ownership.  And it’s fun to come across excellent work by artists who never quite make it to the Big Leagues.  I have seen many of these exhibits in the past 30 years and have acquired hundreds of used auction catalogs as well.

I recently had the pleasure of viewing the latest American Art exhibit at Christie’s and saw some terrific landscape paintings.  In particular, I lingered over paintings by Daniel Garber, Edgar Payne, Oscar Berninghaus, Granville Redmond, Maurice Braun, Julian Onderdonk, John Leslie Breck, Edward Redfield and Willard Metcalf.

Daniel Garber (1880-1958), Over the Hill, 1917, 30x25

Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947), High Sierra, Big Pine Canyon

Edward Willis Redfield, (1869-1965), Hillside and Valley, Point Pleasant, 28x32 1/4

Granville Redmond (1871-1935), Snow Cap Spring, 1927, 20x24

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899), At Annisquam, 1894, 18x22

Julian Onderdonk (1882-1922), Blue Bonnets at Twilight, 1918, 22x40

Maurice Braun (1877-1941), Evening Light

Oscar Berninghaus (1874-1952), A Field in Taos, 18x24

Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925), May Pastoral, 1907, 36x39

What strikes me about all these painters is they found their own way to interpret the beauty of nature.  They did not attempt to copy somebody else’s stylistic approach, which seems to be the standard procedure for today’s artists working in all genres who aren’t copying photographs.  These earlier painters were obviously influenced by the color theories occasioned by the Impressionist work of Monet and other French painters.  But the Americans retained the form of the natural world in a way the average picture lover could appreciate without having to see the paintings encased in expensive Louis XV frames.  The result was the production of some of the most beautiful landscape paintings you have ever seen. 

Willard Metcalf, The Green Canopy, 1908, 29x26

I remember being amazed by a Metcalf painting I saw in a gallery a few years ago that really increased my already great admiration for the painter.  He had chosen to paint a woodland interior scene that seemed an impossible subject to paint.  But he did an incredibly masterful job of it in his own way.  I don’t know how he did it.  I only know that I was awed by the fact that he had pulled it off.  Carlson’s book on landscape painting isn’t going to help you one bit.  You have to figure it out for yourself.

Vincent Van Gogh expounded on this idea brilliantly in a passionate letter to his brother Theo on Sept. 3, 1882 regarding a recent landscape painting:

“Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground — yet that ground is very dark — in addition red, yellow, brown ochre, black, terra sienna, bistre, and the result is a red-brown that varies from bistre to deep wine-red and to pale, blond reddish. Then there are also mosses and an edge of fresh grass that catches the light and sparkles brightly and is very difficult to get. There at last you have a sketch which — whatever may be said about it — I maintain has some meaning, says something.

While making it I said to myself: let me not leave before there’s something of an autumn evening in it, something mysterious, something with seriousness in it.  However, because this effect doesn’t last, I had to paint quickly. The figures were done with a few vigorous strokes with a firm brush — in one go. I was struck by how firmly the slender trunks stood in the ground — I began them using a brush, but because of the ground, which was already impasted, one brushstroke simply disappeared. Then I squeezed roots and trunks into it from the tube, and modelled them a little with the brush. Yes, now they stand in it — shoot up out of it — stand firmly rooted in it.

In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint. Probably then I would have learned to ignore effects like this. Now I say, no, that’s exactly what I want — if it’s not possible then it’s not possible — I want to try it even though I don’t know how it’s supposed to be done. I don’t know myself how I paint.”

Oh, Vincent, how your words resonate with me!  This is one great artist that posterity definitely was right about.  It’s high time for today’s landscape painters to throw over the yoke of instruction from workshops, DVDs, YouTube videos, Internet blogs and books, and paint with their hearts, not just their heads, which are filled with all the rules and regulations they had no part in formulating.  Maybe you won’t become another Van Gogh, but at least you will have learned how to think about painting on your own.  And if you are luckier than him, you may even sell a few paintings.

Romance in Art

Not many of us will come to know “The Romance of an Art Career” as did Joseph Cummings Chase (1878-1965), who wrote the book on it in 1928.  Chase was an indefatigable, multifaceted artist who was quite a schmoozer in his day, hobnobbing with scads of personages in the fields of politics, entertainment and finance in the early years of the 20^th Century.

He began his career as a teenager sketching portraits at political conventions for a newspaper, and then worked as an illustrator for magazines and book publishers.  He taught art and design in colleges and wrote and lectured about it at every opportunity, it seems.  He also created the concept of dramatic retail window displays for fashionable stores like Saks Fifth Avenue.   But above all, Chase was a prominent and prolific portrait painter and sketcher, with a gift for getting a likeness, who estimated he had already painted or sketched about 6,000 portraits at the time “Romance” was published.  

Joseph Cummings Chase, “Henry Morgenthau,” 

Oil on artist board, 1918, National Portrait Gallery

In Chase’s art world, there are no long-haired, lank-limbed aesthetes consulting their muses for inspiration.  Uh-uh!  You have to work like you are on some artistic chain gang from Dante’s “Inferno,” with no relief in sight.  Chase wrote that he had, on several occasions, painted three oil portraits in one day, each of them from a three-hour sitting.  And the last one he painted, at the point of total exhaustion, usually turned out to be the best one, which he could only ascertain on the morning after.  That’s not the half of it.

In a chapter sarcastically titled, “The Artist Works When He Feels Like It,” he describes several instances of extreme deadline pressures he and others have had to work under.  His biggest challenge was a commission in 1927 to paint nine oil portraits in five days of the principal cast members of a new Broadway musical, “Golden Dawn,” for the lobby of the newly constructed Hammerstein Theater, which is now the “Ed Sullivan Theater,” where the David Letterman show is taped.  The musical, produced by Arthur Hammerstein, son of Oscar Hammerstein I, had been out of town in Philadelphia, so Chase painted three cast members there on a Friday and Saturday in their tiny backstage dressing rooms.  Back in New York he had to set up painting paraphernalia in three different locations to paint the rest of the cast.   He just managed to get all the portraits framed and hung in the lobby an hour before the Wednesday evening premiere, which he sat through in his sweaty work attire at the command of Hammerstein.  As a prelude to describing this incredible feat, Chase said he almost had to turn down the job because he had been working “19 or 20 hours a day” for three weeks on a 55-foot long mural that had to be finished on the day he would start this new assignment.   

All this talk of hard work might have been a subtle hint to dissuade young people from entering the profession, since he believed the art schools were already filled to overflowing with untalented students who were looking for an easy route to success.   They only enrolled at their mothers’ urging because the kids weren’t fit to do anything else.  Chase wrote that thousands of art students “will never surmount the early obstacles, and only hundreds of them will find a better than average living in this art game." 

So he proceeds to offer some practical career advice for beginning artists in a chapter titled “What Is This Art Game?”  He lists the various career options in the following order:  design, illustration, advertising art, landscape painting, and portrait painting.  Chase was big on the attributes of decorative design in paintings, textiles, costumes, labels, posters and such, and wrote a textbook on the subject that was published in 1915 when he was an instructor at the City College of New York and at the Cooper Union College for Women.

Ernest Blumenschein, “Sangre de Cristo Mountains, 1925

Chase has some valuable comments on color in a chapter titled “Why All This Confusion About Color?”  He begins with an interesting anecdote about the time he was painting alongside the wonderful Taos painter Ernest Blumenschein at the Académie Julian in Paris.  Blumenschein was returning to the school to refresh his skills upon deciding to leave the illustration field “to be a real painter.”  His painting was proceeding rapidly, but “Blumy,” was cursing and groaning.  “The dreadful thing about it is that I have been working in black and white so long I can’t paint in color,” he told Chase.  “I have been exaggerating the dark and light so long, for the purposes of reproduction, that I just can’t see anything any other way.”  But Chase said Blumy persisted, “and the rich, clean color of his canvases has long since become notable.”

Chase was an advocate of the simple red-yellow-blue palette to mix any colors you want, and his choices were rose-madder, lemon-yellow and French ultramarine light.  He writes that white with a tint of lemon-yellow is lighter than white paint because white paint reflects only fifty to sixty percent of the light that strikes it, while a tint of lemon yellow reflects seventy-one percent.  And he explains why green is the only color that will darken the shadows and folds in a red dress without changing the quality of the red to something other than red.  Chase discusses a few other color matters and wonders “why these things were never told me by my instructors in art school in New York, in Philadelphia and in Paris.  He said art school instructors teach many things to be grateful for, but speak usually in generalities concerning “feeling, atmosphere and beauty,” and make few “statements of fact.”  I wish that Chase, himself, who was dean of the Hunter College Art Department in the 1930s, had been a little more precise about that red and green business.  It’s hard to get those deeper red accents to look great, in my experience, anyway, and I paint very few pictures that feature a strong red, other than the occasional tomato

Joseph Cummings Chase, Ruth Draper, Actress

Chase didn’t appreciate the public’s attitude about artists, summarizing it in this manner:  “The artist, then, is a person who seldom does a day’s work, who can always be picked out because of his effeminate build and his queer tie, and who is just the slave of the successful advertising mogul.  But no!  In reality the artist who has earned a reputation and has arrived is one who has acquired the habit of hard work, whose union hours are ten or twelve, or even more.   There are many whose last vacation was so many years ago that it is entirely forgotten.”

“Romance” is full of interesting anecdotes and observations about the art of portrait painting as it was practiced in his day.  No photographs, please.  A photograph “gives only one impression of the subject.  A portrait may give many, hence the possibility of revealing much more of the person.”  And only one of 12 photographs may produce a good likeness, he says.  An oil portrait painted from life over an extended period allows the painter to observe and capture the “characteristics and personal attributes” of the sitter that set him apart from his fellows.  He agreed with Sargent that a little bit of a caricature of certain features makes for a better likeness than a photograph or slavish photographic rendering.  I couldn’t agree more.  I used to draw at the League sketch classes years ago alongside a very good caricature artist.  One day after finishing a 20-minute sketch of the model he proclaimed, “That’s the way he really looks.”   I thought so, too.

In Chase’s view, getting a likeness is a gift that few students in art schools possess, and “among artists in general, there are not many whose batting average in this respect of getting likenesses is over .300.”  He could be talking about today’s “practicing” portrait artists and students when he states:  “If portraits were just a matter of photographic exactness, the only requirement would be an ability to draw accurately; but accuracy of drawing is at best a matter of mathematics, which might produce a work very much akin to a death mask, and bear as little resemblance.” 

His affinity for capturing a likeness came in handy during World War I when, under the most trying of circumstances, he painted 142 portraits of soldiers and senior commanders, including Sergeant York, General Pershing and Marshal Foch.  He painted military figures from World War II and Korea, as well.  Some of the other prominent personalities he painted during his long career included Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Will Rogers, Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, Rin Tin Tin and the tennis star Helen Wills, who wanted to pursue an art career herself and asked him a lot of questions about the business.  Many of his portraits appeared as illustrations in two other books he wrote, “My Friends Look Better Than Ever” (1950) and “Face Value” (1962).  A number of his portrait sketches are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

Chase chatted comfortably with his important sitters while painting them, and lived to write about those chats.  He tells of bantering one day with William Jennings Bryan, who was pestering him to do his portrait.  It was in the spring of 1920 and Chase was scheduled to do a portrait of then Senator Harding in Washington.  Bryan, whom Chase had sketched at several Democratic National Conventions, came up to the table where Chase was with friends and said, “Hello, Chase, what are you doing here,”  “I came down to make a painting of the next President of the United States,” Chase replied.  “When do you want me to pose for it?” said Bryan.   Everybody laughed, including Chase, who replied, “Not this time.”  “Why not?”   “Well, said Chase, “I think the trouble may have something to do with your politics.  What are you now, anyhow?”  The good-natured banter went on a bit longer and Bryan finally got Chase to agree to paint his portrait, which was commenced at 7 a.m. sharp in Chase’s hotel room the very next morning.

Chase, who was born at Kents Hill, Maine and resided in Milwaukee from 1955 until his death in 1965, studied art at Pratt Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before studying under Jean Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. 

He seems to have loved talking and writing about painting almost as much as he loved painting.  His books have already been mentioned, and several articles written by him are referenced on the Internet.  I came across an old newspaper clipping from The St. Petersburg Times dated December 13, 1928, which I have attached here in an effort to flesh out his career.  It’s an interesting flashback to a far different world, and worth a read.  At the end of the article, mention is made of the Jack Shilkret Orchestra, a terrific novelty ensemble in the Roaring 20’s.   Here’s a link to an entertaining YouTube video featuring one of their big hit records:  http://youtu.be/afVmUHmAUDI

Joseph Cummings Chase, “Red Cross Nurse,1922,OSAntiques

Despite all the work he produced in his lifetime, I couldn’t find many images on the Internet that would give a fair assessment of his long and successful painting career.  I did find an image of a painting of a WWI Red Cross nurse that is pretty good.  It’s for sale on the art marketing website Etsy for $1,200.

Pardon me for thinking this way, but perhaps we would know a bit more about Chase today if he had used a little less perspiration and a little more inspiration to produce his paintings.   But what the heck, he was much celebrated during his lifetime, greatly in demand for the very accomplished portraits he loved to paint, and far too busy to worry about posterity.  

This Anglo-Saxon artist did concede, a bit grudgingly, I feel,  the role of emotion in the creation of art.  He wrote that artists can "enjoy" and "be happier than other people" at the risk of encountering "the dark side of the picture... But no art worker with the soul of an artist ever wishes that he had chosen another career.” 

A Brave New Pixelated World

Some guy, a clinical sociologist, I think, surmised a few years ago that we are spending so many hours in front of our television and computer screens that we will eventually lose our sense of depth perception, and cars will be banging into each other on the freeways with great regularity.  We’ll probably have those “smart cars” before that happens.  But it should be obvious to everybody that the lens of a film or digital camera flattens and compresses space and form and exaggerates detail and color, among other optical aberrations.  The resulting images bear little resemblance to the way things look to us in the natural world. 


An event recounted by Wade Davis, a western advocate for the world's indigenous cultures, illustrates this truth very well.  It seems that a group of five missionaries were attempting to make contact with an indigenous tribe in Ecuador in 1957.  They first dropped 8x10 glossy photographs of themselves into the rainforest as a peaceful gesture of introduction.  The tribesmen had never seen a two-dimensional image before.  They turned the photos every which way looking for form and figure but found nothing.  So they concluded the photographs "were calling cards from the devil," says Davis, and when the missionaries arrived in person they were speared to death by the tribesmen. 

Now you could argue that the same thing would have happened to Rembrandt if he had ever ventured out of Amsterdam to drop a self-portrait into the same rainforest, but I would have to strongly disagree, although not from behind the point of a spear.  I'm a peaceful advocate for oil painting from life, which enabled Rembrandt to capture the impression of his real form and figure on canvas so convincingly that it would surely have elicited smiles of recognition from even the most obstreperous of indigenous tribesmen.

There is no doubt, however, that the civilized world’s sense of visual reality is being challenged subliminally by the virtual reality encapsulated in the multitude of electronic image devices that permeate our daily lives.  We already can’t tell whether images seen on a screen are the real thing or fake.   Computer-generated imagery is so advanced that a video showing crowds of people feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square can be produced entirely in a studio in Burbank with all the elements layered seamlessly into the scene via electronic pixels.   Many purported on-location interviews seen on news programs are actually done in the studio with computer-integrated video of the actual scene playing in the background.  Computer graphics software now enables artists to produce professional looking films, graphics and fine art from their home computers.  Natural looking landscapes and realistically animated images are part of the CGI portfolio.  Photoshopped images abound in the electronic and print media without attracting undue censure from the public. 

 

Bush-Kerry Morph, http://vhil.stanford.edu/projects/

Zoe, A Digital Talking Head, http://youtu.be/kOil2HSDq0E

Computer morphed or digitally simulated people look just like real human beings on the screen nowadays and can easily fool us into believing they are, indeed, composed of flesh and blood.  We can’t tell the difference, and frankly, Scarlett, we just don’t give a damn.  “Everything is so sharp.  It has to be real.”  We believe the high-definition images on television and our home computers to be a more accurate portrayal of an event than what we witness with our own eyes, which we primarily use now to stare at the tiny screens on our cell phones, iPods and tablet computers when we are out and about. 

We are in the midst of a truly amazing assault on human visual perception.  This brave new world composed of nothing but pixels is part of the ongoing campaign to replace human intelligence with artificial intelligence for all critical thinking.  So what, says the human race, this electronically “pixelated” world is a far more entertaining place to live in than the world of our ancestors, who only had boring things like flowers growing in the backyard and sunrises and sunsets to gaze upon in their leisure hours.

Art and Commerce

Everybody loves to paint pictures.  The “Joy of Painting” is in full bloom in this country.  The late Bob Ross would be so proud of the burgeoning industry he helped create.  The Internet is awash with artist’s websites, blogs and how-to videos promoting this extremely pleasurable activity.   Scratch one cheerleading blog and it leads to 20 others.  Making art is an all-consuming passion.  And it helps keep our minds off troubling world affairs that we can’t do anything about anyway.    

The problem is what to do with all the paintings you create.  You can’t sell them all, and sometimes you can’t even give them away.  Storage capacity is never adequate.  It is hard to believe people are so blind to their merits, considering all the heart and soul and enthusiasm that went into creating them.  But even you don’t like them so much after you are done with them.   Then when you dig one out of storage years later, it looks better than anything you are painting today.  What happened to the joy of painting?

As a self-employed artist, I must try to sell my paintings.  Despite my deep love of the painting process and unabashed conviction that I am a companion on a spiritual journey with the great painters who came before, I must candidly admit that my traditional oil paintings are way down on the list of essentials for a civilization survival kit. 

Nonetheless, many people still like to decorate their walls with paintings of one sort or another.  And a few collectors get genuine emotional satisfaction from looking at original oil paintings that fall within their highly selective aesthetic range.  We are fortunate if our work attracts one or two of them when we are getting started.  The rent must be paid and art supplies replenished, after all. 

Art investors, on the other hand, like to speculate that the painter they collect will be the next Jean Paul Basquiat or Gerhard Richter, and that a fortune awaits at Sotheby’s or Christie’s when their work is ultimately put up for auction.   You may have heard that Richter’s enormous, tediously worked, purposely fuzzy, black and white oil painting copy of a black and white photograph of a Milan plaza recently sold for $37 million at Sotheby’s, setting a new auction record for a living artist.  The buyer was a Napa Valley vineyard owner who said the 9 foot square work “just knocks me over.” The previous owners of this painting probably felt the same way, as will the next owner of this painting.  These great works of contemporary art are so beloved by their owners that they like to recycle them through the auction houses on a regular basis to give others the chance to get “knocked over” before they arrive at their final destination, some world-class museum as a generous, fully tax-deductible bequest from the estate of a prominent collector. 

These investors tend not to come knocking on the studio doors of painters of traditional subject matter – onions, apples, blue and white ginger jars, and the like.  I don’t really care.  I’ve never had much interest in making money, but I’ve always made sure I’ve had just enough of it to get by on so I can continue painting pictures.   And I don’t consider myself a disillusioned artist at all, since I’ve never marketed my work hard enough to get to that state of discontent.

Unlike a lot of artists I’ve met, however, I’ve never had a family to support.   Too many talented young artists have had to work full time in other fields to support their families.  One guy I knew supported his family by painting houses for a living, while continuing to paint still lifes in his spare time.  Louie was a passionate Italian with a rugged face and broken nose, who was prone to brief episodic seizures when startled by someone’s approach.  Louie couldn’t get gallery representation for his paintings.  He told me he was making the rounds of the Midtown galleries with his portfolio one day and was getting rejections at all of them.  When he walked into one gallery, the elderly owner took one look at him and cried out, “Michelangelo,” and fainted dead away.  The Avon ladies get much better receptions cold-calling their products.  The last time I saw Louie he told me he was no longer painting pictures.  “I’m not going to paint any more pictures until I’ve sold all the ones I’ve already painted,” he said.  Good luck with that!

Some of us “starving artists” envy the way painters have been treated in other countries, particularly those in the Communist bloc during the Cold War era.  Those terrific Russian artists had to paint a few pro forma portraits of Lenin and Stalin, of course, but they had plenty of art supplies and models and time to paint some beautiful figurative paintings, being descendants of the great Repin and Kramskoi, giants of painting from the pre-Soviet era whose influence continues today in Russia and China.  A similar system of largesse for artists was operated by the Dutch government for years.  Unlike the Russians, though, the liberal Dutch may have been too generous.  Many of the artists spent most of their time lolling around cafés in the 1970s, I was told.  The last of the subsidies ended in 2012.   Here in America, I am hopelessly lost in the unprincipled aisles of capitalism’s free market. 

For those of us smitten by Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit” and similar inspirational pep talks, it is unfortunate that most people don’t care at all if the painting they buy was painted entirely from life by an artist using his own two eyes and brain and brush handling skills to interpret the scene before him.  They don’t care if the painting was copied from a photograph or created entirely on a computer.  It doesn’t matter.  If it looks good, it is good, paraphrasing Duke Ellington’s quote about music.  As with most things in this morally bankrupt world, the bottom line is Machiavelli’s observation that the end justifies the means, no matter how mechanical and inartistic the result may seem to more sentient beings like yours truly.  Most folks just want their paintings, prints, posters, photographs or collages  to remind them of their beloved pet dog, a trip to the Mojave Desert, a scene in a Disney movie, a ride on a San Francisco cable car, or whatever.  Nostalgia is a powerful sentiment.  

Peonies, Oil on Canvas, 20x24"

Meanwhile, your own pretty good painting of peonies, which you knocked out in three hours in the throes of intense passion before the flowers wilted, and which warranted a victory dance to the crescendo of the tune playing on your cassette tape deck, better match the color of the client’s walls or it’s not leaving your studio.  That’s the reality we learn early on in our careers.  You resign yourself to the fact that two framed “original” oil paintings produced in some sweat shop in China and purchased for a total of $50 at a mall warehouse in suburban New Jersey are about all the fine art most people can take in one lifetime.  You want a copy of any oil painting ever painted?  Just click on one of those Chinese art factory websites.  Some people combine their vacation cruises with a trip to the ocean liner’s art salon where the wares of “internationally known” artists are hawked immodestly.

Before dealers took control of the art market in the late 19^th Century and opened Pandora’s box, the only subjects fit for painting were fruits and vegetables, flowers, trees, mountain ranges, buildings and people.  And the paintings had to look pretty close to the real thing as it existed in nature or you wouldn’t be getting much business in that earlier fiefdom of artists.  Now you can paint anything you feel like any way you want using any reference material at your disposal, call your work original art and sell tons of it, providing you are adept at marketing and self-promotion and are in several top-notch galleries around the country.

So how does an ethical oil painter who wants to remain true to his abiding love of creating paintings only from life, taking all his inspiration from nature, just as Robert Henri and his contemporaries did, fare in a market where “skim milk masquerades as cream” and anything goes and nobody cares?  Don’t ask me right now.  I’m thinking about troublesome world affairs that I can’t do anything about either.

Provenance: Artist's Studio, Dumpster, Gentleman of Title

The comfortable old wooden benches in the lobby of The Art Students League have served to rest the weary bones of thousands of artists over the years, including many whose days in the sun were behind them.  They enjoyed occasionally revisiting the place that inspired them to begin their lifelong love affair with art when they were young and energetic and ready to conquer the world.  It's the same scene today.  And not insignificantly for all of us loyal to our “alma mater,” you can always count on the League's restrooms if the need arises when you are out and about in the Midtown area.

Often, the last time you will see League acquaintances is when they are sitting on one of those benches.  Some years ago a retired Brooklyn high school art teacher I knew pretty well from the members’ sketch classes was sitting there on a Friday evening looking very pale and extremely worn out.  I asked her how she was feeling and she said she was fine, just a little tired.  It turned out she had walking pneumonia and died a couple of days later.  I still regret not having called for an ambulance right then and there.   An artist I know well told me that a good friend and classmate of his at the School of Visual Arts in the early 1950s was sitting on a bench one afternoon and casually announced, “I’ve got leukemia.”   “Jerry, that’s terrible,” the artist replied.  “Wait right here.   I’m just going to my locker.  I’ll be right back.”  When he got back to the lobby a moment later his friend was gone and he never saw him alive again.   Probably every League artist has a favorite bench story or two in their book of memories.

Many of the bench sitters I got acquainted with in my first years at the League in the 1980s were Second World War veterans who had studied at the League under the GI Bill.  A fair number of them took jobs in commercial art after their training.

One of those veterans was Arthur “Artie” Albert.  He was a bench regular  in the late afternoon for several years, always wearing his Greek fisherman’s cap and holding a sketch book and a pencil or pen in his hands.  Artie, who studied with Reginald Marsh at the League, had recently retired from his work as a comic book artist.   His own work had a somewhat comical slant to it, as well.  He tended to sketch or paint intricate, multi-figured scenes of a surreal nature.  One piece that he was working on for a long time showed a populous nudist colony being buzzed by a low-flying, banner-streaming, single-engine airplane.  The drawing was excellent and it was fun to explore all the action going on within the sketch, accompanied by Artie’s witty “balloon” text.

As he was color-blind, I think he avoided working from live models in his later years.  But he enjoyed viewing the work of other painters, often stopping by the Saturday members’ painting class to take a look at how I and my friends were doing.  He loved to tell stories from his student days.  One I like to retell involved Morris Kantor, a Russian-born painter who taught at the League in the 1940s and 50s.  It seems one of his students, a woman of means, was working on a painting with unusual zeal.  As Kantor walked over, she began babbling enthusiastically about her very original idea, saying it was inspired by a wonderful dream she had the night before.  Kantor took a good look at the painting and said, “It don’t verk!”  And that was that.  In years past, crusty old painting teachers did not mince words if the student work was truly worth nothing, unlike the gentler approach favored by today’s more youthful cadre of instructors.

Artie, a bachelor, had enough money to live reasonably well in retirement, it seems.  And to the best of my knowledge, he made absolutely no effort to market his own accomplished paintings and sketches in his later years.  But he continued to make art until his unexpected death in 1987 at the early age of 68.

Artie's good friend Phil Alfieri, whom I wrote about in a previous blog entry, told me later that when Artie's family came up from Florida to attend to his affairs, everything was thrown into a dumpster on the street outside his studio.  Phil told me that shortly after the disposal, a neighbor was seen rummaging through the dumpster, salvaging a lot of Artie’s paintings and drawings.  The next thing you know, some of Artie's work was being put up for auction.  Ask/ART, a subscription website that tracks auction records for artists, states that 17 paintings in all were put up for auction.  I have no further information about this affair.  All the people who knew Artie well are probably gone by now.  And I’m not about to pay Ask/ART for the privilege of delving deeper into their scant auction records and zero biographical information on Artie,  who they confidently say was “known for: genre, figure-dance-nude, surreal.”

I never saw any of Artie’s finished works, but I knew he could draw as well as anybody, inspired by his teacher, Marsh, a famous American artist celebrated for his figurative line work.  And I learned in researching this tale that Artie was an excellent painter as well.  He was a pretty private guy and apparently just enjoyed making art without all the hassle of the New York gallery scene.

Arthur Albert, "Sin," Dimensions and Media Unknown

Arthur Albert, “Gallery of Faces,” Pastel, ink and pencil on paper. Back of sheet inscribed in pencil Arthur Albert ,  5 1/8 x 10 ¾”.

I could only find two images of his work on the public Internet.  One of them, titled “Gallery of Faces,” was listed in Sotheby’s auction archives as part of Lot 999, “Arcade Furniture and Decorative Works of Art: Including a Fine Collection of Fine Canes and Chess Sets from a Gentleman of Title.”  I’m guessing that this "Gentleman of Title” was not the person who allegedly did the dumpster diving to salvage Artie’s work. Estimated at $600 to $900, the work sold for $1,200 at auction on June 16, 2004.

Ask/ART tells me that the highest price for one of Artie’s works was recorded on June 1, 1989, two years after his death.  I don’t know the amount, but you could find out for yourself if you pay them their “economy” artist rate of $16.50 a month.  And you could then see six other images of his work on their website.   

Arthur Albert, “Artie” to his friends and acquaintances, isn’t one of those artists who become famous after their death, but at least he got his name listed in Sotheby’s auction records.   That is a fact worth noting for those of us on the waiting list for a dumpster.

Zuloaga Paints Patterns

Ignacio Zuloaga, Self-Portrait, 1942

Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (1870-1945) was an exceptional painter whose solid, largely earth-toned figure and genre paintings served for many Spanish critics and devotees as a kind of sober antidote to the sun-filled brilliance of the work of his contemporary, the great Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923).  Both were drawn to depicting scenes from the culture and folklore of their native land, but with very different means to that end.  Arguments raged over which artist captured the true soul of Spain in his work, the Valencian Sorolla or the Basque Zuloaga.  Sorolla employed his impressionistic, lightning-fast bravura brushwork mainly in the great outdoors to depict Spain as a land of sunny days and happy people.  Zuloaga’s Spain was a darker, more introspective place.

Portrait of Maurice Barres on Toledo Background, 1913

Gregorio in Sepulveda, 1908

Zuloaga was primarily a studio painter in the tradition of the Old Masters he revered and often referenced in his work, particularly Velasquez, Goya and El Greco.  His 1913 portrait of the French writer and nationalist politician Maurice Barres, author of “El Greco, or the Secret of Toledo,” pays homage to El Greco’s iconic view of that city painted some 300 years earlier. Many of Zuloaga’s paintings have a similar tonality.  His superb handling of the earth colors marvelously captures their sincere, natural beauty.  I have long felt that the earth colors have a spiritual quality to them.   No other pigments can match them for depicting human flesh.  We are of the earth and therefore the earth pigments are of us.

One of the things that fascinate me about Zuloaga’s paintings is his handling of the complicated fabric patterns he often used decoratively in his figure work, which has been characterized by many reviewers as “theatrical” in nature, and that’s a pretty good description. 

He didn’t slavishly copy these textile designs, as seems to be the practice of most of today’s photographic realists.  It’s a mystery to me how he was able to paint intricate patterns so boldly, precisely and convincingly from life without apparent effort.  Did he do a careful preparatory drawing of the exact shapes with a mannequin in place?  Did he alter the shapes to suit the composition?  Did he just invent some of the patterns?  How long did he work on those textile designs?  There is a similar boldness and solidity to his figures, as well, so his approach to painting these textile patterns seems entirely appropriate. 

In a 1916 book for a touring exhibition in America of Zuloaga’s paintings, the author, his friend Rita de Acosta Lydig, a beautiful American socialite who was famously painted by Sargent, Boldini, and Zuloaga himself, gives some indication that these patterns were primarily aesthetic creations in keeping with the painter’s “love of arabesque, of formal distribution and balance.”  She says Zuloaga made no preliminary sketches and used only written notes to suggest future compositions, which he undertook only after long deliberation and not until the spirit moved him.  He began his work with a bold charcoal drawing of the main outlines of the subject on a canvas toned a light gray.  From then on he painted without hesitation, employing a limited color palette to depict his subjects with firm contours in a manner she described as “sculptural.”

Zuloaga told her during one of their many conversations that he abhorred “with all my being mere slavish fidelity to fact -- the stupid and servile expedient of those who are content simply to copy nature.  I hold that the painter is entitled to arrange, compose, magnify, and exalt those elements that go to make up a given scene.   How is it possible for anyone still to believe that we should prostrate ourselves before actuality, especially today when we have at our disposal the camera, the cinematograph and color photography…The longer I live the more I detest those trivial, snapshot effects without a trace of individuality, of strangeness, or imaginative force.”

Zuloaga’s attitude, expressed so long ago, was perhaps influenced by the presumed but unproven use of the camera by his rival Sorolla.   It’s too bad he isn’t around to give this lecture today, broadcast live in HD in movie theaters in every city, to a stadium full of today’s photographic realists, who are bent on capturing every pore on the surface of human skin almost as well as any digital camera can.  But I guess it would just be a hopeless cause.

Whether Zuloaga invented his fabric patterns out of “whole cloth,” or altered the actual patterns significantly to suit the rhythmic composition of his paintings, this integrated, decorative work is truly amazing.  It seems to have been accomplished effortlessly in the course of his painting, and not as the result of some masochistic ritual.

I’m enormously impressed, regrettably, by painters who have the stamina and brush control necessary to paint fabric from life in great detail -- folds, patterns, tapestries, oriental rugs, intricate lace and such.  I get frustrated very easily when painting such things with my direct painting method and give up well short of paying proper homage to the designer or maker of the fabric.  I also don’t have the patience for carefully copying lettering on labels, newspaper headlines, and the like.  In short, putting in precise detail of any kind is damned hard work!

I remember that the late Ray Goodbred, one of my teachers at the Art Students League, used to advise us to paint just a few details near the center of interest and loosely suggest the rest.  I’m sure he would have gotten an argument from Daniel Greene, his classmate under the tutelage of Robert Brackman, who seems to enjoy painting every tile on a subway wall.  Flower painters also used to advise doing just a few of the important blooms in a bouquet and suggesting the rest.  There are a couple of Realist painters today who have built successful careers around this selective approach.  Scores of their students closely replicate their visually appealing, idiosyncratic techniques in lockstep and do quite well themselves in the art marketplace.

But for those who paint directly from nature without a special flair, suggesting detail is not good enough for the majority of today’s art collectors, who are in love with photographic rendering.  A perfect example of what many buyers of contemporary Realist art want is what they get from William Acheff, a southwestern painter of Indian paraphernalia.  His Native Indian potteries are portrayed to perfection.  And he puts highlights on every last one of those tiny beads in a beaded Indian moccasin.  Phew!  He does extremely well.  So do many other studio painters who focus on flatly rendering, in a photographic manner, all surface details of old kitchen items, plastic toys and anything else they have lying around the house.

There is a world of difference, though, between today’s painters of infinite detail and the Old Masters who painted in a similar vein.  The old painters established a solid, volumetric foundation first, in an atmospheric setting, and only then painted their incredible details to a fare-thee-well.  They managed somehow to keep those details subordinate to the beauty of the picture as a whole, only revealing them in all their glory upon close inspection.   I’m thinking at once of the linen collar ruffs often seen in Dutch 17^th Century portraits and the delicately embroidered dresses in French and Italian women’s portraits of the 18^th Century.

Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt,1628,Wallace Collection

Joseph Siffred Duplessis,  “Madame de Saint-Maurice,” 1776,

 Metropolitan Museum of Art

These painters had such fantastic brush handling skills that it may have been possible for them to freely interpret intricate textile designs as Zuloaga seems to have done, but in a much more subtle manner.  Who really knows?  Some of it looks so authentic that I guess they just turned the TV off and kept on trucking until they got all the fabric embellishments exactly right, as we attempt to do today.

It is really remarkable how the Old Masters, using finely pointed brushes loaded with fluid, full-bodied paint, made flawless calligraphic strokes to place the minutest details in low relief on the surface of the canvas.  Forever after, painters have been searching for an oil painting medium to match these “secrets of the Old Masters.”  The jury is still out on maroger and all the other “miracle” mediums introduced over the years.  But I believe that the remarkable effects obtained by these earlier painters were primarily due to their extraordinary paint handling skills acquired through long apprenticeships, which they entered into at a very early age.  This training enabled them to gain complete control of their materials, which included fluid, hand-ground paints and unremarkable, quick-drying oils.  We are just guessing when we try to modify commercial tubed paints in hopes of achieving similar effects.

You might see an incredible feat of lace painting by a painter today, but it literally shouts to the viewer, “Look at all my fine holes.  Didn’t the painter work hard to put them all in!”   Today it’s all about slavishly copying each little detail purely for photographic effect.  The resulting work looks flat as a pancake and lacks any discernible pictorial sentiment.  Say goodnight, Zuloaga.