Valentin Serov's Portraits

Valentin Serov (Russian,1865–1911), Portrait of Yevdokia Sergeyevna Morozova, 1908, Oil on Canvas,  44.9 by 29.5 in., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Portrait of Princess Olga Orlova, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 93.7 by 63 in., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Portrait of Princess Olga Orlova, Detail

Portrait of Henrietta Leopoldovna Girshman, 1907, Tempera on Canvas, 55.11 by 55.11 in., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Portrait of Henrietta Girshman, 1906, Tempera on cardboard, 39 by 26.8 in., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Portrait of Mara Konstantinovna Oliv, 1895, Oil on Canvas, 34.6 by 26.9 in., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Portrait of Maria Akimova, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 30.3 by 24.4 in., The Picture Gallery of Armenia, Erevan, Armenia

Model with Her Hair Down, 1899, Watercolor and White on Paper, mounted on Cardboard, 52.4 x 35.5 cm., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

It is truly astonishing to me that the Art Nouveau aesthetic, which influenced or inspired the greatest portrait painters of the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, is passé for portrait painters of the early 21^st Century. Despite paying homage to Sargent, Zorn, Sorolla, Boldini, Kroyer, Klimt and many others, today’s portrait painters avoid the flowing line, the elegance of pose and the expressive feeling those masters captured on canvas.  All that really matters in the business these days is high-definition photographic accuracy.

The accepted conventions of the past are now generally ignored or poorly executed -- a tilt of the head, which is turned in opposition to the torso; a facial expression of any kind, coordinated sensitively with all the mobile features (eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth); a pronounced placement of the pose, whether linear or curvilinear, existing in dominant harmony with the sitter’s environment.

I often reflect on this inexplicable rejection of grace and beauty by today’s hard-working painters when an unfamiliar portrait by one of the past masters of the art catches my eye as I ride herd on the vast Internet art range, a poor metaphor that reminds me of a line from a sentimental cowboy song written by Gene Autry:  “Riding down the canyon to watch the sun go down, a picture that no artist e’er could paint.”  The “Singing Cowboy” sure got that one right.

But an artist was capable of creating the painting I recently came across, and in such a fabulous manner that Mother Nature herself would bow her head in humble submission.  It was the 1908 portrait of Yevdokia Sergeyevna Morozova, wife of the art collector Ivan Morozova, and it was created by one of Russia’s greatest painters, Valentin Serov (1865-1911).

After admiring the beautiful, vivacious face of this woman, I noted the graceful position of her right forearm and skillfully cropped hand resting upon her bosom.  Perhaps this gesture is too theatrical for today’s cynical world, but Serov found it an effective way to add rhythmic movement to a pose, and he used variations of it for some of his most important portraits of women, as well as for a couple of his famous portraits of men.

It is a terrific way to handle painting of those appendages.   Faces are a snap by comparison, and clients are satisfied if you simply copy a flattering photograph exactly.  But if you don’t give the arms at least a slight bend at the elbow, you are better off keeping them covered with sleeves.  And if you don’t give the hands a bit of a turn  or something to do, they are better off left in pockets than lying dead on the arms of a chair.  Also, depicting one hand is usually enough for any portrait.  Serov knew that.  So should everybody else.

Serov was trained as a realist, but he is said to have worked very hard to achieve a look of “freedom, artistry, effortless ease” in his paintings, eschewing any hint of photographic precision in the finished portrait.  “He painted his portraits slowly, sometimes agonizingly,” wrote one critic.  Serov himself said, “Each portrait is for me an illness.”

I wonder if today’s digital toilers, working under the intense glare of LED lights day and night, are able to empathize with Serov, who once said:

Any human face is so complex and so unique that you can always find in it traits worthy of portrayal, be they good or bad.  For my part, each time I appraise a person’s face I am inspired, you might even say carried away, not by his or her outer aspect, which is often trivial, but by [the] characterization it can be given on canvas.  That is why I am accused of sometimes having my portraits look like caricatures.”

And as often happens when a painter like Serov is “in the zone” seeking some primal truth about the sitter, the resulting portrait often ends up being as much about the emotional state of the painter as that of the sitter.

Dmitry Sarabyanov, the author of a brilliant essay on Serov in a 1982 catalog of the artist’s work published by Aurora Art Publishers, St. Petersburg, Russia, suggests that:

In Serov’s world the subject of spiritual beauty in man was one of the most controversial.  In the 1870s and 1880s [Ilya] Repin saw his ideal in real persons.  Unlike his teacher, Serov looks for true beauty, a beauty inaccessible to an eye not endowed with artistic vision; he seeks to fathom human emotions, to divine the human drama involved.  It is these aspirations that brought Serov’s artistry into being, investing him with a penetrating insight into nuances and minor details and an abhorrence for the insipid “verisimilitude” that, in Serov’s opinion, destroys art. 

Serov never depicts character “in general.”  He is interested in a specific facet of that character, the all-important facet that most tellingly reveals the aesthetic worth of the person portrayed.   He uses all the pictorial possibilities of the portrait – pose, gesture, composition, color scheme, the painterly style itself – to bring out the aesthetic merit of the sitter in the most vivid fashion.

From 1890 on, Serov’s portrait work was his most important genre.  His favorite models were actors, artists, and writers, including Konstantin Korovin (1891), Isaac Levitan (1893), Nikolai Leskov (1894) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1898) -- all in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow.  After 1900 he painted several outstanding portraits in the grand manner, as well as intimate portraits of women and children.  In addition to oils, he worked in tempera, watercolors, pastels and lithography.

Serov was a creative genius who bridged the gap between the Russian Realists and the Russian modernists with his paintings. What bridges are today’s portrait painters building with their fealty to pixel counts?  Aw, who cares anyway?  We’re heading more and more to a digital world of virtual reality, where a retrograde painter’s vision of the natural world is completely irrelevant.

The Dreamer and the Painter-Beast

Jan Sluijters (1881-1957), Standing Nude with White Drapery, 1935, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 by 32.3 in., Private Collection

Still Life with Standing Nude, 1933, Oil on Canvas, 55.1 by 45.7 in., Private Collection  

Portrait of Greet Van Cooten, the Artist’s Wife, Oil on Canvas, Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Dr. Floren Marinus Wibauthuis (1859-1936), 1932, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

N.H. ter Kuile and his wife, W.H. ter Kuile-Scholten, 1930, Oil on Canvas, 69.4 by 50 in., Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, Netherlands

Half-Naked (wife of the artist), ca. 1912, Oil on Canvas, 50.2 by 37.6 in.,

Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, Netherlands

Adam and Eve, 1914-1916, Oil on Canvas, 69 by 79 in., Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, Netherlands

Portrait of a girl, 1935, Oil on Canvas, 31.5 by 23.8 in., Private Collection

Portrait of Esther, 1940, Oil on Canvas, 23.6 by 19.7 in., Private Collection

Flowers in a White Vase, 1935, Oil on Canvas, 46 by 41.3 in., Private Collection

Standing Male Nude, 1904, Oil on Canvas, 35.4 by 23.6 in.

Seated Female Nude, Oil on Board

The Artist in his studio

I instantly fell in love with the painting above titled Standing Nude with White Drapery when I saw it in an auction catalog a couple of years ago.  The artist’s sensitive, skillful depiction of a woman’s body, in a pose completely free of artifice but sensual as can be, with subdued natural light caressing the model’s lissome figure, was sublime.  What a marvelous figure painting.  I wanted desperately to paint that picture myself.  I had no desire to copy it, of course.  But I wanted to get the same evocative feeling of ethereal feminine beauty in a nude figure painting of my own.

The graceful pose was perfect for this Dutch model with a Modigliani-like figure.  And oh, melancholy me, years ago I knew a Dutch woman who resembled her very much.  When I first saw this painting, I had been drawing a model in the sketch group I frequent who had the same kind of figure and emanated a similar statuesque serenity.  She would be ideal for my picture. 

So this transcendent painting I envisioned was buzzing around in my head for some time before I woke up and remembered who I was and realized it was just another one of my many impossible dreams.  It was, for want of a more probing disquisition, hopeless.  I’m nothing but an old painter of modest still lifes -- mere bagatelles.  I have no money to hire models, no connections in the art world, and lack the persuasive skills necessary to get people to pose for me for nothing, as I may have already mentioned once or twice in previous musings.  But it’s true and bears repeating until the cows come home.  Personal failures and failings are a lot more fun to recount than successes any day, and doing so always cheers me up.

Anyhow, creating large figure paintings in my tiny, jam-packed home studio in a pre-war apartment building on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper West Side is extremely challenging and nearly always unrewarding, despite some conciliatory words from the sitters after they have been inconvenienced for a few hours, with nothing much to show for their discomfort.

Not being able to paint my own version of this wonderful painting was a huge disappointment at the time.  But the most important thing was that I now knew about this painting, and it immediately found a place in my heart alongside all the other great paintings I admire.  I chanced upon it in a Christie’s Amsterdam catalog published for an auction of 20^th Century Art in December of 1999 that I picked up at a used bookstore in my neighborhood.

I suspect that the model for the painting was Greet Van Cooten (1885-1967).  The painter was Greet’s husband, the much-celebrated, somewhat controversial and hugely talented and prolific Dutch painter Jan Sluitjers (1881-1957).

Greet was his second wife.  Sluitjers won the Prix de Rome for an academic painting he created while studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 1904 and married Bertha Langerhorst that year. They divorced in 1910 and he married Greet in 1913.  Sluijters was a very lucky man to have a wife like Greet who would double as a steadfast, reliable model for many of his figure paintings.  And he got a few paintings out of Bertha, as well, before they parted company.  In addition, it seems that the quintessential “model as mistress” theme was an important element in Sluijters’ artistic life.

Johannes Carolus Bernardus (Jan) Sluijters (sometimes spelled Sluyters) was particularly keen on painting nude figure studies of women and portraits of women and girls of all ages and from all walks of life.  A discerning retrospective exhibition of his work at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in 2003 was titled Women! Muse, Model and Lover.

Sluijters was a peripatetic modernist who was comfortable working on the fringes of many of the post-impressionist styles gaining favor with his contemporaries, but he never completely abandoned his early academic training, always displaying some excellent drawing and sense of traditional design in his stylistic adventures.  He was considered a pioneer of various post-impressionist movements in the Netherlands, including fauvism and colorful expressionism. He also painted loads of landscapes and still lifes, often in a loose, impressionistic manner.  It seems he could paint anything he wanted in any style he chose, with amazing skill.  He was free to do so because he had first learned how to paint and draw accurately with the best of the academicians.  His later creative explorations must have seemed like child’s play to him.  And it seems he never set his brushes down to eat lunch or take a nap.

The exhibit in Rotterdam displayed more than 100 paintings, prints and drawings of his impressionistic, luminist, cubist and expressionist phases.  It was said to give a pretty complete picture of Sluijters' artistic development, from the book bindings and illustrations early on, through his brief but brilliant academic painting years, and ending with the “colorful, lush paintings” he created from about 1910 until his death 47 years later, at the age of 76.  Some of his nudes scandalized the Dutch public, with one reviewer comparing the women to “vampires.”  His portrait of a woman with a big grin and huge red lips caused another reviewer to remark, “Her red mouth is the forbidden fruit.”

When I started to look for his work on the Internet, I was absolutely blown away by the enormity of his recorded output, particularly in evidence on the RKD Netherlands Imagebase, which displays 2,048 images of his artwork on 41 pages of a digital catalogue compiled over many years of research.  What an immense task.  After about 10 pages of 50 images each, I was worn out and abandoned my search to find the perfect paintings to illustrate this blog post.  I gather that most of his artwork is in private collections or museums in Europe.

Every one of his works has something interesting to offer for any serious art lover.  What an imaginative figurative artist he was. Everything seemed to interest his nimble artistic mind, not just the female form divine.  He seemed to float lightly across the entire post-impressionist landscape, producing gems wherever he landed.   

Someone at the RKD Netherlands Imagebase wrote that Sluijters was a painter through and through. With vigorous movements of the brush and a palette of bright and sharply contrasting colours he immortalized beautiful women, sweet children, sundrenched landscapes and exuberant flower still lives on his canvases. Sluijters began his career as an experimenter, trying out practically every ‘-ism’ of his time. In the course of his life he gradually toned down his style to a more moderate but highly successful combination of expressionism and realism. Working steadily he produced no fewer than 1500 paintings.  

Sluijters was nicknamed the “painter-beast” by his contemporaries because of his rugged, robust appearance and insatiable appetite for painting.  He was no dreamer.

Rudy's Legacy

Rudolph N. "Rudy" Colao (1927-2014), Peony Bouquet, Oil on Masonite, 11 ¼ by 15 ½ in., Private Collection

Peonies and Daisies, Oil on Board, Private Collection

Peonies and Daisies, Oil, 12 by 16 in., http://www.pototschnik.com

Lilac Bouquet, 12 by 16 in., Oil,  http://www.pototschnik.com

Thatcher Island Lighthouse, oil on canvas,  16 by 20 in., http://nsartsa.blogspot.com

Seaside Farmhouse, Friendship, Maine, 16 by 20 in., Oil, http://www.pototschnik.com

Friendship, Maine Wharf, Oil on panel, 16 by 20 in., me.usharbors.com

One of my extracurricular delights when trawling for still life objects in the flea markets scattered around Manhattan in the 1980s and 90s was spotting framed prints of gorgeous, lively paintings of ample bouquets of lilacs, daisies, mums or peonies, usually in a copper pot or teakettle.  The flowers were always beautifully painted, with spirited brushwork and excellent tonal values.  The artist was always "R. Colao."

I didn’t know Rudolph N. "Rudy" Colao,  the artist who signed all his paintings "R. Colao."  I did meet him a couple of times in the late 1970s when I was studying painting at The Art Students League of New York, where he would substitute teach for Frank Mason once in awhile.  I knew he had later moved up to Rockport, Massachusetts.  And I was surprised and saddened to learn just the other day that he had died unexpectedly on October 4, 2014 at the age of 86 while walking back home from downtown Rockport. 

But I knew the most important thing about Rudy -- he had figured out how to paint a big bouquet of flowers expertly and seemingly without effort.  Painting flowers and other traditional still life subjects was a serious business for him, as it was with the great Henri Fantin-Latour.  I was talking about Rudy recently with one of Mason’s former students who remembered that Frank used to tell his aspiring artists not to disparage Rudy’s main work as a flower painter.  “He put two children through college on those paintings,” Mason would say.

Rudy sold his original oils in galleries around the country and prints of them galore, in various sizes, through Gimbels and other major department stores that had thriving art galleries within their confines throughout much of the 20^th Century.  He probably had other outlets that I’m not aware of.  The Internet today is inundated with anxious queries about Rudy’s artwork.  A typical entry goes like this, “Can you tell me if my painting by R. Colao is worth money?”

I got a laugh when I saw on Yahoo! Answers that a couple of people were wondering why they owned the exact same still life painting by Rudy.   

“I have a painting by R. Colad (sic) with a pear grapes vase teapot and a knife,” wrote one correspondent.  “There are a lot of people claiming to have the same painting.  Do you know why?”

Another correspondent chimed in, “I also have a painting by R. colad (sic).  Don’t know who he is but if you find out could you please let me know…I found my painting at a flea market in Louisiana which is where I live…let me know where you live and what your painting is of.  My painting has a pear, a knife, grapes, a kettle and a bottle in it. Very good detail! It’s beautiful! Just let me know! Thanks and hopefully we can help each other out!!

Yahoo’s “Best Answer” was provided by someone over at AskART www.askart.com, a site that tracks auction results and much more about a multitude of American artists.  That appraisal expert warned that what looks like an original painting may in fact be a reproduction print:

Rudolph Colao's popular works have been extensively reproduced.  Many reproductions of your popular painting exist.

Rudolph Colao is known for still life paintings and for paintings of interiors. He painted prolifically from the 1950s though the 1990s…His original paintings have sold at auction from $600 to $30,000.  But his work has been extensively reproduced, and millions of copies of his works exist, so they are not particularly valuable. They tend to sell for about $25 to $40.

I often have difficulty myself telling whether back-sealed vintage framed art is a print or an original oil painting without close examination, so I can sympathize somewhat with all the confusion that exists out there in the real world with respect to Rudy’s artwork. 

Despite the enormous popularity of his paintings, Rudy once said, “I don’t think about ‘the art market’ as such - I just paint. I really paint because I want to, and because I need to. I have always felt that 1 never had any other choice!”

Rudy’s alla prima paintings of lavish bouquets of solo flowers inspired me to paint similar arrangements when bored with other still life subject matter -- the usual pots and pans and fruits and vegetables.  Flowers are as thrilling to paint as the human form and the great outdoors, two genres I am unable to paint due to specious circumstances beyond my control that are too depressing to constantly whine about, as I have done occasionally in previous blog posts in shameful fashion.

I’d love to be able to paint some of the flowers Rudy favored as skillfully as he did.  He could describe individual petals in a big bunch of lilacs and not make them look crudely out of place with the tonal mass, something that’s not so easy to accomplish.  And he had no apparent trouble painting those spindly petals on daisies that confound me.  Of course it’s very helpful for flower painters to keep their own gardens, as Rudy did in Rockport and Fantin did at his summer home in France in the 19^th Century.  How I envy them.

Rudy was destined to become a wonderfully skilled painter because he had found his ideal mentor in Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students League, where he studied on the G.I. Bill after World War II.   DuMond taught for 59 years at the League, from 1892 until his death in 1951, and I’ll bet every one of his serious students learned more about painting than most of us who never had the opportunity to study with him.

How many times have we read stories about successful, gifted artists who swore allegiance to DuMond?  And I wonder how many other gifted DuMond students fell under the art market radar?   Rudy’s ex-wife, in fact, the late Camila McRoberts, was a very good painter herself and executed a number of important portrait commissions in the early 1950s.  The couple met in DuMond’s class, but she gave up painting to raise their three children, two girls and a boy.  They divorced in 1976 but remained friends, with Camila continuing to tend Rudy’s flower garden until her death in 2012 at the age of 83. 

Rudy was a member of several arts organizations, including Allied Artists of America, the Hudson Valley Art Association and the Rockport Art Association  AskART notes that articles on Rudy have appeared in American Artist Magazine (March 1975, and May 1982), Southwest Art Magazine (March 1982), and Focus/Santa Fe (Aug/Sept 1988).

An astute summation of Rudy’s painting skill was penned by Jill Warren in Southwest Art magazine:  Like all traditional realists, Colao uses value and simple shapes to show us more clearly than the camera or even the eye what his subjects look like. He achieves astonishing depth so that we can see the front, back and middle of his arrangements and bouquets, even though the canvas has no depth at all.

I’m reminded insecurely of an anecdote about DuMond, Rudy’s mentor, wherein DuMond was painting a landscape en plein air one day when a little boy who was watching him eventually exclaimed, “Look at that man, he’s making something out of nothing.”  I think I read that in an article about the landscape painter Paul Strisik, another of DuMond’s many successful students who also was based in Rockport.

Rudolph N. “Rudy” Colao’s life and career are lovingly recounted in an obituary published in the Gloucester Daily Times on Oct. 11, 2014, which can be read online. http://www.gloucestertimes.com/obituaries/rudolph-n-colao/article_b28e8ad5-19f9-5b7c-9f77-c308f7be91be.html

What an amazing legacy Rudy has left us.  It seems as if he has more paintings or prints of paintings in American households than any other artist, including Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses, and even Thomas Kinkade!  And why not?  On one Internet site, a seller of a set of four 8x10 in. prints on canvas of Rudy’s still life paintings boldly proclaims: “THESE PICTURES WILL BE GREAT TO LIVEN UP A KITCHEN OR EVEN A DARK HALL WAY.”  You know, I think that seller is absolutely right.

8x10 in. Prints on Canvas

Signing Off

Ernest Chiriacka (1913-2010),  Paperback Cover for Model’s Daughter, by Charles X. Wolffe

Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka, paperback cover for The Future Mr. Dolan, by Charles Gorham, 1959, gouache on board, 15.5 by 13.5 in.

Ernest Chiriacka

Ernest Chiriacka, Casweck Galleries, Sante Fe, NM

Ernest Chiriacka, Esquire Magazine Calendar, February 1954, swallace99 at www.ipernity.com

Ernest Chiriacka, Casweck Galleries, Sante Fe, NM

Ernest Chiriacka, Landscape, Casweck Galleries, Sante Fe, NM

Various signatures of Ernest Chiriacka, www.pulpartists.com

I hate having to sign my paintings.

Maybe some painters can’t wait to sign off on their creations with a triumphal flourish because they truly believe all of their paintings are masterpieces.  But I expect those would be painters who fancy they are painting for prosperity and posterity, both strangers to me in my desolate world of forsaken opportunity.

All of us would probably paint better pictures if we never had to sign them.  How often do we wish we had a chance to “touch up” a painting that is now on display in a private or public collection, warts and all?  And I wonder how many of those irritating painters who like to boast of selling their paintings “hot off the easel” to impress their less confident artist friends with their artistic prowess later regret such foolishness?  I can recall selling only one “still-wet” painting, and that was to a gallery in Arkansas that I was hoping to connect with, which I did for the short time it took for the gallery owner to suggest I paint a few pictures she could actually sell.  But I certainly know the feeling of remorse for not being more critical of my own work before signing it and sending it off to see the world.

We often like to say we could have done better if we had more time or the proper surface to paint on, etcetera.  But once you sign off on a painting, you are expected to keep your mouth shut and smile when your slapdash effort is praised to the high heavens by a collector with his checkbook out.

I’m reminded of some advice passed along by an old illustrator friend, Harry Barton (1908-2001).  Harry was a good friend of a very prolific and successful illustrator, Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (1913-2010), who attended The Art Students League and the National Academy of Design, and spent four years studying under the great illustrator and teacher Harvey Dunn (1884-1952) at the Grand Central School of Art.  My friend Harry was tall and good-looking, and often posed for the male characters in Ernie’s pulp fiction cover illustrations.  Harry told me that Ernie used to say you should “never let a painting get out of your studio too soon.”  I couldn’t agree more with that sensible advice.

The variety of ways Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (born Anastassios Kyriakakos) signed his work provides an interesting case study on what I personally consider to be a painting’s coup de grace.  I suspect a lot of the great painters of the past privately held such a view about signing their paintings, but thankfully they didn’t throw all of their paintings out the window (a la Cezanne) or burn them in the potbelly stoves in their studios (a la Monet), as we know many revered painters of the past were wont to do.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a potbelly stove, so I take masterpieces I’m sick of looking at off the stretchers, fold them over and over into relatively small squares, stomp on them to compact them a bit, strap them with masking tape, put them in a plastic grocery bag and place them in the garbage cans off the service elevators on my floor in an apartment building on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper West Side.  If you don’t dispose of your trashed paintings carefully, they are liable to be salvaged by some scavenger and put on sale in the local junk shop or auctioned off on eBay.  You don’t want that to happen, do you? The saying that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is certainly true in the art business.  One of my artist friends, another big city dweller, used to cut her unwanted paintings into pieces with a scissors, as did I, until she learned that a neighbor took one of the pieces out of a trash can and framed it.

Although he is not that well known, Ernest Chiriacka’s work is well represented on the Internet.   His daughter, Athene Westergaard, maintains exclusive representation of her father’s work at her Casweck Galleries in Sante Fe, New Mexico http://casweckgalleries.com/.  Chiriacka often signed his paintings “Darcy,” his childhood nickname familiarly used by friends and family.  On the gallery website, she recalls that "Darcy once told me that Harvey Dunn never had much to say about his work till the cover of his first pulp was displayed and Harvey's mouth just dropped."

There is biographical information about Ernie and images of his published artwork on art auction websites and at several websites that focus on pulp fiction, including http://killercoversoftheweek.blogspot.com/2010/04/good-bye-darcy.html  and http://www.pulpartists.com/Chiriacka.html.   In the first link, J. Kingston Pierce, who edits a blog on crime fiction called Rap Sheet, displays an impressive 55 pulp fiction covers created by Ernie.  Pierce assigns those covers to a category he aptly calls “Art Noir.”  And David Saunders, in his Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists, notes that Ernie’s “pulp covers were usually left unsigned, and he used a variety of pseudonyms, such as Acka, Darcy, and A.D.  He is given printed credit as ‘Ernest Chiriacka’ on the contents pages of only a few Ace Magazine titles.”

I imagine that illustrators like Ernie, whose clients ranged from “high-class” magazines like Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire to publishers of salacious pulp fiction and pin-up calendars, might have wanted to use an alias on a lot of their work for publications that were frowned upon in polite circles.  So-called fine artists wouldn’t seem to have that particular problem, but our signatures often go through many stages until we settle on the one that we feel most comfortable with.  By the way, given today’s congested playing field for artists, if you put a date along with your signature, you will probably never sell the painting or get into a juried show, unless the painting was created last week.  And I’m sure most of us fudge a bit about the date our paintings were created for that very reason.

Scholarly research has probably been done on the subject of artists’ signatures, so I won’t bother delving into that undoubtedly impressive mountain of evidence – way too much interesting trouble in that line of inquiry for a dilettante blogger.   Suffice it to say that the very first thing to contemplate is the “look” you fancy for your signature.  I don’t know why, but most painters don’t seem to like to sign their paintings the same way they sign their rent checks or mortgage payments, if they aren’t doing online banking, that is.  I know I don’t sign the same way because I can’t handle a brush well enough to accomplish moderately cursive strokes in the medium of oil paint.  It was hard enough to come up with a simple “R. Holden” in the first place, admittedly not a very creative signature, but I went with the crowd to adopt that conventional first-name initial and full last name solution to this vexing problem for painters.

And just for the record, our signatures on our paintings are considered “autographs” by those who know more than you and I do about language.  Wikipedia informs:  A signature may be confused with an autograph, which is chiefly an artistic signature. This can lead to confusion when people have both an autograph and signature and as such some people in the public eye keep their signatures private whilst fully publishing their autograph.

So we have many options to consider for our signatures, or autographs, unless you fancy yourself a follower of, say, Bouguereau, and decide to sign your painting in a similar manner, which is not uncommon for those who admire a master’s paintings and adopt that artist’s signature style for their own.  I’ve noted that some contemporary portrait painters choose signatures comprising their first, middle and last names, as did the well-known portrait painters they strive to emulate.

Should our signature be handwritten or printed, full name or just first name or last, initials, capitals or capitals and lowercase, in black paint or complementary color, etcetera?  I’d like a stencil or a rubber stamp to sign the same way each time.  I can never get the same consistency of paint, and no matter what brush I use, the paint never flows the exact same way each time. To avoid that problem, one painter I know signs in pencil, presumably before he varnishes the painting.  A couple of times I’ve used one of those pointed permanent black markers, which is great for a consistent look, but you can’t erase it to change the position if you have second thoughts.

Painters in the old days often seemed to just pick up any old brush they were painting with and drag it through wet paint, making a mess of their signatures.  And I’ve occasionally seen their paintings with two signatures on the surface.  I do best when the paint is thoroughly dry.  But then it’s easier for forgers to erase my signature and replace it with that of Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-Latour to significantly enhance the painting’s value.

Placement is a major concern for many of us when signing off on a painting.  I tend to believe it should be placed at the top or bottom of the painting, anyplace away from dead center, in a style, size, color and position that is in balance with the elements of the painting -- and unobtrusive.  I’ve found that the most punctilious cursive signatures often reside on inferior paintings while some of the most careless signatures are affixed to some of the greatest paintings I’ve ever seen.  There are a lot of examples of famous artist signatures on the Internet that are barely legible, and I’m sure you are familiar with many of them.

Why is signing a painting so annoying?  Well, essentially because it is an afterthought to a very enjoyable and complete performance.  You believe you have carefully designed and concluded your painting, with all the elements in perfect balance from north to south and east to west.  Now you have to figure out where to stick that damn signature without disturbing your perceived perfection.  I must admit, though, that sometimes a properly placed signature can save a painting that needed a little help in achieving the balance I'm always striving for.

I paint mostly still lifes in all manner of configurations as the spirit moves me, and maybe that's why I have so much trouble with signature placement.  I think landscape and portrait painters, and artists who adopt a consistent and compelling design theme, don't worry as much about placement as I do. 

At any rate, I spend way too much time thinking about where to sign my paintings.  There are times when I am nearly finished with a painting that I think of the perfect spot for my signature.  But often that spot isn’t where I eventually sign the painting.  And if you sign a painting and later decide you need to put a kumquat in the corner to balance the elements you have to erase your signature and find another spot for it.

I’ve heard that one bravura painter used to sign his name on the canvas before beginning a plein air demonstration on Cape Ann in Massachusetts.  Some painters sign their paintings so boldly that it is the first thing you notice about the painting, and that signature may be the most creative thing about the work.  What an insult to the painting!  Even if signed prominently, the signature should be in a value and tone that doesn’t draw attention to itself.  I’ve spent a lot of time redoing my signature on some paintings to finally get it to look appropriately inconspicuous.   Sometimes I’ll press it with a clean piece of newsprint to temper it.

Despite my own misgivings, signatures are a big deal for collectors, who are quick to notice if you forget to sign one of your paintings, because they know they won’t be able to auction off your masterpiece later without your trademark signature, although a signature is by no means a guarantee of authenticity, as the history of art forgeries clearly demonstrates.

Why do I hate to sign my paintings?  Well, lack of self-esteem could be a major factor.  Years ago, a shrewd bargain hunter who prowled the outdoor art shows in Greenwich Village bought a few of my paintings for peanuts.  He told me I always had some element in my paintings that was a bit off, not exactly an encouraging observation for a beginning artist.  One day he came to my home studio and left with a bag precariously overflowing with my flawed creations.  But I feel he was right about my work, then and now.  Years later, this same collector approached me with a request to repair some minor damage to one of the $50 paintings he had acquired.  When I said he could probably find someone else to do the work, he tried to convince me that “only I” could repair the work admirably!   Considering his enduring critique from years ago, I was happy to refuse his request for that repair job. 

So now I’ve exorcised my bedtime story about artists’ signatures on paintings, boys and girls.  It’s not worth much, but I’m signing off on it anyway.  I have to.